Waiting for the End of the World

Madison Smartt Bell

Dec 2011 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

An “exhilirating” novel of domestic terrorism in the gritty streets of 1980s New York from the National Book Award–finalist and author of Straight Cut (The New Yorker).
 
As a staff photographer at Bellevue hospital in Manhattan, Clarence Dmitri Larkin is exposed to the fraying underbelly of New York City. Drawn in by the stories of the sick, the lost, and the insane, Larkin’s own dark impulses lead him through the streets of Brooklyn’s shadowy warehouse district.
 
Increasingly isolated from the world around him, Larkin falls in with a disturbed cell of outcasts. Their ringleader, empowered by confused visions of grandeur and revolution, launches an outlandish scheme to plant an atomic bomb in the catacombs under Times Square.
 
Narrated with unsettling plausibility, Bell’s debut novel demonstrates the remarkable literary skill celebrated in his later novels, such as Soldier’s Joy and The Year of Silence. With “real brilliance . . . full of fire . . . Bell provides promise: promise of his own talent and promise that young American writers are not all retreating from ‘big’ subjects” (The New York Times).
 
“Every sentence [Bell] writes is a joy. His power is exhilarating.” —The New Yorker

Ratings and reviews

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About the author

DIVMadison Smartt Bell (b. 1957) is a critically acclaimed novelist. Over the last two decades he has produced more than a dozen novels and story collections, as well as numerous essays and reviews. His books have been finalists for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award among other honors. Born and raised outside of Nashville, Bell’s fiction is often set in the South, or in New York where he lived as a young writer. Bell and his wife, poet Elizabeth Spires, currently live in Baltimore, Maryland, where they are the codirectors of the writing program at Goucher College.
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