Bandbox: A Novel

Thomas Mallon

Aug. 2012 · Verkauft von Vintage

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From the author of Henry and Clara, a dazzling, hilarious novel that captures the heart and soul of New York in the Jazz Age.

Bandbox is a hugely successful magazine, a glamorous monthly cocktail of 1920s obsessions from the stock market to radio to gangland murder. Edited by the bombastic Jehoshaphat “Joe” Harris, the magazine has a masthead that includes, among many others, a grisly, alliterative crime writer; a shy but murderously determined copyboy; and a burned-out vaudeville correspondent who’s lovesick for his loyal, dewy assistant.

As the novel opens, the defection of Harris’s most ambitious protégé has plunged Bandbox into a death struggle with a new competitor on the newsstand. But there’s more to come: a sabotaged fiction contest, the NYPD vice squad, a subscriber’s kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Fosse’s Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the novel races from skyscraper to speakeasy, hops a luxury train to Hollywood, and crashes a buttoned-down dinner with Calvin Coolidge.

Thomas Mallon has given us a madcap and poignant book that brilliantly portrays the gaudiest American decade of them all.

Autoren-Profil

Thomas Mallon is the author of the novels Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Two Moons; In Fact, a collection of essays; and the nonfiction books Stolen Words, A Book of One’s Own, and Mrs. Paine’s Garage. A frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and other magazines, he lives in Washington, D.C.