The Washington Square Ensemble

Madison Smartt Bell

dic 2011 · Open Road Media

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Seven men tell their stories of survival on the streets of 1980s New York City in this gritty debut novel by the National Book Award–finalist.
 
Like most New Yorkers, Johnny B. Goode hustles to make a living. His beat happens to be pharmaceutical distribution. His place of business, Washington Square Park. Over the course of one weekend, he and his crew of “retailers” sell their product to students, businessmen, tourists, drifters, and lowlifes, while evading the law and outmaneuvering the competition. It’s a fragile balance that avant-garde saxophonist and all-around nuisance Porco Miserio threatens to upend with his big mouth.
 
As Johnny B. and his crew scramble to maintain their embattled existence, each relates their personal story of life on the fringes of Greenwich Village. Among them are Yusuf Ali, the NBA-sized Muslim whose profession is at odds with his faith; Holy Mother, Johnny B.’s boyhood friend and former Mafia hitman; and Santa Barbara, the Puerto Rican Santeria practitioner who has been deeply spooked. Authentic and original, the chorus of voices captures the streets of New York in all its widescreen splendor and punishing blight.
 
An “atmospherically electric . . . Winning debut,” The Washington Square Ensemble introduced a prodigiously gifted new novelist to American readers (Kirkus Reviews).
 
“The most exotic bunch of sweet characters since some of Jack Kerouac’s ‘holy angels’ first came alive in print.” —Los AngelesHerald Examiner

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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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