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The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss, Jr. Library Journal's Best First Novels of 2007 ISBN: 0-8021-7042-0 / ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-7042-2 US $14.00 - 5-1/2 x 8-1/4, 288 pp - Jan. 2008 |
An exhilarating and eye-opening debut novel about today’s lost generation, set in
“Powerful and compelling, a novel of nonstop tension in a landscape so modern, so up to the minute, that you can set your watch by it. And while it reminds me of Hunter Thompson and Robert Stone, it is also a book by a young writer whose talent is at once fierce and entirely new. Fresh, haunting, the kind of book that keeps you up at night to turn the pages.” —Craig Nova, author of Cruisers and The Good Son
The Delivery Man is a thrilling and astonishing debut—a scary, fast-paced, and illuminating portrait of the MySpace generation. It is a love story set against the surreal excess of Las Vegas—and the artificial suburbs, gated communities, and freeways that surround it—where broken lives come to seek new beginnings and casinos feed the lust of tourists and residents alike. Ultrasophisticated local kids grow up fast and burn out early.
After attending college in New York, Chase returns to Vegas and is drawn into the lucrative but dangerous world of a teenage call-girl service with his childhood friend, Michele, a beautiful Salvadoran immigrant with whom he shares a tragic past. Over the course of one extraordinary summer they will confront the violence and emptiness at the heart of the city and their generation.
At once stark and electrically atmospheric, horrifying and hopeful, The Delivery Man is an ambitious literary novel as well as a fast and absorbing page-turner—and a powerful indictment of a society in which personal responsibility has been abandoned, lust is increasingly mistaken for love, and innocence is an anachronism.