Need / Nik Cohn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cohn, Nik.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

New York (N.Y.)--Fiction.

New York (N.Y.).

National Book Committee.

Genre:

Black humor (Literature)

Fiction.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

288 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First American edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1997.

Summary:

The city's in the grip of a bad-moon heat wave, on fire, and swarming with street-corner preachers. In this sickly sweet season, the lives of four damaged misfits come together at Ferdousine's Zoo, a pet shop on the Upper West Side. Kate Root, a lapsed visionary, minds the store. Anna Crow, when not belly dancing at Sheherazade's Middle Eastern Cafe or delivering Verse-o-Grams to suicidal poetry lovers, lives upstairs. Willie D, a man in love with his shoes, fantasizes about opening a topless car wash in the Bronx. And finally there's John Joe Maguire, a black Irishman whose distinctive birthmark places him at the very center of this profane inferno. Although their needs and obsessions are so profoundly intertwined as to seem aspects of a single soul, each is consumed by a private hunger as collectively they are driven toward their fate. Meanwhile, far below the subways, members of the Black Swans - a cult inspired by a sixteenth-century slave - have gathered to await the last days.

Notes:

Originally published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg, Limited, London, in 1996.

ISBN:

0679427074

OCLC:

35620248