Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
Narrated by George Newbern
Molly PrentissUnabridged — 9 hours, 44 minutes
Narrated by George Newbern
Molly PrentissUnabridged — 9 hours, 44 minutes
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
Prentiss's first novel is about art…And the book itself is a work of artistry. Prentiss plays with form…She's inventive…She pushes the plot in shocking directions…What stands out is a straightforward and familiar story…But the writing—authentic and frenetic—makes the material feel fresh. I've been there, done that, but I held my breath the whole way.
…Molly Prentiss sets an almost impertinently high bar for herself. She's determined to write a love letter in polychrome to a bygone Manhattan; to recreate the squalid exuberance of Jean-Michel Basquiat's and Keith Haring's art scene; to explore all the important, hairy themes—love, creativity, losing your innocence in one cruel swoop. That she mostly pulls it off is impressive, thrilling.
01/25/2016
First-time novelist Prentiss vividly conjures a colorful love triangle set in the gritty, art-soaked world of downtown New York in 1980. Raul Engales is a painter throwing himself into the scene as a means to escape his past in Argentina, where war has cast everything into shadow. James Bennett is an up-and-coming art critic with an overwhelming gift: synesthesia: “an image was manufactured into a bodily sensation... applesauce tasted like sadness and winter was the color blue.” The fulcrum is Lucy Olliason, a naive beauty from Idaho, drawn to New York by a postcard of the skyline she found on the side of the road. Prentiss shines when showing us James’s powers of perception. Impressive, too, is her ability to create an atmosphere that crackles with possibility as well as foreboding. She sprinkles verisimilitude throughout the SoHo scene—Laurie Anderson sings at a party at Raul’s squat; Lucy spies Keith Haring tagging a subway station; news of “Jean-Michel” and his neologistic SAMO tags are everywhere and nowhere, a spectral presence imprinting on Raul’s psyche. Structured over a year beset by tragedy, the story belongs to the two great men, artist and critic; Lucy’s beauty is her most distinguishing characteristic. One yearns for more time spent on the women artists who are minor characters, James’s magnanimous wife, Marge, and Lucy’s sometime roommate. Nevertheless, this is a bold and auspicious debut. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Apr.)
Innovative to the max, this debut novel from Molly Prentiss is a book that I've been raving about to everyone I know…Prentiss will leave you breathless as she plays with form and description in astounding new ways.”
"[A] sharp rendering of a city in transition...[a] spirited debut."
An April 2016 LibraryReads Pick
"An agile, imaginative, knowledgeable, and seductive writer, Prentiss combines exquisite sensitivity with unabashed melodrama to create an operatic tale of ambition and delusion, success and loss, mystery and crassness. Prentiss’ insights into this brash art world are sharply particularized and shrewd, but she also tenderly illuminates universal sorrows, “beautiful horrors,” and lush moments of bliss. In all, a vital, sensuous, edgy, and suspenseful tale of longing, rage, fear, compulsion, and love.
"[Prentiss'] writing is as vivid and sensitive as the pensées of her synesthetic art-critic protagonist...[her] descriptions of the eighties art world ring true on both the texture of the work and its go-go capitalist corruption."
The gritty New York art scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s pulsed with creative energy, and so does this engaging novel… It portrays an intoxicating world and its raw, ungentrified backdrop—both about to be transformed by greed.
[Prentiss’s] sensual linguistic flourishes exquisitely evoke the passions we can feel for people and places we’ve known or are discovering…again and again, the temptation is to underline passages…there are riveting plots and subplots… still the book’s magnificence remains in its shadings, descriptive and emotional… toward the end you’ll find yourself turning the pages slowly, sorry to realize you’re almost finished.”
"Whether her canvas is as broad as the New York City art world in the good old days of glitz and excess, or as small as the quiet, deeply moving connection between brother and sister, Molly Prentiss seems able to render any expression of humanity expertly onto the page. TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 has worlds in it, all wildly appealing, and Molly Prentiss has chops to spare. I can't imagine the soul who won't love this book."
"It isn't easy to write a novel about art, and even harder to write a novel about art this good, with this much energy and verve and sense of adventure — and Molly Prentiss has done it. 'Tuesday Nights in 1980' is much more than an accomplished first novel; it is a beautifully written story of creation and transformation, set against a backdrop of urban decay and political violence. I loved this book."
"We are luckily introduced to three individuals who bravely take the stage, ready to conquer SoHo by storm. Their trek amongst the bright lights is captivating, and readers will be hanging on the edge of their seats."
In one sentence, Ms. Prentiss captures a sense of intoxication and possibility that six seasons of voice-overs from Sarah Jessica Parker never could…. Ms. Prentiss concludes her novel on a note that’s both ethereal and brutally realistic. She cauterizes wounds, but they’re still visible and bare. But for her characters — for this promising author —it’s enough.
Prentiss’s first novel is about art: making it, loving it and letting it go. And the book itself is a work of artistry…what stands out is a straightforward and familiar story… but the writing—authentic and frenetic—makes the material feel fresh. I’ve been there, done that, but I held my breath the whole way.
"Tuesday Nights in 1980 is a sweepingly large and profound story about art, love and actualization, cleanly and beautifully composed... A poetic novel of ambitiously profound considerations, a large-scale drama in a series of small, perfectly rendered moments."
"For those of us who like our novels soulful and brainy, ambitious and deeply felt, Molly Prentiss has given us a first work of fiction to marvel at and then savor. This is a serious young writer in full command of her craft."
"It's 1980 in SoHo, and in this thrilling, vibrant debut, a synesthetic art critic could make or break [an artist named] Raul. And so could a girl named Lucy. Oh, and his own recklessness, too."
Tuesday Nights in 1980 is a discerning, passionate and humane work.
"It isn't easy to write a novel about art, and even harder to write a novel about art this good, with this much energy and verve and sense of adventure — and Molly Prentiss has done it. 'Tuesday Nights in 1980' is much more than an accomplished first novel; it is a beautifully written story of creation and transformation, set against a backdrop of urban decay and political violence. I loved this book."
The gritty New York art scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s pulsed with creative energy, and so does this engaging novel… It portrays an intoxicating world and its raw, ungentrified backdrop—both about to be transformed by greed.
"An agile, imaginative, knowledgeable, and seductive writer, Prentiss combines exquisite sensitivity with unabashed melodrama to create an operatic tale of ambition and delusion, success and loss, mystery and crassness. Prentiss’ insights into this brash art world are sharply particularized and shrewd, but she also tenderly illuminates universal sorrows, “beautiful horrors,” and lush moments of bliss. In all, a vital, sensuous, edgy, and suspenseful tale of longing, rage, fear, compulsion, and love.
In one sentence, Ms. Prentiss captures a sense of intoxication and possibility that six seasons of voice-overs from Sarah Jessica Parker never could…. Ms. Prentiss concludes her novel on a note that’s both ethereal and brutally realistic. She cauterizes wounds, but they’re still visible and bare. But for her characters — for this promising author —it’s enough.
"An agile, imaginative, knowledgeable, and seductive writer, Prentiss combines exquisite sensitivity with unabashed melodrama to create an operatic tale of ambition and delusion, success and loss, mystery and crassness. Prentiss’ insights into this brash art world are sharply particularized and shrewd, but she also tenderly illuminates universal sorrows, “beautiful horrors,” and lush moments of bliss. In all, a vital, sensuous, edgy, and suspenseful tale of longing, rage, fear, compulsion, and love.
★ 2016-01-14
Prentiss' sweeping debut follows three intertwining lives through the swirling energy, burning excitement, and crushing disappointment of New York City's rapidly shifting art world at the dawn of the 1980s. It's Dec. 31, 1979, and James Bennett, a synesthetic rising star of art criticism, and his also-brilliant pregnant wife are toasting the new decade at the kind of swanky art-scene party they prefer to avoid. Also at the party: painter Raul Engales, a charismatic Argentinian expatriate who's done his best to erase his past life and is now poised, though he doesn't know it yet, to become the darling of the art world. And: in a bar downtown later that night, Raul catches the (gorgeous) eye of 21-year-old Lucy Marie Olliason, recently transplanted from Ketchum, Idaho, in love with the city, and ready to fall in love with the artists in it. Their stories crash into each other like dominoes—the critic, the artist, and the muse—their separate futures and personal tragedies inextricably linked. The particulars of their connections, romantic and artistic, are too big and too poetic to be entirely plausible, but then, this is not a slice-of-life novel: this is a portrait of an era, an intoxicating Manhattan fairy tale. Prentiss' characters—rich, nuanced, satisfyingly complicated—are informed not only by their emotional lives, but also by their intellectual and artistic ones; their relationships to art are as lively and essential as their relationships to each other. But while the novel is elegantly infused with an ambient sense of impending loss—this is New York on the cusp of drastic gentrification—it miraculously manages to dodge the trap of easy nostalgia, thanks in large part to Prentiss' wry humor. As affecting as it is absorbing. A thrilling debut.
| BN ID: | 2940170537952 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 04/05/2016 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
