User

by Bruce Benderson

Overview

A Queer Classic re-published for the first time in 27 years, by the author of The Romanian, winner of the Prix de France.

A New York City hustler with a special gift for reeling in customers, Apollo, "a pale skinned mulatto with a mournful mouth" strips at a gay sex theater in Times Square. He is one of the most seductive and disturbing creations in recent American fiction.

Unflinchingly describing the lives of hustlers, pimps, drug-addicts and transsexuals in 1990s Times Square, User speaks with the authentic voice of characters from the edge. This is a world filled with stark, hypnotic eroticism and mined with terrors peculiar to the subterranean city in the hours after midnight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781739638207
Publisher:	Muswell Press
Publication date:	10/17/2024
Edition description:	Second edition
Pages:	228
Sales rank:	848,990
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bruce Benderson is a novelist, essayist, journalist and translator who lives in New York. He has taught creative writing, urban culture and French literature at Deep Springs College, Nevada and lectured at Brown, Evergreen and Sarah Lawrence. He is bilingual and his work is hugely popular in France.

What People are Saying About This

Dennis Cooper

User is a mesmerizing and important novel. Benderson's fiction combines the brutal, savvy poetry of outsider writers like Lars Eigner...and Paul Rogers, with the elegance and refinement of European masters like Thomas Bernhard and Marguerite Duras. Start to finish, this book is a complete thrill.

Camille Paglia

Benderson is the most original thinker I have ever known....He has the aggressive verbal and analytic style of the Talmudic tradition, combined with the hipster slant of modern urban Bohemia.

Paul Russell

Bruce Benderson is the Rimbaud of all our fallen angels, and User is his harrowing, magnificent season in hell. His prose astonishes with its seamless sweep and the slang of the avenue to flights of rare grandeur.

Editorial Reviews

"This man is an amazing writer. . . . User is a book for a very specific audience, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is unmistakably brilliant." —Los Angeles Times

"Impressive, startling and eerie. . . Echoes the universe of Hubert Selby (who is invoked in one passage) and the teeming sexuality of John Rechy." —Kirkus Reviews

"Benderson's supple and polyglot prose gives voice to a discordant chorus of characters . . . he invests their oppressed lives with profound authenticity and horror." —Publishers Weekly

‘A stunning novel. I both love and respect it even though parts of it challenge and disturb me’ Matt Bates

"What astonishes and intrigues is Benderson's way of recounting, in the sweetest possible voice, things that are considered shocking." Le Monde on The Romanian

From the Publisher

Benderson's second novel (after Pretending to Say No ) plunges the reader into a wretched, liminal community of transexual hustlers, street people, debased cops and bohemian junkies congregating in and around New York City's Time Square. Careening through the center of Benderson's multilayerd story is Apollo, a wired, hypermasculine prostitute of mixed racial descent who, in a fit of existential rage, nearly kills Casio, the bouncer at a porno theater. Dogged by the police, stalked by Baby Pop, Casio's vengeful son, and possessed by an unrelenting drug habit, Apollo moves through a lurid Baudelairian demimonde of numbed souls orbiting around fly-by-night transvestite clubs and after-hours bars. Benderson's New York is a multicultural city of the damned populated by extraordinary characters: Baby Pop, the gifted son of two junkies who sleeps in an abandoned train in the tunnels underneath Grand Central Station clutching an algebra book and a Steven King novel; Abuela, Casio's superstitious Latino great-grandmother; Apollo's unnamed, ``once preppy,'' HIV-infected friend and patron, who hovers at the seedy margins of the city preparing his ``death diary.'' Benderson's supple and polyglot prose gives voice to a discordant chorus of characters; although the plot is fragmentary and the ending abrupt, he invests their oppressed lives with profound authenticity and horror. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly