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| With P, Andrew Lewis Conn explodes on the literary scene. This is a first novel that is hilarious yet haunting, clever yet profound. P is a work of imagination and skill that also manages to be one of the best New York stories ever told. Benjamin Seymour, his unlikely hero, is as fresh a creation as I've read in years. |
| Stunningly visual and fearlessly verbal, Andrew Lewis Conn has written a pornographic Manhattan Transfer for the 21st century. Beneath the stained surface, beside the side-splitting humor, there lurks a sadness the depth of which is almost hard to believe. |
| Like a dirtier, cooler Tom Wolfe, Andrew Lewis Conn has created a crooked and completely compelling world where hustlers, heartthrobs, poetic pornographers and lost little girls wander around and collide in modern Manhattan. A wildly inventive and moving modern tale of sin and redemption. |
| Patterned on Ulysses, crammed with an entire liberal arts education, this debut's vast ambition goes up against Conn's obvious and genuine talent: against all odds, talent wins... Conn sends us on an engaging, entertaining, funny, and moving trip... A writer to watch. —Kirkus Reviews
(starred review) |
| "Conn's discursions on the porn industry and his stream of consciousness presentation of Manhattan through a child's stoned gaze are smart and fun to read. Scenes recounting Penelope and Benjamin's doomed relationship are at once tender and tortured, imbued with a complexity that is rare in a first-time novelist. This novel should get more reader and review attention than most similar experiments." —Publisher's Weekly
(5/26/03) | |
| Cloth | 6" x 9" | 372 pgs. | ISBN: 1-887128-55-7 | List: $15.00 | 05/1/2003 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: P tells the story of Benjamin Seymour, a failed New York City pornographer obsessed with his lost love, and Finn, a ten-year-old runaway girl genius. Separately and then together, they wander the city, searching for home and family. Most of their story takes place over the course of a single day, and the novel telescopes out from Benji and Finn's quest to embrace a wide variety of characters and themes. The pair's perambulations around the city are matched by inward journeys into consciousness and the very nature of language and storytelling itself. One chapter is written in the form of newspaper headlines and articles, one is composed of thirteen vignettes which follow major and minor characters around the city, one is a series of questions and answers, one is a stream of consciousness monologue sans punctuation, and one chapter, the center of the book and its climax, is written in the form of a full-length screenplay.
P is at once profane and sacred, scabrous and lyrical, pop and academic, raunchy and romantic. The novel is of our cultural moment while also tied to a literary tradition that begins with Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy and continues through James Joyce, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and down to Conn's contemporary Jonathan Safran Foer. It is also a heartbreaking work, formally ambitious and imaginatively adventurous, from a superb young writer operating in a major key.
About the author: A Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude graduate of Cornell University, Andrew Lewis Conn is a writer and critic. Since 1997, Conn has been a contributing writer at Film Comment, the official publication of The Film Society of Lincoln Center. His essay, "The Bad Review Happiness Deserves, Or: The Tyranny of Critic-Proof Movies," a Film Comment article Conn wrote about Todd Solondz's film Happiness, was singled out by critic Charles Taylor in "Salon Salutes," and Time Out New York critic Mike D'Angelo, who called the essay, "the best piece of film writing of the year." Since 2000 Conn has also contributed film criticism to Time Out New York.
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