In the Night Cafe - Softcover

Joyce Johnson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006542824 ISBN 13: 9780006542827

Publisher: Fontana Paperbacks, 1990

Synopsis

Tom is estranged from his wife and children when he meets Joanna, a rootless young woman searching for love, in the Greenwich Village of the early 1960s

About this title

About the Author:

Joyce Johnson was born in 1935 in New York City, the setting for all her fiction: Come and Join the Dance, recognized as the first Beat novel by a woman writer, Bad Connections, and In the Night Café. She is best known for her memoir Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 and dealt with coming of age in the 1950s and with her involvement with Jack Kerouac. She has published two other Beat-related books: Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, and The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. She has also written a second memoir, Missing Men, and the nonfiction title What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case.

Review:

“In The Night Café is heartbreaking and exhilarating at once. Joyce Johnson has written a memorable love story.” —Hilma Wolitzer

“Almost heartbreakingly evocative, uncommon deftness and restraint. . . . Johnson has a way of characterizing people with a single stroke, allowing us to color in the rest.” —Anne Tyler, Chicago Tribune

“An intense, strong love story, direct and moving . . . An exhilarating experience.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A splendid piece of work, and I read it with great pleasure. The voice of the narrator is so authentic, and her story is told with admirable integrity, restraint, and poignancy.” —Lynne Sharon Schwartz

“The book sails on its first-person narrator: a fiercely believable, testifying voice that is pungent, close to the bone, stinging with candor. Lyrical atmospheric details aside, the poetry of this novel is in its quick psychological insights and the ability to make us shudder and feel along with it.” —Philip Lopate, The New York Times Book Review

“No one writes about the Bohemian New York art and literary scene of the late 1950s and early ’60s with more affectionate and rueful insight than Johnson . . . Very moving.” —Publishers Weekly

“Novelist and Kerouac-memoirist Johnson . . . hits her stride with this bittersweet novel of love and death on the Lower East Side . . . Haunting and evocative.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Lower Manhattan in the days when Idlewild was Idlewild and Kennedy had not been shot seems like a funky-glamorous Parisian-bohemian Camelot and Joyce Johnson is its chronicler. First in her extraordinary memoir . . . Minor Characters, and now in this incandescent novel.” —Phyllis Rose

“As happens now and then, one novel so totally captured my imagination that I keep going back to it. . . . It’s a story of heartbreak, where the heart breaks slowly, a little at a time. Which makes In the Night Café an exquisitely painful—and profoundly moving—novel to read.” —Joyce Maynard, Mademoiselle
 
“There is a touch here of Jean Rhys and Marguerite Duras . . . but with none of the self-pity of the former or the intellectual dryness of the latter. Johnson keeps an everyday tone in the middle of deep waters. To do so whilst maintaining her balance requires a constant and remarkable artistry.” —The Independent

“The intensity of Joyce Johnson’s imagination lies in the way she looks at the world, in the daring openness she bring to her place and time and the people around her.” —Seven Days

About this edition

• Publisher: Fontana Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0006542824
• ISBN 13: 9780006542827
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224