Bandbox: A Novel - Hardcover

Mallon, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375421165 ISBN 13: 9780375421167

Publisher: Pantheon, 2004

Synopsis

From the author of Henry and Clara, a dazzling, hilarious novel that captures the heart and soul of New York in the Jazz Age.

Bandbox is a hugely successful magazine, a glamorous monthly cocktail of 1920s obsessions from the stock market to radio to gangland murder. Edited by the bombastic Jehoshaphat “Joe” Harris, the magazine has a masthead that includes, among many others, a grisly, alliterative crime writer; a shy but murderously determined copyboy; and a burned-out vaudeville correspondent who’s lovesick for his loyal, dewy assistant.

As the novel opens, the defection of Harris’s most ambitious protégé has plunged Bandbox into a death struggle with a new competitor on the newsstand. But there’s more to come: a sabotaged fiction contest, the NYPD vice squad, a subscriber’s kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Fosse’s Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the novel races from skyscraper to speakeasy, hops a luxury train to Hollywood, and crashes a buttoned-down dinner with Calvin Coolidge.

Thomas Mallon has given us a madcap and poi-gnant book that brilliantly portrays the gaudiest American decade of them all.

About this title

Book Description:

Published in hardcover by Pantheon, 2004, 0-375-42116-5

From the Back Cover:

"One of the best-written, most fully imagined, most linguistically perfect novels published in recent years . . . A generous tour de force."--Kaye Gibbons, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Cuddles Houlihan got clipped by the vodka bottle as it exited the pneumatic tube. . . ."
With that bottle we enter Bandbox, a hugely successful magazine of the 1920s, run by bombastic Joe Harris. Harris's most ambitious protégé (the "bastard son" he never had) has just defected to run the rival Cutaway, plunging Bandbox into a newsstand death struggle. The magazine's fight for survival will soon involve the vice squad, a subscriber's kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the reader races from skyscraper to speakeasy in a madcap romp of a book that brilliantly portrays Manhattan in the gaudiest American decade of them all.

"Antic, stylized, and up-tempo. [Mallon's] dialogue has a Kaufman-and-Hart crackle, and the story boasts more Lotharios, floozies, mobsters, and wised-up dames than an M-G-M double feature."--The New Yorker

Thomas Mallon's books include the novels Henry and Clara, Two Moons, and Dewey Defeats Truman, and the collection of essays In Fact. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the American Scholar, and GQ. He lives in Washington, D.C

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0375421165
• ISBN 13: 9780375421167
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320