Shopping in Space: Essays on America's Blank Generation Fiction - Softcover

Young, Elizabeth; Caveney, Graham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802133940 ISBN 13: 9780802133946

Publisher: Grove Press, 1994

Synopsis

A selection of literary criticism and cultural commentary that provides a broad assessment of the American "brat pack" writers such as Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz - authors who have had commercial success, but whose output is often dismissed as shallow.

About this title

About the Author:

Elizabeth Young was brought up in Scotland but lived for most of her life in London. Her journalism appeared in numerous publications including The Observer, The Independent, The Guardian and The New Statesman. Elizabeth Young died in London in March 2001.

From Publishers Weekly:

Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and Lynne Tillman are among the young American writers examined in this collection of essays. British critics Graham and Caveney, who deem the contemporary literary scene in England insular and petrified, are downright fawning in their admiration of U.S. authors whose work is infused with references to drugs, music videos, advertising and other manifestations of popular culture. The essays are engagingly written, and the authors correctly assert that a wide but needless gap exists between abstruse scholarly criticism and book reviews in the general media. However, they myopically believe that only fiction emanating from or set in New York City or Los Angeles speaks for or to today's youth. Moreover, there is a good deal of critical sloppiness: Graham and Caveney don't attempt to judge whether some of the writers are more talented than others, and comparisons with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Beckett and Nathanael West are overstated. A provocative but flawed study.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0802133940
• ISBN 13: 9780802133946
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288