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A Diet of Treacle

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A vintage tale of lust and drugs in old Greenwich Village—roaring back after fifty years out of print Sick of living respectably with her grandmother, Anita Carbone hops a downtown train. She finds Greenwich Village—the Village of Kerouac and Dylan, but also of Joe and Shank, two small-time dope peddlers more than happy to welcome a square into their midst. But after a few weeks in Joe's bed, she finds that with sex, drugs, and grime come danger, and that it's harder to get back uptown than it was to come down. Lawrence Block is the master of the thriller, and this early novel is a wild tour of a vanished scene: an authentic trip that burns with the slow intensity of a roach's last drag.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lawrence Block, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from his personal collection, and a new afterword written by the author.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 29, 2007
      Reprinted for the first time since its pseudonymous publication nearly 50 years ago, this tour of the 1950s Manhattan underworld begins with Anita, a good college girl with a bright but predictable future, who comes to Greenwich Village to find what else is out there. Block’s New York is a noir wonderland, populated with junkies and beatsters (the dark predecessor to the modern hipster) spouting angular tough-guy dialogue, in which Anita plays curious, confused Alice. Down the rabbit hole, she meets Joe, an aimless loser, and his roommate, Shank, a violent drug dealer whose earnings provide them with a life of leisure. When psychopathic Shank murders a cop, however, they all go on the run toward an uncertain fate. Block effortlessly immerses himself in the mind space of Joe and Shank, reporting their world of drugs, sex and disaffection with a matter-of-factness that hits hard, all the more convincing because Block never makes an overt effort to convince. A potboiler morality play at its finest, the novel doesn’t deliver much action until its last third, but the slow build of the first two will give readers the delicious (and all-too-rare) feeling that anything could happen.

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  • OverDrive Read
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  • English

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