Plays Well with Others by Gurganus Allan

Plays Well with Others by Gurganus Allan

With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists--refugees from the middle class--hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher's son whose good looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina Alabama Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent. These friends shelter each other, promote each other's work, and compete erotically. When tragedy strikes, this circle grows up fast, somehow finding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family.
Funny and heartbreaking, as eventful as Dickens and as atmospheric as one of Fitzgerald's parties, Plays Well with Others combines a fable's high-noon energy with an elegy's evening grace. Allan Gurganus's celebrated new novel is a lovesong to imperishable friendship, a hymn to a brilliant and now-vanished world.

Allan Gurganus's fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. Books include Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All; White People; Plays Well with Others; The Practical Heart; and Local Souls. Gurganus's essays are seen on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times and in The New York Review of Books. He has been awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the American Academy's Sue Kaufman Prize for best first novel, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lambda Literary Award, and the National Magazine Prize. Film adaptations of Gurganus's work have won four Emmys. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Gurganus cofounded Writers Against Jesse Helms. His novel in progress is The Erotic History of a Country Baptist Church.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780394589145
ISBN 10	0394589149
Title	Plays Well with Others
Author	Gurganus Allan
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Year published	1997-10-28
Number of pages	16
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.