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The Tenants of Moonbloom

The Tenants of Moonbloom

by Edward Lewis Wallant, introduction by Dave Eggers

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Norman Moonbloom is a loser, a drop-out who can’t even make it as a deadbeat. His brother, a slumlord, hires him to collect rent in the buildings he owns in Manhattan. Making his rounds from apartment to apartment, Moonbloom confronts a wildly varied assortment of brilliantly described urban characters, among them a gay jazz musician with a sideline as a gigolo, a Holocaust survivor, and a brilliant young black writer modeled on James Baldwin. Moonbloom hears their cries of outrage and abuse; he learns about their secret sorrows and desires. And as he grows familiar with their stories, he finds that he is drawn, in spite of his best judgment, into a desperate attempt to improve their lives.

Edward Lewis Wallant’s astonishing comic tour de force is a neglected masterpiece of 1960s America.Edward Lewis Wallant, introduction by Dave Eggers

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590170700
Pages: 248
Publication Date:

Praise

A remarkable tour de force in which this gifted writer takes the elements of several "Street Scenes," and spins them faster and faster like a deranged merry—go—round.
— Martin Levin, New York Times Book Review

No one since Nathanael West has written better of the rootlessness of metropolitan life. West is a writer whom Wallant resembles not only in his untimely death after early brilliant promise, but for his special Jewish sensibility and...profound moral concern...
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