In the drink

Zusatztext "At a time when authors are penning best-selling memoirs about their alcoholic torment! and 12-step programs are as popular as SUVs! Christensen's take is refreshing."-- The New York Post "[T]he freshest anti-heroine I've read in a long time. This is no depressing drunk-noir; it's a great description of real life--the good! the manageable! and the awful."-- Jane "[A] breezy and confident first novel."-- The New York Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor Kate Christensen Klappentext In this compassionate, wise, and comical debut, Kate Christensen gives an engaging and authentic voice to a new generation of single urban women. Claudia Steiner never intended for her life to become such a disaster. At the age of twenty-nine she finds herself serving as secretary to an insane, aging socialite who barks orders from her toilet, specializes in devastating backhanded remarks, and expects Claudia to ghostwrite her best-selling novels. Her job pays enough to keep her in overpriced cocktails, cabs, and take-out but doesn't cover the rent on her roach-infested apartment or keep her creditors at bay. Her romantic prospects are no better. She's hopelessly in love with her best friend, a corporate lawyer who may or may not be gay, and she's still relentlessly pursued by her ex-lover, a married unpublished epic poet. All Claudia can rely on--aside from her wry sense of humor and her faith in the medicinal properties of whiskey--is a persistent little flame of belief in herself, which gives her the glimmer of a chance for a happy ending.I lived on the fourth floor of a former residential hotel that had been constructed cheaply and hastily after one war or another to house a sudden influx of immigrants willing to live anywhere. The stairwell was a trembling shell of flaking plaster, a fragile husk my mounting or descending tread always threatened to implode and send sliding into a pile of rubble in the basement. The stairs sagged in the middle, eroded like bars of soap. The plaster curlicues in the upper corners of each landing had been reduced by attrition to sad grayish ridges, more fungal growths than embellishments. There was an elevator, but it was a scary, creaky old box, splitting at the seams and frayed at the cables, whose upward speed was slower than climbing on foot. When I opened my door and turned on the overhead light I got a brief impression of vanishing movement, the usual squadron of cockroaches sliding into hairline cracks in the kitchen wall. Seven years in this tiny room with these creatures had dulled my squeamish loathing of them. I still set out Combat disks every few months, but this was more out of habit than any expectation that they'd die out. We'd struck a kind of deal: they roamed at will through my apartment all day, but skedaddled the instant I came home. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, they depended on manna from the sky and the whims of an incomprehensibly larger being who could squash them underfoot if they got out of line. A cross-section cutaway of my wall would have revealed a seething, lustrous blanket of generations upon generations living out their lives in this wall without any awareness that beyond it lay streets, sky, light, trees, countless other walls and worlds like theirs. My kitchen was wedged into the entryway next to the coat closet. It consisted of a waist-high refrigerator with a tiny stainless-steel sink and two burner coils built into its top. Affixed to the wall above this contraption was an old metal cabinet that held plates, bowls, cups, a can of coffee, a three-year-old box of cornflakes, nearly half a bottle of vodka and a box of sugar. I filled the kettle and turned a burner to High. As the coil heated, a stray roach, senile or stupid, came twitching its antennae slowly along the wall. I considered its shiny, flat, greasy shell, the obscene way its feet adhered effortlessly...

Report

"At a time when authors are penning best-selling memoirs about their alcoholic torment, and 12-step programs are as popular as SUVs, Christensen's take is refreshing."--The New York Post

"[T]he freshest anti-heroine I've read in a long time. This is no depressing drunk-noir; it's a great description of real life--the good, the manageable, and the awful."--Jane

"[A] breezy and confident first novel."--The New York Times Book Review

Product details

• Authors: Christensen, Kate Christensen
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 01.08.2000
• EAN: 9780385720212
• ISBN: 978-0-385-72021-2
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 134 mm x 205 mm x 17 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), FICTION / Literary, Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary