Strange Jazz

By Steve Hermanos

From plucking antique furniture from abandoned rural Kansas homes, to exploring the wild underbelly of New York, narrator Jack Pierce describes the decline of his hometown and the kaleidoscopic New... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595162398
• ISBN13: 9780595162390
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

This is a great read, a brilliant book.

Do you like the best of American literature -- Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fistzgerald, a touch of Faulkner? This book deals with current American (and global) themes -- the destruction of farming cultures, gentrification of the cities, and yes, music, music, music.This book confronts important issues head on, and I find that so refreshing in contemporary American literature. The style is mellifluous, crisp, compact, and yet rich. If there were six stars this would get six!

An American novel of greatness. Yes, finally!

Crystalline descriptions. A great plot of 1980's destruction that's as timeless as the migrant story in Grapes of Wrath. The narrative sings between two locales -- New York City and a tiny (vanishing) farm town in Kansas. The book bounces beautifully between both extremes of the American spectrum, and the reader is left exhilerated and wanting more. I'm thoroughly looking forward to more work from this writer.The great American novel -- here it is though I don't know why Random House or some other big publisher didn't find this and push it. If anyone knows this writer, please let me know.--Maxwell Sturgis

Kudos for Strange Jazz

Moving fluidly between a soon-to-be ghost town in Kansas and the roaring eighties in Manhattan, Steve Hermanos has written an important and moving American novel. He covers the waterfront - the demise of the family farm,the real estate boom in New York City and the resulting rise of a new class of dispossessed - the homeless. The plot revolves around the narrator and his two brothers - one a journalist, the other an ambitious real estate mogul - and their grieving wastrel of an alcoholic father. There is a lot of anger in this book, but at the same time a sweetness and affection for its characters.

READ THIS BOOK!!!!!

I loved this book! Quick, profound, funny, insightful. If you love quality fiction then read STRANGE JAZZ!!!!

hilarious and haunting

The best, most insightful, most bitingly funny novel about New York in the 80s I have read. The tightly wound plot unravels with intellectual suspense, revealing the hidden workings and interconnections of powerful and powerless, money and art, country and city. This is a stealth epic disguised as a comico-satiric memoir. An ambitious book about big subjects which at the same time brings into sharp focus a particular time and place.