Welcome to Yesterday

By Ian Spiegelman

Book Overview

"It must have been an amusing scene, me shivering on a doorstep with my face in my hands. Ill have to be amused by it sometime." --from Welcome to YesterdayNot since Dashiell Hammett has dialogue... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1401352502
• ISBN13: 9781401352509
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Miramax
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 6.1"

Customer Reviews

It's All in the Writing

None of these reviews really talk about the quality of the prose. That's what blew me away with 'Welcome to Yesterday.' I could care less that Spiegelman used to work at Page 6, but I do love hard boiled / noir-ish writing and I have to say, Spiegelman is a master. It's so refreshing to find a writer so young who really has 'the touch' when it comes to that gritty city dialogue, that artful masculine swagger - with a subtle paranoia pervading everything. It's something you can't fake. Either you got it, or you don't. And this guy's got it in spades. He really convinces you - like the classic writers in this genre - that the city itself is somehow grotesquely alive, an urban animal with a heartbeat that pounds so loudly it drives everyone that lives within its confines slightly mad. And I'm mad for this book. Put it in your shopping cart, baby.

Book 2

I didn't recognize the characters either, but to me that wasn't the driving force of the plot so it didn't matter. His first book was taught in my writing class last year and a few of us liked it so much we wrote papers on it. The storyline in this one is a guilty pleasure but the writing is so perfect it's nutritious too...

Gossip Noir, Anybody?

Fear and Loathing and Murder in New York - with a healthy dose of quick-fire dialogue. Sounds good? Then you should read Spiegelman's second novel, which confirms everything you've always suspected about the city's glitterati: they're shallow, they're mean, they're backstabbing (and worse), they're into drugs - and they're pretty damn sexy. As WELCOME TO YESTERDAY opens, one of them, talent agent Kyle Prince, is also dead, and a mysterious caller accuses gossip columnist Leon Koch of having killed him. What follows is a neo-noir of the first order, as Koch tries to unravel the events that led to Prince's death and hang on to the little integrity he has left...

Spiegelman or Nostradamus?

I picked this up because I met the author once when he was working for Page Six; we talked for awhile about celebrity gossip, but I never thought to ask him about exactly how these columns operate. He probably could have told me a lot: it seems he is something of a clairvoyant. Payoff scandals, a lying memoirist--it's all here. This book is a great read. The mystery is cool, there's an old-school newsroom character who's office is in the basement of a bar, and an amazing club scene that recalls the hell that was the late Lot 61. (Ok, I guess it could have been Lotus, too...)

A modern noir with bite

One of the more atmospheric novels I've read in a long time, Welcome to Yesterday starts off with a bang that thrusts you into the story and the life of a gossip columnist. I don't know the players in this world, but the author does and he introduces us to some of the more remarkable and despicable of them. While telling a compelling suspense story, the book also manages to share insight into the celebrity industry and the havoc that this sort of reporting can play on a man's soul. It's a great read.