Books about Nersesian from Amazon.com

Arthur Nersesian's underground literary treasure is an unforgettable slice of gritty New York City life...and the darkly hilarious odyssey of an anonymous slacker. He's a perennial couch-surfer, an aspiring writer searching for himself in spite of himself, and he's just trying to survive. But life has other things in store for the fuck-up. From being dumped by his girlfriend to getting fired for asking for a raise, from falling into a robbery to posing as a gay man to keep his job at a porno theater, the fuck-up's tragi-comedy is perfectly realized by Arthur Nersesian, who manages to create humor and suspense out of urban desperation. "Read it and howl," says Bruce Benderson (author of User), "and be glad it didn't happen to you.".
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Praise for The Swing Voter of Staten Island:

FROM KIRKUS REVIEWS:

Having first dazzled Weird-Lit ultra-hipsters with The Fuck-Up in 1997, Nersesian (Unlubricated, 2004, etc.) rounds out a busy decade with a dystopian epic.

Combining sci-fi space/time-warping, Unabomber-style political ranting and an overall air of goose-bump paranoia, this is one turbo-charged trip through a version of the 1980s no one could love. A gumbo of Weather Underground, S.L.A. and Black Panther droogies take over New York City in the '70s, splashing dirty bombs helter-skelter. Manhattan basically kaput, the federal government designates a former "military simulation city," a radioactive desert outside Vegas, as the New New York. The geographic layout's a convincing copy, but landmark names are corrupted: "Vampire Stake Building," "Onion Square," "Rock & Filler Center." And the Gangs of New York rule, with the Boroughs divided between Piggers (or We the Peoplers) and Crappers (All Created Equalers), political parties at mutual knifepoint. Into this bedlam drops protagonist Uli, a Manchurian Candidate knock-off programmed by mysterious nefarious forces to assassinate Dropt, a rival candidate to Pigger Mayor Shub. Hizzonner spouts masterful Orwellian jive ("He's intractable in a business that requires a lot of tractoring!"), and the citizens, when not overdosing on creepy new drugs, fantasize returning to the real Manhattan. But much to the fury of Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg, Ronald Reagan is running for re-election. If Staten Island's borough president allies with the national Democrats and Reagan loses, nobody gets to go back, because it's only budget-crunching Ronnie who wants to deep-six the fake New York. The loony-tune plot merely serves as a launch pad for Nersesian's meditations on Vietnam-era military insanity, big-city frenzy and the Tower of Babel capacities of language.

A sharp, strange read: Imagine William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick sharing a needle."

FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:

Nersesian has carved out his niche with novels like The Fuck-Up and Unlubricated about New Yorkers trapped in their own ugly lives. His sixth is similarly sordid but uncharacteristically fantastical. Over the course of a week in a counterfactual 1980, amnesiac protagonist Uli must navigate a reproduction of New York City built in Nevada after the original was destroyed. He quickly learns that the city is divided into territories run by Piggers and Crappers (“political parties, or gangs”) and he has been programmed to assassinate the Crapper candidate for mayor. Manhattan and Brooklyn belong to Crappers, the Bronx and Queens are held by Piggers; Staten Island is independent, and thus constitutes the swing vote in the mayoral and--more importantly--presidential elections. “Rescue City” consists of smaller, cheaper versions of the original: bridges are made of rotten boards, famous landmarks are redubbed corrupt versions of their real names (e.g., Rock and Filler Center for Rockefeller Center and Onion Square for Union Square), and the East River suffers from a clogged drain. Uli mingles with a wide array of desperate characters while trying to uncover his identity and determine what, if anything, he should be fighting for. Nersesian's novel is exceptionally bleak and bewildering, and his fans would expect nothing less.

Up until now, Arthur Nersesian’s six novels (including The Fuck-Up, MTV/Pocket Books, which has sold over 100,000 copies) have focused on the tragicomedy of fin de siècle New York City. Now, in his boldest novel yet, he has broken through into a new landscape that at once fuses the real with the surreal, the psychological with the psychedelic. Actual characters from the 1960s and 1970s—Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Daniel Ellsberg, and the Berrigan Brothers—are but a few of the folks who populate this alternate version of American history.

The Swing Voter of Staten Island takes place over the course of a week in November 1981. Uli, suffering from amnesia, finds himself on a mission, but isn’t quite sure what it is, who sent him, or even who he is. He ventures across the perilous wilds of New York City, through abandoned neighborhoods and burned-out battlefields. But Uli soon awakens to the awful fact that this isn’t New York City at all. He is a key player in a strange, alternate history of both his city and country.

Uli has found himself trapped in New York, Nevada, isolated in the center of an impenetrable desert—where the US military was able to transform one of its “military situation cities” into a temporary refuge center, designed to resemble New York. While battling to make sense of his surroundings, Uli slowly remembers who he is and his own culpability in creating the current situation.

Arthur Nersesian is the author of six novels, including the smash hit The Fuck-Up (MTV/Pocket Books), Chinese Takeout (HarperCollins), Manhattan Loverboy (Akashic Books), Suicide Casanova (Akashic Books), and dogrun (MTV/Pocket Books). He lives in New York City.

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mary bellanova came home to her east village apartment, cooked dinner, and fought with her boyfriend, primo. but soon mary realized that primo's silence in front of the tv set was more than just one of his bad moods: primo was actually dead.

other guys had abandoned mary before,but primo's exit was by far the most unique. and suddenly mary's life -- defined so far by a string of temp jobs and unfinished short stories -- takes off on a tantalizing adventure as she follows a trail of primo's ex-lovers.

arthur nersesian, who created a howling new york odyssey in his smash hit the fuck-up, captures the spirit of the city itself -- jolting and full of surprise -- in this powerful new novel edged with black humor and poignancy.

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Overly suspicious second novel from Arthur Nersesian, author of The Fuck-Up

Nersesian's brilliant follow-up to his underground classic, The Fuck-Up, Manhattan Loverboyis paranoid delusion and fantastic comedy in the service of social realism. Updating the picaresque chronicles in L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz and Kafka's The Trial, MLB is the tale of an orphan whose only known background is that of the city itself, a scaffold-covered grid sewn together with "Do Not Cross" tape. In this overly suspicious masterpiece, love is expressed through corrective surgery, and families meet across boardroom tables.

Arthur Nersesian was managing editor of the literary magazine, the Portable Lower East Side. He was born and raised in New York City..
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From the author of the cult classic The Fuck-Up comes a vicious new tale of art, drugs, love, and death on the Lower East Side.

Orloff Trenchant is a painter who sells books on West 4th Street in Manhattan and is obsessed with mastering his craft. Desperate for cash, Or agrees to take a commission no one else will touch: he has three weeks to carve a headstone for a recently deceased restaurateur -- a Chinese takeout box. As Or attempts to make his deadline, he navigates among a toxic mix of fellow artists, struggling gallery owners, bloodsucking art dealers, his politically active friends, and a haunting addict poet whose life is more out of control than Or's own.

Nersesian's prose is sparkling and hypnotic in this brutal and comic story that will make you wonder if life and art are two different things.

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A Fierce and Hysterical Tale
Of Self-Destruction On
The Road to Being Discovered

Hannah is a struggling actress living in New York's Tribeca, and like any young thesp she is bent on success: finding paying jobs that offer good material, not just mindless roles for eager and nubile bodies. When she comes across a lost play by a dead 1980s icon -- brilliantly written, with the perfect role that will display her acting chops -- she thinks she's hit the jackpot.

But when she becomes the play's de facto producer and lands a gig on an indie film, she's forced to deal with the nonstop whirlwind of backstage maneuverings and outrageous personalities ... and with the fact that she witnessed the falling of the Twin Towers from blocks away. When Hannah loses her coveted role to an old rival, she learns a shocking truth that could bring her whole world tumbling down.

Dynamic and moving, with trademark Nersesian moments of cutting humor and truth, Unlubricated is a tale of down-and-dirty off-Broadway New York theatre, sex, love, and life in the wake of September 11.

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"Nersesian is this generation's Mark Twain and the East River is his Mississippi."-Jennifer Belle, author of High Maintenance

"Nersesian is a first-rate observer of his native New York."-Publishers Weekly

The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx is the highly anticipated follow-up to The Swing Voter of Staten Island-the first two installments in Arthur Nersesian's series of novels offering an alternate history of New York: The Five Books of Moses.

Robert Moses was responsible for creating contemporary New York's infrastructure, but he did so at the cost of destroying neighborhoods. In this novel, Robert has looted his brother Paul's share of the Moses family fortune, repeatedly blocked his attempts at gaining public office, thwarted his career in the private sector, and set in motion events that decimate Paul's home life.

Paul Moses' deep-seated rage metamorphoses into an act of terrorism committed against his brother and against a city that he once cherished. Although it can be read as a stand-alone novel about Robert and Paul Moses, The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx is also a memory play that follows Uli Sarkisian-the hero of The Swing Voter of Staten Island-en route to solving a massive historical crime, while desperately struggling to escape from becoming another one of its victims.

Arthur Nersesian is the author of eight novels, including the smash hit The Fuck-Up (more than 100,000 copies sold), dogrun, Suicide Casanova (Akashic Books), and, most recently, The Swing Voter of Staten Island, the first volume in The Five Books of Moses series. He lives in New York City.

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"Nersesian is this generation's Mark Twain and the East River is his Mississippi."-Jennifer Belle, author of High Maintenance

"Award-winning playwright Arthur Nersesian has woven an effective dramatic form through four plays, each quite funny in its own way. Each yields very powerful human results while subtly investigating the major social issues of our time."-Evangelina Borges, Trying Time Press

Nersesian's cult status has grown from the success of his novels, and here for the first time his equal skills as a playwright are revealed to a hungry public. Three of the four plays in East Village Tetralogy have been staged off-Broadway in New York City. The four plays included in this volume are:

Rent Control
East Village Writer's Bloc
Plea Bargains
Spare Change
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