Book - BookDetective

Name: Bandbox

Author: Thomas Mallon
Year: 2004
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Genres/categories:
Historical fiction

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ISBNs:
9780156029971
0156029979

From the author of Henry and Clara, a dazzling, hilarious novel that captures the heart and soul of New York in the Jazz Age. Bandbox is a hugely successful magazine, a glamorous monthly cocktail of 1920s obsessions from the stock market to radio to gangland murder. Edited by the bombastic Jehoshaphat 'Joe' Harris, the magazine has a masthead that includes, among many others, a grisly, alliterative crime writer; a shy but murderously determined copyboy; and a burned-out vaudeville correspondent who's lovesick for his loyal, dewy assistant. As the novel opens, the defection of Harris's most ambitious protÃ©gÃ© has plunged Bandbox into a death struggle with a new competitor on the newsstand. But there's more to come: a sabotaged fiction contest, the NYPD vice squad, a subscriber's kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Fosse's Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the novel races from skyscraper to speakeasy, hops a luxury train to Hollywood, and crashes a buttoned-down dinner with Calvin Coolidge. Thomas Mallon has given us a madcap and poignant book that brilliantly portrays the gaudiest American decade of them all. From the Hardcover edition.