The Last Generation of Chainsmokers by Stephen Creagh Uys

by Stephen Creagh Uys

The Last Generation of Chainsmokers is a dark and dazzling novel about doomed love in New York's Lower East Side in the 1990s. When Crane King and Kimberly Anderson first meet in The Village Idiot, it is the middle of the day and both are drunk. The story of their besotted passion in a downward-spiraling world is at once tender -- the exquisite pain of mad love -- and menacing in its descent toward impending catastrophe. Stephen Creagh Uys draws on shifting, often fragmentary points of view to tell the aching love story of a couple perfectly suited to each other, but not the world. They are Scott and Zelda caught in the crosshairs of Big Daddy-O Apple, a haywire existence with devastating consequences for all around them.Uys takes no prisoners in this taut, harrowing book that moves seamlessly from Madison Avenue to the holding pens of The Tombs. Lives lived minimally loom large on every page, with brilliant, often savage wordplay, from a streetwise and savvy observer of the city that never sleeps.

Paperback

First published February 1, 2004