Nike

by Cara Hoffman

Fiction. Set in the red light district of Athens in the late 1980s, NIKE is a dark modern retelling of the story of the goddess of Victory. Maya Brennan returns to Athens after a trip to the Middle East to find that her boyfriend Jezz is dead, their money is gone, and their roommate has disappeared. Haunted by images of Jezz, and beset with memories exultant and brutal, Maya is drawn again into a violent and surreal subculture of hotel running and passport trafficking.

Genres: Fiction

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

HOFFMAN is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Running, So Much Pretty and Be Safe I Love You. She has written for the New York Times, Marie Claire, Salon, and National Public Radio, and is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades including a Folio Prize nomination, and a Sundance Institute Global Filmmaking Award.

She has been a visiting writer at Columbia, St. John’s and University of Oxford.

She currently lives in Manhattan.

Reviews

[Rosemary]

I ordered this book at the same time that I ordered "So Much Pretty". Had I just been patient and ordered only one of them, I certainly wouldn't have been back for the second one.

This book is written in an even more amateurish style than "So Much Pretty", making it unreadable to me -- I only read about half of it before admitting that it was just too self-indulgent to be enjoyable.

[Monica]

Read an excerpt of this in Fifth Estate magazine which I really enjoyed. Unfortunately, I'm not really into this novel so far.

[Jen]

I am SO, SO glad that I haven't actually PAID for either of the Hoffman books I've forced myself to read. You would think I'd learned my lesson from trying to make sense of the senseless "So Much Pretty" but, alas, I thought NOTHING could be worse than that. I was wrong. This is not worth the paper it was printed on.