Dust Devil on a Quiet Street
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9781590212974
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by Richard Bowes
Dust Devils on a Quiet Street chronicles the remarkable life of Boston-born, New York City-reared author Richard Bowes. Bowes's childhood and adolescent brushes with dramatic spirits and hustlers, large and small, paved the way for his adult encounters with the remarkable, the numinous, the supernatural. Deftly orchestrated, this "memoir" is part impassioned homage to Manhattan--decades before and up to its recent wound on September 11th, which creates a hole in the city and allows the ghosts of the dead to return--and part tell-all of the uncanny secrets behind a group of Greenwich Village writers and life as a university librarian.
Paperback, 318 pages
Dust Devils on a Quiet Street chronicles the remarkable life of Boston-born, New York City-reared author Richard Bowes. Bowes's childhood and adolescent brushes with dramatic spirits and hustlers, large and small, paved the way for his adult encounters with the remarkable, the numinous, the supernatural. Deftly orchestrated, this "memoir" is part impassioned homage to Manhattan--decades before and up to its recent wound on September 11th, which creates a hole in the city and allows the ghosts of the dead to return--and part tell-all of the uncanny secrets behind a group of Greenwich Village writers and life as a university librarian.
Paperback, 318 pages
"Decades of a troubled and magical life in New York are described in this fascinating fictionalized memoir. Adapting previously published stories, Bowes creates an alternate version of himself, inhabiting a world where magic might or might not be real." - Publishers Weekly
"Acknowledging the influence of nineteenth-century writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, Bowes has made himself a character in his novel, conflating fiction and memoir, mythologizing both himself and the literary and artistic characters about whom he writes. But it is Greenwich Village, filled with local ghosts and small gods, which remains the most memorable character in Bowes’ latest exercise in speculative fiction." = Booklist
"Richard Bowes' luminous, singular new memoir-thing, Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, has whirled through my life and head for the past week. Ostensibly a book of memories about growing up lost and talented and sad and addicted and gay in the seedy, boho glory days of Greenwhich Village and especially the East Village, it's also one of the most moving meditations I've ever read about the salvations and transformations that a life half-lived in the imagination offers, and one of the more accurate recountings of what living that life costs. These are wondrous streets, populated with folk singers and old gods, the checkerboard floor of the possibly cursed, then-new NYU library and city gyms after midnight, an Office of Doom and the King of the Big Night Hours. Just in case those weren't enough, the book has arguably the funniest Necronomicon riff I've ever read, and the opening twenty pages constitute the most riveting, affecting, and human 9/11 writing I've encountered. Better than Delillo's. Better than Colson Whitehead's. Magical, in the best and most dangerous sense of that word." - Glen Hirschberg
"Part memoir, part tell-all, part homage to the city he has lived in for forty-plus years, and part secret history of that same city, Dust Devil is more than just an examination of Bowes’s life, although it definitely has the quality of someone looking back at his life and trying to make sense of it, both to us, and to himself." - Keith Glaeske for Lambda Literary
"Acknowledging the influence of nineteenth-century writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, Bowes has made himself a character in his novel, conflating fiction and memoir, mythologizing both himself and the literary and artistic characters about whom he writes. But it is Greenwich Village, filled with local ghosts and small gods, which remains the most memorable character in Bowes’ latest exercise in speculative fiction." = Booklist
"Richard Bowes' luminous, singular new memoir-thing, Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, has whirled through my life and head for the past week. Ostensibly a book of memories about growing up lost and talented and sad and addicted and gay in the seedy, boho glory days of Greenwhich Village and especially the East Village, it's also one of the most moving meditations I've ever read about the salvations and transformations that a life half-lived in the imagination offers, and one of the more accurate recountings of what living that life costs. These are wondrous streets, populated with folk singers and old gods, the checkerboard floor of the possibly cursed, then-new NYU library and city gyms after midnight, an Office of Doom and the King of the Big Night Hours. Just in case those weren't enough, the book has arguably the funniest Necronomicon riff I've ever read, and the opening twenty pages constitute the most riveting, affecting, and human 9/11 writing I've encountered. Better than Delillo's. Better than Colson Whitehead's. Magical, in the best and most dangerous sense of that word." - Glen Hirschberg
"Part memoir, part tell-all, part homage to the city he has lived in for forty-plus years, and part secret history of that same city, Dust Devil is more than just an examination of Bowes’s life, although it definitely has the quality of someone looking back at his life and trying to make sense of it, both to us, and to himself." - Keith Glaeske for Lambda Literary