I Am Charlotte Simmons - Softcover

WOLFE, TOM

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312424442 ISBN 13: 9780312424442

Publisher: Picador Paper, 2005

Synopsis

Tom Wolfe, the master social novelist of our time, the spot-on chronicler of all things contemporary and cultural, presents a sensational new novel about life, love, and learning--or the lack of it--amid today's American colleges.

Our story unfolds at fictional Dupont University: those Olympian halls of scholarship housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition . . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.

As Charlotte encounters the paragons of Dupont's privileged elite--her roommate, Beverly, a Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turk of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock-obsessed campus--she is seduced by the heady glamour of acceptance, betraying both her values and upbringing before she grasps the power of being different--and the exotic allure of her own innocence.

With his trademark satirical wit and famously sharp eye for telling detail, Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons draws on extensive observations at campuses across the country to immortalize the early-21st-century college-going experience.

About this title

Review:

"Our pre-eminent social realist...trains his all-seeing eye on the institution of the American university. . . . Wolfe's rhapsodic prose style finds its perfect target in academia's beer-soaked bacchanals." --Henry Alford, Newsday

"Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era. . . . A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel." --Lev Grossman, Time

"Tom Wolfe has scored a slam dunk with his...attention to style, the rule-bending punctuation, the deftness of slang dialogue, and that biting satire." --Steve Garbarino, New York Post

"Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives." --Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

"[A] hilarious, exclamation-point filled novel." --John Freeman, Time Out New York

"Brilliant . . . I couldn't stop reading it. . . . Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure." --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"A lot of fun . . . Hilarious." --Francine Prose, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Tom Wolfe remains a peerless satirist. Alone among our fiction writers he is actively writing the human comedy, American-style, on a grand Dickensian scale." --David Lehman, Bloomberg News

"Scathingly clear-eyed, often very funny take on college life." --Robert Siegel, NPR, All Things Considered

"Dazzingly vivid . . . Tom Wolfe has served up another of his broadly entertaining novels." --Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"His most fully realized and hands-down funniest work of fiction." --Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman

"Captivating . . . Sit back and enjoy the ride." --Tom Walker, The Denver Post

"Tom Wolfe is America's greatest living novelist." --Joseph Bottum, The Weekly Standard

"Rollicking . . . Just as Americans continue to read A Farewell to Arms or The Great Gatsby, we'll be reading I Am Charlotte Simmons for many years. . . . Professors like to complain that they get a year older every fall, while students always remain the same. Add I Am Charlotte Simmons to that magic circle of campus phenomena unlikely to age." --Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

From the Publisher:

Another unputdownable novel from the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, both huge bestsellers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador Paper
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0312424442
• ISBN 13: 9780312424442
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 752