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Book Description Soft Cover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9780385721356
Book Description Condition: New. Brand New. Seller Inventory # 9780385721356
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # BKZN9780385721356
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Book Description paperback. Condition: New. Reprint. Product DescriptionNATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST In this ambitiously multilayered novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it.She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte's narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There's a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society.As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture.From The New YorkerEgan's moving but circumscribed first novel, "The Invisible Circus," in no way prepared readers for the millennial ambitions of her second-a comic, richly imagined, and stunningly written exploration of the American obsession with self-invention. The rebirth of Charlotte Swenson, a model, takes place in a cornfield outside of her detested home town, Rockford, Illinois, when she's pulled from the fiery wreckage of her car. A plastic surgeon painstakingly re-creates her face, but now both friends and strangers pass her on the street without a second glance. While Charlotte tries to "reposition" herself in New York, her namesake, the plain and unnervingly direct teen-age daughter of her best friend in high school, struggles to slip the snares of her confining life in Rockford; ostracized by her peers, she switches schools and initiates an affair with a secretive stranger. Egan's novel broadly and brightly satirizes the grid of power and celebrity as its older heroine negotiates Manhattan's brave new world of Internet entrepreneurs and razor-wielding fashion photographers. But the author is also attentive to those who live in the shadowy interstices of American life: a kid skateboarder with cancer; an alcoholic private eye; a mad professor obsessed with a time when our industries produced things instead of images. Egan's portrait of the younger Charlotte's lover, a rage-choked terrorist nestling into the heartland, is particularly chilling. And yet her novel is also an antidote for the ills it describes-an energetic, unorthodox, quintessentially American vision of America.Copyright 2005 The New YorkerReview"Brilliantly unnerving. . . . A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel."-The New York Times"Comic, richly imagined, and stunningly written. . . . An energetic, unorthodox, quintessentially American vision of America." -The New Yorker"Look at Me is so engrossing, energetic, sharp, and funny, it reminded me of Ralph Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man." -Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air (NPR)"Arresting. . . . Look at Me is the real thing-brave, honest, unflinching. [It] is itself a mirror in which we can clearly see the true face of the times in which we live." -Francine Prose, The New York Observer"Egan limns the mysteries of human identity and the stranglehold our image-obsessed culture has on us all in this complicated and wildly ambitious novel." -Newsweek"Intriguing. . . . An unlikely blend of tabloid luridness and brainy cultural commentary. . . . The novel's uncanny prescience gives Look at Me a rare urgency." -Time"Egan has created some compelling characters and written provocative meditations on our times. . . . [She] has captured our culture in its edge-city awfulness." -The Washington Post Book World"Look at Me is a complicated novel . . . but the questions it raises are worth following a lifetime of labyrinths toward the answers." -Los Angeles Times"Ambitious, swiftly paced. . . . Egan writes with such s. Seller Inventory # BKZN9780385721356
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Condition Notes: New from the publisher. Seller Inventory # 1407432
Book Description Condition: New. pp. 544. Seller Inventory # 26747405
Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Brand New Copy. Seller Inventory # BBB_new0385721358
Book Description paperback. Condition: New. Language: ENG. Seller Inventory # 9780385721356