Pure Slaughter Value: Stories (First Edition)

Bingham, Robert

ISBN 10: 0385488556 / ISBN 13: 9780385488556

Published by Doubleday, New York, 1997

About this Item

New York: Doubleday, 1997. First edition. First printing (with full number line including 1). Hardbound. Fine in a fine jacket. A clean tight copy. Publisher's price intact on front jacket flap ($21.95). Comes with archival-quality mylar jacket protector. Smoke-free. The author's first book, a well-praised collection of stories.

Seller Inventory # Fiction-B-6

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Pure Slaughter Value: Stories (First Edition)
• Publisher: Doubleday, New York
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385488556
• ISBN 13: 9780385488556
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

A collection of short stories by a frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine captures the disillusionment, indulgences, and wayward affections of the educated, privileged wing of the so-called Generation X. Tour.

From the Inside Flap

ordinary debut collection, Pure Slaughter Value, Robert Bingham tracks the conscience of a generation that grew up educated, privileged, and starved for meaning. Bingham's strange sense of morbid fancy collides with a gutsy realism; the result is splendid wreckage: a young man is seduced by his first cousin (or maybe it's the other way around) at her brother's wake ("The Other Family"); a bored couple plot to kill a man during their ski-resort honeymoon ("Marriage Is Murder"); a yuppie banker risks his whole perfect life for an affair with a junkie ("The Fixers"); an insurance-company bounty hunter tracks down walkaways from drug and alcohol rehab ("Preexisting Condition"); and in the title story, an eleven-year-old boy is caught at the exquisitely uneasy intersection of the safety of childhood play and the pain of grown-up love and longing.

These lean, potent stories are utterly original, and yet by turns recall Salinger, in