Bandbox - Softcover

Thomas Mallon's books include the novels Henry and Clara and Dewey Defeats Truman, and the collection of essays In Fact. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the American Scholar, and GQ. He lives in Washington, D.C.

"One of the best-written, most fully imagined, most linguistically perfect novels published in recent years . . . A generous tour de force."--Kaye Gibbons, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Cuddles Houlihan got clipped by the vodka bottle as it exited the pneumatic tube. . . ."
With that bottle we enter Bandbox, a hugely successful magazine of the 1920s, run by bombastic Joe Harris. Harris's most ambitious protégé (the "bastard son" he never had) has just defected to run the rival Cutaway, plunging Bandbox into a newsstand death struggle. The magazine's fight for survival will soon involve the vice squad, a subscriber's kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the reader races from skyscraper to speakeasy in a madcap romp of a book that brilliantly portrays Manhattan in the gaudiest American decade of them all.

"Antic, stylized, and up-tempo. [Mallon's] dialogue has a Kaufman-and-Hart crackle, and the story boasts more Lotharios, floozies, mobsters, and wised-up dames than an M-G-M double feature."--The New Yorker

Thomas Mallon's books include the novels Henry and Clara, Two Moons, and Dewey Defeats Truman, and the collection of essays In Fact. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the American Scholar, and GQ. He lives in Washington, D.C