BLEECKER & BOWERy

Seth Greenland

(Liana Lévi, 304 pages, 2023)

*** Full original manuscript in English available ***

Set at the end of the 70s in a New York fizzing with creativity, this wryly humorous novel follows the tribulations of aspiring young artists passionate about cinema, while dealing with questions regarding ethnicity, relations between Jews and African Americans, love, friendship, and fate.

New York, end of the 70s. Paul, also known as Pablo, is in his mi twenties and dreams of becoming a filmmaker. Until something better comes along, he works as a film critic for a pornographic magazine. One night at a comedy club, he meets up with Jay Gladstone, a childhood friend from a far more well-heeled family than his own. That evening, they also meet Avery, a brilliant African American actress who dreams of breaking into the movies and with whom Jay immediately falls in love. Together, the two friends will do anything to produce and direct their first film. Jay hopes to ride the wave of blaxploitation and asks Pablo to write the script of a road movie, the story of a Jewish gangster on the run in a world where a mysterious virus has wiped out all the Whites, except him… Avery, of course, will play the female lead, and the famous comedian, Frank Bones, the leading man. But setting up a feature film production proves far more complicated than they thought... They’re forced to accept Russian mafia money to finance it, then little by little the filming turns into a fiasco.

Greenland pays homage to the Big Apple and to that moment in life when all things seemed possible.

Seth Greenland divides his time between Los Angeles and New York, where he works as a scriptwriter for both the big and small screens. A novelist, he has written five other novels including Mécanique de la chute (The Hazards of Good Fortune, Europa, 2019) which was enthusiastically received by the critics and nominated for the 2019 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.