{"product_id":"plays-well-with-others","title":"Plays Well with Others","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn his widely read, prizewinning Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus gave fresh meaning to an overexplored American moment: 1860-65. He now turns that comic intensity and historical vision to another war zone: entry-level artistic Manhattan 1980-95. In his first novel since Widow, Gurganus offers us an indelible, addictive praise-song to New York's wild recent days, their invigorating peaks and lethal crashes.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt's 1980, and Hartley Mims jr., a somewhat overbred Southerner, arrives in town to found his artistic career and find a Circle of brilliant friends. He soon discovers both Robert Christian Gustafson, archangelic boy composer of Symphony no. 1: The Titanic, and Alabama Byrnes, a failed Savannah debutante whose gigantic paintings reveal an outsized talent that she, five feet tall, can't always live up to.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis circle--sexually venturesome, frequently hungry, hooked on courage, caffeine, and the promise of immortality--makes history and most everybody else. Their dramatic moment in New York history might've been a collaboration begun, as a toast, by Cole Porter and finished, as pure elegy, by Poe himself. Plays Well with Others is a fairy tale. It has a Legend's indoctrinating charm and hidden terrors. It chronicles a ragtag group of gifted kids who come to seek their fortunes; they find the low-paying joys of making art and the heady education only multiple erotic partners can provide. Having mythologized each other through the boom years, having commenced becoming \"names,\" they suddenly encounter a brand-new disease like something out of fifth-rate sci-fi. Friends are soon questioning how much they really owe each other; they're left with the ancient consolation of one another's company and help. We watch this egotistic circle forge its single greatest masterwork: a healthy community.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe novel, a sort of disco requiem-mass, divides itself into three symphonic movements: \"Before,\" \"After,\" and \"After After.\" The work concludes in a homemade paradise that resembles Hartley Mims's own starter vision of all that seemed waiting--latent and convivial--in New York itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis is a work that could've only been written now, in our age of medical advances, written about these unsuspecting unsung heroes of a medieval scourge's first endgame moves among us. Plays Well with Others becomes a hymn to the joys and woes of caretaking (for waning parents and young friends). Allan Gurganus has created a deeply engaging narrative about flawed, well-meaning people who seem lifted from our own address books. His book offers an obsessive love story, a complex vision of our recent past, and an emotional firestorm--a pandemic's long-awaited great novel., ISBN13:9780394589145 ISBN10:0394589149 Material Type:hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cheap Book Depot","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52494985199923,"sku":"TN_STR_UBD_H0000Z3E","price":14.03,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0748\/5086\/1363\/files\/71TwLYYRphL.jpg?v=1759997023","url":"https:\/\/cheapbookdepot.com\/products\/plays-well-with-others","provider":"Cheap Book Depot","version":"1.0","type":"link"}