[Item #5375] Slam. Nick Hornby.
Slam
Slam
Slam
Slam

Slam

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. First Edition. Hardcover. “Things had been ticking along quite nicely. My teachers suddenly started talking to me about going to college, my mum had ditched her rubbish boyfriend, and I had a gorgeous new girlfriend. You know that bit in a film when they show couples laughing and holding hands and kissing in lots of different places while a song plays? Alicia and I were like that, except we didn’t go to lots of different places. We went to about three, including Alicia’s bedroom. Anyway. It took years for everything to come together like that, and it took two seconds to screw it all up. One mistake and my life would never be the same” (from Front Flap copy). As the above-quoted flap copy of Nick Hornby’s (b. 1957) “Slam” both intimates and relays, the work proceeds — both aesthetically, technically, and plot-thematically — with the same graceful command on its characters’ plot-thematic “transformation arcs” that Hornby’s prose is known for. Like “Juliet, Naked” [See TMB Item #5363], Hornby takes a plot line that should be too “cheesy,” or “Hollywood-friendly” to work AT ALL as serious literary art. Then, by some act of alchemy and sincerity, he does the impossible: making literary art from a saccharine mess. [ISBN: 978-0-399-25048-4]. Hardcover in unclipped dust-jacket: First Edition, though not explicated as such on copyright page; First Printing, as indicated by number sequence, thereon. Book in very fine condition, virtually as new with only light shelf-wear to fine-edges & corners of front, back covers & spine; binding estimably tight, indicating a state of having been unread—an alluring prospect for a future owner-collector, to be sure; a gradation of the book-collecting equivalent to a record being unsealed. Dust-jacket in equally very fine condition with only slightest shelf-wear to fine-edges & corners of front, back covers & spine (the illusion of soiling that one might see in the pictures being, in fact, part of the artwork on the dust-jacket). Very Fine / Very Fine. [Item #5375]

Price: $20.00

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