Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 979-8-9886903-0-6 (Print) 979-8-9886903-1-3 (eBook) $18 (Print); $9.99 (eBook) Paperback, eBook About the Author
SCOTT DIMOVITZ has taught writing and contemporary literature at New York University and Regis University. He has twice won the Bennett Harris Humorous Writing Award, which meant quite a lot to him at the time. While he grew up in the Pennsylvania working-class world depicted in the novel, he now lives in Denver, Colorado among piles of books, guitars, and many half-graded student essays.
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The Joy Divisions
The year is 1993, and art-school dropout Ed Pullman has returned home to work as a janitor in Allentown, Pennsylvania—the enigmatic nexus where goth kids, coffeeshop culture, and sultry drag queens collide with neo-Nazis, the dying textiles industry, and an unsettling commune led by an aspiring cult leader named Tod Griffon. As Ed and his loving cousin Ester struggle to find their place in a bleakly earnest landscape of guerrilla conceptual art, post-NAFTA labor battles, and burning factories, their hometown marches stoically toward a disaster of biblical proportions. With its vivid and original recreation of a place and time that is both utterly real and surprisingly magical, Scott Dimovitz’s grittily nostalgic debut novel is a sensitively imagined fable about an unsuspecting world on the cusp of massive change.
Advance Acclaim for The Joy Divisions
“Scott Dimovitz’s The Joy Divisions is wholly, breathtakingly new. Allentown, Pennsylvania becomes a character in this marvelous debut novel about labor, family, faith, art, and desire. Dimovitz shines in his attention to setting— particularly, his stunning ability to connect the history of places to the lives of his characters. The novel raises compelling philosophical questions in a delightfully unique voice and form, with some truly hilarious, incisive jabs about the art world. A postmodern book about postmodernism, The Joy Divisions is deeply intellectually satisfying, evoking James Joyce’s Ulysses in its scope and command of perspective. At the heart of this book lies an urgent search for meaning in an unstable time—a profoundly human question, and one on which Dimovitz has great wisdom to offer.” --Alyse Knorr, author of Ardor What a romp! Scott Dimovitz’s prose dances, skitters, plunges, and bounce-trips across the page, luring you close only to slap you upside the head. At once steeped in the Joy of ‘90s culture (I dare you to catch all the references) and foretelling the Divisions to come, Dimovitz’s revelatory novel elevates to the realm of the emblematic a working-class story of a working-class young man in a working-class city, eulogizing a Forgotten America, a Forgotten Age, and a Forgotten Way of Being while steadfastly refusing to posit a simple cause or solution. This is a first-rate story of a ‘90s Mr. Lonelyhearts and a cast of goth-punkers, capitalists, unionists, and cultists that you can’t help but find both alarming and lovable. Where did contemporary America come from and where is it headed? It’s all found here, in the unlikely petri dish of Allentown during the ugly after-birth of NAFTA, and in the alternatively philosophical and cinematic prose of Scott Dimovitz." --David Hicks, author of White Plains |