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A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT

Cynthia Weiner

A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT by Cynthia Weiner (the words Freud used to describe a cocaine high) is SWEET BITTER meets THE GIRLS with some GIRL, INTERRUPTED thrown in.

Set against the summer of 1986 in NYC, beginning with the gruesome razor blade slashing of an aspiring model outside a midtown bar in June, and ending with the strangulation of an 18 year old girl in Central Park whose half-clothed body was discovered behind the Metropolitan Museum - Nina Jacobs starts her summer with two goals: to lose her virginity before she goes to college, and avoid provoking her mother's depression fueled rages at home. Temping meaningless jobs by day, and hanging out at Flanagans, the bar on the upper east side that is a magnet for the private school set, during this summer Nina will discover just how dangerous the world is for women, but also that she is tougher than anyone, including herself, thinks. A GORGEOUS EXCITEMENT was inspired by Weiner's teenage years on the Upper East Side in the 80s, including nights of underage drinking at Dorrian's (the model for Flanagan's) where she often hung out with Robert Chambers, aka "The Preppy Killer". Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, Open City, and Epiphany, and one of them, "Boyfriends," received a Pushcart Prize. She has an M.F.A. from Brown University and is the Assistant Director of The Writers Studio in New York where she teaches fiction writing.

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Book Published 2025-01-21 by Crown

Comments

I haven't felt this kind of excitement reading a story set in the '80s since I first discovered Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Bret Easton Ellis. From the breathtaking prose to the thrilling glimpse of NYC circa 1986, Cynthia Weiner's outstanding debut invites us into the introspective yet colorful and reckless world of 18-year-old Nina Jacobs as she navigates insecurity, obsession, and perilous social dynamics. A vivid snapshot of a bygone era and evocative coming-of-age story, A Gorgeous Excitement lives up to its title.

A Gorgeous Excitement is at turns both gorgeous and exciting. Cynthia Weiner offers a delicious response to Bright Lights, Big City, capturing vividly what it was like for a young woman in the louchely glamourous, cocaine-fueled, privileged white Manhattan of the 1980s.

A mesmerizing story - both very much of its time and also timeless - of the young inhabitants of the (mostly) wealthy Upper East Side of NYC in the coked-up 1980s. A gripping, juicy, fascinating glimpse into a rarified world of a realm by now transformed.

A Gorgeous Excitement is a propulsive read filled with vivid characters and a uniquely hilarious, if impossibly sad, mother-daughter dynamic. But the real star of the book for me is the finely drawn world of pre-Giuliani New York, seedy Times Square and all, whose rampant misogyny and racism feel both dated and brutally relevant.

A coming-of-age story with a ripped-from-the-headlines plot, A Gorgeous Excitement plunges us into 1980s New York City in all its seedy glory. Cynthia Weiner's novel is a pitch-perfect evocation of a bygone era. I read this brilliant debut with my heart in my throat.

Italy: Mondadori

A Gorgeous Excitement is the rarest blend of charm and suspense, at once delightful and terrifying, an expertly written non-coming of age that also serves as cautionary tale, as quintessentially haunting as New York City itself. Read it on a bench in Central Park, but only before night falls.