About the Book
Fiction. Just as Soylent Green is people, so THE CHINTZ AGE is now. Everything is cheaper and chintzier than in the past, from consumer products to culture itself. Our great cities, and, in particular, New York, are being transformed as we speak, as rising rents squeeze out the artists and bohemians who honed and burnished the city's glittering cutting edge. So should we look backward in teary-eyed nostalgia for the glorious past, or grit our teeth and move forward, accepting the inevitability of change in order to carve out a place for ourselves in this Brave New New York? This book of gritty urban fairy tales represents a heartfelt prayer for the future of the arts in New York, as well as a blueprint for a moral and spiritual resistance to the forces of cultural philistinism.
In seven stories and a novella, Ed Hamilton takes on this clash of cultures between the old and the new, as his characters are forced to confront their own obsolescence in the face of this rapidly surging capitalist juggernaut. Ranging over the whole panorama of New York neighborhoods--from the East Village to Hell's Kitchen, and from the Bowery to Washington Heights--Hamilton weaves a spellbinding web of urban mythology. Punks, hippies, beatniks, squatters, junkies, derelicts, and anarchists--the entire pantheon of urban demigods--gambol through a grungy subterranean Elysium of dive bars, cheap diners, flophouses, and shooting galleries, searching for meaning and a place to make their stand.
About the Author :
Ed Hamilton is the author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York's Rebel Mecca (Da Capo, 2007). His fiction has appeared in dozens of small journals, including Limestone, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, SoMa Literary Review, Exquisite Corpse, Bohemia, Omphalos, and in translation in the Czech Republic's Host. His non-fiction has appeared in The Villager, Chelsea Now, The Huffington Post, and Living With Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog. Ed lives in New York City.
Review :
"Ed Hamilton's accounts of gentrification in The Chintz Age are not black and white. Importantly, The Chintz Age is short fiction, and short stories--unlike case studies--allow a writer to present ambiguous characters and situations. And Hamilton does this. His bohemians--of the East Village/Lower East Side of New York City--are not utterly the salt of the earth. His gentrifiers are hardly ogres... And get thee a copy of The Chintz Age! It is a captivating account of the consequences of free market capitalism gone greedily amok." -The Thomas Opinions, Thomas Gagnon
"Hamilton has an uncanny ability to show how the inroads of time, age, etc.. forces choices in our lives. His characters find some sort of redemption, and keep on keepin' on. Highly recommended."-Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene, Doug Holder
"Hamilton creates relatable characters with heartbreak and breakthroughs that resonate. Each of the eight short stories in this collection is a keeper. Hamilton paints a New York you recognize, even if you have never set foot in the city. These same people are in your city, struggling to live the same dreams." -www.curledup.com, Zane Ewton (4 1/2 stars)
"Most of the stories are told in third-person, and one could almost believe Hamilton is still working in creative nonfiction, chronicling the lives of his fellow East Villagers. The stories are just long enough for the reader to relax into the characters, but Hamilton rightly changes focus before we can grow tired of his subjects. There is a good dash of romance to be found in these stories, although the love tends to lean toward second chances, and long simmering affection that gently blooms more than explodes.
The tales in "Chintz Age" are often simultaneously elegiac and hopeful. The bohemian New York of our collective imagination is dying, but Hamilton suggests that maybe something new can be born in its place, if we are brave enough to imagine it."--Eli Keel, LEO Weekly
"We are introduced to a fascinating cast of characters, diverse within the somewhat homogeneous subset of "original" New Yorkers, including a used bookstore owner, a once-famous photographer, a musician who is moonlighting as a bellboy at a Chelsea Hotel-esque dive, a couple whose apartment overlooks the Highline, and a group of women whose number one goal is to meet men who have rent-controlled apartments. Some are hanging on by a thread in order to stay here, while others are on their way out. And some have already left. Set in dive bars, flophouses and condemned buildings, the book is completely engrossing, feeling as though we had been to these fictional places and had met - and perhaps sympathized with - most of these characters in real life." -Bowery Boogie, Lori Greenberg
