The Great Wall of New York

Kevin Bartelme

ISBN: 978-1-887276-37-5 • $ 12.95

Art by Robert Grossman

A new book from Cool Grove Press to buffer readers against the harsh realities of the coming elections with comic relief ! The Great Wall of New York by Kevin Bartelme is a contemporary comedy of manners. This fast paced drama, set in New York City today, is a fictional look at the wild side of the haute monde at its most ravenous. Prepare for a wildly comic, high-speed ride down the slippery slope of wealth and power in New York City.

“Like all great satirists, Kevin Bartelme has an unerring instinct for a perfect satiric subject – in this case, the preposterous, astonishing doings of the New York rich. But, also, like all great satirists, Bartelme can’t resist his vastly overcompensated characters, and his interest in them – his tenderness toward them, even – makes The Great Wall of New York as real as it is surreal.”- Vijay Seshadri

“With prose so radioactive it glows in the dark, like Wyndham Lewis, Nathaniel West, and Terry Southern before him, Kevin Bartelme fine tunes his geiger counter to hunt down the peacock in the mineshaft of the vanities and flush it back out into the light of day!” – Alan Jones

A new book from Cool Grove Press to buffer readers against the harsh realities of the coming elections with comic relief ! The Great Wall of New York by Kevin Bartelme is a contemporary comedy of manners. This fast paced drama, set in New York City today, is a fictional look at the wild side of the haute monde at its most ravenous. Prepare for a wildly comic, high-speed ride down the slippery slope of wealth and power in New York City.

With the daily rash of exposures of unrepentant indictees, the motley cast of characters in this novel offers a funhouse mirror to current events and, come election season, people are going to need a good laugh.

The Great Wall of New York is available for serial or excerpting rights. The author will be reading in the NY metropolitan area and is available for radio and television interviews. Gracing the cover and title spread are two comical scenes from the The Great Wall of New York illustrated by well-known political cartoonist Robert Grossman whose work appears in The New York Observer, New York Times, The New Yorker and other major publications. The author and Mr. Grossman worked together to get just the right tone.

This is Kevin Bartelme’s second published comic novel. His first, O’Rourke, another slopsink chronicle was published by Cool Grove Press, 2001. Writing with rambunctious wit about contemporary culture is his specialty. During the eighties he wrote a screenplay which went on to become an award winning television movie. A long time resident of New York city, Mr. Bartelme is currently completing his latest, a peek at the capricious state of our mainstream publishing industry (forthcoming: Cool Grove Press, Summer 2007).

EXCERPTS

Part I

“New York is so phony, all you need to get over is two suits and some real jewelry.”

– Bobby Short

The limousines were pulled up and down 60th Street disgorging their curiously dressed passengers into the Pierre Hotel for a costume party, the annual Pimps, Whores, and Gangsters Ball. Of course the people going into the hotel were not pimps, whores, and gangsters at all. They were the very crème de la crème of New York society who gathered every year for this gala event to support the Humanitas Foundation, a most worthy philanthropic organization.

In the main ballroom, the costumed guests mingled affably in a bizarre array of interpretations of their adopted personae. The corporate executives mostly attempted to look like Dago Petes from the thirties; the fashion designers and other assorted members of the creative community affected huge, plush hats, velvet capes, coke spoon necklaces and other pimp paraphernalia that seemed to have been rented from the wardrobe room of an old blaxploitation movie. It was the women, however, who really shined in their streetwalker garb. Society dowagers tottered about on eight-inch stilettos, their highly visible bras and bustiers acting as counterpart and complement to their leather or gold spangled micro miniskirts. They giggled in giddy abandon at their own wantonness as they circulated through the ballroom, brazenly flirting with the uncomfortable gangsters and the far more appreciative pimps. It was all such good fun.

However, there was a certain pall hanging over the room. Not a few of the gangsters had been forced to answer uncomfortable questions before congressional committees and Federal judges the preceding year. Was it their fault that the invisible hand of the free market had reached down and spanked some of their irrationally exuberant investors? Those poor fools in the government would never understand. Who had ever audited their bottom line?

AUTHOR