Discontented with her dreary suburban existence, Bronxville housewife Mimi Smothers falls for drop-dead handsome gay porn star Joel. By the author of My Search for Warren Harding. National ad/promo.

Love Junkie

PLUNKET, Robert

Literature & Fiction

Harpercollins

The critically acclaimed author of the cult favorite My Search for Warren Harding now writes a hilarious comic novel in which a suburban housewife falls hopelessly in love with a star of gay porno films. "One of the funniest American novels of recent vintage and a worthy successor to Plunket's first . . . (novel)."--Washington Post Book World.

United States

Perennial

Rodney Elliot Wiener, a young historian intent on writing a shockingly intimate book about America's twenty-ninth president, must persuade Harding's senile and reclusive one-time mistress to share her memories and memorabilia

My Search for Warren Harding

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Contemporary

Quartet Books

When My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket's glittering story of literary sleuthing and deceit, first appeared in 1983, it garnered immediate and far-reaching acclaim. Frank Conroy at the Washington Post exclaimed, "The author pulled me in so deftly, moved me up an escalating scale of sly hyperbole so cunningly, that after a hundred pages, I seemed to have turned over the keys, so to speak, of my nervous system"; Florence King at the Dallas Times Herald, "The most exciting event in American letters for a very long time: a momentous book." More recently, though long out of print, it was canonized in The Guardian's "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read," ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top five books of "great American comic fiction," and praised by Michael Leone in the Los Angeles Review of Books as "a classic picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes." Set against the fading light of early-1980s Hollywood, our deeply flawed, bigoted, closeted antihero Elliot Weiner is a historian--Harvard BA, Columbia PhD--with a passion for Morris dancing and Warren Harding, "the shallowest President in history." After Weiner receives a research grant to write a book on the tumultuous life of Harding, he gets wind of a trunkful of the 29th president's bawdy billets-doux that is rumored to be fiercely guarded by his ancient mistress Rebekah Kinney on her declining Hollywood Hills estate. Nothing and no one can stand in the way of Weiner getting his paws on the treasure, and along the way, as the words dance across the page, a hysterical, guffaw-inducing punchline around every corner, Weiner reaches new lows of humiliation and self-delusion.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Humor & Satire

New Directions

Adored by the likes of Amy Sedaris, Madonna (who optioned the film rights), and Gordon Lish,&nbsp;Love Junkie is Robert Plunket's cult classic of the heady heyday of gay New York at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, now gloriously reissued for a new generation of readers. Mimi Smithers, a modern-day Emma Bovary, is a fortyish suburban housewife who has an eye for décor and dreams of hosting lavish cocktail parties. Reflecting on her time in Tehran with her Union Carbide executive husband, she says, "In the waning months of the Shah's regime, entertaining became more and more difficult. Hams--always a problem in Islamic countries--were as rare as hen's teeth." After their move to Westchester, a party she hosts for Mrs. Rockefeller goes south, and she falls into a deep funk. But then life takes an unexpected turn when she stumbles into the gay rabbit hole of Manhattan and Fire Island society and meets Joel, a porn star with a chest "as smooth as a Ken doll." Soon she's helping him with his lucrative mail order business (signed photographs, used underwear, "verbal abuse audiotapes"), and her real dreams and adventures begin.

Imprint unknown

American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) is best known for his portraits of Depression-era America, a number of which were included in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his famous collaboration with writer James Agee. In 1942 at the behest of retired journalist Karl Bickel, Evans journeyed to Sarasota to take photographs for the Mangrove Coast, a book Bickel was writing about the long and colorful history of Florida's Gulf Coast. Featured in Walker Evans: Florida are the surprising images Evans took during that six-week stay in the area, which constitute a little-known chapter in Evans's distinguished career. Far from stereotypical postcard pictures of sandy beaches and palm trees, Evans captured a region of contradictions. Here in the nation's seaside vacationland, Evans focused his lens on decaying architecture, crowded street scenes, retirees, and numerous images of animals, railroad cars, and circus wagons from Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, whose winter home was Sarasota. Accompanying the fifty-two images in Walker Evans: Florida is novelist Robert Plunket's wry account of the human and geographic landscape of Florida.

Walker Evans: Florida

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Oxford University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PLUNKET, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by PLUNKET, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PLUNKET, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Love Junkie

Love Junkie

My Search for Warren Harding

My Search for Warren Harding

Love Junkie

My Search for Warren Harding

My Search for Warren Harding

Love Junkie

My Search for Warren Harding

Walker Evans: Florida