A Gorgeous Excitement: A Novel

by Cynthia Weiner Narrated by Not Yet Available

Overview

A dazzling debut novel set in 1980s New York, when cocaine is as easy to get as ice cream, about one young woman's summer of infinite possibility-and looming danger.

It was the summer of 1986, when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum-half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head.

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother's depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Unfortunately both are seemingly impossible-when her mother isn't lying in bed for days, she's manically up and about, incensed by any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan's, the bar where Manhattan's private school kids hang out. It doesn't help that she's also Jewish, an outsider in a world of blue-eyed blonde girls who populate New York's rarified Upper East Side.

But at Flanagan's, Nina can fit in, kind of-with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents' medicine cabinet. Flanagan's is where she pines over the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed, who every girl wants to sleep with and every guy wants to be. Emboldened by cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, and when he starts paying attention back, it seems like she might finally get what she wants. But at what cost? Freud called a cocaine high “a gorgeous excitement” and, as Nina is about to learn, 1986 in New York is a deadly time and place to be gorgeous.

Set against the backdrop of a menacingly gritty Manhattan of the 1980s, Cynthia Weiner's debut is a timeless and universal story of a young woman trying to find her voice, and of the countless young women whose voices were silenced.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

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.”—Tama Janowitz, author of Slaves of New York and A Certain Age

“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.”—Elisa Albert, author of After Birth and Human Blues
 
“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.”—Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year
 
“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.”—Susan Jane Gilman, New York Times bestselling author of Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress and The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

“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.”—Holly Brickey, author of the forthcoming Deep Cuts

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192299791
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	01/21/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged