Ben Nadler. (2015). The Sea Beach Line: A Novel. Mandel Vilar Press.

Ben Nadler. 2015. The Sea Beach Line: A Novel. Mandel Vilar Press.

Ben Nadler, The Sea Beach Line: A Novel. Mandel Vilar Press, 2015.

Ben Nadler. The Sea Beach Line: A Novel. Mandel Vilar Press, 2015.

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title

The Sea Beach Line

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Sea Beach Line A Novel

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     Ben Nadler is the author of the novel Harvitz, As to War (Iron Diesel Press) and several chapbooks, including Punk in NYC's Lower East Side, 1981-1991 (Microcosm Publishing) and The Men Who Work Under the Ground (Keep This Bag Away From Children Press). A poetry and comic collaboration chapbook is forthcoming with the visual artist Alyssa Berg. Nadler earned a BA from Eugene Lang College of the New School and an MFA from the City College of New York/CUNY. He has taught at City College, Eugene Lang College, and The College of New Rochelle-School of New Resources in the South Bronx. A former Manhattan street vendor, he has also worked in bookstores across New York, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area. He lives in Brooklyn.
     

   • name: Ben Nadler

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Fig Tree Books LLC

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2015-10-13T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Sea Beach Line

fullDescription

Set in post-Giuliani New York City, The Sea Beach Line melds mid-20th- century pulp fiction and traditional Jewish folklore as it updates the classic story of a young man trying to find his place in the world.
After being expelled from Oberlin for hallucinogenic drug use, Izzy Edel seeks out his estranged father—a Polish Jew turned Israeli soldier turned New York street vendor named Alojzy who is reported to be missing, possibly dead. To learn about Alojzy's life and discover the truth behind his disappearance, Izzy takes over his father's outdoor bookselling business and meets the hustlers, gangsters, and members of a religious sect who peopled his father's world. He also falls in love.
As Izzy soon discovers, appearances can deceive; no one, not even his own father, is quite whom he seems to be. Vowing to prove himself equal to Alojzy's legacy of fearlessness, Izzy plunges forward on a criminal enterprise that will bring him answers—at great personal cost.
Fans of Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union will relish to Ben Nadler's combined mystery, love story, and homage to text and custom.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal (starred review)
   • content: "Nadler has crafted a New York hustler coming-of-age tale in which his protagonist's life mirrors that of a yeshiva student, then the hero of a pulp novel about the Mafia, and finally the biblical patriarch Isaac. The interweaving of Izzy's search with Hasidic tales and the realities of life on the streets results in a mesmerizing narrative that will speak to any readers who have tried to make sense of their parents' lives or the secrets that people keep."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "The confluence of a byzantine plot, intriguing references to Jewish folktales and the Talmud, and an epic storm results in an updated noir providing a glimpse of the Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan hidden from tourists and hipsters alike."
3. • premium: False
   • source: New York Journal of Books
   • content: "Nadler has the courage to explore worlds--both spiritual and gritty--that are not usually the stuff of mainstream fiction, especially not combined. Mystical and folk stories are sprinkled throughout, including a retelling of the book of Esther. Best of all are the sympathetic, Steinbeck-like portraits of the lives of street people whom most of us ignore."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Foreword Reviews
   • content: "The Sea Beach Line explores themes of self-reliance, solitude, loyalty, and the stories people weave to diffuse pain. With its colorful immersion into the mind of an unstable narrator, the work speaks to the powerful tide of memory."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Salar Abdoh, author of Tehran at Twilight and editor of Tehran Noir
   • content: "New York City pulsates with the accidental lives of seers and thugs, mystics and con artists, false prophets, lovers, and sidewalk heroes in The Sea Beach Line, a one-way ticket into the subterranean life of the city and what lies beyond it."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Brendan Kiely, author of The Gospel of Winter
   • content: “With echoes of Paul Auster's Leviathan, Ben Nadler's The Sea Beach Line is a hypnotic mosaic of stories within stories whose layers piece together a fascinating mystery of a young man's search for his father. Isaac's story is as philosophical as the oldest question: Who am I, and why am I here? In Nadler's hands, this question rings ever more essential."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Peter Trachtenberg, author of Another Insane Devotion
   • content: "The Sea Beach Line is a thriller, and a very good one. Beyond that, it's a thriller informed by the lore of Jewish mysticism, with its sacred texts and burning words and true and false messiahs, and by themes of paternity and patrimony: what it is our fathers leave us, even the fathers we never knew. It gripped me by the throat and wouldn't let go."
8. • premium: False
   • source: You're Beautiful, New York
   • content: “[F]rom a Vietnam vet's weed farm in California to a gated community in Florida, from Coney Island to Williamsburg - As To War enticingly intimates Nadler's great fund of erudition, shrewdness, and brutality."
9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 15, 2015
     Stories both ancient and contemporary lurk beneath the surface of this New York saga of discovery and revelation. Izzy Edel, narrator of Nadler's (Harvitz, As to War, 2011) new novel, embarks on an odyssey of a peculiar sort after he's expelled from Oberlin for overenthusiastic use of hallucinogens. A cryptic postcard from Izzy's long-estranged father, Alojzy, and a mysterious letter from someone named Semyon Goldov reporting that Alojzy is missing and perhaps dead-received two days apart-prompt Izzy to leave New Mexico, where his mother and stepfather had been providing him with rest and rehabilitation, for his father's world of Brooklyn and downtown New York. Upon arrival in New York, Izzy undertakes to solve the puzzle of his father's life or death. When he steps into Alojzy's role selling books from a cart in Greenwich Village and takes up residence in his storage unit, the gritty realities of his father's hidden life are perplexingly revealed. Rayna, a fragile young woman with mysterious ties to a shadowy Hasidic sect in Borough Park, aids Izzy's bookselling and detective efforts but hides secrets of her own. As more of Alojzy's dubious business dealings are revealed, Izzy descends further into a world of questionable activity and finds that the answers to his father's mystery are as complicated as the circumstances he finds himself in. The confluence of a byzantine plot, intriguing references to Jewish folktales and the Talmud, and an epic storm results in an updated noir providing a glimpse of the Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan hidden from tourists and hipsters alike.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from August 1, 2015
      

      When Izzy Edel receives an enigmatic postcard from Alojzy, the father with whom he has not communicated in several years, his young wasted life immediately takes on purpose. Expelled from college, Izzy heads for New York City to find Alojzy. There are no answers as to his father's whereabouts, but Izzy takes over his father's business selling books on the street. He becomes involved with gangsters who may have worked with his father. He also rescues Rayna, a young woman who has fled her Hasidic home and is living on the streets. For Izzy, life becomes extremely complicated as no one he meets is actually who he seems to be; and the questions about Alojzy's disappearance and Rayna's existence become even more mysterious. VERDICT In his second novel (after Harvitz, As to War) Nadler has crafted a New York hustler coming-of-age tale in which his protagonist's life mirrors that of a yeshiva student, then the hero of a pulp novel about the Mafia, and finally the biblical patriarch Isaac. The interweaving of Izzy's search with Hasidic tales and the the realities of life on the streets results in a mesmerizing narrative that will speak to any readers who have tried to make sense of their parents' lives or the secrets that people keep.--Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

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Set in post-Giuliani New York City, The Sea Beach Line melds mid-20th- century pulp fiction and traditional Jewish folklore as it updates the classic story of a young man trying to find his place in the world.
After being expelled from Oberlin for hallucinogenic drug use, Izzy Edel seeks out his estranged father—a Polish Jew turned Israeli soldier turned New York street vendor named Alojzy who is reported to be missing, possibly dead. To learn about Alojzy's life and discover the truth behind his disappearance, Izzy takes over his father's outdoor bookselling business and meets the hustlers, gangsters, and members of a religious sect who peopled his father's world. He also falls in love.
As Izzy soon discovers, appearances can deceive; no one, not even his own father, is quite whom he seems to be. Vowing to prove himself equal to Alojzy's legacy of fearlessness, Izzy plunges forward on a criminal enterprise that will bring him answers—at great personal...

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