John Freeman Gill. (2017). The Gargoyle Hunters: A novel. Unabridged Books on Tape.

John Freeman Gill. 2017. The Gargoyle Hunters: A Novel. Books on Tape.

John Freeman Gill, The Gargoyle Hunters: A Novel. Books on Tape, 2017.

John Freeman Gill. The Gargoyle Hunters: A Novel. Unabridged Books on Tape, 2017.

OverDrive Product Record

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     JOHN FREEMAN GILL is a native New Yorker and former reporter for the New York Times City section. His work has been anthologized in The New York Times Book of New York and More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, New York magazine, Premiere, Avenue, Guernica, Literary Hub, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where he won two prizes and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he received an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in New York City with his wife, three children, and a smattering of gargoyles.
     
     
     

   • name: John Freeman Gill
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     JOHN FREEMAN GILL is a native New Yorker and former reporter for the New York Times City section. His work has been anthologized in The New York Times Book of New York and More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, New York magazine, Premiere, Avenue, Guernica, Literary Hub, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where he won two prizes and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he received an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in New York City with his wife, three children, and a smattering of gargoyles.
     
     
     

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title

The Gargoyle Hunters

fullDescription

Hilarious and poignant, The Gargoyle Hunters is a love letter to a vanishing city, and a deeply emotional story of fathers and sons. Intimately portraying New York’s elbow-jostling relationship with time, the novel solves the mystery of a brazen and seemingly impossible architectural heist—the theft of an entire historic Manhattan building—that stunned the city and made the front page of The New York Times in 1974.
With both his family and his city fracturing, thirteen-year-old Griffin Watts is recruited into his estranged father’s illicit and dangerous architectural salvage business. Small and nimble, Griffin is charged with stealing exuberantly expressive nineteenth-century architectural sculptures—gargoyles—right off the faces of unsung tenements and iconic skyscrapers all over town. As his father explains it, these gargoyles, carved and cast by immigrant artisans during the city’s architectural glory days, are an endangered species in this era of sweeping urban renewal.
          Desperate both to connect with his father and to raise cash to pay the mortgage on the brownstone where he lives with his mother and sister, Griffin is slow to recognize that his father’s deepening obsession with preserving the architectural treasures of Beaux Arts New York is also a destructive force, imperiling Griffin’s friendships, his relationship with his very first girlfriend, and even his life.
           As his father grows increasingly possessive of both Griffin’s mother and his scavenged touchstones of the lost city, Griffin must learn how to build himself into the person he wants to become and discover which parts of his life can be salvaged—and which parts must be let go. Maybe loss, he reflects, is the only thing no one can ever take away from you.
            Tender, funny, and achingly sad, The Gargoyle Hunters introduces an extraordinary new novelist.

reviews

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   • content:

     January 16, 2017
     Gill, who has written extensively about New York City’s architectural gems, makes his fiction debut with a coming-of-age tale about preservation and its discontents. The result is flawed but intriguing, a structure whose outward charm conceals some hidden cracks. In the late 1970s, the young narrator, Griffin, lives in an Upper East Side row house with his sister, bohemian mother, and the steady stream of down-on-their-heels boarders she takes in. Living downtown, his mercurial father restores antique architectural decorations, often pilfered from one of the many buildings slated to be torn down by “brutally efficient” demolition contractors as the city continues to “cannibaliz itself.” Dad enlists the nimble, eager-to-please Griffin in his thieving efforts, which involve prying gargoyles perched on Manhattan’s historic buildings, then a more ambitious effort: to “steal a building.” The portrait of Griffin’s father has some nice touches—he is the kind of man who takes his baby out for a midnight walk and returns with a terra-cotta bust strapped onto the carriage—but he comes across less as a rounded character than an eccentric tour guide holding forth on ornamental features, lambasting philistine developers, or speechifying: “The lives lived by generations of New Yorkers in and around a historic building give it all kinds of layers of collective meaning—a patina of memory and grime and experience.” Griffin himself is a winning narrator striving to map his place within urban and familial landscapes in a bewildering state of flux.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content: John Gill's decision to perform his own novel for audio is just right. His performance isn't polished, but it's lively and effective, and it deepens the conceit of the story, in which the narrator, Griffin, describes his boyhood with his parents, his mother, bohemian and feckless, and his absent father, obsessed with rescuing (liberating) the architectural ornaments of a vanishing New York. Griffin is a wholly believable and charming character coming of age in Manhattan in the '70's. Gill's knowledge of built New York is granular, and for anyone who cares about the architectural heritage of American cities, and especially of New York, this book is a feast; it succeeds as often-hilarious bildungsroman, as adventure story, and as deliciously accurate and specific urban history. B.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

popularity

167

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Hilarious and poignant, The Gargoyle Hunters is a love letter to a vanishing city, and a deeply emotional story of fathers and sons. Intimately portraying New York’s elbow-jostling relationship with time, the novel solves the mystery of a brazen and seemingly impossible architectural heist—the theft of an entire historic Manhattan building—that stunned the city and made the front page of The New York Times in 1974.
With both his family and his city fracturing, thirteen-year-old Griffin Watts is recruited into his estranged father’s illicit and dangerous architectural salvage business. Small and nimble, Griffin is charged with stealing exuberantly expressive nineteenth-century architectural sculptures—gargoyles—right off the faces of unsung tenements and iconic skyscrapers all over town. As his father explains it, these gargoyles, carved and cast by immigrant artisans during the city’s architectural glory days,...

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