A colourful, multi-faceted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental montage and collage techniques borrowed from the cinema, and the jumbled case histories of a picaresque range of characters from dockside crapshooters to high-society flappers, Dos Passos constructs a brilliant picture of New York City as a great futuristic machine filled with motion, drama and human tragedy.
Reviews
[John Dos Passos's books are] the most satisfying thing I have ever read -- Adam Curtis * Guardian *