a: A Novel

Description

Part novel, part Pop artwork, a is an electrifying slice of Factory life A knowing response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a gives us twenty-four hours in the life of Ondine, an actor and Warhol superstar. The book is transcribed from tapes between Warhol and Ondine, reproduced exactly as-is- as in his visual art, Warhol has used spontaneous performance and explicit lack of editing as a device to create a portrait of Warhol's Factory and the artists, superstars and addicts who lived and worked there. Beginning with Odine taking an amphetamine, we then follow these characters as they converse with incisive wit and humour and run through the clubs, coffee shops, hospitals and whorehouses of 1960s Manhattan.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was a painter, graphic artist filmmaker, and leader of the Pop Art movement. He also produced a significant body of film work, including the famous Chelsea Girls. Equally well known in the late Sixties and early Seventies as resident host at his studio, the Factory. Andy Warhol died following gall bladder surgery, in New York on the 22nd February 1987. As Warhol said- 'I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.'

Hellish hymns from Amphetamine Heaven, the vox populi of the Velvet Underground. . . . The characters of a represent the bizarre new class, untermenschen prefigurations of the technological millenium. * The New York Review of Books * a documents glamour going down on the mores of the day. . . . important and very funny -- Frieze You really ought to own it * Esquire * A new kind of pop artifact * Library Journal *