Bibliographic Description
85.09.W015: McInerney – Ransom
RANSOM | A NOVEL BY | Jay McInerney | Vintage Contemporaries | VINTAGE BOOKS • A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE • NEW YORK
A Vintage Original, September 1985, First Edition
144 leaves, pp. [8] 1-2 3-279 [1]
Contents: π1a blurbs, π1b blurbs, π2a half-title and author photo, π2b “ALSO AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES”, π3a title, π3b imprint, π4a dedication, π4b blank, 1 fly-title, 2 blank, 3-279 Ransom, χ1b about the author.
Cover design by Lorraine Louie; cover illustration by Rick Lovell; interior author photo by Marion Ettlinger.
Copyright: ©1985. ISBN: 0-394-74118-8. Price: $5.95. Ransom was first published, simultaneously in hardcover and paperback, by Vintage Contemporaries in 1985.
Copies: JDP 1.? (later printing)
Note: Vintage Contemporaries also published Ransom in hardcover; see VCW85.09.W015(HC).
Blurbs
- “Jay McInerney is an extremely gifted young writer, and it is a pleasure to see the beginning of a career like his. One waits with anticipation for whatever comes next,” wrote The Washington Post in its review of Bright Lights, Big City. “The author,” according to George Plimpton, “is one of those rare writers who catches the moods, nuances and manners of a sub-culture with humor, finesse, skill and accuracy. A born stylist and a remarkable discovery!”
- Ransom, Jay McInerney’s second novel, belongs in the distinguished tradition of novels about exile. Living in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, Christopher Ransom seeks a purity and simplicity he could not find at home, and tries to exorcise the terror he encountered earlier in his travels—a blur of violence and death at the Khyber Pass. Ransom has managed to regain control, chiefly through the rigors of karate. Supporting himself by teaching English to eager Japanese businessmen, he finds company with impresario Miles Ryder and fellow expatriates whose headquarters is Buffalo Rome, a blues-bar that satisfies the hearty local appetite for Americana and accommodates the drifters pouring through Asia in the years immediately after the fall of Vietnam. Increasingly, Ransom and his circle are threatened, by everything they thought they had left behind, in a sequence of events whose consequences Ransom can forestall but cannot change. Jay McInerney details the pattern of adventure and disillusionment that leads Christopher Ransom toward an inevitable reckoning with his fate—in a novel of grand scale and serious implications.