Everyone is Watching by Megan Bradbury FICTION
Posted 22:41, 20 July 2016
Everyone is Watching by Megan Bradbury, Picador, £12.99
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Megan Bradbury draws a sensuous flesh and blood portrait of New York using the lives and voices of famous artists, alive and dead, and their friends, lovers and relatives to conjure an unusually bold, beautiful, and very, very sexy picture of the city from it's modern beginnings to the present day.
She intersperses the narratives of Robert Mapplethorpe, Edmund White, Walt Whitman and Robert Moses and their various cohorts and contemporaries Patti Smith, Richard Bucke, Jane Jacobs, and 'others' with short descriptions of real works of art, film, installation and performance by, amongst others, Gordon Matta-Clark, Laurie Anderson, Nan Goldin, and Richard Serra which enhance the text with known, or knowable, visual images.
Through these stories Bradbury is showing us the parts that form the sinewy whole of the city itself, its physicality and the imaginings made real within it by its inhabitants past, present and future.
"I loved it." Miranda France, The Guardian
"Beautiful, kaleidoscopic" Eimear McBride
We loved it too.