Perforated Heart - by Eric Bogosian (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Almost forty years after moving to Manhattan, author Richard Morris has achieved if not stratospheric renown then at least the accomplished career and caliber of fame that he envisioned for himself as a younger man. Now financially comfortable and artistically embittered, Richard is at his home upstate recuperating from heart surgery and nursing resentment toward his publisher and his reading public who have found new, more exciting writers and left his star to wane.

In his attic, Richard comes across a stack of notebooks, the journals he began keeping when he arrived in New York in the late '70s. He is alternately fascinated and repelled by the young man he meets in these pages: hilariously naïve and egotistically misguided, the younger Richard compulsively absorbs everything around him from art and creativity to sex and drugs. As he reads more about himself, written by himself, Richard discovers that the pivotal moments of self-invention -- and self-realization -- occur far outside the conventional chronology of a lifetime.

Perforated Heart explores two wholly different characters -- a young, ambitious artist and his older self, jaded by both success and failure -- and creates an unforgettable portrait of the two men who inhabit the one individual. By turns meditative, deftly observant, and scathingly analytical, Eric Bogosian re-creates the landscape and atmosphere of 1970s New York City with fresh, vivid imagery and reveals a powerful commentary on the dynamic between creativity and commerce in the artistic world. Perforated Heart is his most rewarding and penetrating novel yet, with prose that reflects an equally astonishing range of experience and emotion.

Review Quotes

""Perforated Heart" is overflowing with insight and pain and it cuts with thrilling truth. Eric Bogosian was the first and remains the best at digging deep and fearlessly into the American male's heart of darkness." -- Neil LaBute

""Perforated Heart" is the grown-up version of "Next Stop Greenwich Village". It is, in alternating sections, the story of a young literary lion's fierce ambition and of the same lion in late middle-age, still dangerous, still jealous of rivals, but startling himself with the long look back and the not-so-long look ahead. In this novel Bogosian says things about ambition and energy that very few dare to -- or are in a position to. It is completely engrossing. On fire from beginning to end." -- John Casey, author of National Book Award winner "Spartina"

"[Bogosian's character] summons up memories of his potent, everything-possible youth. The narrative switches back and forth from the present day to the seventies, years that Morris filled with every imaginable excess of sex and drugs. Bogosian handles this rapid backward-and-forward deftly, his prose flowing smoothly and vividly, and his characters lively." -- "Booklist"

"Eric Bogosian has an ear for the way Americans talk. He also has an entertaining knack for exposing the appalling yet hilarious way American men think." -- Sarah Vowell, author of "The Wordy Shipmates" and "Assassination Vacation"

About the Author

Eric Bogosian is the author of Mall, the plays Talk Radio, subUrbia and Griller, and the Obie Award-winning solo performances Drinking in America, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead and Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll. He is the recipient of the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear Award, a Drama Desk Award, and two NEA fellowships. An actor who has appeared in more than a dozen feature films and television shows, Bogosian lives in New York City