After the y2k panic had subsided and the streets of Times Square were cleared, America woke up to a new century shocked to find itself more or less the same as it was before. The stock market bubble, fed with steady gusts of hot air from technology companies, was expanding precariously, awaiting the tiniest pin-prick to implode. Following the lives of a group of sharply-drawn characters in this uncannily hip and savagely satirical new novel from the acclaimed Sewanee Writers' Series, greg Williams takes us to the heart of the post-millennial psyche, and into the minds and souls of the dreamers who make the twenty-six square miles of Manhattan the biggest place on earth.
Jonathan Scarver, CEO of Internet startup Allminder.com has visions of wedlth comparable to the technology business's luminaries-Gates, Ellison, Bezos-and an IPO scheduled for late spring guaranteed to skyrocket the value of his stock options to obscenity, nevermind the fact that the company is nearly bankrupt. His publicity director, Brad Smith, has been relying on the comfort of all-night parties to relieve the stress of work and to drown out the calling of a secret ambi-tion. Around his life circles Nicole, a struggling actress-slash-waitress coping with a post-breakup depression. In a series of just-missed chance encounters and lost opportu-nities of the kind that can only happen in Manhattan, Brad and Nicole's orbits nearly collide and are then repelled apart, spiraling with the city's gravitational pull toward their destiny.
A Bright Lights, Big City for the dot. Comage, Boomtown exposes the hubris, vanity, and deceit that fueled the stag-gering climb and precipitous fall of that era's ambition.
