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Title details for Playworld by Adam Ross - Wait list

Playworld

A Novel

by Adam Ross
Adam Ross
Audiobook
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"Starting off 2025 with a novel this terrific gives me hope for the whole year." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"A gorgeous cat's cradle of a book . . . The swirling vapors of Holden Caulfield are present in Playworld, for sure, but also Lolita, Willy Loman, Garp." —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review
"Extraordinary . . . A beguiling ode to a lost era . . . Line for line the book is a revelation." —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut
“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.”
Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse.
Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.
Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 7, 2025

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593947722
      • File size: 638194 KB
      • Duration: 22:09:33

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 30, 2024
      Family dysfunction and the challenges of adolescence lie at the heart of this compulsively readable outing from Ross (Mr. Peanut). In the book’s most salacious and impactful plot thread, narrator Griffin Hurt looks back with vivid detail and analytical compassion on his teen years in the 1980s, beginning with the affair he had at 14 with family friend Naomi Shah, 22 years his senior. Other story lines delve into Griffin’s career as a child actor and his time on the high school wrestling team. Though the affair ends midway through the novel, Naomi’s friendship with Griffin’s parents, who don’t know about the affair, causes him continued distress. Ross also offers a poignant depiction of the pressure Griffin faces in show business, as his father urges him to take an audition with renowned director Paul Mazursky, whom Griffin’s never heard of, while he’d prefer to focus on wrestling. Ross casts the period in a dark light, touching on the turbulence of such historical episodes as the Iran hostage crisis and the Reagan assassination attempt and laying bare the moral emptiness of the adults in Griffin’s life. Readers will enjoy getting caught up in this sharp, discursive narrative.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Author and narrator Adam Ross mines his own background as a child actor and student wrestler for this nostalgic coming-of-age novel set in the Carter-Reagan era. Its centerpiece is the teenage protagonist's affair with an older married woman, but this is only one aspect of a richly developed narrative that embraces family, career, and student wrestling. At just over 22 hours, the audiobook may seem overdeveloped to some listeners. Nonetheless, Ross has a pleasing voice and personality. But he's not a skilled narrator. His delivery is slow and heavily cadenced--read rather than told. But, as always, the voice of the author, especially one so closely matched to his material, brings immediacy and authenticity to the narrative. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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