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Doubleday
October 2010
On Sale: September 21, 2010
304 pages
ISBN: 0385532989
EAN: 9780385532983
Hardcover
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Fiction Family Life
What Jonathan Lethem did for Brooklyn, Matt Burgess does for
Queens in this exuberant and brilliant debut novel about a
young drug dealer having a very bad weekend. Alfredo Batista has some worries. Okay, a lot of worries.
His older brother, Jose—sorry, Tariq—is returning from a
stretch in prison after an unsuccessful robbery, a burglary
that Alfredo was supposed to be part of. So now everyone
thinks Alfredo snitched on his brother, which may have
something to do with the fact that Alfredo is now dating
Tariq’s ex-girlfriend, Isabel, who is eight months pregnant.
Tariq’s violent streak is probably #1 worry on Alfredo’s list. Also, he needs to steal a pit bull. For the homecoming dogfight. Burgess brings to life the rich and vivid milieu of his
hometown native Queens in all its glorious variety. Here is
the real New York, a place where Pakistanis, Puerto Ricans,
Haitians, An glos, African Americans, and West Indians
scrap and mingle and love. But the real star here is
Burgess’s incredible ear for language—the voices of his
characters leap off the page in riotous, spot-on dialogue.
The outer boroughs have their own language, where a polite
greeting is fraught with menace, and an insult can be the
expression of the most tender love. With a story as intricately plotted as a Shakespearean
comedy—or revenge tragedy, for that matter—and an
electrically colloquial prose style, Dogfight, a Love Story
establishes Matt Burgess as an exuberant new voice in
contemporary literature. The great Queens novel has arrived.
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