Katerina

by James Frey Narrated by James Frey

Overview

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning comes Katerina, James Frey's highly anticipated new novel set in 1992 Paris and contemporary Los Angeles.

A kiss, a touch. A smile and a beating heart. Love and sex and dreams, art and drugs and the madness of youth. Betrayal and heartbreak, regret and pain, the melancholy of age. Katerina, the explosive new novel by America's most controversial writer, is a sweeping love story alternating between 1992 Paris and Los Angeles in 2018.

At its center are a young writer and a young model on the verge of fame, both reckless, impulsive, addicted, and deeply in love. Twenty-five years later, the writer is rich, famous, and numb, and he wants to drive his car into a tree, when he receives an anonymous message that draws him back to the life, and possibly the love, he abandoned years prior. Written in the same percussive, propulsive, dazzling, breathtaking style as A Million Little Pieces, Katerina echoes and complements that most controversial of memoirs, and plays with the same issues of fiction and reality that created, nearly destroyed, and then recreated James Frey in the American imagination.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Structurally distinctive, this sensual eye-opener is about the act of creation, and it will prove fascinating reading even for those still mad at Frey.”
—Library Journal, starred review

"With Katerina, a sexy, intriguing, page-turning love story, Frey is back in the game, again."
—Publishers Weekly

"[Frey] proves he can dynamically reimagine his past into a page-turner, in his signature stream-of-consciousness style."
—Booklist

"In propulsive, shattering prose, Frey moves primarily between 2017 Los Angeles and 1992 Paris as a successful but emotionally end-of-his-rope author is thrown back to his raucous, raunchy, revelatory young days in the City of Light and his affair with the heart-stopping Katerina."
—Library Journal, starred review

"[A] sexy and electric novel that flips between modern-day Los Angeles and Paris in 1992... Frey, perhaps best known for his controversial book A Million Little Pieces, has penned a compulsive novel that speaks directly to the scandal that blew up his own life."
—Esquire.com

"[Frey] reasserts himself as a voice to be reckoned with in Katerina."
—InStyle

Kirkus Reviews

2018-07-02
Having kept busy plowing the fields of children's lit, writer and literary industrialist Frey (My Friend Leonard, 2005, etc.) delivers his first adult book in a decade.Jay is a callous young man, a 21-year-old expat in Paris who is resisting a mapped-out future in which he'll be "An obedient cog locked in fucking place forever." A quarter-century later, he's locked in place in Los Angeles as a bestselling writer—writers, after all, don't write about unhappy sea captains these days, not when one of their own ilk is available for dissection—whose agent is 10 years his junior and wears a $5,000 suit. What's to be preferred, a youth of drug-dealing poverty in the City of Lights or a gilded prison in the City of Angels? Easy: When you factor in a torrid season of love with a hot young model then being a cash-strapped kid is infinitely better. Frey takes his presumed alter ego back and forth across the decades, whining and moping and self-medicating ("I played ball and read books and chased girls and got drunk and snorted cocaine")—and, in his later years, lamenting roads taken and not taken and wishing he had figured out how to do better by the title character. So far, so good; it's all the stuff of an Ethan Hawke movie, and there's not a surprising moment in it. What does surprise, perhaps, are Frey's spasms of high-toned porn, of which perhaps the most-printable-in-a-family-publication passage is something like this: "We both move toward each other kissing deeply slowly heavily, lips and tongues, her hands are immediately in my pants, I lift her off the ground set her on the sink tear off her thong." James Joyce it ain't, and though it's marginally more literate than E.L. James, it's nothing the aforementioned Mr. Hawke couldn't pull off on screen and behind the keyboard.A long-anticipated return that many readers will decide wasn't worth the wait.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171092078
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	09/11/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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