Jami Attenberg is the author of a story collection, Instant Love, and four novels: The Kept Man, The Melting Season, and The Middlesteins, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and Saint Mazie. She has contributed essays and criticism to the New York Times, Real Simple, Elle, the Washington Post, and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
"SAINT MAZIE is a love letter to a New York City that doesn't exist
anymore-the gritty, working-class Lower East Side and Coney Island
that your grandparents might remember...genuine and
relatable."--Cond� Nast Traveler
"The Middlesteins author Jami Attenberg has traded writing about
the Midwest for Jazz Age New York-and, oh, what a glorious swap it
is. If you love historical stories with bold language that vividly
paint a picture of another era, you'll be so happy to spend your
summer days alongside Mazie Phillips, the real-life proprietress of
a downtown NYC movie theater called The Venice. Take a peek inside
Mazie's diary, and get swept away."--Bustle, "The 17 Best Books of
Summer"
"[Attenberg] nails Mazie's irresistible combination of sweet and
seedy, tough and tender."--Miami Herald
"[A] gorgeous love letter to the city...a compulsively readable
tribute to a memorable and heroic New Yorker."--Vulture
"[F]resh and witty... SAINT MAZIE looks deep into the spirit of
generosity. Jami Attenberg's Mazie lives a very big life in a very
small space, turning her darkest experiences into something
inspiring."--Wall Street Journal
"[I]ngeniously constructed.... An attentive character study that
also happens to be rich in city lore and period detail, SAINT MAZIE
is an edifying, companionable and moving novel."--Kansas City
Star
"A funny, touching novel."--Vanity Fair
"A raw, boisterous, generous novel with a heroine to match and New
York in its soul, Saint Mazie offers proof again that Jami
Attenberg is a brilliant, lion-hearted storyteller."--Maggie
Shipstead, author of Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements
"A terrific novel--touching, funny, big-hearted, just like Mazie
herself. It's written with great verve and brio, and I loved the
way we circle around and then dig deeper into Mazie's life through
the multiple voices and sources. It's Mazie herself, though, who
shines the brightest, and who lingers on in the mind and heart, a
real diamond in the rough." --Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane and
Untold Story
"A winning novel and a lovely tribute to a New Yorker whose only
claim to fame is her outsized kindness. Her Mazie is richly
imagined and three-dimensional, and in these pages she lives
forever."--Los Angeles Times
"An exuberant portrait of an unforgettable woman and the city she
loves." --BBC.com
"Attenberg captures Mazie's voice so vividly you can close the book
and still hear her talking. She is a tremendous achievement. ...[A]
bold, magnificent book about family, altruism, women and freedom,
as well as a love letter to New York and a timely social manifesto
for the 21st century."--The Guardian
"Attenberg has an impressive ability to capture unique voices and
make these characters authentic and distinctive... the voices in
Saint Mazie ring out and linger, bringing to life this specific
place and time in New York-and American-history."--Dallas Morning
News
"Attenberg is a nimble and inventive storyteller with a particular
knack for getting at the heart of outsized characters. . . . [she]
proves her chops as a historical novelist by perfectly capturing
Mazie's jazz-age voice, which ranges from clipped and vulgar to
melancholy and lyrical. Attenberg also sidesteps many of the
pitfalls of the form: no day-by-day plodding through the decades,
no unedited research notes masquerading as dialogue. She resists
any plot twist or final revelation to provide a tidy psychological
explanation for Mazie Phillips-Gordon sainthood."--Washington
Post
"Attenberg's style, at turns lyrical and blunt, is a strong match
for Mazie. . . .This voice-pleasantly tinged with jazz age argot,
refreshingly modern in its honesty, and always intimate-is
Attenberg's great achievement in SAINT MAZIE. ...[A] boisterous,
deep, provocative book."--Boston Globe
"Boisterous and compassionate."--O Magazine
"Delightful . . . [an] often ebullient tale about the simple
pleasures of a working life. . . . Thanks to the wonderful Jami
Attenberg (with an assist from the legendary Joseph Mitchell) Mazie
does live on, an actual 20th century New York City saint."--NPR
"Entertaining . . . A fascinating portrait of early 20th-century
New York and of an unlikely champion of the
dispossessed."--BookPage
"Full of love and drink and dirty sex and nobility.... Attenberg
takes Mitchell's witty, colorful piece and spins it into something
equally lively and new."--New York Times Book Review
"I loved it to pieces . . . Through an incredible cast of voices,
Attenberg gives us the story of Mazie Phillips, the bawdy, brassy
broad who runs a New York theater from the Jazz Age through
Prohibition and into the Great Depression. Mazie never marries but
has admirers aplenty, and she grows from party girl into community
fixture as she devotes her time to caring for the homeless and
hungry. The frame and structure Attenberg gives her story are as
interesting as the story itself, and the whole experience is a
delight. Highly recommended!"--Rebecca Joines Schinsky, Book
Riot
"I'd love to be Jami Attenberg for a day to see what she sees. The
next best thing is to read the touching, funny, and wise SAINT
MAZIE, which is as difficult to categorize as the hard-living,
heart-breaking, soul-saving ticket taker it is about."--Charlotte
Rogan, author of The Lifeboat
"Impressive . . . Attenberg excels at developing Mazie's voice as
she grows from an impetuous, witty girl, into a shrewd-yet-selfless
character. But the book is largely about the silent tragedies of
womanhood, and the different forms love and loneliness can take . .
. What Saint Mazie is most concerned with: how to be a human
being."--Bust Magazine
"Jami Attenberg is a beautiful, humane, and extremely funny writer,
and SAINT MAZIE-the story of a flawed, spiky, golden-hearted,
broken-hearted broad, a kind of personification of the Lower East
Side of Manhattan in the first years of the 20th century-is a
glorious book."--Louisa Young, author of My Dear I Wanted to Tell
You
"Jami Attenberg is a master at creating complex and compelling
characters. She did it with Edie Middlestein of The Middlesteins,
and she's done it again with Mazie Phillips-Gordon of SAINT MAZIE.
While Mazie is an actual historical figure, in Attenberg's adept
hands, she blossoms as a multidimensional woman who helped the
down-and-out in New York City during and after the Depression,
while stirring up her own mischief and bad behavior. A wonderful
and thoughtful read, as relevant then as it is today, SAINT MAZIE
is not to be missed."--B.A. Shapiro, New York Times bestselling
author of The Art Forger
"SAINT MAZIE is a novel with as much style and moxie as its titular
character. I missed Mazie Gordon-Phillips and her family when I was
finished reading, but I missed New York, too. By telling this one
woman's story, Jami Attenberg has managed to write an ode to New
Yorkers of every generation. She is a true poet of the
city."--Gabrielle Zevin, author of The Storied Life of A.J.
Fikry
"SAINT MAZIE moves with joy and wonder through the past. This book
has such brio, warmth, intelligence and personality it seems a
wonder it is made of mere words."--Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat &
Other Stories
"Tender-hearted and loose-living, Mazie is the unlikely guardian
angel of New York City's Depression-Era down-and-outs. You'll love
this smart, touching novel that brings her world to
life."--People
"The hugely talented Jami Attenberg, most recently author of The
Middlesteins, has built a novel based on an imagined diary of Mazie
Phillips, a Bowery movie-theater proprietress."--New York
Magazine
"The real-life Mazie first appeared in a 1940 New Yorker profile by
Joseph Mitchell and later again in his seminal collection, "Up in
the Old Hotel." Now Mazie's latest, and perhaps more powerful
incarnation, is in the novel "Saint Mazie" by Jami Attenberg. Here
Mazie continues to grab the lapels and hearts of readers - and we
are all the more glad for the shake-up she gives us . . . Achieves
immortality in the minds and hearts of readers."--Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel
"This follow-up to Attenberg's beloved novel The Middlesteins
shares many of that book's hallmarks: unflinching examinations of
some of people's more unflattering qualities, compassion for the
same, and a clear love and respect for the journeys we all must go
on . . . her work has the same sense of bonhomie and joy as did the
original 'Saint' Mazie."--The L Magazine, #1 on the "50 Books
You'll Want to Read This Spring and Summer" list
"With SAINT MAZIE, Jami Attenberg has crafted a tale that is
somehow both a love song and a gut punch at once, and will leave
you all the better for having read it. When I finished reading, I
wanted to start all over again."--Therese Anne Fowler, author of Z:
A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
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