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Sign up todayThe Bonfire of the Vanities
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“Strongly recommended! 5 Patchouli 🪴/5!”
— Patchouli Joe’s • Patchouli Joe’s Books
This bitingly hilarious American satire will forever define late twentieth-century New York style.
Tom Wolfe’s bestselling modern classic tells the story of Sherman McCoy, an elite Wall Street bond trader who has it all: wealth, power, prestige, a Park Avenue apartment, a beautiful wife, and an even more beautiful mistress, until one wrong turn sends Sherman spiraling downward in a humiliating fall from grace.
A car accident in the Bronx involving Sherman, his girlfriend, and two young lower-class Black men sets a match to the incendiary racial and social tensions of 1980s New York City. Suddenly, Sherman finds himself embroiled in the most brutal, high-profile case of the year, as prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers rush in to further their own political and social agendas. With so many egos at stake, the last priority on anyone’s mind is truth or justice.
Tom Wolfe’s numerous books include The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, From Bauhaus to Our House, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. He died in 2018.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto . . . with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.
Reviews
“Impossible to put down.”
“A big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won’t let go.”
“Narrator Joe Barrett sends shivers up the spine…Wolfe’s Bonfire still burns bright with wit, mastery of plot and character, and an astonishing eye for detail.”
“If you saw the movie and liked it, listen to this audiobook, which is a thousand times better.”
“Sheer entertainment against a fabulous background…Wolfe triumphantly mounts scene after magnificent scene depicting the vanity of human endeavor, with every character measured by his shoes and suits or dresses, his income and expenses, and with his vain desires rising in smoke against settings that would make a Hollywood director’s tongue hang out. Often hilarious, and much, much more.”
“Erupting from the first line with noise, color, tension and immediacy, this immensely entertaining novel accurately mirrors a system that has broken down: from the social code of basic good manners to the fair practices of the law…A brilliant evocation of New York’s class, racial and political structure in the 1980s.”
“Wolfe’s genius may be better suited to fiction than to journalism; his novel has all the knowledge, insight, and wit of earlier works but tones down the notorious stylistic excesses. The result is not just Wolfe’s most successful book to date but one of the most impressive novels of the decade.”
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