All-Night Pharmacy
A Novel
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
*A NATIONAL BESTSELLER*
Winner of the California Book Award
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards
Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in this fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace
On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions—nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears.
Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator’s spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics.
With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Madievsky (Emergency Brake) makes her fiction debut with an electric tale of two sisters. "Spending time with my sister, Debbie, was like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus," recounts the unnamed 18-year-old narrator, the result being either "euphoric" or "coming to in a gas station bathroom." They've grown up in an unstable home, their father absent and their mother receiving a "kaleidoscope of diagnoses." Along the way, the acquiescent narrator learns to defer to the older, imperious Debbie: "I didn't like who I was when I was with her, but I didn't like myself any other time either." After hanging out with Debbie and doing drugs at a dive bar, the narrator develops an addiction to prescription pills. She also becomes codependent with Debbie, a dynamic that comes to a head with the narrator stabbing Debbie. The latter survives, then disappears. Afterward, the narrator finds admin work in an emergency room, where she meets and falls in love with Sasha, a queer Jewish refugee from Moldova who claims to be the narrator's spiritual guardian ("She had all of Debbie's larger-than-lifeness, but without the dangerous edge or the bitter comedown," the narrator reflects of Sasha). Madievsky renders her protagonist's search for selfhood vividly and viscerally, resulting in a coming-of-age story that radiates like a Lynchian fever dream.
