Class

Class

<b>"Plainly the work of a forceful and ambitious writer...<i> (Class) </i>is like little else I€ve read in recent years.€ €"<b>Dwight Garner, </b><i><b>The New York Times</b></i><br><br>The breakout novel by Francesco Pacifico, one of Italy€s most acclaimed writers, hailed by Dana Spiotta as €œbrilliantly funny and weirdly subversive€</b><br><br>Ludovica and Lorenzo live in Rome. She works in her family€s bookstore, and he€s a filmmaker€"or, rather, a €œfilmmaker€: so far, all he€s produced is one pretentious short film that even his friends don€t take seriously. But somehow, he gets a scholarship to Columbia University, and the couple decide to head to New York€"specifically, to Williamsburg: the promised land.<br>  <br> They soon fall in with a group of Italian expats€"all of them with artistic ambitions and the family money to support those ambitions indefinitely. There€s Nicolino, the playboy; Marcello, the aspiring rapper; Sergio, the literary scout; and a handful of others. These languidly ambitious men and women will come together and fall apart, but can they escape their fates? Can anyone?<br>  <br> In <i>Class</i>, Francesco Pacifico gives a grand, subversive, formally ambitious social novel that bridges Italy and America, high and low, money and art. A novel that channels Virginia Woolf and Kanye West, Henry Miller and Lil€ Wayne, <i>Class</i> is an unforgettable, mordantly funny account of Italians chasing the American dream.