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Stop's Reviews > Ground Up
Ground Up
by
10 Questions for Michael Idov
An online exclusive interview
By Chris Ross
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
This interview took place at Café Regular du Nord, a narrow, tin-ceilinged coffee shop set on a sun-dappled street in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. Author Michael Idov chose the location, proclaiming it to be one of the rare purveyors of quality coffee in the city. Coffee â€� and the fragile entrepreneurialâ€� dreams so often attached to it â€� are something Idov knows quite a bit about. Following a failed nine-month stint as a coffee shop proprietor in New York’s Lower East Side, Idov penned a widely read on Slate, skewering the romantic bobo dream of kaffehaus ownership with a mixture of confessional woe and cold, hard math. Sadly, the protagonists of Idov’s debut novel, Ground Up, did not get the memo. Aspirational married couple Mark and Nina become enraptured by the idea of opening an authentic Viennese coffee shop in Manhattan, and jumpstart the venture on a wing and a prayer. Financial, marital and social disasters ensue as the couple finds the carefully distressed walls of their café beginning to resemble the bars of their own personal hell. Idov brings his years as a cultural journalist at New York magazine, among other publications, to bear on his portrayal of early â€�00s LES with a precision that verges on the anthropologicalâ€�.â€� Despite the novel’s many funny passages, with newly shuttered storefronts on every American street corner, Ground Up projects a mood which is distinctly if unintentionallyâ€� ´Ú¾±²Ô-»å±ð-²õ¾±Ã¨³¦±ô±ð.
Read the interview...
by
10 Questions for Michael Idov
An online exclusive interview
By Chris Ross
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
This interview took place at Café Regular du Nord, a narrow, tin-ceilinged coffee shop set on a sun-dappled street in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. Author Michael Idov chose the location, proclaiming it to be one of the rare purveyors of quality coffee in the city. Coffee â€� and the fragile entrepreneurialâ€� dreams so often attached to it â€� are something Idov knows quite a bit about. Following a failed nine-month stint as a coffee shop proprietor in New York’s Lower East Side, Idov penned a widely read on Slate, skewering the romantic bobo dream of kaffehaus ownership with a mixture of confessional woe and cold, hard math. Sadly, the protagonists of Idov’s debut novel, Ground Up, did not get the memo. Aspirational married couple Mark and Nina become enraptured by the idea of opening an authentic Viennese coffee shop in Manhattan, and jumpstart the venture on a wing and a prayer. Financial, marital and social disasters ensue as the couple finds the carefully distressed walls of their café beginning to resemble the bars of their own personal hell. Idov brings his years as a cultural journalist at New York magazine, among other publications, to bear on his portrayal of early â€�00s LES with a precision that verges on the anthropologicalâ€�.â€� Despite the novel’s many funny passages, with newly shuttered storefronts on every American street corner, Ground Up projects a mood which is distinctly if unintentionallyâ€� ´Ú¾±²Ô-»å±ð-²õ¾±Ã¨³¦±ô±ð.
Read the interview...
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Ground Up.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
September 2, 2009
– Shelved
