{"product_id":"9781398497559","title":"Fastovski's Tales of Hampstead","description":"Imagine that Isaac Babel's Cossacks wassail together with Runyonesque Liverpool Jews outside the plate-glass window of a Hampstead café where a Klezmer band is playing to a packed and tea-drinking congregation of jazzmen, Hasidic scholars, surrealists, old soldiers, and retired strippers; and you have the tone and temperature of this unique and unclassifiable memoir - no, not memoir, more a stream-of-consciousness novella - no, not a novella but a piece of autobiographical fiction - no, not autobiography but a picaresque drama conquered from the unreliable and fertile brain of the eponymous Fastovski. \u003cbr\u003eAnd who is Fastovski? Is he real or invented? Is he perhaps the alter-ego of real-life jazz pianist, Klezmer swinger, big band leader and flaneur, Wallace Fields, who stares at us from the book's frontispiece in shades, Diaghilev coat and moustache, over a cup of strong black coffee? Fastovski's not telling and anyway, who cares. \u003cbr\u003eThis is a book to be devoured, disseminated, denounced, and delighted in. It belongs to all who think art and life are one and that the Arch-Savant of Canterbury, Issy Bonn, Rashid the Manic Berber Chef of NW3, and Mrs Karl Popper, have an equal claim on history. I haven't had such a good time since I shared Sir Ralph Richardson's motorbike with a parrot and a striking grandmother clock. \u003cbr\u003ePiers Plowright \u003cbr\u003eAugust 2008","brand":"Austin Macauley","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67301236179185,"sku":"9781398497559","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0674\/5433\/7265\/files\/9781398497559_p0.jpg?v=1792856755","url":"https:\/\/shop.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781398497559","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble","version":"1.0","type":"link"}