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The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

A Novel

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The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Written by: Teddy Wayne
Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
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About this listen

For fans of A Visit from the Goon Squad and Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, here is a scathing and enthralling new novel about America’s monstrous obsession with fame from the winner of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award.

Megastar Jonny Valentine, 11-year-old icon of bubblegum pop, knows that the fans don’t love him for who he is. His image, his voice, and even his hairdo have been packaged - by his LA label and by his hard-partying manager-mother - into bite-size pieces for easy digestion, sliding down the gullet of mass culture, the biggest appeal to the widest demographic. But somewhere inside the relentless marketing machine is still a little boy, devoted to his mother and determined to find his absent father among the countless, faceless fans - isn’t there?

A twisted, brilliant, and viciously funny coming-of-age story set inside corporate arenas and luxury hotel suites, Teddy Wayne’s The Love Song of Jonny Valentine explores with devastating clarity the underbelly of fame in 21st-century America’s celebrity culture, told through the eyes of one of the most unforgettable child narrators since Holden Caulfield. This novel is a literary masterpiece from the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Kapitoil - one of the standout writers of his generation.

Teddy Wayne is the award-winning author of Kapitoil and a journalist who contributes to a variety of national publications.

©2013 Teddy Wayne (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

What the critics say

" The Love Song of Jonny Valentine takes us deep into the dark arts and even darker heart of mass-market celebrity, 21st-century version. In the near-pubescent hitmaker of the title, Teddy Wayne delivers a wild ride through the upper echelons of the entertainment machine as it ingests human beings at one end and spews out dollars at the other. Jonny’s like all the rest of us, he wants to love and be loved, and as this brilliant novel shows, that’s a dangerous way to be when you’re inside the machine." (Ben Fountain, New York Times best-selling author)
"I’d wanted to go slowly and read The Love Song of Jonny Valentine over the course of a week or two, but once Jonny’s voice got into my head, I was hooked and kept picking it back up, and so I ended up on the last page, reading that final, amazing sentence, at like three in the morning. This novel is a serious accomplishment.… America as we know it, with laughs on every page, but also a book that doesn’t take one cheap shot.… And at the swirling core, you have an 11-year-old boy trapped by his fame and trying to figure out how to move through the world, and who wants nothing more than to find his father. This is a book with a runaway narrative engine, tremendous ambitions, and an even bigger heart. I do not lie when I tell you: Teddy Wayne is as good a young writer as we have." (Charles Bock, New York Times best-selling author)
"What is most searing about Teddy Wayne’s splendid new novel is not his trenchant social criticism, nor the itchy, unsettling way that he makes tragedy entertaining, but that in the bubble of celebrity which comprises little Jonny Valentine’s whole world, at times the only differences between the savvy, drug-taking, lonely adults and the savvy, drug-taking, lonely kid himself are his outsized talent, and their avarice plus wrinkles." (Helen Schulman, New York Times best-selling author)
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