Robert J. (ygrec23) reviewed Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s on + 25 more book reviews
This poor woman hallucinates a New York era that never existed, and she does it poorly. She seems fixated on a large Manhattan-centric group of cultural supermen and women and their transcendent perceptions of some kind of superior cultural Valhalla. The truth, of course, was much more prosaic. This was a group of almost entirely small-town Americans who had fled their Podunks for New York and seemed entirely carried away by their new-found freedom. Their supposedly significant literary perceptions were the normal, transient productions of fundamentally normal, average people who tried to pole-jump their way into artistic stardom. It didn't work. And this was perceived at the time. Don't waste your time on this book.
