Lawrence Block as Sheldon Lord: 69 Barrow Street (USA 2016) From the Publisher: A year later I was back in New York; I'd found an editorial job at a literary agency and liked it it enough to drop out of school to keep it. I shared an apartment at the Hotel Alexandria on West 103rd Street with Bob Aronson until the Army took him, at which time the hotel let me move to a single room a few floors below. While I lived on 103rd, I spent most of my time in the Village. By the fall of 1958 I was back at Antioch, more focused on writing than classwork. I'd begun selling magazine stories while I was at the literary agency, and began writing novels once I'd left, and Harry Shorten was eager to publish them at his new venture, Midwood Tower Books. My third book for Harry, following CARLA and A STRANGE KIND OF LIVE, was 69 BARROW STREET. I'd had the idea of a novel set at a multiple dwelling-in this case, a Village brownstone-with the characters interacting and living their lives. One model for it would have been 79 PARK AVENUE, an early work of Harold Robbins, when A STONE FOR DANNY FISHER let the world take him seriously as a writer of American realistic fiction. (Then he wrote THE CARPETBAGGERS, and that was the end of that.) I decided-nudge nudge, wink wink-that 69 BARROW STREET would be an appropriately suggestive title.<(ü>) Jesus, 54 Barrow Street. Fred Alliot and Bob Aronson, both of whom I'd run into now and then over the years, are gone now. Paul Grillo and I lost touch with each other fifty-plus years ago... Years and years later, I found out that 69 PARK AVENUE had been Harold Robbins' original title. His publishers made him change it. My publishers had no such compunctions, and 69 BARROW STREET it was and shall remain. And now it's back in print, and graced once again by Paul Rader's magnificent cover art. Lawrence Block as Sheldon Lord: 69 Barrow Street. CreateSpace Publishing (Classic Erotica), ISBN: 9781534920712 (June, 2016), 182 p., $9.99, eBook $2.99.
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