Named Library Journal Best Fiction in Translation 2013. "Cocaine is
a brilliant black comedy that belongs on the same shelf as Evelyn
Waugh's Vile Bodies and Dawn Powell's The Wicked Pavilion.
Pitigrilli is an acidic aphorist and a wicked observer of social
folly."--Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and
Brightness Falls "Pitigrilli was an enjoyable writer--spicy and
rapid--like lightning."--Umberto Eco "The name of the author
Pitigrilli ...is so well known in Italy as to be almost a byword
for 'naughtiness' ...The only wonder to us is that some
enterprising translator did not render some of his books available
in English sooner." -- The New York Times, Paris in the
1920s--dizzy and decadent. Where a young man can make a fortune
with his wits ...unless he is led into temptation. Cocaine's
dandified hero Tito Arnaudi invents lurid scandals and gruesome
deaths, and sells these stories to the newspapers. But his own life
becomes even more outrageous than his press reports when he
acquires three demanding mistresses. Elegant, witty, and wicked,
Pitigrilli's classic novel was first published in Italian in 1921
and charts the comedy and tragedy of a young man's downfall and the
lure of a bygone era. The novel's descriptions of sex and drug use
prompted church authorities to place it on a list of forbidden
books. Cocaine retains its venom even today. Pitigrilli was the pen
name of Dino Segre, born in Turin in 1893. He worked as a foreign
correspondent in Paris during the 1920s, and became equally
celebrated and notorious for a series of audacious and subversive
books. He died in 1975.
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