Petting Zoo

<b>A moving vividly rendered novel from the author of <i>The Basketball Diaries</i> </b><p>Suffused with Jim Carroll's humor and sharp wit his delicate yet hallucinatory imagery and his cool sophisticated streetsmart voice <i>The Petting Zoo</i> is a frank haunting examination of one artist's personal and spiritual quest. Billy Wolfram an enigmatic thirty-eight- year-old star of the late -1980s New York art scene views a show of Velázquez paintings and is so humbled by their spiritual power that he suffers an emotional breakdown and retreats to his Chelsea loft. In seclusion he recalls the most emblematic moments and figures of his childhood and early career as he searches to recover the spark of inspiration in his own work and life.</p>