Shopping in Space takes a walk on the wild side of literature to analyse contemporary New York fiction. This is a fiction of urban depravity and moral decay: greed and deviancy, crime, bohemianism, sexual excess, nightlife and narcotics. From the glittering consumer circus of up-town Manhattan to the desperate strategies of the alienated and dispossessed, the city offers unparalleled opportunities to the creative artist. Young and Caveney provide a close reading of a number of writers including Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Mary Gaitskill, Gary Indiana and Dennis Cooper. Shopping in Space is the literary history of a new generation - essential for all scholars of American literature as well as the general reader who seeks a future for fiction.