In the Night Café A Novel

“In The Night Café is heartbreaking and exhilarating at once. Joyce Johnson has written a memorable love story.” —Hilma Wolitzer

“Almost heartbreakingly evocative, uncommon deftness and restraint. . . . Johnson has a way of characterizing people with a single stroke, allowing us to color in the rest.” —Anne Tyler, Chicago Tribune

“An intense, strong love story, direct and moving . . . An exhilarating experience.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A splendid piece of work, and I read it with great pleasure. The voice of the narrator is so authentic, and her story is told with admirable integrity, restraint, and poignancy.” —Lynne Sharon Schwartz

“The book sails on its first-person narrator: a fiercely believable, testifying voice that is pungent, close to the bone, stinging with candor. Lyrical atmospheric details aside, the poetry of this novel is in its quick psychological insights and the ability to make us shudder and feel along with it.” —Philip Lopate, The New York Times Book Review

“No one writes about the Bohemian New York art and literary scene of the late 1950s and early ’60s with more affectionate and rueful insight than Johnson . . . Very moving.” —Publishers Weekly

“Novelist and Kerouac-memoirist Johnson . . . hits her stride with this bittersweet novel of love and death on the Lower East Side . . . Haunting and evocative.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Lower Manhattan in the days when Idlewild was Idlewild and Kennedy had not been shot seems like a funky-glamorous Parisian-bohemian Camelot and Joyce Johnson is its chronicler. First in her extraordinary memoir . . . Minor Characters, and now in this incandescent novel.” —Phyllis Rose

“As happens now and then, one novel so totally captured my imagination that I keep going back to it. . . . It’s a story of heartbreak, where the heart breaks slowly, a little at a time. Which makes In the Night Café an exquisitely painful—and profoundly moving—novel to read.” —Joyce Maynard, Mademoiselle
 
“There is a touch here of Jean Rhys and Marguerite Duras . . . but with none of the self-pity of the former or the intellectual dryness of the latter. Johnson keeps an everyday tone in the middle of deep waters. To do so whilst maintaining her balance requires a constant and remarkable artistry.” —The Independent

“The intensity of Joyce Johnson’s imagination lies in the way she looks at the world, in the daring openness she bring to her place and time and the people around her.” —Seven Days