The Bonfire of the Vanities

"A big, bitter, funny, craftily-plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let you go."—The New York Times Book Review

"A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right."—The Washington Post Book World

"Nasty, satirical, probing, and dead-on accurate . . . Wolfe falls so naturally into this colorful, supercharged account of New York high life and low life that it's hard to believe he hasn't been writing fiction all life . . . It also reads at a veritable gallop—those pages flash by you as you watch, with fascinated horror, the meticulously charted fall of Sherman McCoy."—The Seattle Times

"The Bonfire of the Vanities chronicles the collapse of a Wall Street bond trader, and examines a world in which fortunes are made and lost at the blink of a computer screen . . . Wolfe's subject couldn't be more topical: New Yorkers' relentless pursuit and flaunting of wealth, and the fury it evokes in the have-nots."—USA Today

"Touches passionately on perennial themes that will give it staying power . . . Bonfire is news that will stay news because a century hence readers will find preserved in it the strong flavor of some unfortunately important slices of life in our time."—George F. Will