HALLUCINATIONS PA

In her latest book, Elizabeth Wilson sets out in a linked series of stories, vignettes and essays to map contemporary city culture. We move from the tawdry glamour of the sixties demi-monde to the urban gypsies of the 1980s, from Kafka's search for love to sexual angst in the B-movie cities of Silicon Valley, from the New York of Brian de Palma's Dressed to Kill to the bleak nostalgia of 'film noir', from the defiant resistance of alternative cabaret to the performance artists of the downtown tourist venues--the Beaubourg, Covent Garden, the Piazza della Signoria--who transform themselves into mechanised puppets: the modern hero as machine.