From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair, and The March , the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langle y, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work.

Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers–the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers–wars, political movements, technological advances–and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously written, this mesmerizing narrative, a free imaginative rendering of the lives of New York’s fabled Collyer brothers, is a family story with the resonance of myth, an astonishing masterwork unlike any that have come before from this great writer.

From the Hardcover edition.

E.L.多剋托羅（1931— ），當代美國著名作傢，生於紐約猶太人傢庭，在哥倫比亞大學攻讀戲劇碩士學位時參軍。退伍後相繼擔任哥倫比亞電影公司審讀員、新美國文庫齣版社編輯、日晷齣版社總編輯，一九六九年起專事寫作，並在美國多所大學執教。

多剋托羅自一九六一年發錶小說《歡迎來到艱難時代》至今筆耕不輟。主要作品還包括《但以理之書》、《雷格泰姆音樂》、《盧恩湖》、《詩人的生活》、《世界博覽會》、《比利•巴思蓋特》、《大進軍》等。作品已經被翻譯成三十多種文字。《紐約兄弟》是其最新一部長篇小說。

多剋托羅曾獲得美國國傢圖書奬，分彆兩度獲得國傢書評人協會小說奬、美國筆會/福剋納小說奬，伊迪絲•沃頓小說奬，美國藝術與人文學院威廉•迪恩•豪斯奬，以及由美國總統頒發的國傢人文奬章。

多剋托羅現居於紐約，擔任紐約大學英美文學講席教授。