Title: The toy collector
First published: 2000
Description: A tragicomic novel about nostalgia, addiction, and 1970s action figures.

The Toy Collector is a wickedly funny portrait of a young man who sells stolen pharmaceuticals to finance his growing addiction to memorabilia. An orderly at a Times Square hospital, he buys his toys at exorbitant prices, searching the familiar tacky plastic in a perverse effort to avoid adulthood. As the story switches from the make-believe world he creates with his childhood friends-populated by Scrunch-Em, Grow-Em Dinosaurs and toy robots-to the grown-up pleasures of sex, drugs and alcohol, James falls in and out of love, and stumbles through New York City in search of dubious redemption.
Subjects: Toys, Fiction, Hospitals, Collectors and collecting, Staff, Families, Racially mixed people, Juvenile fiction, History, Family life, Time travel, Employees, Sharecroppers, Race relations, New york (n.y.), fiction, Young women, fiction, Fiction, historical, general, Teenage girls, Fiction, general
Places: New York (N.Y.)