CLOUT

New York City Gangs & The Pursuit of InstaFame

von Ethan Marlowe

268 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

The video is fourteen seconds long.It shows a man in a navy windbreaker walking north on a Bronx sidewalk at dusk. It shows three shots. It ends before it shows whether he got up. The man who fired the shots is the man who filmed them. Within the hour it was on Instagram. Within the week it had been slowed, stabilized, captioned, and argued over by millions of people, none of whom learned the only fact that mattered. The man in the windbreaker was a federal immigration agent.CLOUT is a book about that distance. About what the record keeps and what it drops on the floor, and about the people who live in the space between the two.In alternating chapters, CLOUT braids original investigative reporting with a fictional narrative told by Ethan Marlowe, a twenty-one-year-old NYU journalism student who receives the video at 2:47 in the morning and follows it into the Bronx, into a family, and into a promise he may not be able to keep.The reporting is built from indictments, court filings, and the public record of New York City in the mid-2020s. It maps a war between two crews called LA World and Wuski, based in housing developments five blocks apart in East Harlem, a conflict that produced twenty-one shootings in six months and half of all the gunfire in an entire police precinct. There is no drug territory at stake. There is no hierarchy, no colors, no revenue stream. The vocabulary the country uses for gang violence is forty years old, and none of it explains what these sixteen-year-olds are dying for. What they are pursuing is engagement. Followers. Views. Clout. The violence is the content, and the content is the point.The fiction follows Marlowe as he learns what the reporting cannot teach him: what it costs a witness to say a name out loud, what a mother carries, what a book takes from the people who let a writer into their lives, and what kind of person reaches for the version of the story that carries.Written under the byline of its own narrator, CLOUT is a work of reported nonfiction and a novel at the same time, each one testing the other. The cases are real. The family is invented. The city is exactly as it is.Book One of the Ethan Marlowe series.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798170745982
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 15.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published