When a copy of this book came my way, I started searching the Internet to see what the US release date would be. Amazingly, I haven’t found one as of yet, which is shocking because quite simply, this is one hell of a book. At a mere 120 pages long, Bobby Gold is less a novel and more a series of linked vignettes from the colorful pages of the title character’s life. But within those few pages are some of the most vivid, visceral snatches of dialogue I have ever read. God, can Bourdain write.

To steal from the jacket copy, we get “12 slices from the life of Bobby Gold,” a lanky young Jewish boy who morphs into a bulked-up silent thug after an 8-year stint in prison upstate. He works as a night club bouncer but moonlights as an enforcer for his even more thuggish buddy, Eddie Fish, who has mobster aspirations. We see Bobby as he throws drunken teenagers out of the club and explains away a beating in a brutal, but useful, fashion. We see him accept an enforcing gig and when it turns out to be one of his prison buddies, the solution they come up with to please everybody is ingenious. And we even see Bobby as he falls in love, after not having “had a woman in years,” with Nikki, a take-no-shit saucier who is just as knocked for a loop over the entanglement.

As I said before, the dialogue just sings. I can hear the different New York borough dialects depending on which character is speaking. Bourdain is a master at capturing vocal rhythms. At the same time, he manages to create a wide array of compelling characters in a few short sentences, from Nikki’s ill-fated one-night stand, to the night club waiters and cooks to the random people Bobby meets. Writing this review makes me want to pick up the book and start again, immersing myself in the smells, sounds, and sights of Bobby Gold’s world. And as this was my first Bourdain book, I’ll be hunting up his backlist eagerly.