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"I'd be twenty-nine at the end of the year," the narrator of Panic Years announces, "and playing bass was the only thing I was good at." Fueled by positive online reviews and a minimum of introspection, Paul and his bickering bandmates--beautiful Laney, hard-drinking Jeff, despairing drummer Gooch--soldier unquestioningly through a gruelling and open-ended quest to play gig after gig in the seamy nightclubs and questionable dive bars of indie-rock America. As the band stoically makes its calamitous way cross-country from Texas to New York, its journey is struck repeatedly by theft, drug use, foot infections, gastrointestinal distress, crooked promoters, and the hatred of rival bands. In his earnestly deadpan account of the claustrophobic daily grind of life on the road, newcomer Daniel DiFranco has created a brutally realistic record--not only of the underground music scene, but of everyday existence in its purest form.
After three decades of an over-extended youth abroad, fifty-six-year-old Wade Ricky returns home to the Los Angeles suburbs to care for his dying mother and come to terms with his memories of an awkwardly sensual affair with Herta, a German woman he meets while biking across India; a two-year stint in Peshawar as an assistant to a blind British expat; and a cheerfully surreal world of drugs and sexual voyeurism in which Wade is continually a complicit outsider. As months turn into years, Wade finds companionship with a landscape painter grieving for her son killed in Iraq and slowly rebuilds his life in America--even as he begins to understand, finally, why he must be alone. In pared-down, richly evocative prose that captures the hidden complexities of social and geopolitical relations, Michael Onofrey's debut novel is a loving, even joyful meditation about the transience of human connection and the experience of solitude.
In an unspecified time and place in America, teenaged Edward Rawlinson paints watercolors, watches his older brother Burke romance pretty, horse-riding Christine, and retreats into his visual adoration of bicycle reflectors, Victorian picture frames, linen tablecloths, and heftily built men. As Ed matures, his ability to lose himself in the sensual, fractalesque aspects of everyday life -including hazelnuts, antique fans, and doorbells-will lead him to a happy, tender relationship and life of security with Lawrence, an aging professor, but also to an avoidant, labyrinthine relationship with the practical world of "straight lines." With its strange, slow-paced portrait of a young man quietly determined to engage with society on his own terms, Carla Bradsher-Fredrick's Hands and Straight Lines creates a calm yet unsettling zone of ambivalence that reconfigures the traditional bildungsroman into a mysterious meditation on adulthood and the good life.
You are in the wrong life, with the wrong man. This is a trap. Escape. You are in the right life, with the right man. This is a trap. Escape. In the surreal, macabre performances of femininity that haunt Suzanne Burns' third collection, nobody emerges innocent or unscathed. Tasha lives in a community that is mysteriously obsessed with a high-stakes bake-off. Junie constantly tries to impress a cabal of unsettlingly toxic ladies who don't respect her-until she suddenly goes missing. Elaine's life seems idyllic, apart from her cold, uncaring husband (and the many black cars that lurk around her neighborhood and cause people to vanish). Underlying the resentful misfit women and boozy tea parties of Now It Seems That I'm Not Here at All is the terrifying question of where-and who-we would be, if we had the freedom to choose.
A young lawyer moonlights as an ersatz psychic; a woman struggles with the caregiver burden caused by her boyfriend's satanic possession; a suburban mother reckons with Kafka's The Metamorphosis in mass-casualty form. In the blank quotidian spaces of Matthew Meade's debut collection, circumstances of profound and surreal horror-reanimated corpses, conspiracy theorists attacked by "energy weapons," highbrow artwork that's alive (and acting like a jerk)-dissipate with shockingly deadpan ease into sensitive accounts of ordinary human relationships and resilience. With its heartfelt portraits of a magical world where late-stage capitalism has blurred the boundaries between the living and the dead, Strip Mall presents a strangely grace-filled vision of the dystopia already upon us.
In a post-Knausgaard fictional reality that is as devastating as it is hilarious, an idealistic social worker with the same name as the author counsels the mentally ill, tries to be scrupulously honest (too honest?) with his girlfriends, and earnestly lectures his fellow writers in the MFA hothouse-all while navigating the complicated administrative aspects of being, and remaining, extraordinarily high. Appropriating the time-worn tropes of an addiction memoir, Michael Keen's kalaidoscopic debut novel recounts a string of harrowingly awkward encounters with oversexed coworkers, narcissistic writers, self-absorbed drug dealers, estranged parents, schizophrenics, and pedophiles-all causing and reflecting one man's pathological confusion about the workings of his inner world. In its transgressively exhilarating depiction of millennial anomie, Notes from the Trauma Party is a no-holds-barred examination of a quest for total transparency that is as awful as it is sublime.
In an unnamed town, an anonymous narrator scrupulously plans and commits an unspeakable, seemingly random act of mass-casualty violence. With a taut and nonlinear exposition that portrays with devastating precision an enigmatic loner's gradual transition from hedonistic anomie to an increasingly strange and sinister obsession, Josh Wardrip's brilliantly intricate debut novel gleefully dissects the raw existential horror of flophouses, mental hospitals, and everyday life. As a primal howl in the wilderness that doubles as an exquisitely structured puzzle, Forum is a meditation on delusion, interiority, and the sources of evil.
"e;I took the second pill. Some relief but not what I'd anticipated. I took the third, overdosed, and that was it for me as a corporeal, living, and breathing human being upon this too sad earth."e; So succumbs thirty-year-old unemployed writer and hopeless romantic Tom Astaire to an overdose in the opening pages of Michael Sauve's newest novel-a bizarrely upbeat romp through the horrors of being phantasmal, OxyContin-addicted, and trapped in the post-industrial blight of small-town Ontario. As nineteenth-century specters like the historian Sir Edward Capp insist on Sault Sainte Marie's glorious past, Tom and his fellow wraiths plot to avenge their border town's full-blown opioid crisis and unwittingly unleash a chain of apocalyptic supernatural events that leads to imminent geological disaster and the calamitous ascendancy of a cretinous neo-Nazi group called the "e;Titans of Thor."e; With its surreally deadpan depiction of a society at rock bottom, The Many Fentanyl Addicted Wraiths of Sault Sainte Marie is a startling and exuberant effusion on nostalgia, memory, and the hopes that outlive us.
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