by: Eugene Marten

Fiction

5 1/2" x 8"

370 pages

$14.95

ISBN 978-1-61658-964-6

Synopsis

Jelonnek is a blue collar Midwesterner trapped in a life he is almost sure he wants to escape. Driven by a dim yearning to transcend, he makes the first real choice of his life when a simple errand to a convenience store escalates into a terrifying encounter. He soon finds himself on a cross-country odyssey with a woman he barely knows and her young daughter, in search of escape and new beginnings. They find shelter in an isolated existence at the edge of the country, only to be besieged by threats from outside and, finally, from within. A descent into paranoia, nascent violence and sexuality follows, culminating in a one-man Armageddon and an aftermath as hopeful as it is horrifying.

Firework is the story of a man who, though ill-equipped to help himself, attempts to help someone else, and the beautifully rendered, perhaps necessary catastrophe that results. Unequaled in intensity, it is also an exhilarating expression of the noble, all-too human impulse to become more than what we seem to be.

Author

Eugene Marten is the author of In The Blind and Waste. He lives in New York City

Praise for Waste

“Only Eugene Marten can keep a reader enthralled with the minutiae of a janitorial existence.  From the most unlikely of subjects Marten constructs, with great care and taking joy in every sentence, a spellbinding work. Precisely and exquisitely detailed, Waste is a stark little masterpiece.”

—Brian Evenson

“When a poet pal had put a copy of Waste into my hands, I right away went nuts until I had gotten myself in touch with its author for to add to my household a supply of enough copies to scare all my writer friends with. Here, said I, in wild proclamation, is one for history and a half.”

— Gordon Lish

“This is surely one of the darkest and most jarring books I’ve read. It is also pitch-perfect. Waste wastes nothing—not a syllable, a beat, a ragged breath.”

— Dawn Raffel