Service

A darkly comic novel set on the lower slopes of the Los Angeles literary world. I stepped out to behold a crimson-streaked sky that would soon be adorning ten thousand Instagram posts, and walked down the sleepy residential streets, suffused with a soft and forgiving evening light, to the main drag. It felt like the end here, both sanctuary and termination: a soft place of harsh realities where a sun that once meant something barely brushed against the world. The perfect spring evening was blighted only by the citizenry. A journalist in his late forties—having lost his job as a consequence of the death of print media—finds himself working at a bookstore in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood, where he is thrown into the company of a younger generation with whom he has little in common. Embittered by his lowly position at this late stage of what had once been a promising career, he collapses his longtime ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances. Service examines the plight of the unrepentant artistic outsider in an unforgiving day and age. It alternates between passages that painstakingly describe the…

Издательство

MIT Press

Год

2025

Страниц

330

Язык

английский

ISBN

9781635902495