What a debut! Early Work is one of the wittiest, wisest (sometimes
silliest, in the best sense), and bravest novels about wrestling with
the early stages of life and love, of creative and destructive urges,
I've read in a while. The angst of the young and reasonably comfortable
isn't always pretty, but Andrew Martin possesses the prose magic to make
it hilarious, illuminating, moving. --Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask
and The Fun Parts
For young writers of a certain temperament--if they haven't had such
notions beaten out of them by MFA programs and the Internet--the
delusion persists that great writing must be sought in what W. B. Yeats
once called the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart." That's where
Peter Cunningham has been looking for inspiration for his novel--that
is, when he isn't teaching at the local women's prison, walking his dog,
getting high, and wondering whether it's time to tie the knot with his
college girlfriend, a medical student whose night shifts have become a
standing rebuke to his own lack of direction. When Peter meets Leslie, a
sexual adventurer taking a break from her fiancé, he gets a glimpse of
what he wishes and imagines himself to be: a writer of talent and nerve.
Her rag-and-bone shop may be as squalid as his own, but at least she
knows her way around the shelves. Over the course of a Virginia summer,
their charged, increasingly intimate friendship opens the door to
difficult questions about love and literary ambition.
With a keen irony reminiscent of Sam Lipsyte or Lorrie Moore, and a
romantic streak as wide as Roberto Bolaño's, Andrew Martin's Early
Work marks the debut of a writer as funny and attentive as any novelist
of his generation.
"Beautifully executed and very funny, Early Work is a sharp-eyed,
sharp-voiced debut that I didn't want to put down." --Julia Pierpont,
author of Among the Ten Thousand Things and The Little Book of
Feminist Saints
