Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
The Arts

AND EVERY DAY WAS OVERCAST

Paul Kwiatkowski

A novel with both sparsely beautiful prose and photography which chronicles one young man’s delinquent coming-of-age in the creep show of swamps and strip malls on the Florida coast.

Set against an early 90’s backdrop during the beginnings of the AIDS crisis and in age before cell phones this story offers an intimate view into the isolation and boredom of adolescence, and the increasingly illicit behavior one young man indulges in to combat it. Photographic and textual snapshots starkly reveal the culture of Americana and create a vivid chronicle of the struggle to find a connection. AND EVERY DAY WAS OVERCAST was a Staff Pick at the Paris Review in 2011. Paul Kwiatkowski is a New York-based writer and photographer. This is his first novel, excerpts from which have appeared in numerous outlets, including Juxtapoz, Beautiful Decay, American Suburb X, and LPV Magazine.

Available products
Book Published 2013-09-01 by Black Balloon

Comments

"Kwiatkowski is such a good writer and editor that we allow him to charm us, despite the possibility that the author may be as unreliable a narrator as the protagonist, because words and pictures are both in the service of such a seductive hallucination. … If you want to know where photography is headed these days, this book provides one interesting answer: Paul Kwiatkowski has made a place inside his head for you and this book will take you there. … And that is the strange, unsettling success of this book. Read more...

Paul Kwiatkowski stitches together an ugly-beautiful fabric of volatile America, threaded with gators and bad acid trips, swampy living and early sexual encounters. There’s hardly anything more American than this ode to coming of age in South Florida. A tour de force in the form of battered scrapbook memories.

Unlike any book I've ever read. [It's] a mix of this clean, spare, unaffected prose about growing up near the swamps of South Florida – plus these incredible photos… A completely original and clearheaded voice.

Reviews Read more...

Kwiatkowski [is] Baudelaire of the swamps. …[His] adolescent angst may be universal, even trendy today, but the mix of nostalgia and dissolution in And Every Day Was Overcast is uniquely Floridian…The narrator says, “My roots were steeped in shallow earth, easily extracted from amorphous terrain – swamps and beaches, neither land nor water.” Any melodramatic teenager might feel that way, but in Florida it’s also physical reality. Read more...

We finish “And Every Day Was Overcast” in a delirious state of disassociation, not unlike the kids whose lives it seeks to evoke. This, of course, is why we turn to books — or one reason, anyway — to see the world as we have not before. …Kwiatkowski’s ruthless excavation give us a new language by which we hear stories that might otherwise go unheard. … This is the faith, and the revelation, at the center of this book. Read more...

I can count on my fingers the number of great books that seamlessly mix photographs and literary text in a compelling way. Paul Kwiatkowski’s And Every Day is Overcast not only achieves this rare feat, he does so with an artistry that makes the achievement nearly invisible. As compelling as the best movies or graphic novels, And Every Day is Overcast is a landmark in visual storytelling.