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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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ARCADE

Drew Smith

A new world opens up to Sam when, fresh from a breakup, he discovers a XXX peepshow on the outskirts of town.

More than a mere venue for closeted men to meet for anonymous sex, it’s an underground subculture populated by regular players, and marked by innumerable coded rules and customs. A welcome diversion from his dead-end job and the compulsive cyberstalking of the cop who broke his heart, Sam returns to the arcade again and again. When the bizarre setting triggers reflections on his own history and theories, he contemplates his anxious, religious upbringing in small-town Texas, the frightening overlap between horror movies and his love life, and the false expectations created by multiple childhood viewings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then, of course, there is the subject of sex. Equal parts anthropological dispatch and bildungsroman, Arcade is a relentlessly candid and graphic account of one man’s attempt to square immutable desire with a carefully constructed self-image on the brink. Drew Nellins Smith’s essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in many places in print and online, including The Believer, Tin House, Paste Magazine,The Millions, The Daily Beast, and Electric Literature. He lives in Austin, TX. Arcade is his first novel.

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Book Published 2016-07-01 by Unnamed Press

Comments

"A book that is both incredibly American and incredibly gay... The sex in the novel is nothing short of splendiferous— deserving of the word in that it is varied, fascinatingly intimate at times and completely detached at others."

"It’s almost impossible to write directly and well about sex. It’s almost impossible to be simultaneously deadly serious and extremely funny. It’s almost impossible to be extraordinarily precise while giving off the effect and affect of slacker casual. In Arcade, Drew Nellins Smith manages to do all these things. A minor miracle."

"In his debut novel Arcade, Smith explores the underground world of an adult video store where gay men cruise for casual sex and enjoy XXX peepshows. Here Smith examines the power cruising has in making us rethink our identities and to help us reconcile with our sometimes troubled pasts."

“A keenly-observed meditation on the ins and outs of an adult video store, Arcade is a heartfelt love letter to a very unlikely place.”

"Smith has created a narrative that entrances its readers, constantly giving us excitement and depicting with audacity the rawness of sexuality... a daring and compelling debut that sheds light on a rather unusual lifestyle. A sexy and poignant novel."

"The novel is funny and chilling by turns, and because of its subject matter, necessarily dark."