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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
| Original language | |
| English | |
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EXES
EXES is an innovative novel that pinballs between bitingly funny and flinchingly sad, and it’s an incredible debut for Max Winter.
For Clay Blackall, a lifelong resident of Providence, Rhode Island, the place has become an obsession. Here live the only people who can explain what happened to his brother, Eli, whose suicide haunts this heartbreaking, hilarious novel-in-fragments.
A former movie star impersonates himself; an ex-con looks after a summer home perched atop a rock in the bay; a broken-hearted Salutatorian airs thirteen years’ worth of dirty laundry at his school’s commencement; an adjunct struggles to make room for her homeless and self-absorbed mother while revisiting a salacious high school love affair; a recent widower, with the help of a clever teen, schemes to rid his condo’s pond of Canada geese. Clay compiles their stories, invasively providing context in the form of footnotes that lead always, somehow, back to Eli. Behind Clay’s task — which seems insane, definitely doomed, and, as the pages turn, increasingly suspect — burns his desire to understand his brother‘s death and the city that has defined and ruined them both.
Full of brainy detours and irreverent asides, Exes is a powerful investigation of grief, love, and our deeply held yet ever-changing notions of home. In Exes Winter expertly explores the nonlinear nature of grief, guiding us through the messy, the humorous, and ultimately the heartbreaking without ever straying into the excessively sentimental. You’ll find he delivers a puzzle-like novel where, when you finish the whole thing, you marvel at what’s been accomplished.
Max Winter is a recipient of two Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Fiction, and a finalist for the 2012 MacColl Johnson Fellowship. He contributed to the Webby Award-winning narrative app The Silent History (Ying Horowitz & Quinn 2012), edited the literary journal Faultline, and has been published in Day One and Diner Journal.
A former movie star impersonates himself; an ex-con looks after a summer home perched atop a rock in the bay; a broken-hearted Salutatorian airs thirteen years’ worth of dirty laundry at his school’s commencement; an adjunct struggles to make room for her homeless and self-absorbed mother while revisiting a salacious high school love affair; a recent widower, with the help of a clever teen, schemes to rid his condo’s pond of Canada geese. Clay compiles their stories, invasively providing context in the form of footnotes that lead always, somehow, back to Eli. Behind Clay’s task — which seems insane, definitely doomed, and, as the pages turn, increasingly suspect — burns his desire to understand his brother‘s death and the city that has defined and ruined them both.
Full of brainy detours and irreverent asides, Exes is a powerful investigation of grief, love, and our deeply held yet ever-changing notions of home. In Exes Winter expertly explores the nonlinear nature of grief, guiding us through the messy, the humorous, and ultimately the heartbreaking without ever straying into the excessively sentimental. You’ll find he delivers a puzzle-like novel where, when you finish the whole thing, you marvel at what’s been accomplished.
Max Winter is a recipient of two Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Fiction, and a finalist for the 2012 MacColl Johnson Fellowship. He contributed to the Webby Award-winning narrative app The Silent History (Ying Horowitz & Quinn 2012), edited the literary journal Faultline, and has been published in Day One and Diner Journal.
| Available products |
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Book
Published 2017-04-01 by Catapult |
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Book
Published 2017-04-01 by Catapult |