Skip to content

MADE TO BREAK

D. Foy

Two days before New Years, a pack of five friends—three men and two women—head to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe to celebrate the holidays. They've been buddies forever, banded together by scrapes and squalor, their relationships defined by these wild times.
Five friends go to a mountain cabin to ring in the New Year. Accompanied by their totem copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Basil, Lucille, Hickory, Dinky, our narrator AJ plan to party til their stash of pills and drugs and booze runs out. But when Dinky is gravely injured in a car accident with no help in reach, the group has to grapple with their existential fears and their true emotions. A strange Hamlet-quoting old hermit named Super appears on the scene, adding a element of uncertainty-- is he friend or foe? With some of the most luminous and purple prose flexed in recent memory, D. Foy is an incendiary new voice and Made to Break, a grand, episodic debut, redolent of the stark conscience of Denis Johnson and the spellbinding vision of Roberto Bolaño. D. Foy has had work published or forthcoming in BOMB, Post Road, the Literary Review, the Georgia Review, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and Laundromat, an homage to photographs of laundromats throughout New York City (powerHouse Books).
Available products
Book

Published 2014-03-18 by Two Dollar Radio

Comments

online interview Read more...

A psychological thriller in the purest sense and it's one of the gutsiest debut novels you're likely to come across. Read more...

Akin in spirit to David Foster Wallace's ungainly short story 'Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way' and echoing the signature cadences of Kerouac, the narrative of Made to Break puts the machina back in deus ex, and then, in case you can't believe your eyes, does it again. Read more...

15 Most Anticipated Books of 2014 D. Foy's debut about friends that are supposed to go to a remote cabin in Lake Tahoe, only to run into all sorts of different troubles, is garnering comparisons to Roberto Bolaño and Denis Johnson. That sounds quite promising to us. Read more...

[Made to Break] reads like a macabre mumblecore script penned by Jim Thompson. It's one swell medley of mayhem and defeat dashed together by the vitality of D. Foy's prose. Zainy, sly, and darkly comedic. Read more...

Strange and freewheeling... forsaking plot in favor of something much more cerebral and immediate. MADE TO BREAK works its English over, coining fresh and sometimes unapologetically awkward phrases to milk out something strange and animate. Read more...

This malice is, for me, the core of D. Foy's debut novel. The group of friends trapped in their tiny Northern Californian cabin all share time and space with one another-most have been friends for a decade-but while reading you can't help but think that none of them would give a second thought to washing their hands and starting life anew with a shiny set of uncontaminated pals. Read more...

"With influences that range from Jack Kerouac to Tom Waits and a prose that possesses a fast, strange, perennially changing rhythm that's somewhat akin to some of John Coltrane's wildest compositions, this narrative is at once emotionally gritty and surprisingly beautiful even during its darkest moments. Foy has delivered the kind of notable narrative that pulls an author out of the very crowded rookie pool and places him at the top of the list of fresh voices that readers of outstanding fiction should keep on their radar. Read more...

Brashly written... in bareknuckle prose. Read more...

One thing D. Foy's menacing and dense first novel, Made to Break, understands extremely well is the strange, exhilarating, depressing, and often stupid and dangerous territory of longtime friendship... Calls to mind the frontier stories of Stephen Crane and Jack London. Read more...

Reading D. Foy's prose is like watching Robert Stone and Wallace Stevens drag race across a frozen lake at midnight.

Debut novelist D. Foy uses a poetic and gritty genre-clashing voice to construct a winter horrorland. Read more...