Flatscreen: A Gleefully Absurd Coming-of-Age Satire of Suburban Teens and YouTube Fame - Softcover

Wilson, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006209033X ISBN 13: 9780062090331

Publisher: Perennial, 2012

Synopsis

“OMFG, I nearly up and died from laughter when I read Flatscreen. This is the novel that every young turk will be reading on their way to a job they hate and are in fact too smart for.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

Indie-lit star and Faster Times editor Adam Wilson delivers the gleefully absurd, effortlessly heartwarming story of one young man’s struggle to shake off the listless, sexless, stoned mantle of suburban teenage life and become something better. Fortunately (maybe) for Eli, his apathetic quest finds a catalyzing agent in one Mr. Seymour J. Kahn, a paraplegic sex addict and two-bit silver screen star who initiates a mad decent into debasement and (of course) YouTube stardom—a transformation from which there will be no going back.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Wilson is the author of the novel Flatscreen (Harper Perennial, 2012). His fiction has appeared in many publications including The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, Tin House, The Literary Review, The New York Tyrant, Gigantic, and many others.

He is currently a regular contributor to both BookForum and The Paris Review Daily. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, Time Out New York, and elsewhere.

Adam holds a BA from Tufts University and an MFA from Columbia University. A former employee of Brooklyn's famous BookCourt bookstore, he now teaches creative writing at NYU and The Sackett Street Writer's Workshop. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat.

From the Back Cover

Flatscreen tells the story of Eli Schwartz as he endures the loss of his home, the indifference of his parents, the success of his older brother, and the cruel and frequent dismissal of the opposite sex. He is a loser par excellence—pasty, soft, and high—who struggles to become a new person in a world where nothing is new.

Into this scene of apathy rolls Seymour J. Kahn. Former star of the small screen and current paraplegic sex addict, Kahn has purchased Eli’s old family home. The two begin a dangerous friendship, one that distracts from their circumstances but speeds their descent into utter debasement and, inevitably, YouTube stardom.

By story’s end, through unlikely acts of courage and kindness, roles will be reversed, reputations resurrected, and charges (hopefully) dropped. Adam Wilson writes mischief that moves the heart, and Flatscreen marks the wondrous debut of a truth-telling comic voice.

Reviews

Adam Wilson's debut novel, Flatscreen, has been billed as a comedy of barely post-adolescent confusion, but there's far more heartwreck than hilarity in these rambunctious pages. If you smashed The Catcher in the Rye into Jesus' Son, you might have something close to Flatscreen, a narrative of wayward youth for our beguiled new century. —William Giraldi

*Starred Review* Eli Schwartz at 20: jobless, pudgy, leading an aimless, often drug-addled existence. Into his life comes the larger-than-life Seymour Kahn, an Orson Wells–like, wheelchair-bound former actor. A raconteur and raunchmeister who shares Eli’s fondness for drugs, Kahn becomes a kind of reverse role model and failed father figure for Eli, who, in the meantime, is struggling to find, well . . . what? A job? A girlfriend? Love? Longing? Meaning or purpose in his feckless life? Actually he’d settle for some sex, but that’s seldom forthcoming, despite his fevered fantasies. In his first novel, Wilson, editor of The Faster Times, has written an antic, amusing, ribald coming-of-age novel. Though secondary characters seem interchangeable and, frankly, forgettable, Eli himself is a well-rounded (!), endearing though sometimes exasperating protagonist. The author’s use of sentence fragments and Eli’s occasional stream-of-consciousness ruminations that flicker like images on a flatscreen TV bring a briskness and energy to a novel that otherwise might be mired in Eli’s inanition. Despite a veneer of the ironic and snarky, the novel offers a foundation of genuine caring, affection, and—yes—love. An auspicious debut that promises, in Wilson, a standout addition to a new generation of writers. --Michael Cart

Edition details

• Publisher: Perennial
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 006209033X
• ISBN 13: 9780062090331
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336