Haywire

Fiction. Asian American Studies. Thaddeus Rutkowski's Haywire is deadpan, darkly funny novel comprised of 49 wry vignettes, tautly toldby the son of a Polish-American artist father and a Chinese-American mother. Filled with unexpected twists and turns, the novel spirals out from the insular life of a biracial teenager into a surrealistic, giddy page-turner once the narrator's obsessions and fetishes fetishism grow, and the reader is pulled along by the nose ring through a rollicking combination of literary and voyeuristic appeal. Our narrator ultimately learns to live and love, the people around him. John Barth has called Rutkowski's work "tough and funny and touching and harrowing," and Alison Lurie has said that "Rutkowski is one of the most original writers in America today. Once you've read his fiction, the world will look different to you--maybe just for an hour, maybe forever."