SUMMERTIME IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM
“A sentence in David Nutt’s hands turns into something ‘shiny and lethal to brandish’ in these fiercely imagined spaces where ‘even the ferns look nervous.’ Under house arrest, crazed by love or war, the freakishy wounded or self-wounding characters in these stories break their bonds for pharmaceutical relief, and we follow them in astonishment at their excess. Summertime in the Emergency Room is a remarkable debut collection of stories from a gifted writer.” – Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood
“Witty, exacting, and full of exuberant prose, Summertime in the Emergency Room is one of those high-velocity collections in which every story swerves and surprises. It is oddly exhilarating to witness Nutt’s characters careen and stagger through their darkest moments and worst decisions, their voices full of heat. This is a stylish, blisteringly inventive book.” – Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
“David Nutt’s Summertime in the Emergency Room contains stories that reveal the psychological truths of the human condition. Here are stories that are strange, heartbreaking, told with precision and delicacy that recalls such writers as Garielle Lutz and Mary Robison. The world shown here through Nutt’s eyes shows a writer with a deep and passionate understanding of language.” – Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed
“‘Do you ever think about how lucky we are? To be alive and awake in this thrilling historical epoch, just moments before the apocalyptic collapse?’ This collection of otherworldly stories reads like a hallucinogenic negative print of the world we are inhabiting today. Sick adolescents stall on unfinished algebra equations that speak to larger enigmas. They burn ants with magnifying lenses, smear them like sauce onto a slide, and patiently wait for the red guts to bake under a microscope’s glare. Adults are stitched up, half dead, or generally so checked out that they are never to be trusted. Molars get extracted with pliers and sadness gets sucked out with straws. Pee gets archived in soda bottles. Nutt reveals the ‘dark strain of lonely,’ one you want to live in even when it hurts because it’s a comforting through line to a very contemporary feeling of solitude.” – Chiara Barzini, author of Things that Happened Before the Earthquake
“Elegant, manic, deeply attentive. The reader may be struck, at first, by a dark undertow (think Gary Lutz meets Grace Paley) but as the language teaches us how to read it, The Great American Suction reveals itself to be a celebratory comic romp from a big-hearted writer.” – George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December
“The Great American Suction is a glorious, glittering heap of astonishing prose and devastating human shenanigans. It’s also an example of truth in advertising because it’s great, it’s American, and it sucks the pettiness right out of you. What a beautiful and hilarious novel! Every sentence is a new adventure, and another chance at life.” – Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The Ask
“David Nutt’s hilarious debut novel is written in energetic, witty, wonderfully inventive prose. His perfectly timed riffs and set pieces skewer American conceits, but his characters are shot through with an eccentric kind of joy. Nutt’s voice is truly new, a marvel of wry tenderness.” – Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others and Stone Arabia
“Life has burned a hole in the pockets of Shaker, the aptly named up-and-at-’em down-and-outer wambling his way through the full spread of our present squalor in this ultravivid, live wire of a debut novel. Page after page, David Nutt shocks the language into a killingly original blaze.” – Gari Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way and Divorcer
“In David Nutt’s luminous debut novel, the perennially put-upon protagonist’s existence consists of a daisy chain of half-baked calamities. A brain-damaged post-postmodern anti-hero, Shaker’s a not-so-innocent Josef K. for the culture that births precocious meth chefs and celebrity impersonator wannabes. Dystopian, and by that, I mean contemporary, this debut ratchets up the possibilities of prose with its stylistic virtuosity while laying bare the toxic underbelly of the garbage art crowd. If you’re a fan of David Ohle’s Motorman or Sam Lipsyte’s Venus Drive, The Great American Suction awaits you.” – Christopher Kennedy, author of Clues from the Animal Kingdom and Ennui Prophet
David Nutt 