We're excited to announce that Andrew Martin will be the guest judge for our Big Sky, Small Prose: Flash Contest! His novel Early Work was just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and his stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Zyzzyva, and Tin House’s Flash Fridays series. His nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Washington Post.
Submissions are still open, so get your best short prose into us by September 30 for a chance to win the $500 first place prize and publication in CutBank 90.
Early Work
A Novel
by Andrew Martin
“Marvelous . . . Read [Early Work] on a beach for the refreshment of a classic boy-meets-girl plot, or turn the pages more slowly to soak in some truly salty koans and morally insolvent characters . . . It’s an accomplished and delightful book, but there’s no hashtag for that.”
―Molly Young, The New York Times
“[Andrew] Martin introduces characters in sharp, funny flash-portraits that declare the book’s intention to perch, vape in hand, on the border of earnestness and satire . . . Early Work is a gift for those readers who like being flirted with by thoughtful and interesting people, and who like observing such people as they flirt with each other.”
―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
“[The] story of a love triangle . . . Martin reinvigorates the form, transposing its chords and riffing on its most familiar melodies.” —Max Ross, The Paris Review
“Compulsively readable . . . [Early Work] asks big questions about ambition and success and art and love, but it's also a story of a love affair, delicious and horrible in equal measure.”
―Emily Temple, Literary Hub
“Stunning . . . whip-smart and rather disturbing . . . [Andrew] Martin has a remarkable ear for natural dialogue and pitch-perfect, witty banter . . .”
―Dana Hansen, Chicago Review of Books
“From a simple boy-meets-girl premise and from the most basic dramatic ingredients—ardor, art, alcohol, anxiety—Andrew Martin has concocted an exceptionally funny and disturbing first novel. I found myself thinking of Goodbye, Columbus and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—from its title and its opening sentence on, Early Workachieves the feel of a classic debut.”
—Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special
“The people in Andrew Martin’s Early Work have it all—youth, intelligence, ready wit, readier irony, terminally knowing tastes in books and music, affordable rents, abundant abusable substances, prolific sexual lives, even endearing dogs—and it’s perversely exhilarating to watch them, despite their fits of good-heartedness, turn a bucolic bohemia into a hipster hellscape. This is one smart, funny, scary novel.”
—David Gates, author of Jernigan and The Wonders of the Invisible World
“What a debut! Early Work is one of the wittiest, wisest (sometimes silliest, in the best sense), and bravest novels about wrestling with the early stages of life and love, of creative and destructive urges, I’ve read in a while. The angst of the young and reasonably comfortable isn’t always pretty, but Andrew Martin possesses the prose magic to make it hilarious, illuminating, moving.” —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Fun Parts and The Ask
“Beautifully executed and very funny, Early Work is a sharp-eyed, sharp-voiced debut that I didn’t want to put down.” —Julia Pierpont, author of Among the Ten Thousand Things and The Little Book of Feminist Saints
“To ignore Andrew Martin’s Early Work—a wry and pitch-perfect novel about late-twentysomething writers and lazy, progressive creatives in varying stages of existential crises—because of any painful familiarity is to do yourself a disservice.” —Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed
Andrew Martin’s stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Zyzzyva, and Tin House’s Flash Fridays series, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, and other publications. Early Work is his first novel.
Early Work, by Andrew Martin, was published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 10, 2018 (ISBN: 978-0-374-14612-2, $26.00). For more information, please contact Lauren Roberts(212-206-5325, lauren.roberts@fsgbooks.com).
Events
7/10 – Harvard Book Store – Cambridge, MA
7/11 – Labyrinth Books – Princeton, NJ
7/12 – McNally Jackson Books (Williamsburg) – Brooklyn, NY
7/14 – Politics and Prose Bookstore – Washington, DC
7/17 – New Dominion Bookshop – Charlottesville, VA
8/21 – Point Street Reading Series – Providence, RI
9/27–30 – Montana Book Festival – Missoula, MT
10/01 – Powell’s City of Books – Portland, OR
10/13 – Boston Book Festival – Boston, MA
10/14 – KGB Bar – New York, NY