A darkly comic novel set on the lower slopes of the Los Angeles literary world. A journalist in his late forties--having lost his job as a consequence of the death of print media--finds himself working at a bookstore in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood, where he is thrown into the company of a younger generation with whom he has little in common. Embittered by his lowly position at this late stage of what had once been a promising career, he collapses his longtime ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances.; With his notoriously dry wit, John Tottenham’s debut novel reflects on a farrago of contemporary afflictions: gentrification, debt, friendship, aging gracelessly, self-medication, male vanity, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era. Eventually, after endlessly agonizing about matters of form and style, he finds that despite himself he has actually written a book....

Autorentext

John Tottenham is the author of four volumes of poetry: The Inertia Variations (2004 & 2010), Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment (2012), The Hate Poems (2018), and Fresh Failure (2023). A unique purveyor of “magnanimous misanthropy” and “magical cynicism,” Tottenham has been described as “Los Angeles’s foremost poète maudit.” His long-standing column in Artillery is widely read, and his paintings and drawings have been exhibited in solo shows at galleries in Los Angeles and New York. Service is his first novel.