Andrew Martin

Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome ANDREW MARTIN—whose writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker—for a discussion of his debut novel, Early Work.

About Early Work

For young writers of a certain temperament―if they haven’t had such notions beaten out of them by MFA programs and the Internet―the delusion persists that great writing must be sought in what W. B. Yeats once called the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” That’s where Peter Cunningham has been looking for inspiration for his novel―that is, when he isn’t teaching at the local women’s prison, walking his dog, getting high, and wondering whether it’s time to tie the knot with his college girlfriend, a medical student whose night shifts have become a standing rebuke to his own lack of direction. When Peter meets Leslie, a sexual adventurer taking a break from her fiancé, he gets a glimpse of what he wishes and imagines himself to be: a writer of talent and nerve. Her rag-and-bone shop may be as squalid as his own, but at least she knows her way around the shelves. Over the course of a Virginia summer, their charged, increasingly intimate friendship opens the door to difficult questions about love and literary ambition.

With a keen irony reminiscent of Sam Lipsyte or Lorrie Moore, and a romantic streak as wide as Roberto Bolaño’s, Andrew Martin’s Early Work marks the debut of a writer as funny and attentive as any novelist of his generation.

Praise

"A well-written amusing debut about what it takes to succeed or fail in love or art." ―Kirkus Reviews

"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 Ask and The Fun Parts

“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

"A wry and pitch-perfect novel about late-twentysomething writers and lazy-progressive creatives in varying stages of existential crisis . . . Early Work is a cautionary tale; it reveals, with damning irony, that one who romanticizes the agonized and drug-addled artist, prioritizing the lifestyle over any actual output, does so at his peril. Because, eventually, the people around him will have created some early work of their own―if only for the opportunity to move beyond it." ―Arianna Rebolini