Trenton Makes

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

'A novel of bewitching ingenuity.' - New York Times

'Electrifying' - Lit Hub

Abe Kunstler wants his share of the American Dream, which for him is a factory job, a wife and a family. Getting these things will be harder for Abe than it is for other people, however, because his life is a lie - an invention forged in the heat of a terrible crime. Haunted by his past, terrified of exposure, and searching obsessively for redemption, Abe moves from one ruthless act to the next, tricking an alcoholic young taxi-dancer into becoming first his wife, then the mother of a child she believes is his. When the life they have built is threatened, he becomes desperate, until even Abe himself isn't sure how far he'll go to keep his secret.

Shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Reviews

This is storytelling on steroids... Trenton Makes is as thrilling as it is disturbing

-- author of THE LAST STATION * Jay Parini *
Gritty, dense and intense... a thought-provoking read * Daily Mail *
Trenton Makes boasts the force of real freshness... It's a novel of bewitching ingenuity, one whose darkling, melodic mind conceives a world of ruin and awe.... It is worthy of not only New Jersey but of that excessive fluorescence called art. * New York Times *
Powerfully lyrical, attuned to the emotional cadences of his characters' worlds * TLS *
The honed-steel sentences on display here - vivid and sharp and scarily persuasive - are all the more harrowing for the vulnerability they manage to convey. Abe Kunstler is a singular protagonist, and Trenton Makes is a passionate and original first novel. * Garth Risk Hallberg, author of CITY ON FIRE *
This is a peculiar, gripping book, and Koelb's is a distinctive voice. Has Kunstler chosen the form his body must take, or has the society he was born into chosen it for him Masculinity and femininity are both prisons here; and social progress - so-called - comes at a price. Trenton Makes is a fascinating interrogation of the industrial American dream. * Financial Times *
A stunning debut. Utterly brilliant. * Philipp Meyer author of THE SON and AMERICAN RUST *

Tadzio Koelb's imagining of his unforgettable protagonist is as tough as it is compassionate; his prose seduces not just because it is stunning, but because it is uncompromising in its pursuit of one character's mutilated truth.

* Belinda McKeon, author of TENDER *
Electrifying. * LitHub *
A transgressive, barbed-wire sharp debut. * O, The Oprah Magazine *
Lyrical, brutal, unorthodox, and brilliantly unsettling. * Robert Marshall, author of A SEPARATE REALITY *

A novel cut from the same startling bolt of literary cloth used by writers like Djuna Barnes, William Faulkner or James Baldwin.

* Laird Hunt, author of NEVERHOME *

Author Bio

Tadzio Koelb is a graduate of the prestigious writing program at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. He has translated Andre Gide's work, and is an active reviewer and essayist for a variety of publications that include The New York Times and The Times Literary Supplement. He teaches writing at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.