Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 979-8-9853124-6-1 (Print) 979-8-9853124-7-8 (eBook) $16 (Print); $9.99 (eBook) Paperback, eBook About the Author
MICHAEL KEEN is from Puyallup, Washington, and has an MFA from Syracuse University. He also has an MSW from Columbia University, and has worked for many years as a social worker. Notes from the Trauma Party is his first book.
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Notes from the Trauma Party
In a post-Knausgaard fictional reality that is as devastating as it is hilarious, an idealistic social worker with the same name as the author counsels the mentally ill, tries to be scrupulously honest (too honest?) with his girlfriends, and earnestly lectures his fellow writers in the MFA hothouse—all while navigating the complicated administrative aspects of being, and remaining, extraordinarily high. Appropriating the time-worn tropes of an addiction memoir, Michael Keen’s kaleidoscopic debut novel recounts a string of harrowingly awkward encounters with oversexed coworkers, narcissistic writers, self-absorbed drug dealers, estranged parents, schizophrenics, and pedophiles—each causing and reflecting one man’s pathological confusion about the workings of his inner world. In its transgressively exhilarating depiction of millennial anomie, Notes from the Trauma Party is a no-holds-barred examination of a quest for total transparency that is as awful as it is sublime.
Advance Acclaim for Notes from the Trauma Party
“One of the strangest, most powerful books I’ve read in a long time. Notes from the Trauma Party is riveting; terrifying and hope-giving at once. What powers both reactions is Keen’s masterful voice: laconic, so frank it hurts, wildly funny in places, always genuine. It’s a book I won’t forget—and I bet you won’t either, once you’ve read it—that taught me something new about the struggle (a spiritual struggle and a national one) to gain freedom from trauma and addiction. It moved me very much.” --George Saunders |
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