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"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, Ive read in a while. The angst of the young and reasonably comfortable isnt 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. For young writers of a certain temperament -- if they havent 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." Thats where Peter Cunningham has been looking for inspiration for his novel -- that is, when he isnt teaching at the local womens prison, walking his dog, getting high, and wondering whether its 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 Bolaños, Andrew Martins Early Work marks the debut of a writer as funny and attentive as any novelist of his generation.. "Beautifully executed and very funny, Early Work is a sharp-eyed, sharp-voiced debut that I didnt want to put down." -- Julia Pierpont, author of Among the Ten Thousand Things and The Little Book of Feminist Saints