The Desperates

Two years after his story collection Pretty comes humor writer and playwright Greg Kearney's debut novel, The Desperates, now a Lammy nominee for gay general fiction. Any book that uses a epigraph from Christopher Coe's novel Such Times is already on my good side and the opening pages are nicely done, describing college dropout Joel's first day on the job as a phone sex worker:

"...he has never done dirty talk. The few encounters he has had with men since arriving here in the fall have all been mute, glancing, furtive, sad affairs: some mutual masturbation, a bit of frottage -- oh, and that older guy in the porno video booth who knelt to blow him but then made a stink-face and waved him off. Why? Were his balls musty? Was it a foreskin thing? Still, he knows himself to be a passionate person, boundlessly so, so surely a little dirty talk should be easy."

Cormorant Books says, "In telling the intersecting stories of Edmund, Teresa, and Joel — all of whom leave trails of hopeful chaos in their wake — Kearney has painted a blackly comic, yet surprisingly earnest, portrait of modern loneliness. The Desperates is one of the rare novels that leaves you laughing even as it breaks your heart."