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by Paul Neilan
A scathingly funny debut novel about disillusionment, indifference, and one man's desperate fight to assign absolutely no meaning to modern life.
The only thing Shane cares about is leaving. Usually on a Greyhound bus, right before his life falls apart again. Just like he planned. But this time it's complicated: there's a sadistic corporate climber who thinks she's his girlfriend, a rent-subsidized affair with his landlord's wife, and the bizarrely appealing deaf assistant to Shane's cosmically unstable dentist.
When one of the women is murdered, and Shane is the only suspect who doesn't care enough to act like he didn't do it, the question becomes just how he'll clear the good name he never had and doesn't particularly want: his own.
"Neilan spins sparkling comic riffs on the tawdriness and sterility of American life." ―Publishers Weekly
"Comprising 50% sheer brilliance, 50% distilled cynicism, and 50% coronary-inducing humor, Apathy and Other Small Victories has more life, laughs, and story on every page than should be possible. A heartbreakingly funny paean to supercharged nihilism, it's the best book you'll read in years, and the funniest novel ever. If you don't love it, there's something wrong with you, and if you do, there is also something wrong with you--but you won't care." ―Max Barry, author of Company
"Neilan's wit is a razor that cuts and slashes mercilessly on every single page, in every single paragraph, so that your fingers will bleed even as the tears of laughter soak your face. So basically, you'll be reduced to a bloody, weeping mess, madly reading whole pages aloud as friends and family shake their heads and slowly back away." ―Jonathan Tropper, author of Everything Changes
This information about Apathy and Other Small Victories was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Paul Neilan grew up in New Jersey before fleeing the Garden State for its polar opposite: Portland, Oregon. A graduate of Rutgers University, he worked a mind-numbing job in an insurance company where he spent much of his time asleep in the bathroom dodging his boss and his coworkers. It was in the uniquely creative zone of the disabled stall of that men's room, legs akimbo and drool puddling on the linoleum floor, that he began to hatch the idea for his first novel, Apathy and Other Small Victories.
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