“Nothing really happens in the stories in Cool for America, and then they just stop. There is no Joycean epiphany, no god descending from the proverbial rafters. There is only life in medias res, and the result is a successful translation of autofiction, which we normally associate with multi-volume quasi-autobiography, into a short story form.”

—Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic

“Martin probes the inertia, self-doubt, and outright shiftlessness that is the prerequisite for artistic creation.”

—Ismail Muhammad, The Millions

“Cool for America serves up glimpses of life in the nation nowadays, and Martin suggests—like the sandcastle—that we are in a world of dazed impermanence. Hardly a portrait of glory from sea to shining sea, these tales drop in on estranged, lost, and overwhelmed people … An amusingly sardonic look at this era, which is clearly proving to be an uneasy one, no?”

—Drew Hart, The Arts Fuse

“Andrew Martin’s 2018 debut novel, Early Work, offered a pitch perfect tale of desultory millennials, becoming (or trying to become) writers while sleeping their way to new adventures. The overlapping stories in Martin’s new collection, Cool for America, promise many of the same pleasures that his, uh, earlier work provided: sharp dialogue, meditations on art and artmaking, and colorful depictions of a young, creative milieu.”

—Alina Cohen, Observer (New York)

“Cool for America is a collection as intensely pleasurable as it is uncomfortably potent. I felt myself growing uneasy as I turned the pages, with each cheerfully aimless, morally compromised, defensively witty character cutting closer and closer to the bone. Andrew Martin’s stories are queasily plausible—or they would be if they weren’t also so funny and fun to read.”

—Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation

“Overeducated and undermined, the women and men in Andrew Martin’s stories fortify themselves with beer, weed, intensely felt verdicts about music and literature, and messing around with people they probably shouldn’t be messing around with. Martin’s prose is as melancholy and ruthless as Raymond Carver’s, and his wit is as dark and sharp as Mary Robison’s or Donald Antrim’s.”

—Caleb Crain, author of Overthrow and Necessary Errors

A Note About the Author

ANDREW MARTIN

Cool for America

Andrew Martin’s first novel, Early Work, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and a finalist for the 2019 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. His stories and essays have been published in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He lives in New York with his partner, Laura, and their dog, Bonnie. You can sign up for email updates here.

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