The Life and Times of Steve Orth

Fiction. Poetry. Dripping with class resentment and charm, THE LIFE & TIMES OF STEVE ORTH taps into generational disgust with an American status quo that has failed to deliver any meaningful accommodations to working people on its descent into the gig-economy. Collecting over a decade of Orth's fiction and poetry, this debut addresses the political and existential demands of the present moment with a searching lust for life and a lot of humor. Through his stories of disgruntled...
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Fiction. Poetry. Dripping with class resentment and charm, THE LIFE & TIMES OF STEVE ORTH taps into generational disgust with an American status quo that has failed to deliver any meaningful accommodations to working people on its descent into the gig-economy. Collecting over a decade of Orth's fiction and poetry, this debut addresses the political and existential demands of the present moment with a searching lust for life and a lot of humor. Through his stories of disgruntled store clerks and bumbling men, Orth's commitment to the present and its perils opens up around our American crises. Still, national headlines don't dictate the morals of Orth's book so much as they shape the lived reality of a subject who was always-already late to work.

Torquing a love for the banal with daydreams and auto-fiction, THE LIFE & TIMES OF STEVE ORTH tracks its narrators' near-constant state of distraction both by and from wage labor, depression, addiction, and common forms of masculinity, ranging from the insidious to the toxic to the dubious. By offering his readers such ordinary forms--of labor, of gender--Orth is capable of quickly transforming a wake into a quest, a grocery store into hell, or trash TV into a holy text. Welcome to THE LIFE & TIMES OF STEVE ORTH.