None of the Bad Ones — Andrew Brown

A nameless narrator is drifting through the summer of 2010. He spends his days skateboarding in Tompkins Square Park and his nights darting between downtown Manhattan hotspots, indulging in his last remaining vices Diet Coke and promiscuity. Amidst one of these aspartamed evenings he meets Rachel, an equally disengaged beauty visiting from Los Angeles. The chaotic and intensely sexual weekend that follows offers only questions. And as he tries to make sense of Rachel, the narrator is forced to take a hard look at the life he s been living and the person he thinks he is.

From the Inside Flap

Andrew Brown's rendering of New York in the late aughts feels ahead of schedule. There is a sense that one is reading a novel whose incubation took decades rather than a few years. And it is only the details all exquisitely drawn that betray his accelerated pace . . . Whether describing clubs, skating or women, his sentences are scraped free of waste and sentimentality. What remains are raw, incisive lines that laugh and rail and cry simultaneously. It is, then, that rare novel that avoids flourish without sacrificing the sort of sensitivity needed to capture a period and community in time. And capture he does. Readers are given a world in which glitz and glamour are shown to be smudged and imperfect and even still, or maybe because of this imperfection, full of longing and feeling and life.