The Papaya King — Adam Pelzman

"An eccentric outsider is baffled by contemporary Manhattan in this engrossing second novel ... another entrancing, deeply memorable offering from Pelzman." -- Kirkus Reviews

"How could anyone who has ever spent time in Manhattan resist taking a peek at a book with this title? Happily, The Papaya King bears more than a passing resemblance to one of my favorite novels of all time, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces ... I turned these pages fast ..." -- Bethanne Patrick, Literary Hub

Bobby Walser's tragic childhood has left him a man frozen in time and mired in a world of his own making -- one that has little in common with reality. Genteel and old-fashioned, his manners and habits are more suited to an aristocrat from a Chekhov play than to a young man on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Haunted by his failure to live up to the legacy of his great father, Walser's sense of ineffectuality is compounded when he suffers a series of deflating professional setbacks. He's baffled by the people around him, and his only solace is the hope of a romance -- conducted via handwritten letters -- with a mysterious woman who may not even exist.

As his despair with twenty-first century life reaches a breaking point, Walser bristles at a newly constructed sculpture that represents everything he loathes about these times. Realizing that he has more to care about -- and fight for -- outside himself, he marches toward a final showdown with this towering symbol of oppressive technology.