Making Nice

by Sumell, Matt

• ISBN13: 9781250081582
• ISBN10: 1250081580
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-02-09
• Publisher: Picador

Summary

Meet Alby, the heartbroken antihero at the center of Matt Sumell’s ferocious, funny, and wrenching debut Making Nice. Fueled by heartache, fury, and the occasional pain pill from his mother’s leftover stash, Alby is flailing wildly as he tries (and mostly fails) to cope with his mother’s death. From his hometown on the Great South Bay to a sailboat in a Los Angeles marina, he stalks the perimeters of calamity: he punches his sister; gets drunk; picks fights; and spews insults at children, slow drivers, old ladies, and every single surviving member of his family. But it’s in the rare moments of connection—training an abandoned bird up for combat, commiserating with a toddler in a breakfast joint, spoon-feeding his grandmother gelatinized milk—that Alby begins to see a way to survive his pain. With unforgettable style and force and an “ingenuous humanity that makes every page feel new” (The Guardian), Matt Sumell’s blistering debut blurs the line between fighting for and fighting with the only family you’ve got.

Author Biography

Matt Sumell is a graduate of UC Irvine's MFA program, and his fiction has since appeared in Esquire, the Paris Review, Electric Literature, One Story, Noon, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Table of Contents

Punching Jackie 1
Little Things 13
If P, Then Q 21
Rape in the Animal Kingdom 23
Everything Is a Big Deal 41
Eat the Milk 54
The Block, Twice 65
American Ninja 2 75
Making Nice 81
Super Markets 85
Their Appointed Rounds 95
Rest Stop 102
Testy 112
Toast 126
All Lateral 138
I'm Your Man 164
Inheritance 172
The Cold Way Home 175
OK 183
Bugs 217

Acknowledgments 221