And Every Day Was Overcast
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This photography-driven fiction about coming of age in the creep show of south Florida's swamps and strip malls is "unlike any book I've ever read . . . A completely original and clearheaded voice" (Ira Glass, host of This American Life)
Out of South Florida's lush and decaying suburban landscape bloom the delinquent magic and chaotic adolescence of And Every Day Was Overcast. Paul Kwiatkowski's arresting photographs amplify a novel of profound vision and vulnerability. Drugs, teenage cruelty, wonder, and the screen-flickering worlds of Predator and Married . . . With Children shape and warp the narrator's developing sense of self as he navigates adventures and misadventures, from an ill-fated LSD trip on an island of castaway rabbits to the devastating specter of HIV and AIDS. This alchemy of photography and fiction gracefully illuminates the travesties and triumphs of the narrator's quest to forge emotional connections and fulfill his brutal longings for love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The form of Kwiatkowski's terrific coming-of-age novel, set in the 1990s, is offbeat and provocative. Short chapters, long on imagery and adolescent attitude, nestle between pages of color photographs. What's exciting is how well these components complement one another. The pictures don't literally illustrate the story, but only suggest connections. The little blond boy jumping into a swimming pool and sitting complacently behind an uncut birthday cake might or might not be the unnamed narrator. Instead, the photographs form a kind of tapestry of the swampy South Florida world he inhabits. There's a young man in a camouflage T-shirt looking somberly down at a deer carcass in the back of a pickup; studies of bathrooms and trucks and abandoned houses; and all manner of bleary-eyed young people, cigarettes dangling from their lips, staring fixedly into the camera. As a child, the narrator gorges on television and compares his dysfunctional clan to idealized sitcom families. As a teenager, he witnesses bullying at school (befriending the chief victim, a hapless boy nicknamed "Cobain"), weathers raging hormones, and experiments with drugs. Kwiatkowski writes in vignettes and verbal tableaux, supplementing the narrative with the photos, and vice versa. Vibrant and original.
