The Garbage Times/White Ibis
Two Novellas
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“I love the pulse of Sam Pink’s sentences, the way they can hold the gorgeous and the grisly and the hilarious all at the same time. The Garbage Times/White Ibis thrilled me and messed me up, left me feeling a little dazed and a lot changed.” —Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel and Find Me
From the freezing alleys of Chicago to the dew-blanketed bayou of Florida. From bouncing drunks and cleaning up puke to biking through the swamp laughing at peacocks. Freeze to thaw. Filth and broken glass and black water backed up in showers; lizards and Girl Scouts and themed birthday parties. A baby rat freed from the bottom of a dumpster becomes a white ibis wandering the wet driveway after a storm. Goodbye, hello, goodbye. It was the garbage times; it was time for something else. A tale of two tales, connected by a mysterious sunlit portal.
The edition is designed with tête-bêche binding as a single volume.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pink (Person) brings together two novellas about slackers in this uneven volume. "The Garbage Times" is the story of a miserable year-ish in the life of a man employed by a Chicago dive bar to throw out garbage, unclog the toilet, eliminate rats, and eject drunks. Besides his cat Rontel, life seems to offer the unnamed narrator few pleasures, though he manages to find some occasional zen among the refuse. "White Ibis" is a much more lively affair, the story of an unnamed broke artist-writer and his equally broke girlfriend. They relocate to Florida, where her family lives, and are by turns charmed and aggrieved by the local wildlife, including quite a few lizards, armadillos, and a white ibis, which takes on an almost totemic significance for the struggling narrator. Between awful jobs, country club soir es, reptile shows, and an unlikely turn entertaining a troop of Girl Scouts, the narrator and his girlfriend learn to thrive in "the theme park state." Pink certainly gets Florida right, and his prose is wonderfully offbeat, but neither novella feels complete.
