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"Goodbye,
Goodness is the rock n' roll Great Gatsby." "Sam
Brumbaugh's debut novel couldn't be more timely. Goodbye, Goodness boasts
just enough sea air and action to make an appealing summer read without
coming anywhere near fluffsville . . . Just as you find yourself
engrossed in one [narrative thread], he switches to another, building
a ferocious
tension right up to the novel's bushwacking conclusion." "Sam
Brumbaugh’s semiautobiographical Goodbye, Goodness has
scenes set in Georgetown, Malibu, and the Wild West, but its real location
is the whooshing vacuum left behind in the wake of failed American
optimism . . . [the novel] beautifully captures the wrung-out feel
of a depleted American century. "As
the beautifully told story comes into focus, you begin to feel the
relationships between the characters, each toiling
at the edge of a frontier that’s been crossed a thousand times,
each trying (with varying degrees of success) to live beyond loss and
self-disillusionment." “Brumbaugh
takes us to the burnt-out edges of personal history. He is able to
watch and observe and feel at the same time—a fact finder stuck
in a tragicomedy, with slow acoustic guitar as a sidekick.” “This
is a beautifully written book of range and vision. Sam Brumbaugh captures
wonderfully the aching possibilities of his generation of quintessentially
solitary, wandering Americans, along with their sense of isolation,
silence, and betrayal. The characters in this rich, smart novel live
their lives like reenactments of fake memories as they seek to earn
mystery, myth, and second chances. I can’t recommend this haunting
novel highly enough.”
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GOODBYE, GOODNESS by Sam Brumbaugh |
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A brilliant debut novel about New York and Los Angeles in the nineties, Annie Oakley, and the end of the American Dream.
Hayward
Theiss is on the lam, hiding out in a Malibu beach house that is not his,
and trying to understand how he got there. A car crash, a bag of dope, a
sinister producer, and his best friend’s strange escape from rehab
all figure into the story. To further complicate matters, Hayward is the
great-grandson of a massively ambitious robber baron named Finn Theiss, who
had a long-ago affair with the sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Hayward begins
to untangle the convoluted estrangement between these two, and confronts
the possibility that Annie Oakley is in fact his great-grandmother. The novel
includes beautifully interwoven excerpts
from Oakley’s autobiography that have never appeared in book form. Goodbye,
Goodness is a simultaneously hopeful and bleakly realistic, hilarious, and devastatingly
sad book about the American dream coming to the end of the line.
Brumbaugh writes with the exquisite, nonchalant precision of a master chef preparing an early dinner for friends. Readers will be thrilled at the arrival of this new voice—and this new take on coming of age while fervently reckoning with the past.
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Sam Brumbaugh
has worked in the music industry for two decades, touring with bands
such as Pavement, Cat Power, and Mogwai, producing music specials for
PBS, and, most recently, a documentary on the great Texas musician Townes
Van Zandt (Be Here to
Love Me). His fiction has been published in Open City magazine and
The Southwest Review. A relative of Annie Oakley himself, he lives in
New York City. |
| Author photograph by Roe Ethridge |
Paperback
original publication date: April 20, 2005
5 x 7.5 inches, 280 pages
$13.00 paperback; ISBN: 1-890447-39-0
To place an order, please contact: Publishers Group West, 800.788.3123
Please direct all other inquiries to Joanna Yas, 212.625.9048, editors@opencity.org.