Burnside - by Devyn Defoe (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Burnside is the coolest weird fever dream you'll ever have while awake. [...] This incantatory tale of two young women caught up in an intrigue in a dusty CA town may well prove a signature chronicle of our American endtimes." --Chang-rae Lee, author of The Surrendered and A Tender Age

"With a marvelous cast of characters and a smoldering setting, this luminous debut novel speaks directly, and defiantly, to our troubled times, with acid, darkly antic tones." --Jamel Brinkley, author of Witness

A Lynchian, absurdist debut novel for fans of Joy Williams and Emma Cline about two disaffected young women and the local homeless man they become obsessed with.

The Bowl is a strange place: Surrounded by abandoned almond orchards filled with feral children and neighboring towns that keep burning down, the polluted, riverside city has a decades-old web of serial killers and missing people.

Our unnamed narrator, a bookseller at a used bookstore, and her roommate September, a waitress at a cowgirl-themed breasturant, spend their days avoiding their deadbeat boyfriends, commuting to class on the raccoon-infested 'rat bus, ' and hanging out at wine bars with their friend Claudia Thursday. But after September has an encounter with a local homeless man named Burnside, she becomes terrified that he's stalking her. Soon, the entire town has turned on Burnside, convinced that he is responsible for the violence, precarity, and wildfires that surround them.

Burnside builds a dreamlike yet utterly propulsive tapestry of brilliant, flawed, and dangerous characters. A commentary on victimhood and safety, both real and imagined, the cruelty of late-stage capitalism and climate disaster, the brutal contradictions of patriarchy and quotidian humiliations of girlhood, and a fiercely imagined portrait of a California seemingly right next to our own, Burnside is a singular, epic, and wonderfully strange debut.

Review Quotes

"Burnside is the coolest weird fever dream you'll ever have while awake. Sly, mordant, and often hilarious, with sparks of brilliance on every page, this incantatory tale of two young women caught up in an intrigue in a dusty CA town may well prove a signature chronicle of our American endtimes. A revelatory debut."
--Chang-rae Lee, award-winning author of The Surrendered and A Tender Age

"Slippery and elegant, sublime and profane, Burnside is a vortex. This is a beautiful, bizarre, visionary book, utterly unafraid of its own intelligence. I think Devyn Defoe is an oracle."
--Avigayl Sharp, author of Offseason

"Devyn Defoe's Burnside is written in prose that consistently surprises, sentences that are thickly woven, that dramatically unravel, that bristle with unanticipated streaks of color, that throb with rhythms so vivid they touch the eye as well as the skin. With a marvelous cast of characters and a smoldering setting, this luminous debut novel speaks directly, and defiantly, to our troubled times, with acid, darkly antic tones."
--Jamel Brinkley, author of Witness

"Burnside is a powerfully strange, deftly brutal, sickly comic book that I read with alarmed awe. Imagine a Tropic of Cancer for the Central Valley, blanketed with Pyrocene haze. Devyn Defoe wrote it into being and made it wholly her own. A wild new talent."
--Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility and Golden State

"No one writes like Devyn Defoe. Her language is vivid and surprising, and this beautifully weird book lets you see the world through Defoe's maniacal genius. Set in Sacramento's bars and restaurants and cafes, its empty bookstores and down by the trash-strewn river, the book follows a young woman as she navigates the dangerous, forceful, entitled and sometimes endearing men of her world against the background horrors of murder and the devastation of wildfires. This is a book about the menaces and violences and annoyances men inflict on women: mundane and daily, horrific and singular. A funny and insightful and atmospheric book about the hidden corners of California and the ways women navigate and evade the challenges of men."
--Lydi Conklin, author of Songs of No Provenance and Rainbow, Rainbow

About the Author

Devyn Defoe is a writer and bookseller from Sacramento, CA. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, her work has been published by Socrates on the Beach and The White Review. Burnside is her first novel.