Preparation for the Next Life - by Atticus Lish (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Dizzying in its ambition and exhilarating in its triumph."--The New York Times Book Review

Brad Skinner, newly returned from three tours in Iraq, hitchhikes to New York hoping to exorcise his demons and reacclimate to American society. Zou Lei, an undocumented immigrant from Central Asia, catches a bus into the city, searching for a way to get by--or at least stay out of jail. Skinner and Zou Lei meet each other in the margins of the metropolis, each finding something they long for in the other, and their unlikely love story becomes the beating heart of this remarkable tale.

Set in the underbelly of New York, Preparation for the Next Life exposes an America as seen from the fringes of society and, in devastating detail, lays waste to the myth of the American Dream through two of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction. Powerful, realistic, and raw, Atticus Lish's masterful first novel is one of the most ambitious--and necessary--stories of our time.

Review Quotes

"The finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade."
--The New York Times

"[Preparation for the Next Life] has the boundless, epic exhilaration you expect to find only in a writer as mighty as, say, Walt Whitman."
--The New York Review of Books

"Dizzying in its ambition and exhilarating in its triumph."
--The New York Times Book Review

"So much of American fiction has become playful, cynical, and evasive. Preparation for the Next Life is the strong antidote to such inconsequentialities."
--Joy Williams

"As bold and urgent a love story as you'll read this year."
--The Wall Street Journal

" Lovely and soft, tragic and cutting . . . maybe the most surprising novel of the year, for the author's sudden, astounding appearance on the scene, yes, but more for the temporal details matched and succeeded by glowing tenderness."
--Vanity Fair

"Preparation for the Next Life ... is an astounding first novel about a world so large there is, sometimes, nowhere to go; a world so small the people in it, sometimes, get lost."
--The New York Review of Books

"A bare-knuckled tale about two lost souls."
--Oprah.com

"A sledgehammer to the American dream."
--Kirkus Reviews

"One of the most acclaimed debut novelists of the year."
--New York Observer

" This novel is nothing less than a triumph, worthy of every heroic adjective a critic could throw. It is a reminder, plain and simple, of what fiction is for."
--Financial Times

" Atticus Lish writes with beauty, striking attention to detail, and painful honesty about life on the margins of America--about the people we don't see, the places we don't go."
--BuzzFeed

About the Author