The Best People - by Robert Lopez (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"An inventive and utterly refreshing masterwork. As always, Lopez writes with precision, menace, blazing wit, and a relentless devotion to the absurdity of life."--Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe

Completing his celebrated novels-in-stories triptych, begun with Good People and A Better Class of People, Robert Lopez delivers the third installment, The Best People, which follows a man who made the mistake of being born and is trying to make the best of that mistake

In an uncanny world where linear time is nonexistent and everyone he meets is either Esperanza, Sofia, or Manny, the unnamed narrator wrestles with his past lives, his abusive upbringing, his sexual proclivities, his obsession with cleanliness, and how to stop the world from breaking in.

With his signature unconventional storytelling and beguiling prose, Robert Lopez delivers a no-holds-barred, whiplash-fast polyphonic novel for the ages.

Review Quotes

"Every sentence--part Beckett, part Bernhard, and all singular Lopez--is a startle of rhythm and veer and comic sting haunted by shadows. Inhabited by the obsessed and the lopsided and the mischievously unpleasant, animated by the fierce disappointment at having been born, and even fiercer one at having to romance and age on a planet like this, Lopez's novel-like object is the work of a virtuoso that proves again and again the best innovative fiction is still on fire in splendid, enlivening ways."

--Lance Olsen, author of Absolute Away

"Bleak, biting, and so very funny, The Best People is an inventive and utterly refreshing masterwork. As always, Lopez writes with precision, menace, blazing wit, and a relentless devotion to the absurdity of life."
--Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe

"The Best People made me feel a giddy sort of awe, both for the story it tells and for the way it is told. Lopez remains utterly and boldly wild on the page."

--Lindsay Hunter, author of Hot Springs Drive

About the Author

Robert Lopez is the author of three novels, Part of the World, Kamby Bolongo Mean River (named one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant), and All Back Full, and three story collections, Asunder, Good People, and A Better Class of People. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in dozens of publications, including Bomb, The Threepenny Review, Vice Magazine, New England Review, The Sun, and the Norton Anthology of Sudden Fiction - Latino. He teaches at Pratt Institute and Stony Brook University. He was a fellow in fiction for the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2010 and Visiting Writer at Syracuse University for fall, 2018. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.