Waste by Eugene Marten
In an age of conspicuous and blinding affluence, an important depiction of a member of the purported invisible class.
ISBN 978-0-9637563-1-8 | Fiction | 116 pages | $10
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Review on Goodreads.
Praise for Waste
Dark and difficult, with clipped sentences and pungent passages, [Waste] concerns a janitor whose use of office workers’ waste and personal objects is queasy…. a look at humanity from the slick insides of a wastebasket.
Angle: a Journal of Arts + Culture
Only Eugene Marten can keep a reader enthralled with the minutiae of a janitorial existence. From the most unlikely of subjects Marten constructs, with great care and taking joy in every sentence, a spellbinding work. Precisely and exquisitely detailed, Waste is a stark little masterpiece.
–Brian Evenson
There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten’s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.
–Sam Lipsyte
When a poet pal had put a copy of Waste into my hands, I right away went nuts until I had gotten myself in touch with its author for to add to my household a supply of enough copies to scare all my writer friends with. Here, said I, in wild proclamation, is one for history and a half.
–Gordon Lish
This is surely one of the darkest and most jarring books I’ve read. It is also pitch-perfect. Waste wastes nothing–not a syllable, a beat, a ragged breath.
–Dawn Raffel
About Eugene Marten
Marten’s novel In the Blind was published by Turtle Point Press in 2003. He lives in Harlem.
Read an excerpt.
