Summertime in the Emergency Room

Nine stories about befuddled loners, estranged friends, and detonated families, all hobbled by various acts of self-sabotage, yet still they flounder forth, grasping at every loose thread as if it were a lifeline, only to unravel themselves instead.

A sentence in David Nutt's hands turns into something 'shiny and lethal to brandish' in these fiercely imagined spaces where 'even the ferns look nervous.' Under house arrest, crazed by love or war, the freakishy wounded or self-wounding characters in these stories break their bonds for pharmaceutical relief, and we follow them in astonishment at their excess. SUMMERTIME IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM is a remarkable debut collection of stories from a gifted writer.--Christine Schutt, Pure Hollywood

When it comes to David Nutt, the only thing I love more than his sharp, inventive and seismically funny style is the deep humanity from which it springs. His is a brilliant and much needed voice in these sad, ridiculous times.--Sam Lipsyte

Witty, exacting, and full of exuberant prose, SUMMERTIME IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM is one of those high-velocity collections in which every story swerves and surprises. It is oddly exhilarating to witness Nutt's characters careen and stagger through their darkest moments and worst decisions, their voices full of heat. This is a stylish, blisteringly inventive book.--Kimberly King Parsons

David Nutt's SUMMERTIME IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM contains stories that reveal the psychological truths of the human condition. Here are stories that are strange, heartbreaking, told with precision and delicacy that recalls such writers as Garielle Lutz and Mary Robison. The world shown here through Nutt's eyes shows a writer with a deep and passionate understanding of language.--Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of Deep Ellum

'Do you ever think about how lucky we are? To be alive and awake in this thrilling historical epoch, just moments before the apocalyptic collapse?' This collection of otherworldly stories reads like a hallucinogenic negative print of the world we are inhabiting today. Sick adolescents stall on unfinished algebra equations that speak to larger enigmas. They burn ants with magnifying lenses, smear them like sauce onto a slide, and patiently wait for the red guts to bake under a microscope's glare. Adults are stitched up, half dead, or generally so checked out that they are never to be trusted. Molars get extracted with pliers and sadness gets sucked out with straws. Pee gets archived in soda bottles. Nutt reveals the 'dark strain of lonely, ' one you want to live in even when it hurts because it's a comforting through line to a very contemporary feeling of solitude.--Chiara Barzini

Fiction.