Philip Galanes makes his debut with a novel that is both heartbreaking and deftly comic, the story of a young man struggling with his most primitive desires--wanting and needing. It is a novel about the complex relationships between parents and children, a story of loss and of our unrelenting need for acknowledgment, to be seen as who we are. And in the end it is simply a love story for our time.

I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt.

I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.

I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.

Sometimes you can do things for others that you can't do for yourself.

People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.

The struggle is how to write optimistically when the world we're living in is not inherently optimistic. I love the idea of the family from the most Norman Rockwell version to Norman Bates. Without family, we have very little - it is the most basic social structure. So yes I suppose I wanted to write a hopeful book about the evolution of the family.