After school the very next day, El Rey's mobile home was gone. I laid in bed and wondered what happens to people when they go, if they become like shadows, if they fade away when they disappear from your life. The only thing I could see was the broken picket fence. The only sound I could hear was the cry of birds being killed in the night.

Funny as hell, searingly honest, and urgently real, Sam Pink's Rontel puts to shame most modern fiction. His writing perfectly captures the bizarre parade that is Chicago, with all its gloriously odd and wonderful people. This book possesses both the nerve of Nelson Algren and the existential comedy of Albert Camus.

What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths.

I'm kind of interested in learning to learn and grow and challenge myself. I think I've been very fortunate in that my books are pretty different from one novel to the next. There's a lot of things that are similar but in terms of tone and the scale and how they interact with history and just the different styles as well.

Being decent is the only thing that matters in a terrible world like this.

The city glitters past us with its sharp edges, reminding us of how tiny, how weak, how totally unimportant we are.

We have fun acting like this, acting like we are incredibly offended. Really, we are just bored to tears with everything.