Losing in Gainesville. Brian Costello
PRAISE FOR BRIAN COSTELLO
“If Joyce was right that you could rebuild Dublin by reading Ulysses, you could definitely reconstruct a very specific American village of dive bars, record shops and drugstore cowboys from this slab of post-punk tragicomedy [ . . . ] [Losing in Gainesville] traces the emotional arc (or lack thereof) of superslacker Ronnie Altamont, the lead singer and guitarist in his low-rent Florida rock band, The Laraflynnboyles. Set in the mid-1990s, the story captures in intimate detail the wilderness years experienced by many American males of a certain class, age and background. The desolate outlooks of Ronnie and his buddies are weighed down by crap jobs (asbestos removal, pizza delivery, etc.), fueled by the massive and constant intake of drugs and alcohol, and soothed only by the likes of Charles Bukowski, Lou Reed, The Kinks and The Replacements [ . . . ] It’s a big, messy, uncomfortable story but one that captures its milieu [ . . . ] [I]n the end, the book's real question is whether this beautiful loser is capable of being saved from himself. A rock-and-roll fable about the secret lives of the unsatisfied.”
—Kirkus
“A bittersweet, twenty-something, rock-and-rolling tale of angst and longing, riffing on art and the meaning of it all amidst the banality and beauty of ’90s Florida in a fever dream portrait of the artists as not-so-young punk rockers.”
—Eric Charles May, author of Bedrock Faith
“Costello describes suburban absurdities in teeming detail, approaching the self-aware gross-out humor of Tromaville: tumbling forward with the rushing momentum of Kerouac’s prose. Nineties counterculture—emo bands, riot grrls, shit jobs, sleeping on floors, warm beer and cold pizza—often provides the punch line. Though funny and poking fun, Costello remains sympathetic to the awkwardness and ambivalence that drives young people, feeling trapped, to struggle to express themselves: that beautiful, life-affirming cycle of broke kids starting bands.”
—Tim Kinsella, Joan of Arc frontman, author of Let Go and Go On and On and The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense
CURBSIDE SPLENDOR PUBLISHING
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents, situations, institutions, governments, and people are fictional and any similarity to characters or persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
Published by Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc., Chicago, Illinois in 2014.
First Edition
Copyright © 2014 by Brian Costello
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948799
ISBN 978-1-940430-31-7
Edited by James Tadd Adcox
Cover art by Ryan Duggan
Designed by Alban Fischer
Manufactured in the United States of America.
“He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great.”
—Herman Melville
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