Roughhouse

FORMAT: Paperback, 5 x 7 in. / 166 pgs / 3 b&w.
LIST PRICE: U.S. $10.95
LIST PRICE: CANADA $16
GBP £9.50
ISBN: 9781885030269
PUBLISHER: Kaya/Muae
AVAILABLE: 5/2/1999
DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P.
RETAILER DISC: TRADE
PUBLISHING STATUS: Active
AVAILABILITY: In stock
TERRITORY: WORLD

D.A.P. CATALOG: SPRING 1999

PRESS INQUIRIES

Tel: (212) 627-1999 ext 217
Fax: (212) 627-9484
Email Press Inquiries: publicity@dapinc.com

TRADE RESALE ORDERS

D.A.P. | DISTRIBUTED ART PUBLISHERS
Tel: (212) 627-1999
Fax: (212) 627-9484
Customer Service: (800) 338-2665
Email Trade Sales: orders@dapinc.com

Roughhouse

Published by Kaya/Muae.
By Thaddeus Rutkowski.

Roughhouse gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence and deviant sex that connect a surreal, semi-rural childhood with adult urban neurosis. Terse flashes of narrative, told from the point of view of a troubled youth, provide a stark sketch of an American family on the brink: a gun-toting father prone to inexplicable rages; a mother who speaks in ineffectual, half-remembered Chinese homilies; siblings rendered almost mute from excessive bleakness. And there’s the narrator himself, who responds to the torment of home and neighborhood bullies with increasingly aberrant behavior, including sexual bondage and a form of pyromania that requires placing a paper bag over one’s head and igniting it. In spare, unrelenting prose that has been honed to a point, Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bone of absurdity at the center of emotional displacement.



Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in New York. His work has been published in numerous publications, including Fiction magazine and The New York Times. He is a winner of the Nuyorican Poets Café’s Poetry Slam.



“[Rutkowski’s] sulfuric tale of family breakdown and fetishism chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood even as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity.”— Publishers Weekly



“Rutkowski gives us a novel in bites and slices: sharp, shocking, and certainly not for the faint-hearted. Here is gall with gusto, a voice of reckoning, and writing to be reckoned with.” — Molly Peacock

VIEW MORE ONLINE AT: https://www.artbook.com/1885030266.html