Down and Out

Down and Out is a heartfelt, hilarious novel about the dilapidated America we live in–not some imagined place where the dream remains alive. How Briseño manages to leave us feeling hopeful is nothing short of a miracle. –Colin Winnette, author of Haints Stay and The Job of the Wasp

Down and Out’s momentum churns on such a cruel premise for a reality television show–about poverty and suffering deliberately exploited for mass entertainment– that we know it could and must be true. As a new economy violently supplants the old, a parade of hardworking people is caught between twisting gears and unspooling film. Down and Out delivers these quiet episodes of smalltown desires, failures, and dreams, which we are lucky to witness as one season of this world fades into the next. –Dolan Morgan, author of Insignificana

In Down and Out, J. Andrew Briseño sees something like hope where others would merely gawp. This book is sad and funny and an outrage and the good kind of weird and at the end of it all just really really human, with images of small factory-town life that sit somewhere between the bible and a Springsteen song getting all defrauded and wrong through a reality TV lens that refuses to look away or stop meddling in what might be good if it could just be let alone. Deep down, it’s a book about what it is to be moral, how we’re always losing it, how we sometimes get it back that way. I need J. Andrew Briseño. We all do. –Zach VandeZande, author of Apathy & Paying Rent