Series: American Literature Series

The narrator of The Longcut is an artist who doesn't know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by the question of what her work is and how she'll know it...

The Deer is a rhythmic, surrealist psychological thriller about a physicist who hits what appears to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear....

An Evening of Romantic Lovemaking is the tale of a would-be standup comedian/terrorist as he hilariously and heart-wrenchingly performs his last act in front of an audience who may or may not be there. Curtis White calls it "both the funniest and one of the saddest novels I've ever read" and "a work of comic genius." While comparisons to Gilbert...

A Gogolian nightmare from the point of view of a small-town English professor. The Mad Diary of Malcolm Malarkey is a kind of post-modern May-December black comedy about the 60ish, cancer-stricken, Oxford-educated, Irish-English literature professor, Malcolm Malarkey, who falls in love with the beautiful, 30ish Italian returning graduate student, Liliana Liliano. By then, she has tragically lost her husband in...

You'll Like it Here is a haunting bricolage, divided into three parts, that excavates the forgotten history of Redondo Beach in the early 1900s through old news clippings, advertisements, recipes, and other ephemera. These elements speak to the ills of male stoicism, industrialisation and capitalism, and environmental displacement. Ashton utilised digital archives from the Redondo Reflex and other city-adjacent newspapers...