Haywire: A Novel

Composed of forty-nine flash stories narrated by the son of a Polish-American artist father and a Chinese mother, Thaddeus Rutkowski’s deadpan, darkly funny third novel spirals out from the insular life of a biracial teenager into a surrealistic, giddy page-turner via the narrator’s obsessive fetishism, and the reader is pulled along by the nose ring through a heady combination of literary and voyeuristic appeal. Our narrator eventually learns to get along with, even love, the people around him, but the feeling doesn’t come easily.

John Barth has called Rutkowski’s work “tough and funny and touching and harrowing,” and Alison Lurie has said, “Once you’ve read his low-key, continually surprising fiction, the world will look different to you—maybe just for an hour, maybe forever.”