Cartilage and Skin

Michael James Rizza

Release Date: November 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-938603-18-1

Price: $16.00

 

 

DESCRIPTION

Winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, Rizza's debut novel is an urban, brainy thriller that keeps us turning pages via a narrator both seductive and strange and a plot that ever shifts back on itself. This is a world of philosophy and violence, voyeurism and doubt, guilt and intrigue. Repelled, we keep going back for more.


PRAISE FOR CARTILAGE AND SKIN

Cartilage and Skin has it all: a fast-paced narrative, cool language, downtrodden characters, and addictive intrigue. Rizza writes with dark high-energy and philosophical flair about his nervous anti-hero on a self-destructive quest. The story shifts with every page, never losing momentum, always surprising us. Fascinating, ferocious reading." Deb Olin Unferth, in awarding the Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize

"Cartilage And Skin is an astonishing debut novel, uncompromising, dark, part Dostoevsky, part Camus. It's a brilliant journey into the underside of the unconscious with no holds barred. In this unsentimental challenge to predictable fictional assumptions, the possibility of transcendence has been lost forever. Not least, this is a page turner." Joan Mellen, author of A Farewell To Justice and Our Man In Haiti.

"Rizza's style slides between grit and sophistication, just like his characters, echoing Nabokov and Nersesian. Readers won't like Dr. Parker, but they'll find his darkness strangely magnetic. Cue the Klimer and Heil score." Brian Ray, author of Through the Pale Door and Unknown Female.

"Cartilage and Skin takes us on a strange, dark, enlightening tour of the slushy world we inhabit. My God, Rizza has written a fine debut novel. Alex Kudera, author of Fight for Your Long Day

 

About Michael James Rizza

MICHAEL JAMES RIZZA was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey on January 6, 1972. He has been teaching writing and literature for the past tweleve years. He has an MA in creative writing from Temple University in Philadelphia and a PhD in American Literature from the University of South Carolina. He has published academic articles on Don DeLillo, Milan Kundera, Harold Frederic, and Adrienne Rich in peer reviewed journals, such as Arizona Quarterly and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. His fiction has recently appeared in Switchback (2012), Atticus Books Online (2011) and Curbside Splendor (forthcoming). He has won various awards for his writing, including a fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts in 2003. The first chapter of Cartilage and Skin was performed at Playwrights Theatre in Madison, New Jersey. His current projects are a book about the theories of Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault, and a novel tentatively titled Domestic Men’s Fiction. He lives in New Jersey with his wife Robin and their son Wilder.