Bummed Out City

Aspiring writer David Moore spent his twenties waiting for the world to recognize and applaud his unique literary talent, but at twenty-nine he's still unpublished, still scraping to pay his bills, still "just another nobody." His girlfriend, Carol, wants them to get a dog, wants them to move out of their apartment, wants them to move into the next phase of their lives. But how can David move forward, when pursuing that future feels like accepting that he's failed? Readers are calling Scott Burr's "funny, sad, and urgent" debut novel "a surprisingly honest account of millennial angst" and a "bildungsroman for our age."      "I'm there with the characters as they move through their fictional lives with that special kind of purpose that only fictional characters get to have, where everything matters and each thing leads necessarily to the next thing and it all adds up to something, to some dramatic and fulfilling and satisfying and appropriate conclusion and it's nothing at all like real life, where things just happen and you do one thing and then you do something else and the next day you do it again or maybe you don't and none of it adds up to anything or goes anywhere, where you wake up the next morning and you're still there and you still have to brush your teeth and trim your toenails and worry about money and pay for car insurance and all the other mundane pedestrian slogging shit you did the day before." - from Bummed Out City