James Greer reads The Failure at Quimby’s with Zach Dodson and Natalie Edwards

The Failure is a picaresque novel set in Los Angeles about two guys who conceive and badly execute a plan to rob a Korean check-cashing store in order to finance the prototype for an impossibly  ridiculous Internet application. The main character, Guy Forget, is a twenty-something drifter with brains, good looks, and absolutely no ambition except to get rich without having to work. His best  friend, Billy, is a professional dog walker who ties the dogs to the rear bumper of his run-down car and drives very slowly. Along the way we meet, among others, Guy’s Midwestern parents, his  theoretical-physicist brother, his girlfriend Violet McKnight, and his secret nemesis, Sven Transvoort, who hates Guy with unusual passion for reasons that are not immediately clear. Using elements of pop culture,  tech jargon, and noirish satire, the book attempts to answer the question not enough people ask themselves on a regular basis: Am I a failure?

JAMES GREER is the author of ARTIFICIAL LIGHT (a selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery Series), which won a California Book Award for Best Debut Novel, and the nonfiction book GUIDED BY VOICES: A BRIEF HISTORY (Grove), a biography about a band for which he once played bass guitar. He is currently working on a rock musical about Cleopatra starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. He lives in Los Angeles.

ZACH DODSON’s hybrid typo/graphic novel, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, came out last year under the nom de plume Zach Plague. He hosts The Show N’ Tell Show. His writing has appeared in The2ndHand, ACM, Take the Handle, and Proximity Magazine.

NATALIE EDWARDS once worked at an Australian indoor theme park, but now writes about art. You can find her fiction in the Chicago Reader, theRumpus.net, Mcsweeney’s Internet Tendency, and on TripleQuick Fiction.

For more information visit www.akashicbooks.com and www.featherproof.com