Ari Rosenschein reading - Coasting - February 16, 6pm

Join us for an evening with Seattle author Ari Rosenschein. 

About Coasting

Perched between Middle Men and A Visit From the Goon Squad, Coasting follows music-industry aspirants, a brooding record store clerk, goth teens, and others into rehearsal rooms, 12-step meetings, a cult indoctrination, even a Russian heavy metal bunker. Along the way, they pursue success, connection, and a sense of purpose.

Dreamers, schemers, addicts, innocents. They are all coasting.

Coasting captures the infectious buzz of aspiration and the omnipresent pall of rejection, the too-bright October sun, the smell of cigarettes and strawberry lip gloss, losing your live-show virginity, getting the wrong tattoo, hiring the wrong drummer, falling for the wrong girl or the wrong scam, or all of it, all at once, and still taking it all in stride. Rosenschein’s writing brims with tenderness for the last holdouts in a city of seekers and real passion for books, games, comics, and music, always music, every kind of music. His characters inhabit a backstage space, a few steps from glory, looking for the next gig, hoping for a big break, reveling in every note along the way. Their sweet gritty persistence is irresistible.

-Ana Maria Spagna, author of Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going 

About the author

Ari Rosenschein is a Seattle-based writer whose essays and fiction appear in Entropy, Noisey, Drunk Monkeys, P.S. I Love You, Observer, The Big Takeover, The Bookends Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch Los Angeles. A lifelong musician, Ari currently records and performs with his bands The Royal Oui and STAHV. He lives with his wife and dog and enjoys the woods, the rain, and the coffee of his chosen region. Coasting is his first book.

The characters in Coasting breathe life back into the bygone era of Walkmans and used record stores, of garage bands and MySpace. These musicians, rock n’ roll aficionados, scenesters, producers, and fame-seekers coast through Los Angeles with eyes toward the derelict, the debauched, and the beautiful. They inhabit tattoo parlors, clubs, bodegas, studios, and grungy bathrooms while navigating divorce, desperation, dating, loneliness, and rediscovery. Rosenschein’s collection is an artifact of Los Angeles—its darker corners, its bright lights, its many mysteries. With heart and grit, Coasting refuses to forget the past while yielding to an inescapable, transient future.

-Nathan Elias, author of A Myriad of Roads That Lead to Here

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/426123934820805/