An Interview with Andrew Martin

Andrew Martin’s recent short story collection, Cool for America, is a complex, challenging work interrogating the spiritual and material deficit confronting so much of today’s overeducated white bourgeoisie. It’s also a hilarious and entertaining collection of stories about young people getting drunk and saying and doing terrible, and terribly self-destructive, things. Here is a series of probing, Jamesian portraits of people damaged by their pasts, the aftermath of trauma and the crushing weight of dead dreams—but also a deeply funny gift of a book from a deeply imaginative writer.