Pay as You Go

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4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
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Product Details
Price
$28.00  $26.04
Publisher
McSweeney's
Publish Date
Pages
500
Dimensions
5.8 X 8.1 X 1.7 inches | 1.75 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9781952119743

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About the Author
Eskor David Johnson is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago and the United States. His writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was the recipient of the Richard Yates Short Story Prize, the Maytag Fellowship and the Teaching-Writing Fellowship, he currently lives in New York City.
Reviews
"Both lampooning city life and confessing love for it, this story is a display of prodigious storytelling talent. It rushes by with the creative adrenaline of a one-man show; it hums with an infectious joy. [...] Told in a raucous vaudeville style that blends gorgeous lyrical descriptions with madcap farce, Pay As You Go is a magnetic novel."
--Foreword Reviews, starred review

"A madcap odyssey through the hellscape that is the metropolis of the near future. [...] Like Dante, Slide wanders in circles, soaking in weirdness, tragedies, and occasional flashes of beauty. And like Joyce, Johnson builds a world that, for all its improbabilities, is recognizable. [...] An inventive, beautifully written debut that will leave readers wanting more."
--Kirkus, starred review

"Johnson's unbridled debut runs in circles of accelerating grandiosity and lunacy."
--Publishers Weekly

"A brilliantly surreal and vivid feat of imagination."
--Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2023, Part Two

"Eskor David Johnson's Pay As You Go dramatizes the important question of what is home as Slide maneuvers life's obstacles and searches for a place to live. Johnson writes with the fierce intensity of Ralph Ellison and delivers a prodigious and compelling novel with an unforgettable story. Eskor David Johnson is an extraordinary writer."
--Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed

"Pay As You Go is an exuberant, maximalist delight."
--Kelly Link, author of White Cat, Black Dog

"A wondrous mock epic, dreamlike yet jaunty, the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time. [...] Johnson's gift for pure invention is downright García Márquezian, and Polis is his rambunctious Macondo, a place readers will want to visit again and again."
--Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams

"Pay As You Go is testament to what is possible when we, in the paraphrased words of Mary Oliver, allow the world to open itself to our imagination: we might, as Eskor David Johnson achieves in these pages, bring to bear art so wondrous, so magisterial as to be prophetic. What but prophets are the great voices of literature? Count Slide among them, a character you won't soon forget in this masterpiece."
--DK Nnuro, author of What Napoleon Could Not Do