Between

With a kaleidoscopic narrative of small, shifting plates of time, Nicholas Hayes's Between deftly plays out its terrible story. Set in the nowhere of exurban America, his protagonists are serving out the sentence of their adolescence. To say they live like animals would deprecate animals. These boys subsist on pork fritter sandwiches, cherry limeade, whatever booze and dope they can cadge. Sex is jacking-off to single porn video on an endless loop. Friendship is desultory camaraderie punctuated by violence. The future extends before them as an already written calendar of days exactly like today. Love, what would that even look like here? Hayes stares his subject down. He doesn't blink. He's made a brave book. -Carol Anshaw, author of Aquamarine and Carry The One There is no rainbow, no silver lining in this debut novel from Nicholas Alexander Hayes. It doesn't all work out. No one feels better in the end. Reading Between is like picking a scab, or staring at a picture of that girl in high school who you loved but would never fuck you and still wouldn't even if you ran into her today. In a letter to his friend, Franz Kafka said that we need "books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves." Between is that disaster. -Terri Griffith, author of So Much Better Between is a disturbing, luminescent, tightly-crafted novel that stands up to repeated reading and reflection. In asking the reader to sta "between" judgment and expectation, Hayes forces a certain individuation and pleasure on his audience not possible for his characters. It is perhaps, a legitimizing of ambivalence and ambiguity that nonetheless allow for specific dcisions of how and whom to be in relation to the becomings and writhing individuations of others. -Gina Rae Foster, author of heart, speech, this Between: Be teen. That "between" in a word derives from what it once meant - "be two" - changes everything. To be two or not to be two, that is the question Nicholas Hayes's novel Between answers in the affirmative -Laurence Rickels, author of The Vampire Lectures