Synopses & Reviews
Set in the American Southwest, forty miles north of Juárez, Casey Gray's ambitious, tragicomic, and ultimately redemptive novel follows a group of customers and employees through the twenty-four hour work cycle as they seek comfort and sustenance inside of the cinderblock walls of a classic American institution--The Superstore. On the eve of the company president's visit to the store, a manager's drunk text to a coworker leads to a series of consequences as brutal as they are wide-ranging: Everyone around him will be affected.
Review
“In
Discount, Casey Gray uses the American phenomenon of the superstore as Nathanael West used Hollywood in
Day of the Locust but also as Ken Kesey used the psychiatric hospital in
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and even as Upton Sinclair used meatpacking industry in
The Jungle: it is metaphor and microcosm, a source of satire and of social commentary. Which is to say,
Discount is a big, bold, ambitious novel that takes on just about everything suspect in the culture and shirks nothing. With this novel, Casey Gray leaps into the American literary landscape as an author who cannot be ignored.”--Robert Boswell, author of
Tumbledown,
Mystery Ride,
Crooked Hearts, and
Centurys Son
“This novel takes as its magnificent social subject the world of the mega-store, a book as relevant to our contemporary lives as Middlemarch was to a different society. It is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, personal and political, and all in the very best ways. I love this novel. Its news is vital.”—Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once
Synopsis
Immigration, suburban poverty, and big-box retail converge in this audacious debut novel of a nation coming apart at the seams
About the Author
Casey Gray teaches English at New Mexico State University. His work has appeared in Ploughshares.