The most successful authors I know enjoy the process of learning and got into the business from the pleasure and challenge of writing.

Impatience, mistrustfulness, and competitiveness with other writers can be very damaging to a career. Focus on your own content, find your own best voice, and enjoy the ride. This can be a wonderful business.
--John Talbot

By: Arthur Nersesian

Okay, the narrator really is a f***-up. Barely employed as an usher at a Village cinema, he falls for a colleague who seems dewily innocent even as he continues dumping his dirty clothes on girlfriend Sarah's floor. Then all in one day he loses his job, his chance for new love, and Sarah herself and winds up sleeping on the coach of a friend who's probably even more of a f***-up than he is. From here he moves swiftly through trying to score, trying to keep his job at a porno theater by pretending that he's gay, and somehow getting himself involved in a robbery. Nersesian, a former editor at a literary magazine called The Portable Lower East Side and an English instructor at a community college in the Bronx, writes briskly and acutely, with a good sense of detail.

Arthur Nersesian's underground literary treasure is an unforgettable slice of gritty New York City life...and the darkly hilarious odyssey of an anonymous slacker. He's a perennial couch-surfer, an aspiring writer searching for himself in spite of himself, and he's just trying to survive. But life has other things in store for the f***-up. From being dumped by his girlfriend to getting fired for asking for a raise, from falling into a robbery to posing as a gay man to keep his job at a porno theater, the f***-up's tragi-comedy is perfectly realized by Arthur Nersesian, who manages to create humor and suspense out of urban desperation.

By: Arthur Nersesian

When Mary Bellanova finds her live-in boyfriend, Primo, dead on the couch in her New York City apartment, she is catapulted into a manic quest for the truth about his life in this lightweight, plot-driven, downtown grunge novel. Primo was an enigmatic drifter, author of a pornographic novel and ex-lover of an eclectic collection of girlfriends; it seems he even had a child. Mary's own life is nothing to write home about. She's 29 years old and has been working a succession of temp jobs while making fitful attempts at finishing a collection of short stories. On Primo's trail, she stumbles into a series of new adventures. In search of one of Primo's many ex-girlfriends, she arrives at a band audition and accidentally becomes a bassist in an all-woman band, the Beautiful and the Crazy. Other forays land her dates with a toe-sucking foot fetishizer and a borderline rapist. Finally, she meets a marginally more suitable tattooed hipster while walking Primo's dog, Numb. Meanwhile, she is being wined and dined by Joey, an older man who once lived next door to her parents in New Jersey. As it happens, it is Joey, and not Primo, whose secrets will ultimately matter the most to Mary. As the coincidences mount, Mary tries to make sense of them, ultimately realizing that life is just "a series of battles and treaties." Nersesian (The F***-up) knows downtown Manhattan's East Village life better than most, and his characters are instantly recognizable, if somewhat cartoonish. But his tongue-in-cheek humor and uneven prose may limit the novel's readership to the slacker denizens it chronicles.

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