STEVE TOLTZ reads from his new novel QUICKSAND with ANTON MONSTED

Quicksand (Simon & Schuster)

A daring, brilliant new novel from Man Booker Prize finalist Steve Toltz, for fans of Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace: a fearlessly funny, outrageously inventive dark comedy about two lifelong friends. 

Liam is a struggling writer and a failing cop. Aldo, his best friend and muse, is a haplessly criminal entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for disaster. As Aldo's luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on his best friend's exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo's mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship. With the same originality and buoyancy that catapulted his first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, onto prize lists around the world--including shortlists for the Man Booker Prize and the "Guardian" First Book Award--Steve Toltz has created a rousing, hysterically funny but unapologetically dark satire about fate, faith, friendship, and the artist's obligation to his muse.

Sharp, witty, kinetic, and utterly engrossing, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity.

Praise for Quicksand:

“Steve Toltz possesses an imagination that knows no limits. His work is mordant, prophetic, and very funny. He is a true original.” —Patrick McGrath, author of Asylum

“Steve Toltz writes with a singular, propulsive energy, with sentences and characters that rise off the page with a force that leaves you almost breathless.  There is more heart, and joy and compassion and hard-earned wisdom in Quicksand than seems possible for a single novel; it is life, literature at its fullest.”—Dinaw Mengestu, award-winning author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and All Our Names

“Quicksand is one of the smartest, funniest, angriest novels I have ever read. But it's also a surprisingly touching meditation on friendship and family, on art and God, on law-breaking and law enforcement. … A brilliant piece of fiction, from a novelist who so clearly sees the outsized pleasures and terrors of our troubled time.”  —Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England and The Happiest People in the World

“Quicksand crackles with such intensity it made me turn the pages with a harder snap, lean closer, want to gnaw the words.  This is a novel of sneak-attack seriousness, so funny it fools you into letting down your guard—then knocks you upside the head with intense intelligence, probing thought, raw pain. For all the wit and wisdom in this book, all the pleasures contained in its raucous, furious, fearless pursuit of truths, the greatest thrill comes when it strikes you that you’ve never read anything quite like it before, that you just might have stumbled—startlingly, unsettlingly—on something close to genius in the writing of Steve Toltz.”
—Josh Weil, author of The Great Glass Sea

“Steve Toltz is a verbal magician and lunatic storyteller. Every page of this novel bursts with ideas and humor and pathos and incisive riffs that perfectly express the grand absurdities of the irrational universe, along with the smaller ones of a very particular friendship. Quicksand is the work of a writer in full command of his many outsized gifts, not least of which is his humanity.”—Teddy Wayne, Whiting Award-winning author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Steve Toltz was born in Sydney and graduated from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. His first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

After working on Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in 1996, Anton Monsted went on to co-found Luhrmann’s music company, Bazmark Music, and served as Music Supervisor and Executive Music Producer on Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge! He was Executive Producer of Luhrmann’s 2004 campaign for Chanel No.5 starring Nicole Kidman, and was the Co-Producer and Executive Music Supervisor for Luhrmann’s Australia and The Great Gatsby. He is currently Senior Vice President of Music at Twentieth Century Fox, and, notably, has been Steve Toltz's friend since they met in a bowling alley in 1988.