Description

Hugo wants to destroy his life. He’s worked long enough. Where better to fry than on a shimmering, sunny, subtropical cruise? A ship that takes vacations seriously—worships them.Maybe here Hugo can finally relax like he’s always wanted, forever.

 

In this menticidal culture of workaholism, irrevocable consequence and self-censorship, Garth Miró has concocted a salve for the monotonous severity of American life. Buy a ticket on this cruise and bid farewell to the meat grinder of exceptionalism, emancipate yourself from rugged type-A try-hard individualism and cut loose from the punishing pressure cooker, freak flags at full-mast, hair down the barrel of hallucinatory bliss, thunderous flashbacks to pre-leisure living but monsters in a world frightening enough without them. Achievement is brittle, and this, THE quintessential novel of the Great Resignation, brooks no quarter with top-down control. Aloofly through a gauntlet of self-deception, a maze of mirrors reflecting sharp, unforgiving lapses of paranoia where nothing is as it seems and time is a museum of fatigue from duty, sobriety, and the glacial torture of painful memories, The Vacation offers trippy reprieve via its narrator’s promise to “stop listening,” shaping the experience of reading as tapered withdrawal from the whips and snares of abjection, society’s center of gravity shifting to post-labor zone-out. The implacable lifeblood of stress will radicalize your heart from the hardscrabble hard-luck so-called birthright keeping you keyed up and wound too tight like nothing good. A wrecking ball to snap you out of defeatism. The cult of work meets its nemesis, dies on a silver tongued bait-hook, dies dead to the world forever and ever never to return. Sink into the cradle of delightfully cracked hedonism and indignity. Let it show you a better way of life at the end of history. Just ride.

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“Garth Miró is the misanthropic voice of humanism, here to help us travel on this meat cruise called life. The Vacation is his sun-soaked dark comedy that plops your brain in a blender, spins it with essential truths, and liquifies your concept of narrative into piña colada. Bon voyage, you might not return from this journey.” —⁠ Jon Lindsey, author of Body High

“Garth Miró’s The Vacation is a surreal nightmare. An American fever dream of failure, sloth, and paranoia. Wildly funny and original. Cronenberg on a cruise ship (if he had a sense of humor and sickly- sweet drink in hand.) I gulped down the unhinged second half and loved every moment. Uneasy and provocative entertainment from an exciting new voice.” —⁠ Richard Mirabella, author of Brother & Sister Enter the Forest

“Fast paced and dynamic, Garth Miró’s The Vacation is a secretion of literary and material sun, water, and the unavoidable viscera of the portent, sea-translated, imminent lay flat culture. Don’t drown under the commanding narrative binding Miró’s nautical imagination.” — Vi Khi Nao, author of The Vegas Dilemma

“A brilliant blast of demented fun, Garth Miró’s The Vacation asks what it means to wreck your life in an already-ruined world. What if leisure were an actual cult (and is it)? The tetchy, twitchy comedown on a cruise ship quickly turns into an existential whirlpool. By twists darkly hilarious and disturbing, Miró walks us down one man’s hell, the guided tour with a perverse star map of unhinged riffs and surreal disorientations, where laughter, dread, and insanity become indistinguishable.” — Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book

 

5.5×8.5″. 180 pages perfect-bound. Cover Art by Adrianna Matwiejczuk. Cover Design by Mickey King. Edited by Sam Pink.

 

Interview with Garth Miró

Garth Miró Dot Com (writing)