Anchor

A young man arrives in recession-era Austin broke and desperate, taking any work he can find to survive. Through the bars and restaurants where cash, drugs, and desire become interchangeable currencies, he falls in love, starts building a new life, and discovers a city where anything feels possible.What follows is a descent through Austin's service industry-coke before fent, casual encounters, senseless violence, and the brutal discovery that survival and self-destruction look exactly the same. Told in compressed, unsparing sentences, ANCHOR captures the brutal economy of working-class Millennial life-the impossible dreams and late nights, the fragility and violence of being young, broke, and adrift in a city that's already changing without you. A debut novel-in-stories for readers of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, Lucia Berlin's A Manual for Cleaning Women, and Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter.