Set in New Jersey, author David Galef's latest novel asks how much we really know about the forces that define our lives, and if maybe the answers to some secrets are better kept in the dark.
Facing jail time after crashing a stolen ambulance and coming face-to-face with the consequences of a life that never once went right, Tony Mazza asks himself where he went wrong.
Tony’s been no stranger to bad days. In fact, the bad days all too often seem to define his life, presenting pitfall after pratfall, whether he's working a stint at a real estate agency, a bike shop, or a bar. But once Tony starts pulling on that thread, looking for answers like we all do, his lifetime of failed relationships, ill advised investments, and accidents, starts to seem less random. Reaching all the way back to his childhood, through the haze of memory and half remembered guilt, a darker secret begins to take shape, a secret that Tony might not really want revealed.
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"Tony Mazza is the ne'er-do-wellest of ne'er-do-wells, equally inept at romance and retail, whose best intentions invariably transmute gold to lead [...] A wry masterpiece and a must-read for anyone who has ever screwed up royally.
—Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein’s Beach House
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Where I Went Wrong is a coming-of-age story in reverse, with a surprise ending (or is it a beginning?) that may just send you back to page one to reread the whole thing in a different light.
—Gary Krist, author of The Mirage Factory
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David Galef’s Where I went Wrong is a novel of striving, failure, and more striving—lovely, deft and bittersweet. It’s the story fading industrial Jersey has been waiting for.
—D. T. Max, author of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
David Galef is an American fiction writer, critic, poet, translator, essayist. A shameless eclectic, Galef has published over a dozen books, including the novel Flesh, the short story collections My Date with Neanderthal Woman, and Laugh Track, the literary critique Supporting Cast an analysis of character creation, and the illustrated book Japanese Proverbs. He has written over two hundred short stories for magazines ranging from the British Punch to the Czech Prague Revue, the Canadian Prism International and the American Shenandoah. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The Village Voice, Twentieth Century Literature, and The Columbia History of the British Novel. He is the editor of Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine on the planet and authored Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook. When not riding his bicycle along the narrow roads of New Jersey, he is currently a professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Montclair State University. - https://davidgalef.com/
