Cannibals in Love, Mike Roberts
Cannibals in Love, Mike Roberts
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Cannibals in Love

Author: Mike Roberts

Narrator: Michael Crouch

Unabridged: 8 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/20/2016

Synopsis

Soulful, gritty, and hilarious, Cannibals in Love is the debut novel from a bold new voice in fiction, and a manifesto for the generation that came of age at the dawn of the twenty-first century.Mike is about to graduate from college and inherit a world much different from the one he was promised. The World Trade Center towers have just fallen, the Beltway Sniper terrorizes the nation’s capital, and a polarizing president pushes forward a dubious war. Told in eighteen vignettes, Mike’s misadventures begin in Washington, DC, and span Brooklyn, Portland, and Austin as he takes up arms with the overeducated, underemployed millennials who surround him. Nursing writerly ambitions, he works a series of humiliating jobs—counting lampposts, writing spam emails, babysitting a teenage boy—while composing a thousand-page novel about cows as an allegory for the invasion of Iraq. And at the center of the book resides a tumultuous, passionate love story that could arise only between two people with nothing to lose.Like a carefully assembled mixtape, Cannibals in Love weaves tender moments and summer idylls with violent late nights and the frustrations of a generation. From delirious offtrack betting to a fateful walk across Kansas, Mike Roberts takes us into the guts of masculinity and identity in the age of the Internet, and joins an emerging group of young writers who are redefining the contemporary novel.

About Mike Roberts

Mike Roberts is a writer from Buffalo, New York. His screenplay adaptation of Brad Land’s memoir Goat, which was produced by James Franco, premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. His first screenplay, King Kelly, premiered at the 2012 South by Southwest film festival, was nominated for the Golden Eye at the Zurich Film Festival, and won the Jury’s Choice Award at the Puchon Film Festival. His stage play, The Kill Chain, was featured in the 2013 Tongues Reading Series at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Cannibals in Love is his first novel.

About Michael Crouch

Michael Crouch is an actor based in New York City. His audiobook narration has won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine, and Best of the Year accolades from Booklist, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. He can also be heard on national commercials, cartoons, video games, and the animé series Pokémon XY and Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Tori on February 08, 2017

i read this in 2 sittings, attached to the familiarity of it - like it was me, like these were my friends. the wildness and uncertainty, the gaps in time and perceived stability, the leaning in and out of love and vulnerability, the defining and redefining of ourselves through shared memory and expe......more

Goodreads review by Jenny on November 29, 2018

Some of the cleanest, freshest descriptions I've read--just for a random example, "A snowplow went by in a cloud of silted exhaust that stained the snowbanks brown. We watched its orange and yellow lights flicker as it dropped the blade with a harsh metal scrape, before gathering, and running cleanl......more

Goodreads review by Ella on August 24, 2023

i wanted to stop reading this book but i’m stubborn. just about the life of the most boring mundane dude, didn’t eat a person. not even once......more

Goodreads review by Kyle on June 04, 2018

This was by far one of the best books I have read in a long long time. It tells the story of a 20 something year old man named Mike, living out his youth in post 9-11 America. The chapters are vignettes of his life, offering a new story within each and a new side to his character and his growth. Thi......more

Goodreads review by Jennifer on July 30, 2017

This novel is intriguing and enthralling. Not for someone who isn't a fan of muddled writing, though. There was no set plotline, climax or theme, and the ending had no closure, but I enjoyed the freeform and the curiosity I was left with. It truly is like a disorganized mixtape of unreliable memorie......more

Quotes

“There are shining moments where Roberts’ novel moves seamlessly from humor to heartbreak and back again.” Publishers Weekly

“Unapologetically political and full of youthful whimsy, Roberts’ debut captures one man’s reluctant search for stability.” Booklist

“Impression by impression, fragment by fragment, Roberts chronicles the low-grade agony of growing up with insight and accuracy. A study of young masculinity: atmospheric, quietly aggressive, and unexpectedly hopeful.” Kirkus Reviews

“Cannibals in Love is a portrait of American life in its twilight years―bristling with humor and absurdity, rotten with longing. With tenderness and wit, Mike Roberts brings us a tragicomic ode to our millennium, crisper and more penetrating in retrospect.” Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body like Mine

“Episodic novels don’t usually breathe like this. Deceptively simple, but warm, even recklessly honest, the story Mike Roberts tells here is essentially about the nature of time. A scrupulously sane tribute to youth, Cannibals in Love describes the blessed entropy that disperses our friends, and in so doing saves us.” Benjamin Lytal, author of A Map of Tulsa

“Cannibals in Love is hard to forget. Midway through, you start calling up earlier episodes, forming connections, and remembering the book the same way a life is remembered while it’s being lived. The vignettes in Roberts’ novel of millennial America hit with a sense of relief, like when a friend fills in a blank spot from the past and you think, ‘Thank God someone remembered something!’ This novel belongs on a shelf of Americana with Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes and early DeLillo.” Will Chancellor, author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

Awards

  • Refinery29 Pick
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