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Wine Clerk
Rand Wyndham returns in Wine Clerk, John Grochalski’s follow-up to his 2013 novel The Librarian. This time, Wyndam is working in a wine emporium, slugging it out with a motley crew familiar to anyone who’s worked on the lower rungs of the service industry. Grochalski serves up his peculiar vision of the American nightmare with a heady mix of wit and pathos, delivering a bitter dose of the everyday in all its quotidian absurdity. It’s engaging. It’s frightening. It’s funny. It’s the pitch-perfect reflection of the current inebriated state of the American monster.
—Larry Duncan, author of Drunk on Ophelia
—Larry Duncan, author of Drunk on Ophelia
214 pages, Paperback
Published July 23, 2016
8 people want to read
About the author
John Grochalski
30 books20 followersJohn Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press, 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon Books on Blog 2012)and the novel, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press, 2013). Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he constantly worries about the high cost of everything.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 10, 2018
Another rock-solid working-class read from Grochalski, this one centers on a liquor store job. It'll make you think twice next time you're grabbing a sixer at your local pit, think differently of the characters offering up ideas on a bottle. Rand Wyndham, the 40-year-old anti-hero spends the book getting in his own way both with work and the women he's hoping to get with. He's wise to the game, sees the empty hustle for what it is, and yet he's not ambitious enough to escape it. Deep down in it is a cautionary tale about how folks fail to live up to their promise, but the book never takes itself seriously enough to lecture anyone. Instead it's a caustic wit, and killer one-liners -- which, let's be honest, are always a real treat -- leaving the larger lessons to the rest of the stockboys and the middle-management clones. I've always loved books about drinking, books about working lousy jobs, and books about trying to figure out how to have a some small place of peace and quiet in a hard and uncaring world. If you like those themes, this you'll dig Grochalski's Wine Clerk.
July 20, 2016
Great book about bad times! I was lucky enough to blurb it:
John Grochalski is one of the last true working-class writers in America. His is a line that extends back to Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair and up through the Fantes and Charles Bukowski. The Wine Clerk is another brilliant example of how miserable the world can be and how surviving with a drink in a dive bar is the only chance we have for victory. Drop all the boxes in the warehouse. Run from the temp agency. If you want to understand what it means to be broke in America, to be working poor in the richest country in the world, read John Grochalski's excellent new novel. Read everything he's written and everything he's going to write.
John Grochalski is one of the last true working-class writers in America. His is a line that extends back to Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair and up through the Fantes and Charles Bukowski. The Wine Clerk is another brilliant example of how miserable the world can be and how surviving with a drink in a dive bar is the only chance we have for victory. Drop all the boxes in the warehouse. Run from the temp agency. If you want to understand what it means to be broke in America, to be working poor in the richest country in the world, read John Grochalski's excellent new novel. Read everything he's written and everything he's going to write.
January 14, 2017
Grochalski’s gift is pulling humour from sadness. And as anyone who has worked in retail knows, the customer is not always right. Managers, particularly when they are most needed, hide in their offices and the garish promotions, mass-produced uniforms and chipper smiles are an altogether insufficient layer of veneer, spread too thinly over too much misery. From Wyndham’s first day, and throughout his personal decline within the wine store, there is an equal measure of despair and laughter. In fact, the more despairing the situation, the more comical prowess Grochalski displays.
There is, however, far more to this black comedy than the musings of a working-class drunk. Where other tales of inebriated woe and demoralising excess have failed, Wine Clerk delivers, line after line. That is to say, much like Grochalski’s poetry, his novels are written with defining intent. In contrast to his plain spoken and sometimes crass style of prose, this – seemingly autobiographical – work of fiction holds a heavy burden of complex purpose. Here is a writer who understands the importance of making the mundane interesting.
Read the full review as it appears on Screaming with Brevity, here: http://wp.me/p3tad2-Bt
There is, however, far more to this black comedy than the musings of a working-class drunk. Where other tales of inebriated woe and demoralising excess have failed, Wine Clerk delivers, line after line. That is to say, much like Grochalski’s poetry, his novels are written with defining intent. In contrast to his plain spoken and sometimes crass style of prose, this – seemingly autobiographical – work of fiction holds a heavy burden of complex purpose. Here is a writer who understands the importance of making the mundane interesting.
Read the full review as it appears on Screaming with Brevity, here: http://wp.me/p3tad2-Bt
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews