Ashton Politanoff – författare

You'll Like it Here is a haunting bricolage, divided into three parts, that excavates the forgotten history of Redondo Beach in the early 1900’s through old news clippings, advertisements, recipes and other ephemera that speak to the ills of male stoicism, industrialization and capitalism, and environmental displacement. Ashton used digital archives from the Redondo Reflex and other city adjacent newspapers as the basis for his surrealist account, masterfully tracing this larger shift away from coastal maritime repose in the wake of the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II through momentary fragments that feel as real and palpable as they do transient, mythological, and strangely reminiscent of our current times.Formally, You'll Like it Here works in conversation with Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, and Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 Fog. The novel also embraces a multi-register, journalistic storytelling that questions the tenuous line between objectivity and subjectivity in documenting the unreliability of history—both personal and collective—brilliantly balancing voids of loss, absence, and disappearance with moments of natural transcendence and miraculous phenomena.

"This book is a triumph. Impeccably, propulsively, and hilariously rendered, Politanoff writes about tennis like Barry Hannah wrote about alcohol—something swift, addictive, fun, life-giving and also totally filthy. Nobody writes like Ashton Politanoff." —Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize“[I] could not put [Dad Had a Bad Day] down…[Politanoff's] atmospheric descriptions were spare but sensuous . . . his dialogue was perfectly rhythmic, to the point of being hypnotic. Until it was electrified by frenetic, Tim Robinson-style outbursts—then I was wide awake; then I was cracking the f up . . . I delighted in its chiseled prose, and the suspense and surprise of its plot.” —Beau Dealy, Racquet MagazineWhen Ned finds his old Slazenger tennis racquet buried in the garage, he unearths a part of his former self. Having recently lost his job, his sole duty is to watch over their six-year-old son while his wife works. On a whim--and without his wife's knowledge--Ned joins his childhood tennis club with a secret credit card, where he finds life outside the realm of “sad dad” domesticity. He becomes the captain of a local men’s rec league team, reconnects with his old hitting partner and former tennis prodigy, Roland, and commits his whole sad self to building a winning team. But when Roland disappears, Ned’s search for his friend threatens to consume the path to glory, the relationship with his son, his marriage, and his mind.A meditation on fathers and sons, male friendship, and the psychic pressures of an individual sport, Politanoff’s novel sits beautifully alongside the dark comedy of Iris Murdoch and the masculine angst of John Cheever, with a style all its own. Funny, poignant, and deeply relatable, Dad Had a Bad Day explores our desire for structure, the emotional limits of domestic life, and the unbelievably potent, powerful, intoxicating feeling of winning.