Bad Teeth: A Novel

Four interlocking narratives set in four American cities form a richly comic feast about love, academia, an elusive Tibetan novelist―and SOFA, a protest group so mysterious its very initials are open to interpretation.Bad Teeth follows a cast of young literary men and women, each in a period of formation, in four very American cities―Brooklyn, Bloomington, Berkeley, and Bakersfield. A Pynchonesque treat, it’s four (or more) books in one: a bohemian satire, a campus comedy, a stoner’s reverie, and a quadruple love story. The plots coalesce around the search for a mysterious author, Jigme Drolma (“the Tibetan David Foster Wallace”), who might in fact be a plagiarist. But how does the self-styled arch-magician Nicholas Bendix figure into this? What will happen when SOFA unleashes the “Apocalypse”? And what’s to become of Lump, the cat?

Booklist

“Long’s novel, with its savvy humor, intelligent satire, and rewarding prose, is wildly successful.”

Publishers Weekly

“A literary mash-up that is both a send-up of modern academic life and a heartfelt novel of loves lost and purposes vainly sought…a wondrous, funny, and philosophical novel.”

DuJour

“A group of young writers, scattered from Brooklyn to Berkeley, are all on the hunt for a enigmatic scribe, known as ‘the Tibetan David Foster Wallace,’ in this comic take on today’s literary scene from the author of the bestselling Icelander.”

Matthew Gallaway, author of The Metropolis Case

“Dustin Long has created a hypnotic and often hilarious kaleidoscope of satirical vengeance, political conspiracy, literary sleuthing, and―last but not least―some old-fashioned sexual neuroses and drug addiction, all culminating in a paean to self-awareness and the interconnectedness of all things.”

Andrew Lewis Conn, author of P and O, Africa!

“Bad Teeth is a smart, funny, tricky, resonant, and exceedingly graceful work. The author’s name (remember it!) inspires other four-letter adjectives: Long’s prose is surpassingly fine, the humor wise, the feeling deep, the ache real. Bad Teeth glows bright.”

Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Sorry Please Thank You

“This novel is both playful and profound. Long possesses a searching, powerful intellect, and a confident, engaging voice, and I plan on reading everything he writes from now on.”

About the Author

Dustin Long is the author of Icelander. He is currently finishing a Ph.D. in American Literature, and he teaches literature at a private institution in Manhattan. He lives in Brooklyn with his fiancée and son.

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