Behold the Naked Singularity!

It's here. The official publication date for Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity is May 1, but if there's a good bookstore near you, they've probably got a stack up front right now, dizzying their patrons.

I've written about the book before,and you are welcome of course to take all my praise for it with a shaker of salt, since I'm also the book's publicist over in my day job. But you don't have to take my word for it that this is a novel worth seeking out. Try Scott Bryan Wilson's praise at the Quarterly Conversation, or Steve Donoghue's at Open Letters Monthly. Or Miles Klee, at Flavorwire, where he names it one of "Ten Malicious Masterpieces," putting it in company with Thomas Bernhard, Martin Amis, and Christina Stead. If those don't convince you, just keep your eyes peeled: the coming weeks should see lots of new readers and critics weighing in on the book.

In the meantime, since presumably you're sitting at your desk right now avoiding work anyway, go check out a venture into nonfiction that Sergio made last year, an essay for Triple Canopy on, of all things, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and boxing. If you like the voice, pell-mell language, and bone-deep empathy you find there, then I expect it'll be worth your stopping off at your local bookstore on the way home tonight and picking up A Naked Singularity. The weekend is ahead of you--hours and hours to spend getting sucked into a strange, compelling, funny, ridiculous, moving account of life, the law, and justice in New York and America today.