Washington Writers' Publishing House

Testimonials

• Adam Schwartz’s debut collection, The Rest of the World introduces a writer whose ear is so pitch-perfectly trained to his characters it seems as if he’s an angel eavesdropping from their rooftops.
  His cast heralds from every walk of life, from street corners and housing projects, from dive bars and fishing boats in which open otherwise drown out what we make of our lives, a
  nd he listens to them with a gigantic heart.
  In a literary world where we’re rarely bound by more to stay in our lanes and others who bemoan the airlessness of autobiography, his work is refreshing, fearless and, like a subway’s third rail, hums with electricity.

  Adam Ross, editor of the Sewanee Review and author of the novel Mr. Peanut, named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The New Republic and The Economist

• This is a portrait gallery of young people who will pierce you with their longing and loss, and with their fierce resolve to transcend impossible choices. If you have known—even only for a moment—the sense that any choice you make to be free will exact a price as large as the price of subjugation, these stories will break your heart with their visceral truth-telling. The hope that the stories offer undoes one of the hard realities they portray: You can’t erase nothing, says one character, You just carry it along. At-risk populations of young Americans are simply never presented in literature with the honesty Adam Schwartz’s stories affords them.

  Kevin McIlvoy, author of One Kind Favor (2021), At the Gate of All Wonder (2018) and other works.

• Avoiding even the whiff of sentimentality, Adam Schwartz takes the reader into the lives of characters from disparate racial and socioeconomic backgrounds as they struggle for some sort of normalcy in a world that too often ignores their plight. The dialogue in this collection of stories is terse and edgy, the prose spare and lean. With its unforgettable characters, The Rest of the World gives us reason to have faith in the resiliency of young people.

  Elizabeth Nunez, award-winning author of the memoir Not for Everyday Use, and nine novels, including Prospero’s Daughter