Pay as You Go

Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize

New to town and delusionally confident, Slide imagined himself living in a glossy building with doormen and sweeping views of the skyline. Instead he's landed in a creaking, stuffy apartment with two roommates: a loping giant who hardly leaves his room, and a weight-obsessed neurotic who keeps no fewer than forty-seven lamps throughout the house, blazing at all hours.

Unwilling to accept this fate, Slide--a barber with an opaque past--embarks on a quest for the perfect apartment, pinballing through the sprawling, madcap city of Polis and its endless procession of neighborhoods. As he bounces from foldout couch to disaster-relief tent, falling in with some tough types, Slide begins to realize that he's going to have to scratch and claw just to claim a place for himself in this world--let alone a place with in-unit laundry.

An exuberant, fantastical odyssey, Pay As You Go wonders if what we're searching for is ever really out there. Its pages--surreal, biting, and teeming with life--announce the startling talents of Eskor David Johnson, who knows that all any of us really want is a place to rest our head.

Author: Eskor David Johnson
Publisher: McSweeney's
Published: 10/24/2023
Pages: 1
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.85lbs
Size: 7.90h x 6.10w x 2.70d
ISBN13: 9781952119743
ISBN10: 195211974X
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | World Literature | Caribbean & West Indies

About the Author
Eskor David Johnson is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago and the United States. His writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was the recipient of the Richard Yates Short Story Prize, the Maytag Fellowship and the Teaching-Writing Fellowship, he currently lives in New York City.