Jason Rapczynski

Mfa: the Novel Jason Rapczynski

John is an alcoholic writer who drinks to keep writing and writes to keep drinking. While studying for his MFA at Emerson College, he records his day-to-day existence in the city of Boston, writes about his experiences in workshops and dive bars, and reads literary biographies. Of the seven American-born writers awarded the Nobel Prize, five were alcoholics, and he follows their staggered footsteps into a cycle of recurring situations, volatile relationships, and similarly disturbing encounters that threatens to push him over the edge. He might be gathering a wealth of material for his autobiographical thesis?but will he survive to actually complete the program? Full of seedy sex scenes, rebellion, dysfunction, dark humor and self-destruction, MFA is a defining installment in the gritty genre of transgressive fiction. ?Rapczynski does it again with MFA: plunges us into the seedy underbelly?this time in the form of a young alcoholic whose drinking, sex life, and ambitions are equally promiscuous. In the tradition of Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, in MFA the narrator rises above his narrative?sharp, witty, sad, and grimily real?so we can?t help but like and feel for him. Read it and weep.? ?Elizabeth Inness-Brown, author of Burning Marguerite