Trash Mountain

by Bradley Bazzle

Overview

Ben Shippers doesn’t have much use for school, friends, or pretty much anyone except his smartass siser, but he does harbor a secret passion: Trash Mountain, the central feature of the noxious landfill next to his house, the fumes from which have made his sister ill. After a botched attempt to destroy Trash Mountain with a homemade firebomb, Ben begins a years-long infiltration operation that leads him to drop out of school to work alongside homeless trash-pickers, and then, eventually, intern at the very place he meant to destroy. Ben’s boss there, a charismatic would-be titan of sanitation, shows Ben the intricate moralities of the trash industry, forcing him to choose between monetary stability and his environmental principles. With dark humor, Trash Mountain reflects on life in small southern cities in decline and an adolescent’s search for fundamental values without responsible adults to lead the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597099103
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Bradley Bazzle’s first novel, Trash Mountain, won the 2016 Red Hen Press Fiction Award, judged by Steve Almond. His short stories have won awards from The Iowa Review, New Ohio Review, and Third Coast. They also appear in New England Review, Epoch, Copper Nickel, Web Conjunctions, and other literary journals. Bradley grew up in Dallas, Texas, and has degrees from Yale, Indiana University, and the University of Georgia, where he taught writing. He remains in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

"The novel has an episodic feel, as Ben encounters an array of fellow students, potential employers, and local luminaries. Throughout, Bazzle chronicles the ways in which Ben’s early idealism erodes under more complex concerns. The novel’s tone is occasionally uneven: Bazzle’s observations on questions of race and class feel rooted in a social realism tradition, while other characters, like a long-winded local businessman and his father, a contentious figure nicknamed “Donkey Dan,” seem imported from a more broadly satirical work. Bazzle’s novel explores the compromises one makes in life even as it blends the gritty and the extravagant along the way."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2018-02-20
The (metaphorically) long shadow of a massive landfill shapes the destiny of a young man in Bazzle's bleakly comic debut.Some people have an idea of their life's goal from a young age. That's the case here, as narrator Ben Shippers decides early on that he must destroy the massive pile of garbage located in the landfill beside his childhood home. After an early and failed attempt to burn the landfill down, Ben embarks on a host of quixotic projects to raise enough money to buy a flamethrower, in hopes that his future attempts will work. The landfill comes to stand in for many of the issues young Ben encounters, from his family's economic problems to the decline of his parents' marriage to the tensions that exist between his hometown of Komer and the nearby municipality of Haislip, two archetypal small American cities. Gradually, Ben's assorted odd jobs temper his penchant for destruction—"I guess I had lost some of my terroristic spark, I'm ashamed to admit," he observes—and his friendship with Demarcus, son of a local bar owner, gives him a greater sense of community. The novel has an episodic feel, as Ben encounters an array of fellow students, potential employers, and local luminaries. Throughout, Bazzle chronicles the ways in which Ben's early idealism erodes under more complex concerns. The novel's tone is occasionally uneven: Bazzle's observations on questions of race and class feel rooted in a social realism tradition, while other characters, like a long-winded local businessman and his father, a contentious figure nicknamed "Donkey Dan," seem imported from a more broadly satirical work.Bazzle's novel explores the compromises one makes in life even as it blends the gritty and the extravagant along the way.

Kirkus Reviews