The Garbage Times/White Ibis

“I love the pulse of Sam Pink’s sentences, the way they can hold the gorgeous and the grisly and the hilarious all at the same time. The Garbage Times/White Ibis thrilled me and messed me up, left me feeling a little dazed and a lot changed.” —Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel and Find Me From the freezing alleys of Chicago to the dew-blanketed bayou of Florida. From bouncing drunks and cleaning up puke to biking through the swamp laughing at peacocks. Freeze to thaw. Filth and broken glass and black water backed up in showers; lizards and Girl Scouts and themed birthday parties. A baby rat freed from the bottom of a dumpster becomes a white ibis wandering the wet driveway after a storm. Goodbye, hello, goodbye. It was the garbage times; it was time for something else. A tale of two tales, connected by a mysterious sunlit portal. The edition is designed with te^te-be^che binding as a single volume. The joining of these two works brings together two sides of the coin of lived experience; sometimes life is garbage, and in other moments it is nothing short of moving." —Jack Hawthorn, Raven Bookstore (Lawrence, KS) "Upsetting, moving, and so so . . . SO funny. The Garbage Times/White Ibis follows a guy and his settling into the fuck-you beauty of the world, with a two-part story that has a clever flip-over design like so many special summer editions of teen magazines before it. The main difference between the two parts is geographic—The Garbage Times is set in cold, sewage-coated, rat-infested Chicago, while White Ibis takes place in densely green, animal-full, family-party-crazy, humid Tampa Bay, Florida—but subtler advances in spirit weave their way into the second part (White Ibis); though our guy is still broke and anxious and not a super great fit for the world, his heart is growing as he opens it to his girl, her family, an expanding menagerie (a kitten named Dottie, a chocolate hamdog named Bam, and a street cat named Benito 'Benny' Bahama), a kindred misfit Girl Scout, and the chillest white ibis on the block. Sam Pink is a writer with incredible timing, a cool unique style, and a way of describing people/places/things/states of being that I find buoyant and refreshing—this weird book made me sick to my stomach, laugh a whole lot, and markedly happier after finishing it." —Molly Moore, BookPeople (Austin, TX) "This book is alive. Sam Pink's writing makes me feel things I didn't know about. Hopefully these two novellas will make you laugh and cry, too." —Sam, Square Books (Oxford, MS)