Bummed Out City

“I’m there with the characters as they move through their fictional lives with that special kind of purpose that only fictional characters get to have, where everything matters and each thing leads necessarily to the next thing and it all adds up to something, to some dramatic and fulfilling and satisfying and appropriate conclusion and it’s nothing at all like real life, where things just happen and you do one thing and then you do something else and the next day you do it again or maybe you don’t and none of it adds up to anything or goes anywhere, where you wake up the next morning and you’re still there and you still have to brush your teeth and trim your toenails and worry about money and pay for car insurance and all the other mundane pedestrian slogging shit you did the day before.” - from Bummed Out City

Readers are calling Scott Burr's "funny, sad, and urgent" debut novel "a surprisingly honest account of millennial angst" and a "bildungsroman for our age."    
  
At almost thirty years old, aspiring writer David Moore is living the unremarkable life he always equated with failure: instead of going on book tours and giving readings he's scraping to pay his bills; instead of meeting with producers and selling the movie rights to his breakout novel he's arguing with his girlfriend about whether they should get a dog. When an unexpected visit from his deadbeat dad upsets David's fragile financial balancing act it sets in motion a series of domestic disagreements and ill-advised reactionary reprisals whose compounding repercussions threaten to unmake the tenuous structure of David's mundane life: the life that David, focused only on that life's disappointments, may not appreciate or fight to salvage until it's already too late... 

"Bummed Out City is one of the most painfully honest books about the writing life that we've seen, and it's a credit to the technical skill of Mr. Burr that it's done with incredible grace--a bitter but surprisingly gentle picture of the constant quasi-Nietzschean revaluation of all values that is necessary for people in our day and age to function and thrive." - The Tailwinds Review

"It is always such a joy to feel that a book is distinctly of its time, and this one certainly is. The echoes of our current climate are redolent: recession, high unemployment rates, urban decay. And, above all, the belief of my generation - that we are all special little snowflakes - and the reality: That we are not." - SlightlyIgnorant

“Mesmerizing and intelligent, possessed of a powerful authenticity, Scott Burr’s Bummed Out City emanates out of the quiet desperation that is uniquely that of the writer at the beginning of the 21st Century.” - Steven Hayward, author of To Dance the Beginning of the World

Scott Burr is a graduate of the creative writing program at The Colorado College. His writing has appeared in Mildred, The Mayo Review, The Decades Review, and elsewhere. Bummed Out City is his first novel. He lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio.