Description
A searing examination of male friendship and the broader social implications of masculinity in an age of toxic loneliness
In a small town in North America, two boys, or men, embark on a vaguely charted road trip through the northern wilderness with little more than canned food and secondhand camping gear—and the rifle they buy on their way out of town for reasons neither seems able to articulate. The more they handle the gun, and the farther they get from their parents’ houses and their peers, girlfriends and online gaming, the grim future that awaits them in their nowhere town, the less their actions—and the games, literal and metaphorical, they play—are bound by the usual constraints. When Adam decides to harass a young couple they meet on the highway, the outcome is irreversible, and leads them even further down a road from which there’s no turning back.
A searing examination of male friendship and the broader social implications of masculinity in an age of toxic loneliness, The Passenger Seat introduces Vijay Khurana as an powerful new voice in fiction.
Praise for The Passenger Seat
“A poignant examination of male friendship, homosocial desire, and the trappings and broader social implications of masculinity.”
—Fitzcarraldo Editions/New Directions/Giramondo Novel Prize shortlist citation
“Vijay Khurana’s profound and propulsive The Passenger Seat is a thrilling, terrifying, devastating ride. This perfectly pitched tale of masculinity gone wrong exposes the ways that intimacy can so quickly veer into violence—yet it evades easy moral pronouncements at every turn. Khurana is a brilliant stylist who drives straight toward the heart. I would follow him down any road.”
—Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape and Oval
“Vijay Khurana writes incredibly succinct and vigorous prose. His stories, always full of insight and depth, shine a light on the most nuanced and ambivalent corners of our lives.”
—Yan Ge, author of Strange Beasts of China
“This book is simply great—an elegant novel written with disturbing emotional intensity and a sly, judicious sense of contemporary detail.”
—Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts
