The Sabotage Café

A gripping story of how a mother's obsession with the past darkly impacts on her daughters attempt to forge her own identity

Praise for The Sabotage Cafe 
'Skillfully and ingeniously written, this gripping account presents the devastating effect of a mother's instability on her child . . . Highly recommended.'

Joshua Furst's The Sabotage Café renders beautifully-through both its observational intelligence and the shrewd deployment of a quietly radical and flexible point of view-the obsessive neediness of a mother whose own past screwups make her all the more terrified for her daughter. As it does, it provides a harrowing account of the way, for better and very much for worse, we cling to the notion that we live inside our children and they live inside us.

Flawless eloquence... The reader cares immensely how it ends... Remarkable. No reader of fiction, whether a fan of punk music or not, should miss it

A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Joshua Furst has written several plays produced in New York, where for a decade he also taught in the public schools. He is the author of Short People an acclaimed collection of stories. He lives in New York City.

As a young woman in the 1980's, Julia became entangled with the emerging punk scene in Minneapolis - in particular with the band Nobody's fool - until a mysterious and unspeakable catastrophe delivers her to a husband and the suburbs. Battered by mental llness, haunted by memories and grief that stretching back to her childhood, she is unable to put her past behind her - or refrain from making her daughter Cheryl into a vessel for her own hopes and fears. 
 
So it comes as little surprise when 16 year-old Cheryl packs a bag and runs away. Exactly where is anyone's guess, though as Julia envisions her daughter's every move from the house through the city's outskirts and into the city - she relives her own bygone experiences in the very same place, where the radical fringe converge. Here amidst a group of would-be revolutuionaries squatting in the Sabotage Café, Cheryl re-enacts her mothers troubled coming-of-age, initiated as she is into a sullied melange of drugs, awkward sex, glib anarchy and acts of vandalism and violence that throw into question everything that she, in her mothers mind's eye, has run from and wishes to become. 
 
A chilling, mesmerizing portrait of todays innocents burdened with the fallout of their parent's rebellion in addition to their own, The Sabotage Cafe is an unforgettable tour de force of insight and compassion, a brilliant first novel by a writer in full, ambitious command of his craft.

Joshua Furst

These stories amount to a powerful and moving commentary on our society's often cynical and contradictory attitudes to childhood.

In Short People, we encounter, among many others, Jason and Billy, best friends who discover by the age of six how to conquer the world, only to see this idyll then shatter before them; Shawn, whose baptism compels him to make life a holy hell for everyone around him; and Evan, who finds that his pursuit of a Boy Scout merit badge is luring him into uncharted social territory. In the meantime, an agonized couple exhausts their expectations for their own kids, with an aftermath that afflicts them all. There's also Mary, whose sixteenth birthday precipitates an adulthood she is scarcely prepared to enter, and Emmy, who began that same transition when she was only twelve. Finally, and perhaps most harrowingly, is the nurse who with eerie prescience delivers so many babies to their destiny. 
 
In a remarkable display of imagination and compassion, Joshua Furst reconstrues our preconceptions about innocence, purity, faith and memory through an unflinching, pitch-perfect gaze, with both authority and originality. Each new story enhances a collection whose importance is thoroughly contemporary and at once hilarious and heartbreaking.

Short People

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

sectionTitle

isEnabled

anchor

anchorLabel

prhuk/featured-book

prhuk/praise-section

maxBooks

showViewMore

prhuk/books-section

hideAuthorAlert

formName

iterableDivision

iterableBrand

buttonText

description

heading

legalText

successHeading

successText

image

alignment

variation

prhuk/email-section

prhuk/series-section

prhuk/biography-section

prhuk/articles-section

prhuk-authors

The perfect gift? A Penguin Shop gift card

East of Eden

Wuthering Heights

White Nights

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Boxed Set: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov

Joshua Furst

Praise for Short People

Moving... Haunting

These stories amount to a powerful and moving commentary on our society's often cynical and contradictory attitudes to childhood.

A subtle, richly textured book.

Moving... Haunting

These stories amount to a powerful and moving commentary on our society's often cynical and contradictory attitudes to childhood.

A subtle, richly textured book.

Moving... Haunting

These stories amount to a powerful and moving commentary on our society's often cynical and contradictory attitudes to childhood.

A subtle, richly textured book.

Books by Joshua Furst

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter