Contemporary Authors

• The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac ( novel) Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), 2012
• The Antiques ( novel) Scribner (New York, NY), 2017

1. The antiques : a novel https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045830 D'Agostino, Kris, 1978- author. The antiques : a novel / Kris D'Agostino. New York : Scribner, 2017. 289 pages ; 24 cm PS3604.A3335 A83 2017 ISBN: 9781501138973 (hardcover : alk. paper)9781501138980 (trade paper : alk. paper) 2. The Sleepy Hollow family almanac : a novel https://lccn.loc.gov/2011038421 D'Agostino, Kris, 1978- The Sleepy Hollow family almanac : a novel / by Kris D'Agostino. 1st ed. Chapel Hill, N.C. : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2012. 340 p. ; 21 cm. PS3604.A3335 S54 2012 ISBN: 9781565129511 (pbk.)1565129512 (pbk.)

• Kris D’agostino - http://krisdagostino.com/bio/

  BIO

  Kris D’agostino author of The AntiquesKris D’Agostino holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. He is the author of The Antiques and The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac. He lives in Brooklyn.

• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2017/02/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-71-kris-dagostino/

  THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #71: KRIS D’AGOSTINO
  BY MICKIE MEINHARDT
  February 16th, 2017

  In Kris D’Agostino’s second novel, The Antiques, he returns to familiar forms: A dysfunctional family whose members are in various stages of arrested development; a generational home in upstate New York; and the absurdity of life in its most darkly comedic moments. Here, the three grown (yet hardly mature) children of the Westfall family reunite in their childhood home in Hudson in the aftermath of a tremendous hurricane, during which their father has passed away. Bringing all their baggage (emotional, physical, and sometimes in the form of other people), they reconvene to determine the fate of their father’s priceless Magritte painting and, perhaps, to repair desperately strained bonds. The characters are loveable exaggerations, the kind one can easily pinpoint but relate to in spite of, and perhaps because of, their recognizable flaws, and the book is primarily delivered in the bracingly funny dialogue D’Agostino assigns them. Sharp as a mean older sister’s comeback and witty as the brother who always gets under your skin, The Antiques is dark humor delivered lightly, and at a quick clip that makes it hard to put down.

  Kris and I sat down in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, where he lives, to discuss the book, its characters, and writing fiction from one’s own family experience—though, as he is quick to note, not too much personal experience. At least, not in this novel.

  ***

  The Rumpus: Living in New York, Hurricane Sandy was such a big deal thing, and I wondered at your choice of that scenario. If you came to it after having decided to have this crazed family situation and just wanted to add more drama.

  Kris D’Agostino: It just seemed to fit. A nice backdrop for the chaos. Forget if a family member has passed away. Just coming together with your family can be chaotic, even if it’s just for a minute. The storm I thought nicely suited the situation. It’s a little on the nose, but in some ways it’s not, because the storm is happening, and then quickly it’s not. I could have been super obvious with it, way more of a clichéd player in the book, but I tried to stay away from that.

  Rumpus: I think you succeeded in that. It’s an interesting way to start, too, because you think with a storm, afterwards, the action would die down. And really it just picks right up again. How did you pace it that way? Because the story itself is quite fever-pitched throughout.

  D’Agostino: I outlined this book a lot. Plot was a problem I ran into with my first book. I would think of the chapter or whatever I wanted to write that would forward the story, and then I would write that thing, and then when I was done [with the book] I hadn’t put any semblance of a plot in it at all. When it was time to sell, both my agent and my editor wanted me to go back and add more of a story to it. So for this book, I wanted to concentrate on plot from the beginning. Plot is a big thing for me, and I’ve gotten a lot better at it, but it’s a very hard thing to do. A lot of people don’t care about it at all and they can just write, and write so interestingly that plot becomes secondary. That’s fine, but it’s a very hard thing to do. And rare.

  Rumpus: Hard to do well.

  D’Agostino: Very. And I’m always amazed, especially with film—I went to film school—by a movie with one of those plots that feels like it existed already. And whoever wrote the thing just took it and described all this stuff that had already happened; it’s that well put together. I wanted to work towards that. It’s something I didn’t ever think I could do, and I’m not necessarily sure I did it here, but I came a lot closer.

  Another thing I wanted to do, consciously was have it be over the top with all the things that were happening. I don’t think it’s that wild and zany, but every time I came to a point about what was going to happen, I just decided to push it a little bit further. So with Abbott, thinking, “What’s this kid’s problem going to be?” He throws his poop around. [Laughs]. So whenever I had a chance to do that, I did it. I was keeping a conscious eye on trying to make it as frantic and kinetic as possible the whole time, while also incorporating the ideas I wanted to throw in there about death and family and grieving. Thinking about keeping the scene going full-tilt. For the most part, though, it just goes.

  Rumpus: I think that’s a writing process thing. Once you’re in it you find that it builds on itself.

  D’Agostino: Another thing that helped in that regard was that I wrote all of the character’s sections separately, basically up until the point that they all come together up in New York. The book was originally laid out that way. Then I talked to some people and it was suggested that it would be better to mix it up. At first I didn’t really want to, but then I started cutting pieces up and using blocks together, alternating around, and found it was easier to do it that way. So, that might have helped with the pacing, because when you can do one person from A to Z, and then you chop their story up, it has that momentum already built in.

  Rumpus: So you started with this situation with Sandy and your father’s death. How much of these characters did you know then? Did you see them all fully formed, or how much came out of writing through?

  D’Agostino: A lot came from writing through. It’s hard for me to recall now. But when I started writing, I definitely had the older brother, Josef, more fleshed out than anything else. And one thing I knew was I wanted to set part of it in Los Angeles, because at the time I was, and still kind of am, having a minor love affair with Los Angeles. Writing about a place or thing, at least to me, is a great way to connect to it. I’m not going to move to Los Angeles right now, but it was a great excuse to look at maps of the city. I also wanted to work in my ridiculous ideas about Hollywood and, from talking to people who live there, what I think it is like to deal with Hollywood people. From those two things, Charlie started to come out. Josef, his thing came from a fascination with Craigslist and all this weird stuff that goes on in Casual Encounters.

  Rumpus: A rich mine of material there.

  D’Agostino: Not to reveal too much about my weird proclivities but… [Laughs] If you actually start looking, there’s a lot of funny stuff happening on Craigslist. Not just spam and fake people. Real people. And I wanted to throw that in, with these weird experiences, because there’s tons of people selling their underwear on Craigslist and it’s interesting and something I’ve never read about before. But again, I didn’t want to dive to fully and write this whole thing where we analyze why this guy’s doing this. He’s just doing it, creating these problems for himself based on these fetishes he has.

  Rumpus: But if you look at his character, and the way you’ve set him up, it’s not that hard to tell why he’s doing it.

  D’Agostino: Oh sure. One hundred percent. So I started from, what kind of guy would be doing this? Okay, he’s got money, he’s probably a hedge-fund guy…

  Rumpus: You seem to have this fascination, between your first book and this one, with characters in various stages of arrested development. Even if they live full lives—Josef has a career, and so does Charlie, and she has a husband and a child—this whole family is really underdeveloped. You especially see it when they’re in the house together. Where does that come from?

  D’Agostino: The short answer is probably that I’m like that. [Laughs] I’m thirty-eight, and I feel like I’ve matured and grown up a lot in the past six or seven years. But throughout my twenties and into my early thirties, I really didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. Emotionally, in life, and in the larger world, and in terms of my relationships with other people and with my family. I don’t want to generalize and say that everybody’s like that, because there are definitely people that keep maturing and they become full-on adults with compassionate, full lives that do whatever it is adults have to do. But it’s just something that’s always interested me. I feel like I’ve always felt a little bit behind. So when I was twenty-four, I was having all these revelations I felt I should have had at nineteen, that other people were having at ninteeen. And I tried to figure out if that was a generational thing, if everyone was slowing down, because I did know a lot of people that were my age and going through the same kind of thing. Then, I thought I’d moved on: You turn thirty and everything changes! Then I realized I’d turned thirty, I’d matured, but then I’ve got all these things happening in my thirties that I’m not dealing with. Everyone’s starting to get married, have kids. I’m thinking about is that something I want to be doing, where am I headed in my career, do I want to make money, do I care? And then I guess the question is, does anybody ever get to the point where they feel like they’re completely on top of it, where they’re completely matured to where they want to be? Or do we just continue to grow, or slowly grow, or do we not grow at all? That interests me.

  Rumpus: Though these characters tend to lack that ability to question whether they’re going to ever get there. They function in this state of simply not being there yet.

  D’Agostino: I think it might be hard to write that. Or, for me it’s hard to write that sort of introspective thing for characters. People do it and do it really well, but I don’t know if that’s where my skills lie, so I’d rather not. Or maybe I’m just not really interested in people pondering those questions.

• http://www.hvmag.com/Blogs/Poptional-Reading/May-2012/Author-Interview-The-Sleepy-Hollow-Family-Almanac-by-Kris-DAgostino/ - HV Mag

  Author Interview: The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac by Kris D’Agostino
  Poptional Reading catches up with Kris D’Agostino, Westchester native and author of The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac

  MARISA LASCALA
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  When you think of Sleepy Hollow, you think of Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow, right? Writer and Pelham native Kris D’Agostino sets out to change all that with a new tale — one that doesn’t involve any headless horsemen. In The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac, grad-school dropout Calvin Moretti moves back home and tries to find his life’s purpose amidst his own debt, his family’s tenuous grasp on their house, his father’s illness, and other family dramas. We caught up with D’Agostino, who now lives in Brooklyn.

  Why Sleepy Hollow?
  I was born in New Rochelle and grew up in Pelham [on the Long Island Sound]. Most of my family still lives there, or in neighboring towns. At the same time, though — and this may be a conflict in terms — I was not that interested in describing the setting. I didn’t set out to really talk about or comment on Westchester County. I just wanted to ground it somewhere familiar, somewhere I knew.

  I’ve always been fascinated with [Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson River Valley]. The whole waterfront has such amazing architecture and a unique feel and history. It’s such a — for lack of a better word — quaint place. I think I was trying to make up for the fact that I hadn’t grown up in one of those towns. Setting the novel there seemed to be a nice excuse to do some vicarious living.

  So many new writers live in Brooklyn and set their novels in New York City. Why do you think there aren’t more about the Hudson Valley?
  As soon as I see that a writer has set their book in Brooklyn it makes me want to die. I am so uninterested in people trying to capture the young New York scene or anything remotely connected with it. It (usually) ends up being way too on the nose, or arch, or cloying, or just pointless. Life here in Brooklyn is certainly interesting and there are countless scenes here to be part of, but I’m not sure that any of them transcend the scope of bad romantic comedies or worse. For dramatic purposes, life outside this place feels much more grounded in what is real. Of course I’m being intentionally hyperbolic and you can most certainly set a novel in Brooklyn and do it well. You just have to be really careful about what you are trying to say and what elements you are going to incorporate. For example, I don’t think Woody Allen can be accused of using New York City in a phony way.

  And as far as the Westchester/Hudson River Valley setting, I’m not sure why more people haven’t tapped into the area. For me it’s one of the most versatile palates for setting I’ve ever come across. You can pretty much write any genre or style you want and place it in the context of the Hudson River Valley and it would make sense. Horror goes really well with the whole aesthetic history of the region, for example.

  The book is about a family whose members all wind up living together as adults or near-adults. Do you think that’s a situation that’s endemic in this area, or do you think young people everywhere are going through the same thing?
  It seems to me like a lot of young people, post-college, certainly in the United States, are going through this. I know a lot of people from my college class who wound up in the same situation. And I’ve heard from people younger than me that it is getting even more popular. I did a reading last week at PowerHouse Arena in DUMBO [Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass neighborhood in Brooklyn] with another author, Leigh Stein. She has written a similarly themed book called The Fallback Plan, about a young girl who moves back home post-college. At the reading, Japanese television was filming her because they were doing a special about how young Japanese kids were moving back home with their parents in droves. So it definitely seems to be a rising trend.

  The characters in your book are clearly based on your family. Did you have any reservations about letting them read it? How did they react?
  I didn’t really take that into consideration. My intention was not to vilify anyone or settle any grudges. I knew that I would end up making myself look the worst. If anything I wanted to paint my family in a realistic light and show them as they are, like all of us, human.

  I think there is also a secret egomaniac side to the D’Agostinos, and people like being put into a book. They can go around and brag or fake-complain about it. I know my mother does. She tells all her friends the “real” stories behind what’s in the book.

  You touch upon a lot of things that seem to be hot-button issues now: a family in danger of losing their house, young people hampered by student debt, etc. Did you mean for this to be political at all?
  A really good friend of mine argues that all writing is political by nature, no matter what you are writing about. That said, I didn’t mean to make any political statements. I wrote about those things not just because they were/are topical, but because they were happening to my family, or to me, or to people I cared about, at the time.

  When people hear “Sleepy Hollow,” they think of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Was that in your mind at all when you wrote the novel?

  Not consciously and it really doesn’t surface at all in the book. I think there is a way to tie that whole history into a novel, and actually now that I’m thinking about it, it could be done really well. You could have a character living in Sleepy Hollow and draw analogies to their current life or plight in relation to the history of Washington Irving and the headless horseman and the mythology that his stories set up.

  What’s the biggest difference between living in Westchester versus Brooklyn?
  The biggest difference for me is access to culture. Restaurants, movies, theater, the music scene. That stuff exists in Westchester but not like it does in New York City. Literally every day I hear about some new restaurant I want to go to. My dream is to have infinite funds so that I can eat out every single night. It’s my main focus in life right now. Food.

  Are there any surprising similarities?
  Bad driving.

  Finally: Any advice for the adrift young people out there who are about to graduate college?
  My advice is simple: Don’t worry too much. It won’t last. Nothing does. If you find yourself adrift and floundering, try to enjoy the good stuff that comes with that period of your life. I don’t wish I was 24 again, I’m quite happy where I am now, but I did have some good times back then. They were all good times, even when they weren’t.

• Large Hearted Boy - http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2017/02/book_notes_kris_10.html

  Book Notes - Kris D'Agostino "The Antiques"

  The Antiques
  In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

  Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Lauren Groff, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Jesmyn Ward, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

  Kris D'Agostino's novel The Antiques is fast-paced, dark, and funny.

  The New York Times wrote of the book:

  "There's not a sluggish moment in Kris D'Agostino’s second novel . . . with sharp, funny dialogue that never seems formulaic. More impressively, he conveys the disorienting and ever-shifting effects of grief."

  In his own words, here is Kris D'Agostino's Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Antiques:

  I have a playlist that I listen to on repeat whenever I’m at my desk writing. The list is mostly songs from the original London cast recording of Les Miserables and it probably doesn’t make for a very interesting playlist, so I’m going to focus more on music that was part of my life while I was writing and editing my second novel, The Antiques—Music that, in essence, provided the backdrop for the novel.

  When I wrote my first book, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac, I wanted the main character to be someone who listened to a ton of music, constantly, but at the same time I wanted to avoid writing about music, if that makes any sense. I feel like it’s a hard thing to do: to try to capture with words the emotions and sensations you experience audibly. It seems nearly impossible.

  The Antiques has as its central characters three siblings whose lives are informed by music in a lot of ways, but none of that comes forward in the prose, or at least, not as intensely as it did in my first novel. Charlotte, the middle child, listens exclusively to Tom Waits during the course of the book. And indeed while I was writing it, I too was going through a Tom Waits phase.

  The following list is a curated guide to several songs either inspired me, or that I discovered or, or old favorites that I revisited, or new ones that somehow intensely impressed themselves upon me and the world I was trying to write about in The Antiques. There were certainly lots of others, but these are some of my favorites:

  Tom Waits – "Take Me Home”
  This song seemed to inform the entire scope of the book in a weird way. "The world’s not round without you," still feels like the most succinct and beautiful way to express how you can miss someone even though life goes on without them. It was kind of the jumping off point for the whole thing.

  Xiu Xiu – "Dear God, I Hate Myself"
  I don’t think anyone in the novel actively hates themselves, they just want to make their lives better and overcome the situations they’ve found themselves in. Also, side note, "I will always be nicer to the cat, than I am to you," is possibly the best lyric of all time.

  Dirty Three – "This Night"
  I’ve actually only recently—as in the last couple years recently—gotten into Dirty Three. I’m not sure why I slept on them for so long, since I have so many friends who love them. I could listen to "This Night" on loop for hours. It’s one of those propulsive, emotional instrumental songs (that Dirty Three do better than anyone) that once it gets its hooks into you don’t want it to end.

  Naps – "Social Skills"
  This Florida band came out of nowhere for me. I read about them on one of the music blogs I like and then this song immediately attained a mythic status in my mind and then boom they broke up, just like that. But they left a lot behind in a short period of time. The looping guitar line, combined with the spot-on lyrics and the way the chorus repeats for so long: It’s perfect. And it also in a lot of ways reflects the emotional state of the characters in the novel. For lots of reasons, we’re not always equipped to handle the things life puts in our path and our dependence on drugs, of whatever kind, our self-imposed crutches, don’t always help.

  Vic Chesnutt – "You are Never Alone"
  This song is about a lot of different things, none of which are relevant to the novel, but at the same time, the sentiment that whatever the thing is that’s keeping you down, whatever your ailment or affliction, you are not alone as you stumble and flail through this life, is a strong one. I have been in love with Vic Chesnutt since I was a teenager. R.I.P. to that wonderful man.

  Kraftwerk – "Radioactivity"
  Somewhere during the writing of The Antiques I finally sat down and watched all 15+ hours of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. The "epilogue" to the film is a two-hour movie—unique in it’s own right—and Fassbinder had the balls to make/name it "My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf by Alfred Döblin, An Epilogue." And that’s literally what it is. He constructed a two-hour film that was his "dream" about the "dream" that the main character had based on the author’s writing of that character. Needless to say, it is the best part of the whole epic thing. And literally 80% of it is set to this one Kraftwerk song, just popping back up, over and over, and always with amazing impact. I’m not sure you can just watch the epilogue without viewing the13 hours leading up to it, but what do I know?

  Brian Eno – "The Big Ship"
  During the writing of The Antiques, I spent eight months (yes, eight months) reading Infinite Jest. After I was done I then read as much about David Foster Wallace’s life as I could get my hands on, including the D.T. Max biography Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. There’s a lot in it about DFW’s musical obsessions. He loved R.E.M. (so do I) and he loved Brian Eno (who doesn’t?) and he spoke often about his particular fondness for "The Big Ship" and how as a student he would get really high and listen to the song over and over again and try to get his head around it. It’s that good.

  This Heat – "A New Kind of Water"
  When I first heard This Heat, in college, it was one of those lame, revelatory moments that we all experience. I was played their album, Deceit, and that was it, I didn’t know there were people out there making music like that. I was still a teenager. It was eye-opening. I’d been waiting for music like that without even knowing I was waiting. Boom. I will always revisit this album and it has remained in heavy rotation for nearly a decade now.

  Joan Shelley – "Remedios"
  Joan Shelley’s voice is transporting and ethereal. Her lyrics are always top notch and her songwriting about perfect. And yet this one, with no "real" words, only a beautifully sung melodic harmony that builds and builds to a crescendo, is one of my favorites.

  Lower Dens – "To Die in L.A."
  I would not mind dying in L.A. It seems as good a place as any. I love the city and since I don’t live there, I did the next best thing and decided to make one of my characters live there. Vicarious living, the sad author way!

  Kris D'Agostino and The Antiques links:

  the author's website

  BookPage review
  Financial Times review
  Kirkus review
  New York Times review
  Newsday review
  Publishers Weekly review

  Largehearted Boy Book Notes playlist by the author for The Sleepy Hollow Almanac
  The Rumpus interview with the author
  Salon interview with the author

  also at Largehearted Boy:

  Support the Largehearted Boy website

  List of Online "Best Books of 2016" Lists

  Book Notes (2015 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
  Book Notes (2012 - 2014) (authors create music playlists for their book)
  Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
  my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays

  100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
  Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
  Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
  guest book reviews
  Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week (recommended new books, magazines, and comics)
  musician/author interviews
  Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
  Short Cuts (writers pair a song with their short story or essay)
  Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
  Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
  weekly music release lists

• The Quivering Pen - http://davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com/2017/01/my-first-time-kris-dagostino.html

  MONDAY, JANUARY 16, 2017

  My First Time: Kris D’Agostino

  My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Kris D’Agostino, author of the novels The Antiques (now out from Simon and Schuster) and The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac. Kris holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and lives in Brooklyn. On a purely personal note, I had the privilege of reading an early copy of The Antiques and had this to say about the novel: “In The Antiques, Kris D’Agostino introduces us to a messy, delinquent, outrageous family plunged into mourning when the patriarch dies. While other writers might see this as an opportunity to throw ashes of grief on their characters’ heads, D’Agostino comes at us briskly, shaking our hand with a joy buzzer. This book also reminds us that life and laughter still continue even after our loved ones have left us. The Antiques is an exuberant, lusty novel that had me laughing in the most inappropriate places. I loved it!”

  My First Reading

  I tend to seek out humor in any situation where I can find it. To that end, author readings have served me well. They can be strange affairs, and not always in good ways. I’m not sure how much of that statement reflects my own personal idiosyncrasies and how much is a fair assessment of what it’s like to watch an author read their work. If I can be honest and hopefully not terribly offensive: they’re often dull, lackluster affairs. It’s not rare for me to leave a reading feeling as though I’ve actually lost something. To be fair: It’s quite a difficult task to bring words alive by simply reading them off a page and in actuality, contrary to what people seem to think, the person who wrote those words, is not always the best equipped person to read them aloud.

  Now at the same time, I’m fully aware that readings serve a crucial function for both writer and publisher, for promotion and exposure, as cultural locus—I’m not suggesting they’re unnecessary or irrelevant in any way. I’m merely saying they can be, for lack of a better word, bizarre. Also, to make a small caveat here, I’m limiting this to fiction readings, as I think non-fiction and poetry lend themselves a little more to the group setting.

  In my experience, and from talking to other authors, it can be a challenge to make a reading engaging, even when reading the most engaging of prose. This doesn’t even factor in the potential for how the sound, timbre and cadence of an author’s voice, their inflection and intonation—the way they read—coupled with the particular passage they’ve chosen to read can cut so hard against the way the reader interprets and “hears” those words. It can certainly take away a lot of the mystique surrounding a work or an author, if you’re the kind of person who assigns mystique to authors and their work.

  I’ve seen quite a few authors (some that I really like) read from novels (some that I really like) and in most cases the experience didn’t even come close to mimicking the way the words resonated and felt, the way the characters acted or spoke, the way the scene played out, in my own head. Maybe this is more a reflection of the power of novels and the breadth of the human imagination at work. Not much can compare to how potent and influential our own minds can be. But still: readings. They are an interesting and baffling animal.

  In my estimation the best parts of readings, when it comes to comedy, are always the author Q&As. And by “best” I mean most cringe worthy. I once saw a clearly unhinged and jittery young man ask Don DeLillo if he thought the United States government was responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11th. You know, because he wrote Libra. Another time I watched as Denis Johnson tried to field a question about whether his drug abuse had made him a better writer. Listen to any Q&A and I guarantee you’ll be more amazed by the “questions” people come up with than any answer the author might articulate.

  Where am I going with this? Well. When my first novel, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac, published in 2012, I was faced with an interesting dilemma. Or at least in my mind it was an interesting dilemma. How was I going to make my reading (particularly my first reading) good? How was I not going to just show up at the bookstore and bore everyone by getting up at the podium and reading, with my not-particularly-exciting voice.

  I thought for a long time about how to proceed and what I came up with was this: I decided to let other people do the reading for me. Brilliant! I thought. My idea cleverly got around me having to read my own work and possibly ruining it.

  The novel focuses around a family—specifically a 24-year-old guy, his parents and his two siblings. The family in the novel is based on my actual family. It’s ostensibly a Roman à clef inspired by a couple of supremely strange years in my early 20s. One notable straying from the facts is that I turned my youngest brother, Tom, into a sister for plot purposes.

  The third chapter of the novel centers around a dinner table scene and this particular dinner table scene happened in real life and involved my middle brother, Chase (Chip in the book) attempting to convince us all that he had been, in his words, “reverse discriminated” against on a Metro-North commuter train while on his way to work. So I thought, why not just ask my real family, who would essentially be playing themselves, to get up on stage and read from a script and re-enact this dinner table episode. I would read the narrative parts and they would read their corresponding lines of dialogue. The more awkward things got up there, the better—the more interesting and weird the whole performance would be.

  I had no clue as to whether they’d be up for this and to complicate matters my father, who was battling advanced-stage blood cancer at the time, had been hospitalized and most likely would be there still when this first reading—the “launch” of the book—happened.

  To my surprise, not only did my mother and my brothers (I had decided to make a joke about how I turned Tom into a girl and have him read the part anyway) agree to my little experiment, they seemed genuinely excited about it. As for my father, I had another great idea. I went to the hospital to see him and brought along some recording equipment and made audio clips of him reading his lines. I then sampled the clips. The night of the reading, my plan was to hook the sampler up to the sound system and Skype my dad in on a laptop. When it came time for him to read one of his lines, I would simply trigger the appropriate sample and his voice would come through the speakers. I didn’t want to add any more stress to his life by asking him to “perform” live. He did a hilarious job recording his lines. He wanted to “nail” them and so we did several takes of each, me sitting there at his hospital bed holding a microphone up to his face and him trying different tones and approaches to the line readings. It remains one of the better memories I have of him from that period, which was not always the most fun of times.

  As Kris D’Agostino narrates The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac, brother Chase, mother Kathleen, and brother Tom supply the voices at the WORD bookstore reading.

  I’m fortunate enough to live a few blocks from one of my favorite bookstores in the world, WORD, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and the reading took place in the basement space there, which is an awesome, cozy little room. On the night of the reading there was a packed house, filled almost entirely with friends and family and co-workers who generously came out to support me. I arrived with photocopied pages I had typed up for each of the “players” in the scene. I had laid the whole thing out in screenplay format to make it easier and highlighted the lines for each character in a corresponding color. My mother was purple, Chase yellow and Tom (reading the sister’s lines) was pink. We hooked up the sampler and I ended up using my iPhone to call my father via FaceTime so he could see the whole thing and be there, remotely, from his hospital room. The sampler volume was ludicrously too high so his voice boomed out like some omniscient god-figure overhead every time I played one of his lines. I was of course the most nervous out of everyone and did my best to contain my self-diagnosed sweating problem. The reading went off really well. I got laughs in the places I wanted to get laughs, and, in my mind at least, people were into it. I had successfully, to my satisfaction, circumnavigated the problem of giving a normal, forgettable reading, the kind that I’m always mocking. It felt nice.

  The question now is: What the hell am I going to do when I have to read from my second novel?

• New Now Next - http://www.newnownext.com/19-questions-with-sleepy-hollow-family-almanac-author-kris-dagostino/07/2012/

  19 Questions With ‘Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac’ Author Kris D’Agostino
  by Julie Gerstein 7/20/2012

  Name: Kris D’Agostino
  Location: Brooklyn, NY
  Profession: Business and Technology Director at Beginnings Nursery School and I moonlight as a novelist.
  Twitter Handle: @krisdagostino

  Kris D’Agostino’s debut novel Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac is the story of the dysfunctional Moretti family. The protagonist Calvin is a pot-smoking pre-school teacher — and he’s saddled with a pregnant teen sister, a cancer-stricken, gun-toting father and a total existential crisis. Somehow Calvin’s story is funny instead of tragic. So funny, in fact, that NPR named it one of five “Funny Books With Substance.”

  Check out our interview with D’Agostino below.

  1. What are you wearing?
  Grey Uniqlo jeans and a Steven Alan button-down and the only sneakers I ever seem wear: a pair of Vans. These are blue Authentics, the low ones.

  2. What do you do in a typical day?
  Go to work and do work things that pay my rent, then work on my second novel (which is almost done), then try to eat some good food. And if it’s a really great day I get to watch a movie.

  3. What book/movie/TV show are you really into right now?
  I just finished For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’ve been claiming Hemingway as a major inspiration for years now and I’ve secretly only read two of his books. I figured it was time to increase that number to three. Also, everyone should see The Marriage of Maria Braun.

  4. What’s a trend you wish would die?
  The prohibition style jeans and suspenders and various other things that Brooklyn men seem to be really championing these days. Also men wearing flip-flops. Also anything with shoulder pads. Also the term “fashion-forward.” I heard some idiot telling the salesguy at Barneys the other day that he was “in the market for some really fashion-forward sneakers.”

  5. What do you order for brunch?
  My patent pending brunch move is to order French toast “for the table” and then get some sort of eggs/toast/bacon combo for myself. That way I never have to choose between sweet or savory. Oh and iced coffee. Always iced coffee.

  6. Who should we follow on Twitter that we’re (probably) not?
  John Wray, the novelist. He tweets in the 3rd person, as Citizen, and makes amazing NYC-centric life comments. One of my favorites: Is there a term, Citizen mused, for being pissed that a thing you secretly love has become dipshit poseur standard issue? Oh, right. Aging.

  7. What song or band has most affected or influenced you?
  The Byrds!

  8. What project are you obsessed with right now?
  Starting my model train-phase. Originally this was scheduled for my late 60s, early 70s, but I’m pushing it up. I just ordered this really amazing European LEGO train engine on eBay. Wait, did I just admit that I brought a LEGO train on eBay? Next question.

  9. What do you think is the best reality show?
  They are all horrible wastes of time and I really mean that. But there was this one-off a few years back where human beings challenged animals to various athletic competitions. Like a bear versus a man in a hotdog eating contest. A chimpanzee versus a NAVY Seal racing through an obstacle course. It was a very proud moment for humankind. [Ed note: The show was called “Man vs. Beast”!]

  10. What’s your hangover cure?
  Well for starters, you can try not getting shit-faced. That helps.

  11. What fictional character do you most identify with?
  Mad Max.

  12. What was the best vacation meal you’ve ever had?
  This is a bad answer, but it has to be Cape Cod whole belly fried clams. I never get tired of them.

  13. What’s your favorite solo outing?
  I love going to movies by myself.

  14. What’s your favorite bar in another city?
  The Dime in L.A. is pretty rad.

  15. What luxury do you think should be included in plane travel to make it more fun?
  Massages.

  16. What’s your biggest vice?
  Guitar Hero. It may be my only vice.

  17. What movie will you always watch to the end when it’s on TV?
  A Few Good Men. I don’t know what it is about that film, but I always just have to watch until Jack Nicholson flips out: “Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.”

  18. Who’s your Spirit Animal?
  Horse-man.

  19. (Picture of the week): what’s the first thing you think of when you see this?

  It makes me want to play Ping Pong.

• The Penman Review - http://penmenreview.com/spotlight/penmen-profile-novelist-kris-dagostino/

  The Penmen Profile: Novelist Kris D’Agostino

  by Rebecca LeBoeuf

  Bestselling authors Nickolas Butler, Ann Leary and Jonathan Evison agree that novelist Kris D’Agostino’s second book, “The Antiques,” is a must read. Dealing with heavy topics like death and natural disaster, D’Agostino adds humor as a broken family comes together again. Published in early 2017 by Scribner, “The Antiques,” also garnered praise from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Booklist and People.

  Have you always written?
  I think so? I mean, I can remember back to when I was maybe 10 and there were these toys called Barnyard Commandos – they were two armies of anthropomorphic sheep and pigs who battled one another on the farm. I collected all the characters and weapons and then I would use my father’s word processor to type up my own versions of different stories and scenarios for them. I wish I still had some of those actually. I bet they’d be pretty funny to look at now. In high school, I started attempting to write my own short stories. Lots of sci-fi related stuff and little bits of novels that I would begin and then quickly abandon. In college, I wrote a lot of “poetry,” which was really just a thinly veiled diary. It wasn’t until around junior year that I started getting serious about it. I knew I wanted to write novels, but I didn’t know how one went about doing that. It would definitely take me another five years until I attempted grad school and actually completed my first novel.

  What’s your process in developing your storyline and characters?
  After I’ve come up with the overarching plot or story idea I like to outline the whole scope of the novel in its own document. I’ll type or handwrite several pages, devoting a small paragraph to each scene or section of the book. For me, setting up an outline this way is great because not only does it help flesh out the plot, it also helps mitigate that dreadful feeling of sitting down to work and not knowing where to begin. I basically always know what scene/section I need to work on and go from there. In terms of the characters themselves, once I establish the rough parameters for them – who they are, what they’re looking for, what their motivations and interests and specifics are, a lot of the rest of their details come from just having them in my head all the time and eventually they begin to form themselves more concretely.

  What challenges do you face in your writing, and how do you overcome them?
  Plot is always a challenge. Is the story moving forward at the correct pace? Am I doing a good job of both developing the characters and pushing the story in the right direction? How do I get my characters the various places I want to get them to? I think the only way to overcome that is to keep writing and to keep re-writing. Polishing and revising is a great way to smooth out wrinkles and make adjustments. Another good lesson to learn is getting to the point where you are okay with throwing away sections of stuff you have written. People tend to cling everything they write, holding it precious, but I think throwing away something – a page, 10 pages, 20 pages – of stuff you think is totally fine but just isn’t serving the story or “working” as well as it should – I think that is a fantastic place to get to as a writer.

  What has the road to publication been like for you?
  The road to publication for me has been, knock of wood, relatively boring and straightforward. Obviously it’s been something I’ve wanted for a long time and something I’ve worked hard to achieve, but in terms of the steps I took to get there, nothing too crazy was involved.

  I decided to go back to school and get my MFA in 2005. I was living in New York City and wanted to stay, so I just applied to writing programs here. I was accepted at the New School and went. When I finished in 2008, I had completed a draft of my first novel, “The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac,” and I gave myself a year to try to find an agent with it. As luck would have it, I met an agent literally one month after getting my degree, in a bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I was living at the time. He came walking in while I was there and we got to talking and he gave me his card and I sent him the manuscript and he loved it and that was that. He’s been my agent ever since. Together, we did a few rounds of edits and revisions to the novel and sent it out in the spring of 2009, got some interest and ended up selling it to Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

  So really when it was all said and done, my road to publication was extremely “by the book” (no pun intended). I got a degree, wrote a novel, found an agent, sold the book. I had to work pretty hard to get all of those things to fall into place, but I knew I wanted to try to write a novel while I was in grad school and I knew I wanted to publish it, so it all made sense to just keep going and take each of those steps one at a time.

  How do you market your work?
  I promote and am active as much as I can be on social media, although, admittedly I’m not that great at it and don’t really enjoy it. Instagram is my favorite of all the social media outlets, because I feel like I get to post things that reflect more accurately me as a person and my interests (outside of writing) as opposed to just plugging the book itself on Facebook or Twitter or places like that. I’m lucky to have a big house like Scribner behind me (for my second novel, “The Antiques,” which just published in January of this year) and their marketing and publicity department is amazing and has gotten me reviewed and placed in lots of amazing publications.

  What do you wish you knew when you first started writing?
  That’s a tough one. Maybe just to not to be afraid of “going for it” sometimes. Like writing the scene you think you aren’t talented enough to write or the storyline that feels bigger or more complex than you think you can handle. I feel as though I was way more timid when I first started writing and am now more confident in my capabilities.

  Who are the authors that have inspired you most, and how have they inspired you?
  This list could go on and on, so I’ll just talk about a few. In terms of style and prose, no one has influenced me more than Cormac McCarthy. I don’t know that there is a single author on the planet who writes more cleanly, accurately or precisely as he does. I learned a lot about grammar and punctuation from reading him and his ideas about sentence structure. Like, for example, his disdain for the semi-colon (I agree) and his refusal to use quotation marks. I’m basically obsessed with how stripped down and sparse his prose is. It’s perfect.

  A more recent book that hit me really hard was Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life.” I’ve been reading and writing for so long that I’ve sort of accepted the fact that I don’t get as easily “lost” in a book as I once did. But “A Little Life” proved me wrong. It can still happen. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten so emotionally invested in a set of characters before, or experienced such a fantastically orchestrated rollercoaster of a plotline. She nailed it. I was a wreck reading that book. Crying on the subway on my way to work, having to put it down because I just couldn’t take it anymore and then picking it up two seconds later because I had to keep going. And I’m still thinking about it, months later. Her writing style isn’t close to mine at all, but she knows how to plot and narrate a book like a master and I think there is a lot I can learn from just analyzing her structuring and plotting.

  If you could keep just three books in your library, which would you choose and why?
  That’s a tough one. I would pick “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson, “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller and “The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.” “The Crucible” is my favorite play of all time and in terms of dialogue, things don’t get much better. I love to just open my copy to some of my favorite sections and read them over and over. Daniel Day Lewis plays John Proctor in the film version from the 90s and he is jaw-droppingly good in the role. “Jesus’ Son” because it was one of the first books that dazzled me on a sentence-by-sentence level. Some of the prose in it is so brilliant that it’s almost disheartening. Like why bother to try to write anything because it will never be as good as Denis Johnson? But I like that feeling too, it keeps you motivated. And Eudora Welty is just the most badass short story writer of all time and you get style points for having her on your shelf.

  Visit D’Agostino’s website to read reviews.

The Antiques
Kris D'Agostino
Publishers Weekly.
263.43 (Oct. 24, 2016): p52.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The Antiques
Kris D'Agostino. Scribner, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-1-5011-3897-3
In his second novel, D'Agostino (The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac) paints a darkly humorous portrait of the American family under duress. In the path of a hurricane sweeping toward Hudson, N.Y., the Westfall family gathers to
support patriarch George, who's been given months to live after a bout with cancer. He dies unexpectedly as the storm intensifies. Ana, George's grieving wife and his partner in an antiques business, and their three children, all with
problems of their own, are left to settle the estate by selling off a painting by Rene Magritte called Conversation in the Sky, which has hung over the mantle for decades. The Westfall children are Charlie, the caretaker of a cheating
husband, a developmentally challenged son, and A-list Hollywood actress Melody Montrose; Josef, a sex-addicted tech entrepreneur working halfheartedly to win back the love of his children and his estranged wife; and Armie, a
talented woodworker who lives in his parents' basement and pines for his high school crush. The antique store and her children's personal lives in shambles, and Ana experiences a crisis of confidence, wondering how the family will
survive. D'Agostino balances scathing and humorous commentary on the foibles of family with keen insight into his characters who, despite their myriad flaws, deserve a satisfactory ending to the worst week ever. (Jan.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
D'Agostino, Kris. "The Antiques." Publishers Weekly, 24 Oct. 2016, p. 52+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771783&it=r&asid=c822593ee057e2d218806b7b52ade7c0. Accessed 28 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771783

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Kris D'Agostino: THE ANTIQUES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Kris D'Agostino THE ANTIQUES Scribner (Adult Fiction) 26.00 1, 10 ISBN: 978-1-5011-3897-3
Screwed-up siblings rush home to upstate New York to say goodbye to their father during a hurricane.All members of the Westfall family are in terrible shape, including the dog. Patriarch George has inoperable cancer and is going down
fast, spending his last days in his living room contemplating the Magritte he’s owned since 1965, planning to leave his family instructions to sell it and split the profits. “Let them find whatever it is they were looking
for in this life. Let them be happy.” No matter what that painting is worth, happiness is going to be a tall order for this crew. Oldest son Josef is a sleazy corporate wheeler-dealer and sexaholic whose wife has left him for a
poet; even his kids are beginning to have some doubts about him. Daughter Charlie lives on the West Coast, where she's personal assistant to a demented A-list actress and has an awful French husband and a seriously disturbed
son who has just broken another child's arm and been kicked out of preschool. Poor Armie, the youngest, has boomeranged home to his parents’ basement, where he messes around with woodworking and moons over the girl
he’s loved since high school. Mother Ana is not only losing her husband—her antiques store is devastated by the storm, and the dog is on his last legs. Having just slid across the kitchen floor after stepping in a puddle
of half-digested salmon chunks, she reports to Armie, “There’s blood in his vomit.” “The dog?” “Yes, the dog.” “Not Dad?” “Your father is
asleep, I think.” D’Agostino (The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac, 2012) specializes in snappy repartee, with most scenes centered on conversational free-for-alls among the Westfalls and their entourage.A family in a
thoroughly modern mess, played for laughs.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kris D'Agostino: THE ANTIQUES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463216082&it=r&asid=df03c8beef0869408bdd7231267f90a4.
Accessed 28 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463216082

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D'Agostino, Kris: THE SLEEPY HOLLOW FAMILY ALMANAC
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2011):
COPYRIGHT 2011 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
D'Agostino, Kris THE SLEEPY HOLLOW FAMILY ALMANAC Algonquin (Adult Fiction) $14.95 3, 20 ISBN: 978-1-56512-951-1
Cancer. An overdue mortgage. An unexpected pregnancy. All weigh upon Calvin Moretti, film-major graduate, special-education teacher assistant and vaguely guilty semi-slacker. Cal actually is responsible for none of these troubles.
He has dropped out of grad school and taken work as a teacher's assistant in a school for autistic children, a job he's good at but disengaged from. But he does live at home, where his father copes with cancer, bemoans his loss of his
flying career and obsesses about death. Meantime Cal's harried mother stretches disability benefits to cover bills and� stave off foreclosure on their suburban New York City home. Cal's older brother, Chip, also residing at
home, brings a substantial paycheck home from the city, but neither Chip nor Cal are ready to assume responsibility, financial or otherwise. That doesn't dissuade Cal's younger sister Elissa, a high-school senior, from confiding in him
that she's pregnant. Therein lies D'Agostino's narrative arc. Mired in ennui, Cal watches independent and self-aware Elissa struggle with her decision to keep her child-to-be even while reaching out to empathize with her father. Cal soon
experiences a series of convoluted self-realizations suggesting he can accept that life and love carry responsibilities, to family and self. The book is modern realism, eavesdropping on a family big on hugs, vocal expressions of love and
lacing casual conversations with the F-word as they live a life less perfect with sardonic humor and fatalism. D'Agostino sketches a memorable turning point in a scene involving a wedding and a gunshot, an occasion that blasts Cal out
of the boredom generated by a world of unearned comfort toward an existentialist awareness. Cal's character is well-defined, one that grows in likability. Surprisingly, so does the self-centered Chip. Elissa is more foil than central to the
narrative, but the older Morettis mirror modern woes that cast shadows upon the American dream. D'Agostino's fiction debut winningly describes the millennial generation exploring the borders of love and responsibility.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"D'Agostino, Kris: THE SLEEPY HOLLOW FAMILY ALMANAC." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2011. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA274719186&it=r&asid=4c0bbd8cedc60acaf4ac9440d4f8f0d6. Accessed 28 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A274719186

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D'Agostino, Kris. The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac
Katie Wernz
Library Journal.
137.2 (Feb. 1, 2012): p55.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
D'Agostino, Kris. The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac. Algonquin. Mar. 2012. c.336p. ISBN 9781565129511. pap. $13.95. F
Twenty-four-year-old Calvin Moretti still lives at home with his quirky parents and siblings. He is angry about his situation--employed only because his mother requires it, and he has no money saved up to move out. In addition, his
father has been diagnosed with cancer, his teenage sister is pregnant, the family is about to lose their home in Sleepy Hollow, NY, to foreclosure, and Calvin just wants to escape it all. He gradually realizes that his options are either to
move out and allow his family to struggle alone or to force himself to grow up so he can emotionally and financially help the people he loves. VERDICT In this sometimes amusing, sometimes heartbreaking debut coming-of-age story,
Calvin's initial self-absorption and self-pity will be off-putting to readers; however, as he struggles to make the hard decisions that will shape his present and future, they will soon root for him to make the right decisions to keep his
family afloat. D'Agostino's style will appeal to Michael Chabon fans and readers who enjoy novels about dysfunctional but lovable families.--Katie Wernz, Powell, OH
Wernz, Katie
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Wernz, Katie. "D'Agostino, Kris. The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2012, p. 55. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA331003377&it=r&asid=4bd4ee1fb53b5f66a5cc2ea250b5f7a5. Accessed 28 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A331003377

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The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac
Publishers Weekly.
259.2 (Jan. 9, 2012): p27.
COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac
Kris D'Agostino. Algonquin, $14.95 trade paper (336p) ISBN 978-1-56512-951-1
Calvin Moretti is plagued with suburban angst. He still lives at home, works as an assistant at a school for autistic kids, and hasn't finished graduate school, for which he's now saddled with debt. Despite being fortunate enough to live in
a million-dollar home in upstate New York's tony Sleepy Hollow, he can't stand his loving-if-irksome family: the successful older brother, Chip; the beleaguered but devoted mother; the infuriating, depressed father recovering from
cancer after expensive treatment. Thankfully, Calvin is human enough to tolerate his pregnant 17-year old sister, Elissa, and a host of childhood stoner friends. Apathetic to the core and wildly frustrating, Calvin is a difficult character to
like but also brutally honest about his flaws, which makes him heartbreakingly human, more like his father than he realizes and kinder than he wants to be. D'Agostino's narrator wants to "know how it feels to be passionate about
something" and his keen observations about family expose the worst in him. Wickedly funny and as often beautiful as it is meandering, this debut novel reads much like Calvin's life: bursts of activity followed by long periods of idleness
and deep thought. Agent: Ethan Bassof, Inkwell Management. (Mar.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2012, p. 27. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA277520554&it=r&asid=0460165c25893d7f39844ebc48d7bd0b. Accessed 28 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A277520554

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The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac
Heather Paulson
Booklist.
108.11 (Feb. 1, 2012): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac.
By Kris D'Agostino.
Mar. 2012. 336p.Algonquin, paper, $14.95 (9781565129511).
With a sense of humor that suggests Bart Simpson, Calvin Moretti approaches the challenges laid out before him. He's stuck in a job he dislikes. He lives at home with his parents, beef-head brother, and little sister (student-loan
payments make it impossible for him to move out). Not to mention that his father is suffering from cancer, his mother is struggling to keep the house from foreclosure, and his 17-year-old sister just announced that she's pregnant. The
best thing he has going for him right now is that one of his friends just had knee surgery, which means he can get a supply of prescription painkillers to distract himself over the weekend. When things seem as if they couldn't get worse,
they do. D'Agostino's tragicomic first novel is an insatiably readable tale of a family held together with duct tape and string. Yet when the going gets tough, Calvin knows how to see the humor in life and pull himself and his family out
of an emotionally perilous situation. A memorable debut by a writer who bears watching.--Heather Paulson
Paulson, Heather
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Paulson, Heather. "The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2012, p. 30. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA280386976&it=r&asid=3d74cde6d53d311c90ac6236017a9535. Accessed 28 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A280386976

D'Agostino, Kris. "The Antiques." Publishers Weekly, 24 Oct. 2016, p. 52+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771783&it=r. Accessed 28 May 2017. "Kris D'Agostino: THE ANTIQUES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463216082&it=r. Accessed 28 May 2017. "D'Agostino, Kris: THE SLEEPY HOLLOW FAMILY ALMANAC." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2011. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA274719186&it=r. Accessed 28 May 2017. Wernz, Katie. "D'Agostino, Kris. The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2012, p. 55. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA331003377&it=r. Accessed 28 May 2017. "The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2012, p. 27. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA277520554&it=r. Accessed 28 May 2017. Paulson, Heather. "The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2012, p. 30. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA280386976&it=r. Accessed 28 May 2017.

• The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/books/review-new-novels-by-kris-dagostino-kathleen-rooney-and-others.html
  Word count: 1045

  BOOKS | NEWLY RELEASED

  Review: New Novels by Kris D’Agostino, Kathleen Rooney and Others
  By CARMELA CIURARUJAN. 29, 2017
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  The Antiques

  By Kris D’Agostino. 289 pages. Scribner. $26.

  There’s not a sluggish moment in Kris D’Agostino’s second novel, which, like his first, follows a family in crisis. Just when you think he’s overdone things a bit — the approach of a massive hurricane, a dying father, estranged siblings, financial turmoil, the threat of a redemptive ending with tears and hugs — the narrative strands unfold with plenty of dark comedy. The Westfalls own an antiques store in upstate New York, but they might lose it after the death of their patriarch, George. Family members are forced to confront their troubles and one another. The callous, ethically challenged Josef, whose sex addiction and infidelity killed his marriage, faces bankruptcy if a big business deal falls through; his sister, Charlie, lives in Los Angeles, where she works for a tantrum-prone movie star and pops antidepressants like Tic Tacs; and the sensitive Armie (“unmarried, unfocused, demoralized, penniless”) still lives at home in his parents’ basement. Their mother, Ana, doesn’t know what to make of any of them: “She’d envisioned specific lives for her children and it stung to see reality dash those grand designs.” The siblings’ reunion sets off rounds of score-settling and the reopening of old wounds, and the author lets them play out with sharp, funny dialogue that never seems formulaic. More impressively, he conveys the disorienting and ever-shifting effects of grief.

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  Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

  By Kathleen Rooney. 287 pages. St. Martin’s. $25.99.

  New Year’s Eve, 1984: an 85-year-old woman in a mink coat and wide-brimmed navy-blue fedora strolls around Manhattan, encountering colorful characters as she revisits her past and beloved former haunts. Her reverie takes her back to her early years, working as a pioneering copywriter for R. H. Macy’s. Lillian Boxfish was once the highest-paid female copywriter in the country, and a popular light-verse poet who published several books. It’s an unlikely story based on a real one: the remarkable life of Margaret Fishback, an outspoken protofeminist who also met the demands of her era by being a wife and mother. Lillian is given a rich interior life by Ms. Rooney. As a young woman, Lillian is tough and ambitious, and a regular presence in the society pages. Known for her mordant wit, she’s indifferent to propriety and scornful of romantic love. (She prefers the ease of one-night stands.) As she recalls her glamorous days in advertising, along with darker personal struggles to come, she laments the current state of the city — squalid, crime-infested and on edge, thanks to the Subway Vigilante. Undeterred by lurking dangers, she insists on roaming the streets for miles each day. “I am old and all I have left is time,” she says, adding, “Time to kill until time kills me.” Lillian’s wide-ranging meditations are reason enough to read this charming novel, but it’s also like taking a street-level tour through six decades of New York.

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  This Is the Ritual: Stories

  By Rob Doyle. 188 pages. Bloomsbury. $26.

  In these 13 stories by the Irish writer Rob Doyle, a sunny disposition is nowhere to be found. It’s a collection saturated with nihilism. Nearly all the characters are men, several are writers, and all suffer from failures of some kind — literary neglect, listless sexual encounters, creative impotence. In the opening story, “John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist,” the narrator listens uneasily to his friend Finnegan rant against Ireland, claiming that no one has ever actually read “Ulysses,” while he chugs a concoction he calls the Guinnskey (Guinness with a shot of whiskey). As Finnegan rages on, he proclaims himself the practitioner of a bold new genre, paltry realism — “which, for the time being, consists solely of me” and involves “writing rapidly, and yes, even writing badly, in fact only writing badly,” as he denounces the “vanity” of writing well. In “Paris Story,” a failed novelist, envious of his friend’s success, writes a cruel review of her work that haunts him for years. “On Nietzsche” recalls the narrator’s obsession, years ago, with writing a book about Nietzsche, a project he cannot complete. Elsewhere, an aspiring writer suffers “a prolonged psychic unraveling” when he accepts, finally, that he will never write like Martin Amis. A few of the stories seem slight, like clever vignettes. More often than not, though, Doyle plumbs the bleaker aspects of literary life with startling precision and candor.

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  Lucky Boy

  By Shanthi Sekaran. 472 pages. Putnam. $27.

  The plight of undocumented immigrants is nothing new, but in our current political moment the issue has acquired a fresh urgency, its implications more tragic. Along with trenchant observations of privilege and power, Sekaran delves fearlessly into rape, infertility, adoption, identity politics and more. She captures — in harrowing, moment-by-moment detail — the treacherous border crossing of 18-year-old Soli, who makes it from Mexico to California and finds work as a housekeeper and nanny for a wealthy Berkeley family. Her precarious existence is further complicated by the birth of her son, Ignacio, whom she’s raising as a single mother while earning around $200 a week. In catastrophic ways, Soli’s narrative will collide with the story of an affluent Indian-American couple, Kavya and Rishi, whose bedroom comes to signify a “theater of failure” after they are unable to conceive. In pitting two very different kinds of immigrants against each other — one comfortably assimilated, the other helpless in every sense — Sekaran offers a brilliantly agonizing setup. “When you have just one possession,” Soli says, “you guard it with your life.” Although a number of brutal events occur in this exceptional novel, comic relief is found throughout — namely in the clumsy and often baffling attempts of Soli’s new boss, Mrs. Cassidy, to bond with her: “Help yourself to anything in the kitchen. O.K.? Mi casa es su casa. Or whatever.”

• Newsday
  http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/the-antiques-review-kris-d-agostino-s-novel-of-a-dysfunctional-funny-family-1.12828783
  Word count: 762

  BooksENTERTAINMENT
  ‘The Antiques’ review: Kris D’Agostino’s novel of a dysfunctional, funny family
  Updated January 2, 2017 6:00 AM
  By Marion Winik Special to Newsday

  + -

  "The Antiques" by Kris D'Agostino. Photo Credit: Scribner

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  REVIEW
  THE ANTIQUES, by Kris D’Agostino. Scribner, 289 pp., $26.
  Spend a week with the Westfalls, the feisty clan at the center of Kris D’Agostino’s second novel, “The Antiques,” and you may feel better about your own family. Thanks to the author’s ink-black sense of humor, these messed-up characters are also very funny.

  As the week begins, father George is in his study, pondering the news that his cancer has metastasized and he may have only months to live. He gazes at a painting of two suited figures, viewed from the back, floating in a perfect blue sky with puffy clouds. It’s a so-called “lesser Magritte” he has owned for decades, last appraised at half a million dollars. He has left instructions for his family to sell it and split the profits.

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  George’s bleak prognosis is not the only cloud on the horizon. There is an actual killer storm making its way up the East Coast, scheduled to hit their town in upstate New York that night. Meanwhile, Shadow, the family’s 18-year-old border collie, is vomiting blood. As George’s wife, Ana, supervises storm preparations at the family’s antiques store, she is in despair. “When George and the dog were gone, what would she have? Nothing. No one.” Then she corrects herself — after all, one of her three adult children lives at home in her basement.

  By the next morning, the town is flooded, George & Ana Westfall Antiques is a pile of broken glass and splinters, and George is dead. The dog, however, hangs on.

  The oldest and most apparently successful Westfall sibling, Josef, has been ignoring his father’s voicemail messages and his mother’s texts for days, too busy making sleazy business deals and trolling “casual encounters” on Craiglist. With New York City blacked out by the storm, Josef crosses the Williamsburg Bridge on foot to see his young mistress. He might have continued to ignore the phone had the girl not begged him: “Can you answer this please? Your mother has called, like, eighty times.”

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  Clearly Josef’s ex-wife made an excellent decision when she threw him out. As the older of their two daughters puts it, “I hate this family.”

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  The middle sibling, Charlie, who lives on the West Coast, also receives word of her father’s death at an inopportune time. The Hollywood starlet she works for has just overdosed on pills (this is a regular thing) and her 5-year-old son has gotten expelled from school for putting a classmate in the hospital (also per usual). And there are not enough psychotropic medications in the world to make her husband, an obnoxious older Frenchman who is cheating on her, bearable.

  So maybe the timing of her father’s death is more opportune than it seems. At least she gets to leave town.

  The youngest Westfall, Armie, is quite a sad sack. After a brief, disastrous business career, he ended up back home, doing woodworking projects in the basement and mooning over Shadow’s dog walker, a girl he’s been infatuated with since high school. He goes to Mass with his mother just to give some structure to his empty days.

  Once the siblings are assembled and the memorial service scheduled for the coming weekend, additional players flood the scene, including Josef’s ex and her new boyfriend, Charlie’s crazy starlet and awful husband, Armie’s dog walker and her mother, and more. D’Agostino’s specialty is rapid-fire banter, with conversational free-for-alls providing as many laughs as the increasing absurdity of the situation. Will they sell the painting? Will Armie finish his memorial table? Will Josef’s daughters get an autograph from their Hollywood idol?

  Nothing works out, and it all works out — just as it should in a novel like this.

• Financial Times
  https://www.ft.com/content/a1ae2424-d75c-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e
  Word count: 676

  Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
  https://www.ft.com/content/a1ae2424-d75c-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e

  Fiction Add to myFT
  The Antiques by Kris D’Agostino — heavy weather

  A New York tale of natural disaster and family dysfunction
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  Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout — the lives of others
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  JANUARY 13, 2017 by: Zoë Apostolides

  New York is hunkering down, battening its hatches and boarding up its windows. A hurricane is fast approaching: the roads are blocked, bridges closed, flights cancelled. In Hudson, Ana Westfall is busy preparing the family antique shop for the storm and tending to her cancer-stricken husband George. He paces around his study, “watching the green-yellow-red vortex as it spun up the meteorologist’s screen”, knowing he’s dying but, as Ana wonders, “did he have to stop living?” The day starts as it means to go on: the dog gets sick, the weather worsens, George deteriorates and no one’s answering their phone. “Just get through this storm. It’ll blow over,” she thinks, hopefully.

  D’Agostino’s ambitious decision to narrate through all members of the Westfall family also introduces us to George and Ana’s three children. Josef, the eldest, is a moneymaker in the city who flings himself between therapists’ chairs, high-stakes deals and the beds of various women. “Give me fixed variables and market fluctuation . . . Give me all your bad weather,” he brays. “I’ll come out on top. I will be just fine.”

  Charlie lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son, a five-year-old with a penchant for My Little Pony and biting other children. Armie, the youngest, is still stuck in his parents’ basement making furniture, constantly undermined by his own lack of confidence — a theme also explored by D’Agostino in his 2012 debut novel, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac.

  At one point, George desperately tries to contact Josef, his favourite: “I might be dead by the time you call back, haha!”, he jokes — but suddenly it’s no joke.By the following morning, D’Agostino’s five narrators have become four.

  As the Westfalls filter back into the family home, the hurricane ebbs away — “Hudson was in wake-up mode, drowsy after its storm slumber” — and so, appropriately, does the narrative pace. After the frenzy of the build-up to the storm, there’s a more reflective focus on the family’s efforts to cope with their grief. These take various forms, ranging from a bar-room brawl to medication.

  D’Agostino relies a little too heavily on dialogue during these escapades. Although convincing, it hinders a clear understanding of motive, and leaves one with a sense that this is a novel begging to become a script. (D’Agostino attended film school and studied screenwriting.) The best moments come when D’Agostino eschews speech to simply tell us what people are feeling.

  George’s final send-off, replete with assorted mishaps, wired emotions and cyclical family arguments, is as funny as it is moving. What his legacy will amount to is unclear: the antique shop has been flooded and there’s no guarantee of future security. For all the drama of the storm, the family’s dysfunctionality remains intact. Who could honestly expect otherwise? Yet in a way, the weather has been a small baptism: the promise of change, of something fresh and new, is in the air, even if it will never come overnight.

• REadings
  https://www.readings.com.au/review/the-antiques-by-kris-dagostino
  Word count: 339

  The Antiques by Kris D'Agostino
  Reviewed by Amanda Rayner
  30 JAN 2017
  Antiques store owner George Westfall is dying. He knows it, his wife Ana knows it and so do his three children: Charlie in LA, Josef in New York City and Armie in his parents’ basement. As George passes away and a hurricane ravages through the east coast, George’s family (and numerous other hangers on) converge on the New York city of Hudson to pay their final respects. George has left the family with the following instructions: a party instead of a funeral and the family to sell everything – especially the original ‘lesser’ Magritte that he bought from a painter friend in 1965.

  It would be tempting to categorise The Antiques by Kris D’Agostino as simply a dysfunctional family story (although there is nothing wrong with that!) but this novel is ultimately about the healing nature of the family dynamic without being overly sentimental. The Antiques is, at its core, a character study of primarily flawed and ‘larger than life’ characters but somehow D’Agostino finds a way for us to care for them; even the obnoxious Josef. One of the relationships in particular, between Charlie and her ‘difficult’ five year old son Abbott, is especially moving (and occasionally hilarious).

  The Antiques takes a little while to find its rhythm as there is a lot of movement in relation to time, location and point of view in the first part of the book. This setup, however, pays off in the latter stages of the novel once the characters merge together and the shifts in point of view highlight the differences in perception between each of the characters.

  D’Agostino has been compared to authors such as Jonathon Tropper, Emma Straub and Meg Wolitzer. Based on my personal reading I was most reminded of Tom Perrotta and the Mark Haddon book A Spot of Bother; examples that, like The Antiques, successfully combine humour and drama in a contemporary setting.

• Bookpage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/20910-kris-dagostino-antiques#.WStk9hMrJR0
  Word count: 393

  Web Exclusive – January 10, 2017

  THE ANTIQUES
  The winds of change blow a family back together
  BookPage review by Hope Racine

  Kris D’Agostino’s new novel, The Antiques, is familiar in the best of ways. As a hurricane threatens upstate New York, the estranged Westfall siblings experience their own personal storms as they are forced to congregate at the family home to mark the passing of their father. While they deal with the physical damage of the hurricane, the family tries to find common ground and work together to carry out their father’s dying wishes.

  Despite a peaceful childhood spent in the family antique shop, the three Westfall children aren’t exactly succeeding at life. Armie makes beautiful furniture, but his skill hasn’t helped him move out of his parents’ basement. Josef, a sex-addicted tech-guru who lives in New York, struggles to connect with his daughters, while Charlie juggles her job as a publicist to an impossible starlet, her peculiar son and her husband’s infidelity. The Westfalls are flawed, selfish and rather absurd, but it does not detract from how realistically likable they are.

  D’Agostino first demonstrated his talent for delightful family based fiction in his debut, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac. In The Antiques, D’Agostino has once again succeeded in creating a vivid portrait of the modern family and giving readers insight into a unit that is both comfortingly familiar and exceedingly awkward. Their foibles and quirks—from braving a hurricane for a hookup to having a son that’s been kicked out of preschool—provide hilarious fodder in the midst of family tragedy. Yet, even through the absurdity D’Agostino still delivers an insightful rumination on the nature of family. Although the catalyst for the novel is a death, The Antiques is far from melancholy, instead throwing readers into the surreal and sometimes farcical aftermath that so often follows such family events.

  Although the formula may be familiar, The Antiques still feels fresh. Readers who enjoyed Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s The Nest and Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You may find a new favorite in D’Agostino.

  This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

• Star Tribune
  http://m.startribune.com/fiction-the-sleepy-hollow-family-almanac-by-kris-d-agostino/142848735/?section=entertainment%2Fbooks
  Word count: 553

  BOOKS

  FICTION: "The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac," by Kris D'Agostino

  THE SLEEPY HOLLOW FAMILY ALMANAC By: Kris D'Agostino.
  By MATT BURGESS , SPECIAL TO THE STAR TRIBUNE
  March 17, 2012 - 5:11 PM

  +
  A character more familiar from real life than literature, Calvin Moretti, the 24-year-old narrator of Kris D'Agostino's debut novel, "The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac," has just moved back in with his family after dropping out of graduate school. His life does not resemble what he'd imagined for it. He spends too much money on records, hangs out with his high school friends, smokes joints in the family's third-floor bathroom, organizes his porn collection by category, and works at a preschool for autistic kids, whom he refers to in the first line of the book as retards. You've met him before, just probably not in a book.

  Also living at home is his teenage sister, who's pregnant, and their older brother, a finance guy who wants to commission an artist to paint a portrait of him dressed as a samurai. The father, a pilot grounded by a life-threatening illness, is building a geodesic shelter in the back yard. The mother is trying to keep the house from foreclosing. Amid all this, our hero Calvin embarks on a quest for adulthood. The only problem is that he has no idea what that means or how's he's supposed to do it.

  With his vague, watered-down wants, he is highly resistant to narrative, a character in search of a plot. He applies for an entry-level position at a film company that he tells us is "at least in some way connected to a field I care about. Or pretend to care about." He has a mini-crush on a woman -- who has a literal hole in her head -- but he just sort of hopes she'll show up at parties. He wants to move out of his parents' house and into a place of his own, but then again he kind of likes it at home with its familiar floorboard creaks and "Law & Order" reruns.

  In other words, Calvin is not the slacker hero at the end of a Judd Apatow movie, the screwup who puts on a charmingly ill-fitting tie and steps over the shards of a broken bong into the slender arms of an impossibly attractive blonde. D'Agostino is more interested in extending the stasis that begins an Apatow movie over the course of an entire novel.

  Without any definitive actions, "The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac" elicits its pleasures in smaller ways: nice people being nice, a loving family cohering around ordeals. Late in the book, Calvin's mother tells him it's been such a relief to have everyone around. He's confused: We drive each other crazy, he tells her.

  "'We laugh a lot, too,' she points out."

  Matt Burgess teaches at Macalester College and is the author of "Dogfight: A Love Story."

  THE SLEEPY HOLLOW FAMILY ALMANAC

  By: Kris D'Agostino.

  Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 340 pages, $13.95.

  Review: There's no grand plot here; the pleasure in this funny book comes from the small moments and the way the family sticks together in hard times.

• A Year in the Life of a Reader
  https://yearinthelifeofareader.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/the-antiques-kris-dagostino/
  Word count: 318

  The Antiques–Kris D’Agostino
  JULY 11, 2016 ~ LIFEFROMTHESTEP
  the-antiques-9781501138973_lg

  The premise of this novel intrigued me–siblings coming together in the wake of their father’s death. One sibling, Armie, lives in his parents’ basement, shell-shocked by life and failure and possibly on the autism spectrum (which he shares with his nephew). Another, Josef, is a wheeling-dealing businessman, sex addict, and divorcee in New York City. The third, Charlie, is fighting addiction to Enabletol, her husband’s infidelity, her employer’s ridiculous demands, and the increasing needs of her autistic (although they never use the word) young son.

  Ana and George seem to have shared an idyllic life–young marriage, building an antiques business together, raising three children, moving upstate, and growing old together (or starting to). Until Ana reveals that a decade has passed since they’ve slept together. And until George dies from his second bout of colon cancer in the midst of a horrible East Coast storm.

  D’Agostino moves between the characters as their lives march on and, for George, towards a close. The characters are well-developed, even if their dominant characteristics take center stage.

  The question that remained for me was why, with such seeming idyllic childhoods, did all three children end up with near-crippling problems–two with addictions and Armie with fear and very low self-confidence. D’Agostino ends the novel with a musing about life in Ana’s voice, and maybe that was meant to wrap it all up. The characters and plot seemed well-suited to a holiday-release family movie attended by women and men who lost the date-night coin toss. It won’t be earth-shatteringly revelatory, but it will be a good escape, much like the novel.

  Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Simon Schuster, for an advanced review copy of this novel.

  Finished 7/11/16

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