Meltdown in the Cereal Aisle

In nine interconnected stories, David V. Matthews depicts the ordinary and secretly-subversive lives of high-school students, university professors, aspiring creative types, and dissatisfied office workers in Western Pennsylvania from the 1970s to today. With a meticulous eye for detail, he shows how America’s sociopolitical ideologies have shaped—and misshaped—characters who crave nothing more than the brief, transcendent moments that art, music, religion, sex, cheesy pop-culture, or patriotic hydrants can bring. Satirical and serious, hilarious and heartbreaking, Meltdown in the Cereal Aisle heralds the arrival of a quirky new talent. "Meltdown in the Cereal Aisle, is by turn, tender and tough, full of both satire and earned sentiment, all rendered vividly in a voice that is fresh and original and bristles with ribald comedy and recurrent pain. It is heart-breaking and humorous and hard to put down." —Chuck Kinder, author of Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale