SCUMBAG SUMMER by Jillian Luft (Signed)
$20.00 / Sold Out
PRE-ORDER a signed copy of Jillian Luft’s debut novel, Scumbag Summer, out June 20, 2024!
It’s the summer of 2003 and an idealistic yet unambitious Florida college grad moves to Orlando—the most magical and maddening place on Earth. Determined to find transcendence in trash culture, she soon finds herself immersed in a torrid love affair with her married, opioid-addicted boss. From bowling alleys to barrooms, malls to matinees, through the dull refuse of suburbia with new and unforgettable meaning, this book is a love letter to a fleeting season of illicit love, rampant addiction, buried grief and inevitable heartbreak—a whiskey-soaked, deep-fried, classic rock-scored mega-chain ode to Florida, youth, and the swan song of the human heart.
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Praise for Scumbag Summer
“Scumbag Summer is a bible for hedonism and heartbreak, where bad choices give us a reason to live. While the narrator is seeking magic, the reader will find it radiating through every page. In this remarkable debut, Jillian Luft has charged onto the scene as Florida’s Eve Babitz.”—LEXI KENT-MONNING, author of Burden of Joy
“I’m going to yearn forever for the lives lived in Scumbag Summer, which hits you like a crush you’ll never get to touch, possessing the kind of exiled frisson that happens the moment before you kiss someone new—but just the moment before—because once it’s over, you’ll be wishing you were back at the beginning experiencing it for the first time again.”—ELLE NASH, author of Deliver Me
“Scumbag Summer is a burning sensation, is young and drunk, is numb bodies hurled at risk to feel alive, and the sick heartbreak and elation of want, with lyrical devastation, sensual, hot, wet, and textured in its humanity. It is sex, shock, and scandal, longing and shame, nostalgia and escape, and the precarious balance of innocence with dark hunger for meaning. Jillian’s book captures the thrill of racing toward danger, and she knows Florida in her cells.”—SARAH GERARD, author of True Love
“Scumbag Summer is a love story by way of a dumpster fire—Romeo and Juliet if Romeo was hopped up on pills and Juliet was an administrative assistant in kitten heels. In prose as menacing as its alligator-infested setting, Jillian Luft has written the summer’s sexiest (and darkest) love letter.”—KEVIN MALONEY, author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim
“Can romance be fanned in TGI Fridays? Is bondage sex better with bungie cords, Percodan, and Hot Topic lingerie? In Scumbag Summer, Jillian Luft never flinches from the tawdry, and thus blurs the merely pathetic into sublime pathos.”—JACK SKELLEY, author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker
“Jillian Luft’s language doesn’t feel so much written as conjured from a jewel-encrusted skull buried under a burned-down gas station in central Florida. She’s phenomenal. Eve Babitz with a warning label.”—TROY JAMES WEAVER, author of Temporal
“Set in a sticky, purgatorial Florida where constant heartache and emotional deadlock are elevated to forms of Zen practice, Scumbag Summer is an anti-coming of age story that blurs the fine line between lust and disgust. If Zola and Honey Boy had a baby and fed it a diet of Vicodin and Pop Rocks. To be read in a busted lounge chair by a mosquito-littered motel pool, drinking a fluorescent MD 20/20 in a stolen leopard print bikini.”— MILA JARONIEC, author of Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover
“A crash-n-burn love letter to one’s ever-fleeting wild youth. On the quest for love and drugs, or drugs and love, Jillian has written a book that feels at home on my shelf next to favorites by Kate Braverman and Misti Rainwater-Lites.”—BUD SMITH, author of Teenager
“A high-humidity love story set to a soundtrack of all the old mix CDs you lost in other people’s cars, Scumbag Summer is a kiss blown from an America that no longer exists.”—CASH COMPSON, author of People Scare Me
“A heartfelt fuck-fest. Honest, reflective, nostalgic, and beautifully written, Scumbag Summer brings the driving-home-intoxicated-from-a-shopping-plaza-dive-bar vibe you’ve been missing in your life.”—CHARLENE ELSBY, author of Violent Faculties
“Steeped in early aughts nostalgia and grenadine-soaked sunsets and sleaze gutted from the Sunshine State, Scumbag Summer is a passionate ode to reckless romance, rock-n-roll, and a season of consequence-be-damned decision-making. This is a story of a combustible but determined love, an affair which spits at the odds, offers its chin to the world, and dares fate to take a good, hard swing. I savored every dreamy, drug-fueled, disaster-romanced page. Nobody does capital-D desire like Jillian.”—KIRSTI MACKENZIE, author of Better to Beg
“Jillian is the patron saint of Floridian-flavored heartache. Scumbag Summer seduces you, fucks you, chokes you into a humid haze, and leaves you wondering if you’ll ever find anything that hurts this good again.”—D.T. ROBBINS, author of Birds Aren’t Real
“Scumbag Summer is as intoxicating as it is toxic, addictive yet absolutely off-limits. If you’ve ever hit the ground without knowing you’d fallen, if you’ve ever known illicit yearning by its strangulation of your bones, this one’s for you. Bottoms up!”—SHY WATSON, author of Horror Vacui
“In her sun-soaked and fuck-drenched debut, Jillian Luft weaves a blazing, beauty-marked cautionary tale of tainted love and familial loss shrouded in the sticky bake of Florida’s gutted strip-mall heart—an electro-fying survivor’s manifesto of rash fornication, misdiagnosed hope, and youthful folly.”—BRIAN ALAN ELLIS, author of Hobbies You Enjoy
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190 pages // Paperback
Shipping Included // SHIPPING IN THE UNITED STATES ONLY
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JILLIAN LUFT is a writer and Florida apologist. Her work has appeared in Vlad Mag, X-R-A-Y, Expat, Hobart, Rejection Letters, and many other publications. This is her first book.
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