OUT NOW: Recommended If You Like, a novel by Adam Voith
paperback, ebook, and audiobook available for $0.00
“Absolutely excruciating. I loved it.”
Josh Tillman, Father John Misty
$0.00 IN THE SHOP
audiobook on Apple, Spotify, etc.
What happens when your taste is real but your world is fake? When your longing is legit but channels for expression have been defanged and sanitized?
RECOMMENDED IF YOU LIKE is a novel built from the recorded cassette tape monologues of Anderson Humphrey, a music obsessive and aspiring snob known curiously as The Christian Humper in a vast but isolated underground scene in the 1990s. The stories are oral but recall zine culture at its photocopied peak, when music was still a total identity machine.
A chance encounter with a wildly unsuccessful punk band and a newfound zeal for life beyond church camp lead The Humper and his friends on a chase for selfhood, status, and cool inside a world designed to stifle all three.
Under the surface, or maybe blending into the surface so smoothly you might miss it, there are countless undergrounds beyond those commonly celebrated in word and song. What is it like to love something that will someday belong to an earlier version of yourself? Voith’s immensely readable book explores a side of being young both familiar and strange. Recommended if you like mirrors.
— John Darnielle, The Mountain Goats
Please Kill Me from inside a confessional. Get in the Van after being baptized.
— Kevin Morby
Brutally honest. It’s so unbelievably fucked, and it’s beautiful. Get on this book immediately.
— Damien Jurado
Took me on a surprising tour through a life I did and didn’t lead. I found familiarities in deep places I wouldn’t have without this story. So complete. So beautiful and fun. Totally and utterly a home run.
— Justin Vernon, Bon Iver
Andy’s tapes are a vulgar comedy of compromise peppered with micro-economies, status games, moral codes, humiliations, delusions, and little bursts of joy as he and the band attempt to cover up their scarlet letter and avoid paying the Christian Rock tax.
For the three years he records, Andy’s dispatches are conversational, breezy, and funny, but the jokes belie the depth of The Humper’s project as he wrestles with doubt, shame, and embarrassment while seeking adventure, autonomy, and validation.
ABOUT ADAM (ME) AND THE PUBLISHER (ALSO ME)
R.I.Y.L. is the first novel set in the weird world of underground Christian Rock, the least-cool American youth movement of all time. Unfortunately, I was a participant, so I’m qualified as the author. People love to recover obscure, semi-forgotten music scenes from the ’90s, but there is no appetite for rehabilitating underground Christian Rock. It remains culturally radioactive. There aren’t any Numero Group reissues coming.
When I began work on the book, I was angry about my youthful enclosure in the Christian Rock culture, and thought I was doing satire. Eventually, I had to admit that the scene was ridiculous, but real for those inside it. I hadn’t metabolized that period of my life, and what started as reportage turned into something closer to release. Instead of writing down to that world, I wrote from inside the bruise.
I retired from the music industry recently, but my 25-year career as a booking agent also informs the novel. R.I.Y.L. is fiction, but the source material eventually led to my representation of world-class artists like Bon Iver, Vampire Weekend, the Mountain Goats, Dijon, Songs: Ohia, Father John Misty, Haim, and many more.
My post-agent life is about writing and running Little Engines, an underground small press which publishes a literary magazine of the same name and has recently turned its focus to books.
Happy pub day, Adam!
an incredible read, congrats!