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REX
ROSE BIO
Novelist,
journalist and poet Rex Rose brags of being a 3rd grade
dropout. He came of age in New Orleans, where he played
electric guitar in indy rock groups, worked in a Bourbon
Street sex toy shop and shucked oysters for seven years
at a bar. He never returned to school in earnest until
entering Tulane University, where he earned a BA in English
on the John Kennedy Toole Writing Scholarship. During
his Tulane years, Rose wrote a monthly techno-culture
column for Tribe magazine and was also one of the
magazine's journeymen music critics. After a stint in
law school, he earned his MFA in fiction at LSU under
Andrei
Codrescu, Vance Bourjaily, Moira
Crone, James
Gordon Bennett and Mark
Poirier. At
LSU, Rose was assistant to poet, novelist and NPR commentator
Andrei Codrescu at Exquisite
Corpse, and was twice nominated for the Scribner
Prize by Vance Bourjaily and Andrei
Codrescu respectively. His short fiction has appeared
in the Tulane Literary Magazine, his poetry in
Exquisite
Corpse and Milk
magazine, his biographical work on photographer E.J.
Bellocq has appeared in Arts Quarterly and Exquisite
Corpse, and Creative
Arts Book Company, Berkeley, CA, has just published
his first novel, Toast.
Rose is a contributing editor at Exquisite
Corpse. He travels extensively in Mexico and has
recently moved to Austin, Texas, where he now lives and
writes.
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 Rex
Rose's first novel, Toast,
from Creative
Arts Book Company, Berkeley, CA, is now available by order
from most booksellers.
PRAISE
FOR TOAST
"Toast
has about it some of the feeling of The Catcher in the Rye, but
even more Day of the Locust-but neither of these overwhelms the
remarkable originality and interest of Rex Rose's first novel."
-Vance Bourjaily, Novelist
"Toast
marries the demons of New Orleans to the demons of Rose's unconscious
to create a classic character. His tattoo-seeker will take her
place in the city's repertoire of unforgettables. This first novel
announces a writer. There will be many more characters and stories
from Rex Rose. I can't wait."
-Andrei Codrescu,
Author of Casanova in Bohemia
"Toast
is a muscle-car montage of midgets and freaks, trailer-trash tattooists
and other sideshow rejects thrown into a world of explosions,
obsession, neuroses and narcotics-all served up by Rex Rose, a
writer who will knock your socks off."
-Mark Spitzer, Author of Bottom Feeder
"Rose
delves fearlessly into his complex and seemingly self-contradictory
characters." (Read
entire Booklist review on Amazon.)
-Bonnie
Johnston, Booklist
"Rose
is the ringmaster of this circus in its entirety, and there is
great pleasure in watching him work. If surface is all these characters
know, or all they think there is to know, Rose manages to delineate
them with a level of detail that shows compassion as well as wit."
(Read whole review.)
-J.D.
Smith, American
Book Review
Readers
beware: Toast is hip. Ultra-hip. Toast
is an in-your-face, narcotic hip-trip through millennial New Orleans.
Toast has a big-breasted, dreadlock-babe tour guide. Toast
is tattoo-hip, polyester-hip, Delta 88 and Roadrunner-hip. Trailer-park-hip.
Light-bondage-hip. Smart-ass, punk-rock, wink-wink, Doc-Martens-hip.
Toast is self-consciously hip in the way that only the
truly hip (or hipless) can be. (Read
whole review.)
-R.
Becker, New
Delta Review
SO
WHAT'S IT ABOUT?
By
the time dreadlocked and pierced Tania comes home to New Orleans
to get her snake tattoo completed, the seemingly simple task has
gotten more difficult than she could have ever imagined. If she
can't find a way to pay for the "tat" quickly, she must stay forever
unfinished. Enter Big Marcus, a British hipster, who falls for
Tania and tries to extract her from her maze of bad judgement.
Yet he, too, loses his way as their lives enmesh. The unlikely
pair then labor to bring a subcutaneous work of art into a world
that couldn't possibly understand their obsessions. In their milieu
of loonies, lovers, tattooists, transvestites and French Quarter
freaks, the impossible becomes the merely improbable, and common
sense gets as rare as an honest cop.
Toast is an intellectual action novel--a darkly funny love story
with kinship to Irvine Welsh, Denis Johnson, Harry Crews and John
Kennedy Toole. Andrei Codrescu has placed Toast in the "new wave
of one-word titled novels originating in the swamp at Baton Rouge.
It's too early to say if it's a school or not but certain elements
are there: unleashed gutter sexuality, over-the-top perils faced
by the protagonists, disdain for psychology, and downright disrespect
for authority."
Toast emerged both as tender goodbye and profane salute
to the unlikely beauty Rose knew in the decadent subcultures of
New Orleans. Expect muscle cars, hard drugs, characters skirting
the edges of our sympathies, unlikely sexuality and body thievery.
READ AN EXCERPT OF TOAST HERE
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