Debut novel Last Acts now available
“Exceptional, hilarious” - The New York Times
“Sammartino has done something in this debut work I didn’t quite think was possible: he’s written a truly secular novel about salvation.” - Pittsburgh Post Gazette
“Sammartino, who pulls off a hilarious "Onion"-style headline one minute and wrenches your heart the next, is a remarkable talent.” - StarTribune
Even though his firearms store is failing, things are looking up for David Rizzo. His son, Nick, has just recovered after a near-fatal overdose, which means one thing: Rizzo can use Nick’s resurrection to create the most compelling television commercial for a gun emporium that the world has ever seen. After all, this is America, Rizzo tells himself. Surely anything is possible. But the relationship between father and son is fragile, mired in mutual disappointment. And when the pair embarks on their scheme to avoid bankruptcy, a high stakes crash of hijinks, hope, and disaster ensues.
Featuring a cast of unforgettable characters, this razor-sharp social satire lays bare both the gun and opioid crises. Fans of Don DeLillo and Stephen Markley will be thrilled by this smart, inventive debut.
Praise for Last Acts
“Sammartino is extraordinarily good at balancing the farcical nature of contemporary America with the complex humanity of his characters. He’s also a magnificent sentence writer, with a gift for pulling poetry out of an American vernacular that recalls the early work of George Saunders, and a sense of the beauty in shoddy landscape.” - The New York Times
“Sammartino has created a wholly American novel about salvation in “Last Acts,” specifically, a book that encounters the objects of salvation — quintessentially American objects like guns, opioids, and, of course, money.” - Pittsburgh Post Gazette
“What a taut, energetic, tender, and wholly original debut novel Alexander Sammartino has written. He knows something deep about the dark heart of America that somehow doesn’t stop him from writing about it with genuine, goofy love. Somewhere, Denis Johnson and Saul Bellow are smiling because their lineage —that of honest, highwire, virtuosic writing that summons up the world with all its charms and hazards, has found a worthy heir." — George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
"Last Acts announces a brilliant new voice. Sammartino is precise, funny and will break your heart all at once. Not to be missed." — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain Gang All Stars
"It's hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel. Sammartino's brilliance and originality shine out from every page of this masterful debut." — Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
"Alexander Sammartino has penned an astonishing baller of a book so pitch perfect in voice (Tony Soprano meets Samuel Beckett) I predict it'll be the sleeper hit of the year. A gun-store-owning dad tries to save his unmoored dope fiend son, the latter literally back from the dead. But some canyon-sized gap stretches between the floundering pair. Yes it's a send up of American masculinity circling the drain. Or is it? This funny as hell tale moved me to the core. Unputdownable." — Mary Karr, author of Lit and Tropic of Squalor
"A sad, hilarious father-son redemption story that touches every American third rail: guns, drugs, religion . . . Sammartino is heir to the 20th century American masters: DeLillo, Pynchon, McCarthy, Wallace. He’s as smart and as funny and as electric a stylist and as spot-on about the dark societal carnival we’re all doing our best to survive.” — Jonathan Dee, author of Sugar Street
“Last Acts is an astonishingly strong debut, big hearted and hilarious. I swear every sentence in this novel is glorious. Sammartino writes like a millennial Don DeLillo—giving us a witty, brilliant satire of American capitalism as it is lived and felt at the margins. Rizzo is a singular and great American character: a tender-but-obtuse father, a confidence man with no confidence, a charismatic loser with a voice you can’t help but love.” - Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward.