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Beautiful people always get what they want.
Elizabeth Salas, single, middle-aged, and mostly confined to her room, lives in a faceless city in the American Southwest. She has little hope for the future. And then a young man named Jace Jason walks through the door…
Epic in scope, The Moon Down to Earth is filled with living, breathing characters rarely seen in modern novels today.
Look no further for the great American novel. James Nulick has lusted, labored and agonized to deliver just that. The Moon Down to Earth does more to remind us what the form is capable of than any in recent memory. With its almost unbearably intimate and probing portrayals of its richly inhabited characters, through their rolling, cascading thoughts, Nulick situates us in their deepest interiors and implicates us in their crimes. Río Seco is a Hispanic neighborhood in North Hill, a barrio evocative of the essence of the American Southwest. Moon follows eight coexisting lives as they navigate the quotidian and confront uncomfortable truths about themselves and the world, our world, which their humanity must reckon with. It so completely submerges us in the milieux that you can smell the dirt and desert dust. It never objectifies, never panders, it interrogates and provokes, it’s the kind of book that’ll light up parts of your brain you haven’t used in a very long time. It’s an experience like no other which will jolt a reader into recognition of what it is to be alive and human in 21st century America, with all its dimmed promises and tragic dimensions, its numbing vibrations, ebbings and flowings, its coruscating, convulsing noise and seductively unspeakable pinched nerve promises. Mystifying in its testament to our universal condition with respect to alien longings, Moon may as well have been programmed by an extraterrestrial on an ancient technology in some lost future long ago. Intoxicating and hallucinatory, The Moon Down to Earth stimulates in such a way as to lay bare everything you’re hiding. It reads you as you read it. Don’t miss this singular experience of sharing time on this rock together and alone. Nulick has put it all here in this extraordinary feat of revelation, defiant in its sensitivity and tireless determination to challenge the limits of writing.
Novels need human beings, and if there’s something James Nulick’s novel The Moon Down to Earth has, it is human beings, in all their multifold, messy complexity. By the end I felt as if I knew them intimately, from their musical tastes to the smell of their pillows. These desperate women and men aren’t just living on the edge, they’re dissolving in the singularity, the lapsarian wasteland of 21st century America, but Nulick allows a frail, fungal numinosity to glow through the cracks.—James Champagne, author of Harlem Smoke
James Nulick’s writing is tender and knowing as he explores, in The Moon Down to Earth, the inner lives of outsiders, the longings and disappointments, the fantasy and reality of pure quotidian existence. It is achingly beautiful in its description of the desires and disappointments of the neglected and the invisible.—Steve Finbow, author of The Mindshaft
James Nulick’s The Moon Down to Earth is a multi-narrative, unconventional, exciting novel in the spirit of William T. Vollmann—moving, sad, and at times, humorous. The Moon Down to Earth gives us hope for the future of the American novel.—Brandon Hobson, author of The Removed
In The Moon Down to Earth, the definitions of conventional beauty and acceptable desire are ripped open and turned inside out. James Nulick’s characters felt utterly alive to me. This is a fantastic novel that will stay with me a long time.—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
With The Moon Down to Earth, James Nulick has succeeded in crafting some of the most perfectly sublime stand-alone sentences I have ever seen in a modern American novel.—Mike Kleine, author of Kanley Stubrick
James Nulick’s prose in The Moon Down to Earth is extraordinary, once harsh and tender, flaying and consoling, yet also enlivened by wit and erudition. The results are deeply revealing of the body’s incantatory rhythms, the somatic thought-forms. In this manner he delves with his reader to the limit of his characters’ souls.—Jonathan Lethem
The Moon Down to Earth is a hypnotic and frightening exploration of psychosis, though not without moments of strange warmth and tenderness. The hopes and desires of its various narrators—a bed-ridden social worker, a cosmos-minded pizza courier, a widower thirsting for sex and death—twist out toward each other like the tips of fractals before curling inward and collapsing. Here, Nulick beautifully captures the sheer psychedelia of human existence, and the myriad ways we devour each another.—B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
There is a sentence in James Nulick’s The Moon Down to Earth that I copied by hand so I could practice writing something more beautiful than I am currently capable of.—Christopher Zeischegg, author of The Magician
File under:
James Nulick
Anxiety Press / Chicago
Fiction / Poetry
