Dilettantes and Heartless Manipulators

Jimmy aspires to rap stardom, or at least to make something. Josie wants out of her relationship with Phil. Josie's parents look back at an escape from a cult and subsequent lives of frustration. Jimmy's brother Elvis writes fan fiction in his room. It's a book about growing up, relationships, arrested development and artistic ambition.

Nate Waggoner has contributed fiction and criticism to Quiet Lightning, Shipwreck, TheFanzine.com, Write Club SF, Makeout Creek, Walrus, and KQEDPop. He has an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University. In 2014, SF Weekly named him one of the best writers in the Bay Area without a published book. He co-founded The-Tusk.com, a literary website.

＂Nate Waggoner writes about modern disaffection and the yearnings of early adulthood with curiosity, tenderness, vigor, loathing, and a little blood. Dilettantes and Heartless Manipulators is a visceral, unrelenting look at the years of hope that lead to the years of everything else: middle-age, mediocrity, and madness.＂ - Shobha Rao, author, ＂An Unrestored Woman＂

＂Dilettantes and Heartless Manipulators is one of those books that calls you out on your bullshit without ever sharpening the point that it is your bullshit we’re talking about here. Like ’C’mon, man, how can you not get this?’ Waggoner is the living embodiment of optimistic charm and nervous sweat, and every bit of him soaks through the pages of this book (like in a good way). Read it, is my point.＂ - Casey Childers, producer, Shipwreck

＂With a masterful use of voice that dances the line between sarcasm and sincerity, Waggoner may be best described as hilariously outrageous and absurd.＂ - SF Weekly, ＂Best Bay Area Writers Without a Published Book,＂ 2014