MIKE ROBERTS READS FROM HIS DEBUT NOVEL CANNIBALS IN LOVE

Cannibals in Love (FSG Originals)

It’s strange to even think about, but an entire generation came of age in the world of George W. Bush and his administration. For a decade and a half, tens of millions of young Americans watched their country go to war, slide up to the brink of a depression, and navigate seismic shifts in race, gender, and sexual identity politics…all while trying to go to college, get jobs, and live lives as normally as they could. Now, almost a decade removed from that time comes a debut novel that chronicles one young man’s life in the tumultuous eight years of Bush’s America: Cannibals in Love.

Told in a series of vignettes and based largely on the experiences of the author, Cannibals in Love is a bildungsroman for a generation still grappling with the full effects of the bizarre 2000s. Beginning shortly after the fall of the World Trade Center as the main character is about to graduate from college, the book captures the peculiar blend of lost and carefree aimlessness that comes from watching the generation that preceded yours screw everything up pretty royally. Jumping forward through events both national and personal - from the Beltway sniper to falling in love for the first time – and featuring chapters in all the places twentysomethings go to discover themselves, including New York, Austin, and Portland, Cannibals in Love is a funny, sad, and moving depiction of a new lost generation.

Mike Roberts is a screenwriter whose adaptation of Brad Land’s memoir Goat was produced by James Franco and premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Though he began writing Cannibals in Love during a time of personal and professional hardship, it was while writing the novel that his screenplay work began to take off, and he ended up putting the book on hold while he finished his other projects. As a result, the book mirrors the growth and maturation of the author in a sense of literary realtime.