Bubblegum

said, No way, then spoke to me rudely. Go assfuck a swingset, you psycho, he said.

That cut me a little, but I came back fast. I said, Fetch me my cold Cherry Coke and Pringles. In the meantime, though, shut your piehole, cakeface.

Jonboat laughed.

The crowd around the court took a couple steps back, alarmed and confused. I possessed at that time a fair-size, however provisional measure of blacksheepish cool, and so was someone who d have normally been able to get away with wising off to Buxman in response to a slight it would have looked like we were riffing but Jonboat s laughter bent the social calculus. No one quite understood where he fit yet. Girls seemed to like him. He was certainly big. His father was Jon Jon-Jon Jason, and his granddad Hubert All Hell Pellmore. Nevertheless, Jonboat was the new kid; the new, rich, blond kid. He didn t have friends, or we were, all of us, his friends none of us were sure. For all we knew, Jonboat was too blond and rich was that a thing? It seemed like it could be and it seemed like it couldn t. Did he have the right to laugh at Blackie s expense, though? And if he had the right to laugh at Blackie s expense, did I have the right to get credit for his laughter? Did Blackie Buxman have to save face?

Blackie thought he did. So it was Jonboat or me. Someone had to hurt. I was the easy choice, and Blackie liked it easy, simple as that. He stepped in my direction. Jonboat shoved him sideways. Blackie reached for Jonboat, and Jonboat smashed his nose.

You ll pay, Blackie said.

Shut your piehole-cakeface, gaylord, said Jonboat.

Blackie loped home without buying me snacks. Jonboat round

in the world with vast energy, shows us new ways of loving it. George Saunders, author of the Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo
 
Perfect. . .While reveling in absurd premises and sophomoric humor, Bubblegum is, more than anything, a considered look at the human capacity for cruelty. [Levin] is known for his inventively frattish dialogue, inserts of transcripts and instruction manuals and neo-Jamesian and at times even Joycean sentence structure, all of which are on full display in his new venture. Forward

Tantalizing. The Boston Globe

Adam Levin s brilliant, inventive, fully imagined alternative world gives us insight and clarity about the actual world we live in.  We are implicated, warned, but what a hilarious ride. Bubblegum is a wild, ambitious, and original novel.  Levin is a wonder. Dana Spiotta, author of NBCC finalist Stone Arabia and NBA finalist Eat the Document

Monumentally imaginative. . .Levin s vibrant voice is unlike anyone else in contemporary fiction. . .Breathtakingly bizarre, this relentlessly inventive novel teems with humanity, humor, and pathos like few other recent works and is a book many will obsess over and delight in. Booklist, starred review
 
With Bubblegum, Adam Levin has created a cubist painting about consumerism, fetishization, and the increasingly blurred line between life and advertisement in a hyper-materialist, post-IRL society. Levin masterfully creates a world without the internet to examine the impact and insanity it has sewn into the American project, and he does so while gleefully skewering our unraveling vernacular. A freaky marvel of a tome. Catherine Lacey, author of Certain American States, The Answers and Nobody is Ever Missing

Funny. . .moving. . .Levin creates a fascinating world with a wild and often touching coming-of-age story at its center. Publishers Weekly
  
Levin is the new Mailer. Think The Naked and The Dead, remove World War II, insert the war we are in now; up the introspection, lower the Nobel posturing (Bubblegum!) and the pontificating of the self, keep the outsized ambition, make the damned book even larger. One wonders how the Mailer vacuum went empty this long. This is ambition and large-statement talent. The precision of the errancy is thrilling. This son of a bitch is perfect. Padgett Powell, author of You & Me

Bubblegum is startling. Ingenious in its form and meaning-making. Levin gives you everything. A hilarious and serious meditation on what we might become. To paraphrase one of its characters, the novel makes me feel understood. Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper
 
A book may be said to be a kind of fist, and the readers of such a fist-book as Bubblegum can surely not predict or prepare for the ecstatic bewilderment of the encounter, particularly when they are greeted in the depths of it by long-form theoretical analysis of their plight. Jesse Ball, author of Census