"A life of quiet desperation examined with well-crafted cynicism, insight, and humor. This clever exploration of existential angst manifests in a character who epitomizes the axiom that those who can do and those who can't teach. Margrave asks the question, 'Can one get by faking a purpose in life, and the corollary—is the idea of purpose in life fake?" 
– Manhattan Book Review

". . . an insightful, wickedly funny and devastatingly-on-target satire of the plight of the adjunct professor in America today.”
– Fred Voss, author of Robots Have No Bones

"The squeamish and the sensitive need not apply. The shades of Knut Hamsun and John Fante and Hubert Selby Jr. haunt these pages. You have been warned."
– Robert Guffey, author of Chameleo and Until the Last Dog Dies

"A darkly humorous novel following a defeated adjunct professor as he contemplates the bleak mundanity of his life, his fellow travellers and even the prospect of his death. Sardonic but not cynical, jaded and yet tender, Berlin Saunders is a touching but uncomfortable observer of the state of being human." 
– Helen Pluckrose, editor of Areo Magazine

When a masked gunman barges into his classroom on the last day of school, adjunct English professor Berlin Saunders finds himself playing dead on the floor, wondering if the shooter may be his own student, Adam Rowan. A novel for our times, Lying Bastrard is a darkly comic literary novel that captures a man on the brink and a nation on the brink.

Clint Margrave is the author of Salute the Wreckage (2016) and The Early Death of Men (2012), both published by NYQ Books. His work has also appeared in The New York Quarterly, Rattle, Cimarron Review, Verse Daily, and Ambit (UK), among others. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.