Discount - Casey Gray

On the eve of the company president's visit to the store, a manager's drunk text to a coworker leads to a series of consequences as brutal as they are wide-ranging: Everyone around him will be affected. With a cast of characters featuring Ernesto, a local gang member struggling to choose a job pushing carts over a desultory life as a drug dealer; Wilma, a grandmother working double shifts to support her family; and Keith, a high school student with a penchant for filmmaking, Gray offers a startlingly humane, utterly contemporary portrait of life on the suburban fringe. A vision of an America barely getting by and assaulted by crime, corruption, and exploitation in all of its manifestations, Discount is nevertheless a triumphant and big-hearted novel that marks the arrival of a new voice we won't soon forget.

Casey Gray teaches English at New Mexico State University. His work has appeared in Ploughshares.

Casey Gray has delivered the Superstore novel that our age requires. Unsentimental but huge-hearted Discount is concerned only with literature's bottom line - honesty and empathy
Chris Bachelder author of Bear v. Shark and U.S!

Gray combines a complex vision of the wide heart of America with an eye for all the things that are constantly wounding it.
David MacLean, author of The Answer to the Riddle Is Me