Max Winter is a graduate of UC Irvine's MFA program, and a recipient of two Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Fiction. He has been published in Day One and Diner Journal. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and son.
Praise for Exes
"Powerful. . . . Exes, among other things, is an amazing feat of
plotting and engineering, an elaborate puzzle of a book that brings
to mind Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests for the intricacy of its
carefully calibrated interlocking connections. . . . [A]
heartbreaking novel about the devastations of severed attachments."
—NPR
"The immersive and accomplished debut novel by Winter is haunted as
much by the city of Providence, R.I., as it is by the suicide of
Eli, brother of Clay Blackall, one of several narrators in this
novel in fragments who each provide insight into why Eli might have
ended his life. Providence serves as the backdrop for Clay’s doomed
search for answers, and the novel is peppered with local lore that
subtly intersects Clay and Eli’s family history. Both an
appreciation and evisceration of Providence and its residents, the
novel straddles the line between humor and tragedy in each of its
disparate parts.... brilliantly unique and incisive." —Publishers
Weekly
"There is so much blunt beauty in Max Winter’s Exes, so much
confidence in the prose and the pacing, that it is easy to miss the
bomb he slips into each story until it detonates, taking with it
any careful distance you’ve tried to maintain." —Mira Jacob, author
of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing
"This novel is a hot–heeled tango dance of desperation and humor,
fight and grace. Max Winter is a heart–stopper and a
showstopper of a writer. Stop everything and read Exes."
—Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and
Plenty and A Guide to Being Born
"I got a parking ticket, missed a dentist appointment, burned my
oatmeal and lost count of the times my coffee went cold––such is
the spell of Max Winter’s wildly inventive, flat–out fearless debut
EXES and its cast of big–hearted fuckups in 1990s Providence, Rhode
Island, whose doggedness is matched only by their inability to
learn from failure and their powerlessness to change the fact that
the game is rigged. Ferocious, gritty, hilarious, and
near–impossible to put down, EXES will make you laugh and break
your heart at the same time." —Matt Sumell, Making Nice
"Americans are puerile—all you think about is fucking and yet have
just one word for it." America, language, puerility, these are at
the heart of Max Winter’s Exes, its cast of young Americans and
their teachers, and the "teachings" of their callow culture. Fast
Times At Ridgemont High indeed. Where are they now? These
characters bivouac in abandoned malls and dormant factories, live
"on the wrong side of hope." They aren’t "much older than
babysitters, but every bit as between things." These are lives
lived as though asterisks at the bottom of a page, except they are
the page in Winter’s ingenious literary construct. The bounty here
is the compound eye these characters create from what they perceive
and call for the bullshit it is. They live amid the detritus, and
our reward as readers is hypocrisy detected and undone, a gun held
to the head of America, "there to shoot her every minute of her
life." —Michelle Latiolais, Even Now, Widow, She
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