experimental novel

If you’re the type of person to leave a warm bed to Google something like “experimental novel” or “magical realism books” or “where can I find a novel where drug smoking Bunraku amateur puppeteers plot the death of a drug dealer” then you should consider buying my book, Donald Goines.

If you enjoy trawling through the results for search terms like “experimental novel” or “experimental fiction novel” or “experimental books” then holy shit do I have a book recommendation for you. Donald Goines by Calvin Westra. Seriously.

It’s a book told circuitously but it isn’t self-serious or hard to read. Hell, just using the word “circuitously” makes me sound pretentious but let’s be real, it’s just a book that spins in circles and it’s fun the whole time. Really. Everyone loves it. The Goodreads page is almost entirely five-star glowing reviews where people say they’ve never read a book like Goines before in their life. If you need some fun easy magical realism with druggie puppeteers, you really need this book in your life.

It’s extremely chill, I promise.

It’s the kind of thing people who are looking for magical realism examples would immediately want to check out because it is a PRIME example of magical realism meaning you NEED TO BUY IT NOW.

It doesn’t matter what kind of magical realism you’re looking for, whether it’s indie magical realism or something more like what’s his name that guy who wrote The Buried Giant…KAZUO ISHIGURO. Yeah. It’s kinda like that but it’s also totally its own thing.

Bud Smith liked it. Bud Smith who wrote Teenager. Bud Smith who published in the Paris Review. Bud Smith who is handsome and cool and works heavy construction and likes books that are good. He liked Donald Goines. You will like it too.

I really want you to buy it.

I’m confident you will enjoy it.

I think you’ll find it weirder than anything you’ve ever read, but I think that you will love it for that reason.

Because it’s a weird book but it isn’t one of those weird books to read to give yourself a headache.

It’s a weird book meaning it’s kind of mystical fiction, sort of operating in the shadows between say crime drug goon fiction and like fantastical realism, where things seem a little larger than life but not too large. That kind of thing.

Here’s the first chapter.

Yeah, I know. It’s punchy. The whole book is smooth as butter.

And then Honduran Emerald convinces his girlfriend Dunie to go up to the pig’s apartment but kinda skips mentioning that the pig is definitely going to jerk off while talking to him and that it will be weird and of course Dunie will be weirded out because who wouldn’t but Honduran Emerald will try to brush it off because he’s trying to get drugs and isn’t always great about thinking about how other people feel.

When I was starting out, I styled the novel after equal parts Junky by William Burroughs and Dopefiend by Donald Goines. I wanted the core story of Donald Goines, that type of character, and a similar vibe but I wanted a presentation that felt almost anthropologically technical, similar to how Burroughs wrote Junky and Queer. Naturally, after five or six drafts of it, it took on a style of its own and I think one of the qualities of Goines I am the happiest with is that it just feels like it is what it is. It doesn’t, in my opinion, seem like it’s aping a different type of book. It has a distinct sentence style but also the characters and how they riff and what they do with themselves is really specific and weird like a druggy fairytale but not.

I mention the fairy god Carls when I can because it’s something I don’t see many people mentioning, including people who have read the book a lot of times. But I baked in a cast of Carls who show up to help the characters when they are in need. It was a way of padding the edges of the book and subtly giving the impression that people couldn’t get too hurt in the world.

Then I change things at the very end to hint again that things actually can get really bad. I think it’s cool. If you’re curious, click one of the links on this page and it will take you right to the buy Donald Goines page and use the features of Donald Goines plus some cool social proof such as a Bud Smith blurb to convince you to buy it.

I read over seven hundred psychology textbooks while designing the page and I think it makes a pretty compelling argument for why you should buy my book.

If that really isn’t enough for you I can keep going.

Donald Goines took eight full rewrites.

That isn’t eight drafts.

That’s eight rewrites. I wrote the book from scratch with the old manuscript as a reference and I did that eight times. I honestly discovered a lot about my own creative writing process through that journey because while I have always been a chronic rewriter, with Goines it was clear that the only way I really knew to solve a problem was to start from scratch knowing everything that current draft had taught me.

Now, as I work on what will be my third novel, moth girl, I feel more prepared than I otherwise might have because of what Goines required of me. Which, sure, is a bit of a tangent. But learning what your specific process is to writing is one of the most important aspects of writing in my opinion and it absolutely can’t be taught. It is something that you learn by doing again and again and again.

It recently came to my attention that approximately ten to one hundred people per month google the terms “rock fiction” and “punk fiction.” I would like to humbly suggest that these people also buy my book.

I can’t say too confidently that my book is rock fiction or punk fiction but I think it might be. I feel like if you gave a gander to the Amazon preview, which you can view simply by clicking the link to the ebook on the main page, you would say oh cool this is something that I want to read.

But I could be wrong.

But I could be right.

People have told me Donald Goines was the strangest book to read.

People have told me it was the best book they ever read.

People have told me they laughed.

People have told me they cried.

If you’re still reading at this point that means you’re looking for the real meaty information that is going to convince you to buy Donald Goines by Calvin Westra. And that’s cool. I’m here to give you all the meat I have. This is a book about drug doing high school kids growing up into drug doing post-high school kids. If you read the book you’ll find out where they all went to high school and it will make you laugh. It’s a pretty funny book, dare I say, one of the funniest books to come out in indie lit recently, though that’s maybe a bit arrogant of me to say, especially since I haven’t even read all of the indie books that have come out this year. But I’ve read a lot of them. And I’ve read a lot of mainstream big five books as well and I can’t think of any books that are as funny, chill, readable, and insane as my book is.

Yeah, I know, I’m obviously biased. The main characters in Goines are all named after weird, endangered or extinct birds and they go about their lives trying to steal and pawn stuff or making puppets. At one point they get it in their head they can pull off a sweet drug heist on the tyrant drug boss they always buy from (he bans a couple of the rare birds from coming into his apartment because they’re always wearing sock puppets on their hands and they never stop doing the impersonations and all around goofiness and he gets so pissed off he kicks them out).

The whole book is full of stuff like that. It’s really crazy.

Do you want to see the cover?

The cover is AMAZING.

Donald Goines took over my life and I loved every second of it. Donald Goines will take over your life too if you let it.

If you like books by indie authors, good indie books, if you’re looking for the best indie book of all time, if you’re new to indie books, if you want an indie book that is an easy read, funny, crazy, somber, interesting, that Bud Smith said he loved, that Expat Press published, that Calvin Westra wrote, that Unity posed half naked with, that Cavin Bryce Gonzalez used as a coaster and a plate and also posed entirely naked with, etc. then you need this book in your life.

You can get the Donald Goines ebook for three dollars. It doesn’t get any cheaper than that.

I personally really recommend getting all three versions. The audiobook is like twelve bucks and it’s really good, comes well reviewed, has all the fancy social proof, and the cover looks way cooler than any of the other covers of any of the other audiobooks. It’s an indie audiobook but it’s way better than any others you will find and it’s mad professional looking and sounding. It’s great.

The physical paperback is amazing and comes on really nice paper and has a great cover with great cover art and Expat Press doesn’t do print on demand so quite frankly the book is just really high quality and feels like it was worth the twenty bucks you paid for it.

And then you snag that ebook on your way out, that’s only three bucks, and now you can take Goines with you everywhere. Indie reads like this are rare, baby.

Isn’t that sweet? This is what the audiobook looks like on my iPhone when I listen to my own book while I work, which I do all the time.

The guy who did the audiobook, Kelby Losack, is crazy good and super chill and there are some funny/badass lines in the book that he reads in this super unique way and it just kicks ass.

Sam Pink made the illustration for the cover and he’s an incredible artist, as you can tell.

Michael ‘the zeps’ Kazepis did the cover design and got it looking all fancy and did the charcoal DONALD GOINES and Calvin Westra.

He did it by hand because none of the fonts he was playing with seemed good enough for him.

I feel like everybody who had a hand in Goines coming together did something amazing for it and I’m really grateful for that.

There really are no other novels like Donald Goines, not even indie novels. Read my book and tell me I’m wrong. I put everything I have into this thing. It’s crazy to think about. I would get up in the morning, make coffee, and I would write for like eight or nine hours until I had to go to my regular job as a janitor and then I would clean my building while I thought about my book and then I would come home and write and edit until I went to sleep.

Donald Goines is the best magical realism novels. Donald Goines is Haruki Murakami magical realism.

Donald Goines is Salman Rushdie magical realism. Donald Goines is Borges magical realism.

Donald Goines is about buying drugs and selling drugs and doing drugs and stealing drugs.

Donald Goines is about working at Calls and applying to work at Cigarettes and hanging out in the parking lot at Videos and getting your life quietly saved by a fairy god Carl.

Donald Goines is contemporary magical realism. Donald Goines is Kafka magical realism.

Donald Goines is easy and fast and insane. Donald Goines is indie reads, indie books, the best indie books, the best indie reads.

Donald Goines is magical realism authors. Donald Goines is magical realism in film.

Donald Goines has a Donald Goines brand in the Donald Goines universe. There’s a Donald Goines magazine.

There are late night Donald Goines advertisements on TV.

There is Donald Goines brand soft drink and it’s the pig’s favorite soft drink. The carbonation is better.

Wait til you find out how he drinks the sodas though. Everybody is still laughing about it, all these years later.