Excerpt from Quicksand by Steve Toltz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The man in the ponytail slides a stool closer. Aldo blots sweat from his cheeks with his sleeve. "So what'll you write about exactly? And I mean, exactly."

"Your murder trial and astonishing testimony, of course. Your trillion failed businesses. Your dire luck. Your grim health." I could go on. So I do. "Your luminous desperation. Your impressive resilience. Your humiliating bankruptcies. Your dead child." I pause. I won't go further. Maybe just a little. "That tractor-beam personality of yours. How you're always womanizing, only with the same woman. Your thwarted suicide attempts—"

"I never really tried to kill myself."

"Get the fuck."

This is such an absurd lie—his suicide attempts were so numerous, so unambiguous, so well documented—I'm forced to try a different tack. "All right. What about those late-night prank calls you used to make?" I say. "First to old schoolteachers, then to people in the phone book with the same names as celebrities, and finally to the suicide hotline." On his face, a look of embarrassed surprise, like a janitor caught shouting lines of dialogue in an empty theater. I parrot, "Hello. What kind of noose knot would you suggest? A triple bowline? An angler's loop? A zeppelin bend? Which is better, suicide by cop or suicide by fatwa? Ideally, I'd like to liquefy in my sleep, or be taken by the hand and led to my coffin. I certainly don't want to go through the whole hire-a-hitman-to-kill-me-then-change-my-mind-when-it's-too-late rigmarole."

He almost smiles. "That was for laughs."

"Once I saw you draw a finger across your throat while looking at yourself in the bathroom mirror."

"I don't remember that!"

"Remember what Morrell told me?"

"Today of all days I don't want to think about that man."

Aldo bites his lower lip. I should probably pursue another topic altogether. "That nobody more snidely dismisses originality than the terminally unoriginal," I quote nevertheless, pulling up my stool. "He meant it as a putdown. And I hate to admit he's right about anything anymore, especially in light of, you know, but it still sounds right, and for the life of me I can't think of anything new either. That's why I've decided to write about not what I know, but who. If I could deploy you as my fictional attaché, so to speak . . ."

Aldo says nothing, his eyes trained on the window, at the slender cabbage-tree palms swaying in random gusts of wind. We both let out sighs and I think how over the years we've sat in bars long enough for them to gentrify around us. The bartender calls to someone in the back who I suspect is not actually in the building. Aldo reaches into his cup holder and pulls out a plastic bag crammed with medications and counts out two egg-shaped, five elliptical, three oblong, three six-sided, four barrel-shaped, and two diamond-shaped pills of every hue, and gulps them, three at a time, with his beer. More customers file in wearing same-colored walking shorts with socks pulled to the shin or old jeans I suspect never fitted even when they were new. Aldo greets each newcomer with a prison-haunted stare. They sit at the long bar, breathing like stampeding animals at a wallow, pretending to ignore Aldo's joggling foot, his alarming leg spasms, the incremental rocking back and forth. He has never been sedentary, although these days most of the motion and turmoil take place under the skin, at the level of his nerves: beads of sweat form irrespective of air-conditioning and without exertion; his hand perceptibly trembles when he holds something; he has constant goose bumps on his arms and legs, unrelated to external stimuli, and an overproduction of saliva that he slurps from his lip back into his mouth. He's stunted and subtracted, his central nervous system has gone feral, his bowels are on the back foot. He has a lifetime of sitting ovations, cloudy urine, and skullaches ahead of him. He's musculoskeletally fucked. I write: Aldo's experience of time. His version of "past," "present," and "future" is "the memory of pain," "pain," or "the anticipation of pain." Poor Aldo. The first half of his hair fell out in hospital, the rest fled his cranium in prison. Why couldn't God let him at least keep his hair?

Excerpted from Quicksand by Steve Toltz. Copyright © 2015 by Steve Toltz. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.