Death Row Restaurant

Daniel Gonzalez is the author of Death Row Restaurant. His work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Hobart, The Fiddleback, Defenestration, Pravic, The American Book Review, Nonsite and other places. He lives in Evanston, Illinois and can be contacted on Twitter @DRRmarch2024.

"Gonzalez has married Americans’ childlike sense that TV characters are real people with the now-warped Horatio Alger notion that anyone can come up with the next big thing if one taps into the underbelly of fad fascinations, like celebrities’ real-life downfalls and obsession with psychopathic spree killers. Around the edges flicker our common annoyances with aspects of everyday life from airline-travel protocol, to celebrity chefs, to theme restaurants, to the way failed relationships continue to affect us. With a style at once deadpan and tongue-in-cheek, Gonzalez has tweaked the definitions of representative, realistic and dystopian fiction." —Cris Mazza, author of It's No Puzzle: A Memoir in Artifact and How to Leave a Country“In a world of tradeoffs, how do we live an authentic life? Thus wonder a pair of earnest and loveable seekers so hungry for lives without duplicity or regret that they slip down a rabbit-hole proposition: that psychopaths will show them the way. Funny, upsetting, and unique, Death Row Restaurant is a prison-cooked satire that hits the spot, and throws away the key.” —Alex Shakar, author of Luminarium"Death and ingestion, culinary art and literary art, the act of killing and the act of cooking—Death Row Restaurant probes each of these and more, exploring nothing less than the violence underwritten by our present age. Gonzalez is cooking with gas. A darkly hilarious and innovative novel." —Brooks Sterritt, author of The History Of America In My Lifetime