Dustin Long: Bad Teeth

In Bad Teeth (New Harvest), Dustin Long calls into question our tendency to confuse complexity and complication. Long speaks of the disappointment his generation has grown to expect at having prepared for a life that isn't there. His purported narrator, a translator named Judas, is one of a group of tech-savvy writers searching for the Tibetan David Foster Wallace. He travels between Brooklyn, Bloomington, Berkeley, and Bakersfield, four American cities beginning with the letter "b," but such surface similitudes deflect us from deeper meaning (or seeing what's actually going on).