I love the pulse of Sam Pink’s sentences, the way they can hold the gorgeous and the grisly and the hilarious all at the same time. The Garbage Times/White Ibis thrilled me and messed me up, left me feeling a little dazed and a lot changed. —Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel and Find Me

Sam Pink is the most important writer in America. This isn’t hyperbole. In a world of literary Bing Crosbys, Sam Pink is our Little Richard. The Garbage Times/White Ibis is the voice of the new writing underground. —Scott McClanahan, author of The Sarah Book and Hill William

Sam Pink’s writing is exquisitely succulent—it stimulates my intellect, makes me laugh and smile and feel complex emotions, and delights me with its tenderness, novelty, intensity, concision, and surprises.—Tao Lin, author of Trip and Taipei

With so many emotions stirred up while reading, this book is hilarious, intense, heart warming, and surreal. Sam Pink’s honesty and style make for a very poetic and lyrical prose in what I feel, reads like a modern day journey through the underworld. At the same time, brilliant and strangely uplifting. —Rob Hawthorn, Gallery Bookshop (Mendocino, CA)

Upsetting, moving, and so so … SO funny. Garbage Times/White Ibis follows a guy and his settling into the fuck you beauty of the world…Sam Pink is a writer with incredible timing, a cool unique style, and a way of describing people/places/things/states of being that I find buoyant and refreshing—this weird book made me sick to my stomach, laugh a whole lot, and markedly happier after finishing it. —Molly Moore, Bookpeople (Austin, TX)

Sam Pink’s The Garbage Times/White Ibis is unique in terms of its contents as well as its physical presentation. The visual juxtaposition of the two halves of the whole does much to emphasize the different lenses through which the world is viewed in each portion … The joining of these two works brings together two sides of the coin of lived experience; sometimes life is garbage, and in other moments it is nothing short of moving. —Jack Hawthorn, Raven Bookstore (Lawrence, KS)

The Garbage Times/White Ibis is a daring new book by the wildly original, esteemed cult author Sam Pink and it contains two complementary novellas in one striking volume with a unique tête-bêche (fliperoo) binding.

Pink merges the subversive, tenderhearted humor of Scott McClanahan in The Sarah Book and Hill William with the knowing empathy for the struggles of low-wage workers in Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back and Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life.

Beginning with The Garbage Times, Pink leads you on a visceral, eye-opening journey to the rat-infested dive bars, restaurant kitchens, and dark alleys of his Chicago. Here our protagonist stacks kegs, unclogs toilets, breaks up fights, fantasizes about killing his landlord, and impersonates a doctor to adopt a kitten. Turn over the book and then you’re in the suburban Florida of White Ibis, where exotic birds and reptiles roam freely in sunny backyards and muggy bayous. Our protagonist is biking through the swamp laughing at peacocks, going to themed birthday parties, dealing with lizards and Girl Scouts.

Freeze to thaw. Goodbye, hello, goodbye. A tale of two tales, connected by a mysterious sunlit portal.