Pay As You Go [Paperback]

A finalist for the 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award. Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize. Named a best book of 2023 by NPR.

New to town and delusionally confident, Slide imagined himself living in a glossy building with doormen and sweeping views of the skyline. Instead he's landed in a creaking, stuffy apartment with two roommates: a loping giant who hardly leaves his room, and a weight-obsessed neurotic who keeps no fewer than forty-seven lamps throughout the house, blazing at all hours.

Unwilling to accept this fate, Slide-a barber with an opaque past-embarks on a quest for the perfect apartment, pinballing through the sprawling, madcap city of Polis and its endless procession of neighborhoods. As he bounces from foldout couch to disaster-relief tent, falling in with some tough types, Slide begins to realize that he's going to have to scratch and claw just to claim a place for himself in this world-let alone a place with in-unit laundry.

An exuberant, fantastical odyssey,Pay As You Gowonders if what we're searching for is ever really out there. Its pages-surreal, biting, and teeming with life-announce the startling talents of Eskor David Johnson, who knows that all any of us really want is a place to rest our head. Both lampooning city life and confessing love for it, this story is a display of prodigious storytelling talent. It rushes by with the creative adrenaline of a one-man show; it hums with an infectious joy. [.] Told in a raucous vaudeville style that blends gorgeous lyrical descriptions with madcap farce,Pay As You Gois a magnetic novel.
-Foreword Reviews, starred review

A madcap odyssey through the hellscape that is the metropolis of the near future. [.] Like Dante, Slide wanders in circles, soaking in weirdness, tragedies, and occasional flashes of beauty. And like Joyce, Johnson builds a world that, for all its improbabilities, is recognizable. [.] Anl'