"A life of quiet desperation examined with well-crafted cynicism, insight, and humor. This clever exploration of existential angst manifests in a character who epitomizes the axiom that those who can do and those who can't teach. Margrave asks the question, 'Can one get by faking a purpose in life, and the corollary--is the idea of purpose in life fake?'"

-- Manhattan Book Review

"Clint Margrave's novel LYING BASTARD is an insightful, wickedly funny and devastatingly-on-target satire of the plight of the adjunct professor in America today. In the black sardonic manner of Céline and Bukowski, Margrave manages to brilliantly satirize the contemporary American college system with its desperate adjunct professors and absurd hypocritical commercialization of literature, while also commenting on the broader malaise of contemporary barely- getting-by working class America in general."

-- Fred Voss, author of Robots Have No Bones

"In an age when the creative imagination has been colonized by shallow fantasy epics that never seem to end, in an age when artists are afraid to tell (or even think) the truth, it's such a relief to encounter a first novel with as much spirit and intensity and raw authenticity as Lying Bastard. This is muscular writing informed and built upon actual lived experience. The squeamish and the sensitive need not apply. The shades of Knut Hamsun and John Fante and Hubert Selby Jr. haunt these pages. You have been warned."

-- Robert Guffey, author of Chameleo and Until the Last Dog Dies

"A darkly humorous novel following a defeated adjunct professor as he contemplates the bleak mundanity of his life, his fellow travellers and even the prospect of his death. Sardonic but not cynical, jaded and yet tender, Berlin Saunders is a touching but uncomfortable observer of the state of being human."

-- Helen Pluckrose, editor of Areo Magazine