“Extraordinary, profound, and intensely alive, this book stays with you. It’s a heady mix of the suffocating jungle bleakness of Hunter S. Thompson’s Rum Diary and the magical boyhood winters of Kerouac’s Maggie Cassidy.”
— Lauren Sapala, author of The INFJ Revolution and Between the Shadow and Lo
The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life is available now through Outcast Press
To purchase The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life click here.
“I wanted to read about the narrator from Bright Lights, Big City making terrible decisions in Iquitos, Peru. I wanted to read about the guys from Meatball Mulligan’s lease-breaking party trying to make their way across the Andes and down the Amazon River. I wanted to explore the unanswerable questions surrounding the meaning of life and the origins of the universe in a way that my buddies and I might explore them if we’d eaten a bunch of mushrooms and were laying out on a dock, looking up at the stars in Northern Ontario.
But that book didn’t exist. So I wrote The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life.”
Sean McCallum lives outside of Toronto, Canada, with his wife and two children. The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life is his debut novel.
What People Are Saying
“McCallum understands how to write the heart… Closing the final page to The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life, the reader is left with a beautiful sadness, reminded of humanity’s complexity, the love we share, and the wounds we carry. Stunning.”
— Rev. Joe Haward, author of Burning the Folded Page
“Sean McCallum writes from the gut. Semi-autobiographical, this ambitious debut follows Rosy’s self-destructive sojourn, and the friends who try to drag him back to the light. McCallum’s loquacious syntax crosses an expanse from Toronto to Peru… The Recalcitrant Stuff of Life grants a glimpse into the crisis of humankind - and the opportunity to enter a new life.”
— CE Hoffman, author of Sluts and Whores
“Ambitious, lyrical, poetic, honest - this is what real writing should be about. One poetic truth after another laid beautifully across the page unashamedly… Kerouac for the disenfranchised and the alienated from the social media generation.”
— Stephen J. Golds, editor at Punk Noir Magazine
and author of I’ll Pray When I’m Dying
“An acrid, ambitious story with a snappy Spotify playlist and all the bluesy twang of a T-bone guitar. A deluxe homage to Bukowski in all his half-baked glory.”
— The Bookologist
