Andrew Martin on the Coming-of-Age Story
Editor’s Note: Read “Deep Cut,” new fiction from Andrew Martin.
“Deep Cut,” a new story by Andrew Martin, which is adapted from the author’s upcoming story collection, Cool for America (available July 7), will appear in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. To mark the story’s publication, Martin and Thomas Gebremedhin, a senior editor at the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Thomas Gebremedhin: “Deep Cut” concerns the exploits of Paul and Thomas, teenage best friends, at a punk concert gone wild. The story takes place over the course of a single night. Why did you elect to limit the narrative scope in this way?
Well, there are a couple of answers to this. The prosaic one is that the earliest version of this story was a
