Jay Caspian Kang with Rivka Galchen

A murder mystery set against a grimy, seething San Francisco, The Dead Do Not Improve, Jay Caspian Kang’s debut novel, brings us Philip Kim, a bored MFA recipient suddenly sucked into a Bay Area netherworld of angry surfers and quinoa cafes following the murder of his next-door neighbor Dolores Stone, aka, “The Grey Beaver.” Kim is chased by the curious duo of bitter homicide detective Sid Finch and his partner, the stoic Jim Kim, as they all attempt to discover what in the heck is going on.

Already The Awl’s 2012 novel to anticipate, author Ryan Boudinot (Blueprints of the Afterlife) wrote the following of Kang’s debut: “Jay Caspian Kang writes like he has a gun to his head and his middle finger on the pulse of our target-marketed age. The Dead Do Not Improve treats us to his antisocial networking sensibility and a hilariously urgent voice with one hell of a story to tell. This is some killer shit.”

Kang, an editor at Grantland.com, and a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, will be joined by writer Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances, and one of the New Yorker’s top 20 writers under 40.