A group of friends and lovers in Paris weather the polycrisis of contemporary life together and explore cycles of connecting, belonging, departing, and inevitable change in Will Mountain Cox's debut novel.

Excerpt:

In the spring, the Seine promptly flooded its promenades with water. Yellow was the water, and murky too. It matched the spring sky of election season and some of us spoke in documentary voices. One evening we crossed the river on our way to an election party. From the bridge we looked down in. There were no answers in the river. It was just pretty in its drawn-out, yellow-tough question. At the party, Brassens was playing. His music was starting to mean something new. The party had no television, but it had a view onto a tall new-build building with rows and rows of windows. We listened to the election on the radio, pausing Brassens to listen, some of us watching the living rooms of the building we could see into. There were dozens of living rooms, each with their own television making colors. When the results burst in we watched the living rooms begin churning. Hands were thrown toward the sky, toward God we guessed. And remote controls were thrown screenward, useless. The apartments with nice decorations looked angry. So too the apartments with no decor at all.

Will Mountain Cox is a writer from Portland, Oregon living in Paris, France. His work has appeared in Forever Magazine, Hobart, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Shabby Doll House and The Drunken Canal. He is the author of With Paris in Mind and was previously a co-founder of the literary magazine, Belleville Park Pages. He is a graduate of Boston University and Sciences Po. This is his debut novel.

"I can sometimes find experiments with the form of the novel a bit tiresome – I’m an Edwardian at heart – but Cox’s novel bucked that trend for me." — Tash, Burley Fisher Books’ Books of the Year 2023

Selected as a Dennis Cooper favorite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2023.

"It's kinetic in a way I haven't experienced before... this feels like a poet's novel." — Lo Fi Lit Podcast

Will Mountain Cox is a writer of consequence and vision. Reading his work, both fiction and poetry I can feel the author's need to reveal something just out of reach, be it a truth hidden or an emotion disguised. Will's new novel, Roundabout, searches for such truths and the emotions we sometimes hide from ourselves so as to carry on. Sometimes a writer comes along who speaks for his generation. Will Mountain Cox is such a writer.  — Michael Katakis