A SIMPLE MACHINE,
LIKE THE LEVER
A NOVEL
EVAN P. SCHNEIDER
"Like its co-protagonists—Nick and his bicycle—the novel cranks out quietly subversive, smart, and funny prose that crackles with insights..." —Steven Church, author of The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst
Nicholas Allander, 31—carless and careerless—is trying to get his life on track while holding his head high. He’s trying to pay off his debt, impress his girlfriend, keep his job, cast off his introversion, and accept the world’s imperfections without abandoning his heart. Unsure of what moves to make, though, he considers growing his beard, taking up alcoholism, abandoning scrounging, and owning an automobile—before too much slips by. All the while he clings to his bicycle, a simple machine whose purpose and workings he grasps.
Nick’s struggle to position his aesthetic within the world is the story of a perfectionist who is far from perfect, who is considerate but clumsy, and may be invisible. Like Nick, A Simple Machine, Like the Lever is short, toned, observant, generous, purposeful, and brimming with bicycle wisdom.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
"Clever, poignant and unexpectedly funny, Schneider’s A Simple Machine, Like The Lever masterfully evokes the simple pleasures—and harsh realities—of keeping to one's ideals in a world where speed is revered and complexity is king.”
—David Rozgonyi, author or Goat Trees: Tales from the Other Side of the World
“Schneider's literary cycling uplift is enough to counteract the weight of the world. He nails the essence of being a cyclist and of being young—the yearning, the detachment, the attempted grace, the uncertainty, the gray confusion.”
—Jonny Waldman, founder of Zero Per Gallon ($0.00 9/10)
"All the fresh pleasures of taking a bike ride are to be found in A Simple Machine, Like the Lever. The novel is by turns innocent, lyrical, wistful, funny, and poignant. Necessity has made its observant narrator, Nick, hopelessly thrifty, but what has made him so bafflingly sweet?"
—Mary Rechner, author of Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women
“Evan Schneider's debut novel, A Simple Machine, Like a Lever, is exactly that: a deceptively simple, efficient, and potentially revolutionary machine. Like its co-protagonists—Nick and his bicycle—the novel cranks out quietly subversive, smart, and funny prose that crackles with insights on the current human condition; a book that, while never polemical, seduces you into fully re-examining the stuff of your life and somehow convinces you that the answer lies in reducing, reusing, and riding . . . just riding.”
—Steven Church, author of The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst
"Just as a simple machine is defined as ‘a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of force’, A Simple Machine, Like the Lever is a literary creation that changes the reader’s intellect and heart. With sincere and engaging narration, Schneider unfolds the spirit and the flaws, the sorrows and the loves of an endearing character whose honest observations transcend the conventional cultural obsession with profit, convenience, and speed. Like a child lifted upon a teeter-totter, like a rider propelled upon a bicycle, the reader is carried back to the invaluable world one can never purchase, and given again the too-often forgotten splendors of everyday life."
—Erzsébet Gilbert, author of Logodædaly, or, Sleight-of-Words
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Evan P. Schneider is the founding editor of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac. His work has appeared in The Normal School, Propeller, False, GER, on the McSweeney’s website, and in other publications. He has received a fellowship from KHN Center for the Arts, and in 2006, his poem “Traffic” was printed as a limited-edition broadside by New Leaves Press. Born in New Mexico and raised in Colorado, Schneider now lives in Portland, Oregon.