Big Man with a Shovel

"If there could ever be anything like The Great American Novel, it might look like Big Man with a Shovel, an achievement that shows just how flexible and surprising the novel can be, and how, in the hands of a poet, it may still be the most incisive means we have for examining who we are as individuals and collectively as a society."

Steve Tomasula, author of VAS: An Opera in Flatland

"The charm and power of Amato's book is in its mutability. Amato's text moves easily through working-class narration, American folklore, high academic palaver, war narrative, editorial splashback, history and ephemera, in an intelligent, erudite, and passionate novel."

Steve Katz, author of Creamy & Delicious

A work of highly unconventional literary fiction, Big Man with a Shovel is a modern-day fable in which a powerful laborer befriends a young worker only to find himself pitted against a tyrannical foreman. Set in Upstate New York in 1965, this coming-of-age drama mixes folklore, myth, and metafiction in a story that is by turns playful, suspenseful, and mysterious. Available in paperback and Kindle editions.