“Book Descriptions: Oen is submitting a story called Family Annihilator, about a guy named Florian making a YouTube series called Family Annihilator. Oen and Lee are in love. Florian and Rosebud are in love. An act of faith and alchemy, a dazzling feat of ingenuity and mesmerism, Calvin Westra writes with the startled confidence of a phenom, the hot-blooded creative fever of an upstart eager to cut a permanent swathe through the culture, and the wryly insouciant wit and inventive economy of a seasoned stylist. His imagination cartwheels past the event horizon where you end and Family Annihilator begins and he seems like a writer who can do anything. Family Annihilator is about the frailties behind obsessive visions. It’s for humans, written by a human, while extraordinarily giving in its deconstruction of personal hardship and artistic travails for unitary communion with revelation. Many books invite you to be adjacent to the process. This is the story of process generously shared in brevity. It relishes the agony of trial-and-error creation like no other, celebrates it, teasing out the joy in not being understood to ferret out the misery in triumphantly connecting to confirm the emancipatory notion that storytelling can be at once incredibly intimate and eerily alien. It restores the promise of queasy fun in discovery. We at expat don’t take lightly your trust and wouldn’t dream of letting you down. Family Annihilator is poignant, our most uncompromising and unclassifiable yet, a hilarious book that will crack you up, a slim sleevehearted treasure to directly affirm the sheer wonder of you, a wonderfully strange hit of the heart from the heartland. The experience of reading should reassure readers starved for sincerity that isn’t cloying, tone-deaf or manipulative. Weirder than alt lit 2.0. Family Annihilator is an autofiction dressed in big ideas bound to seed and germinate spawn perennially. Westra’s characters are written with the most sobering attention to their humanity. A book that is simply good, in a good naturedly uncomplicated, refreshingly unpretentious and unironic way. It is pure love, unassuming surrealism. It will make you wonder why there aren’t more Family Annihilators. That’s because there can only be one, this one, from the mind of a literal genius, Calvin Westra, who writes stories no one else has in them. This book will remind you that reading can be cool in a familiar way while disorienting in the most exotic ways, it’s a meta-seduction worthy of everything being said about it and everything that will be said about it. Another in a continuing series of important contemporary classic literature on home book format, Expat Press proudly presents Family Annihilator, a disarmingly frank experience to cast a cooling glow over the summer. Lose yourself in its kaleidoscope of metaphysical charm. It’s iconoclasm without the baggage, an ode to deep beauty too casually, flippantly dismissed and forlorn these days. Calvin Westra nonchalantly assumes the mantle of formal fantasist of the quotidian alienated creative, of making crazy eyes at you from behind a contactless caress up your spine.” DRIVE