“Sidewalk Dance is a life-affirming, raucous romp through a hyper-contemporary vision of New York City. Fish is a foolish, lost, yet eminently lovable picaro on a quest for meaning that Fletcher Michael comically & gracefully shows us is doomed. Because as Fish (possibly?) learns, maybe the truest thing is to shun laurels & aplomb & rectitude and just BE.” —Harold Rogers, author of Tropicália

"Sidewalk Dance follows Fish, a confused young man overly bewitched by the mythology of the New York artist. Determined to become a tortured playwright, Fish doesn’t bother to read or attend plays. Instead, he focuses his efforts on looking the part with booze and drugs, and on resisting the gravitational pull of a committed relationship or a respectable career. At the root of Fish’s delusion is deeply buried trauma that he’s failed to confront. He might make us cringe at times, but we can all relate to Fish’s quixotic search, as he tilts at authenticity amidst the city’s condemned galleries and dive bars.” —Tyler McMahon, author of One Potato

"Rollicking, debaucherous, yet heartfelt, Sidewalk Dance goes all in, a take-no-prisoners bildungsroman that rattles with all the havoc and zeal of being (or at least coming across as) a viable artist in modern New York. Readers shall shimmy.” —Jakob Guanzon, National Book Award longlisted author of Abundance

From the author of Glass Bottle Season comes a gritty new coming-of-age novel that examines what happens when one man’s desperate journey to become a New York Writer leaves him more “tortured” than “artist.”

Sidewalk Dance is an American masterpiece of the artist as a deluded self-saboteur. Haunted by his brother’s tragic death in the War in Afghanistan and unable to process this trauma, Fisher shuns his elitist pedigree by abruptly quitting Yale Law School, changing his name to Fish, and moving to New York City. Once there, he sets about reinventing himself as a doomed playwright. Unfortunately for Fish, he is more of an idealist than a talent; a dreamer more than a doer. His delusions of grandeur quickly lead him into an abyss of self-doubt, addiction, identity crisis, and isolation.

The pregnancy of his would-be muse, Madame Meticulous, the debaucherous tendencies of his alter ego, Partiboy, and the impending destruction of the Hell’s Kitchen art gallery where he works combine to complicate Fish’s pursuit of literary legacy. His central delusion is that by cloaking himself in the trappings and lifestyle of the tortured artist (hurling his iPhone off the Brooklyn Bridge, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, growing out his hair, drunkenly clobbering a typewriter late at night), he will somehow become one. As paternity, unemployment, creative sterility, and romantic abandonment loom, Fish clings to a misguided hope that the staging of his play will make all well again.

Fletcher Michael
Fletcher Michael is a writer and actor based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the founder of Infinite Monkey Theater Company, through which he writes, directs, and produces full-length plays and sketch comedy shows. Sidewalk Dance is his third novel, following Glass Bottle Season (Keylight Books, 2023) and Vulture (Rebel Satori Press, 2022).