In the opening story of Rohin Guha’s Relief Work we are treated to vomit, Steve Madden shoes, diarrhea, and the euphemism “eat-hole.” Later there are blow jobs, teenagers, mothers, grandmothers, ghost dogs leaving ghost shits, and a keen yearning for connection and continuity; if you’re smart--and you are--then you know that all these things are little glowing marks on the axis of life that can only be puzzled out long after the fact. In Rohin’s world, we go home, live, drink coffee, unfurl, fuck, and fall asleep with the puzzle pieces stuck to our cheek. We wake up and laugh at the reddened indentations on our faces, and even though our small tragedies make us ache something terrible, we call our mamas and tell them we love them. Relief Work is a smart, funny, nasty little darling wretch of a mama, and you will love her. Promise.

"The book isn't long -- it's 56 pages -- but the stories are poignant and lyrical (Guha is not afraid to use beautiful and even ornate words), and offer a mix of hyper-realism and fantasy." - Matthew Gallaway

"Guha’s sense of atmosphere is savage; the New York of these stories droops and wavers and stinks in a clammy, vibrational heat. Guha’s characters are like glass, showing hairline fractures, shattering at acute pressures. Guha’s vignettes resemble snowglobes, polished and fantastically static on the shelf and meanwhile aswirl with interior tempest. Relief Work is what all work by young writers should be, and what established novelists forget they once were: not merely confessional, or personal, but desperate." - Miles Klee