"Matt Batt proves himself an oddball cousin to Thoreau and Tracy Kidder in Sugarhouse, a charming and compelling memoir in which a professor of writing decides to renovate a disaster of a house."--Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States, 2001-2003 "It's hard to write funny, especially when your world is crumbling around you, but in this utterly compelling memoir, Matt Batt makes it look easy. This is a sweet and deeply memorable debut by a writer who's clearly the real thing."--Andre Dubus III, author of Townie When a season of loss tests the mettle of their marriage, Matthew Batt and his wife decide not to call it quits and set their sights, instead, on the purchase of a dilapidated house in the Sugarhouse section of Salt Lake. With no homesteading experience and a full-blown quarter-life crisis on their hands, these perpetual grad students/waiters/nonprofiteers decide that salvation can be had through renovation, and do all they can to turn a former crack house into a home. Dizzy with despair, doubt, and the side effects of using the rough equivalent of napalm to detoxify their house, they enter into full-fledged adulthood with power tools in hand. ---- Matt Batt’s writing has appeared in Tin House, The Huffington Post, Mid-American Review, Fifth Wednesday, Quarterly West, Western Humanities Review, Soundings East, The Isthmus, San Francisco Chronicle, Salt Lake Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, and in the anthology Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. Matt Batt teaches at the University of St Thomas and lives in St Paul. Learn more at www.matthewcbatt.com.