Greg Ames has written a brazen and tender book about a city and a scene, a mother and a son, and the beauty and pain of several kinds of love. Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land
The voice of this novel invites you right in, and Ames knows how to build up the world with a light hand while still getting to the complicated and painful ways we muddle through. Funny and fresh and generous. Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
In this beautifully observed debut, a son wrestles with the possibility of assisted suicide for his mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s. . . . A novel about hard choices and doing the right thing that is modest, moving and true. Kirkus (Starred Review)
Ames's depiction of James's bedside concern for his mother straddles the line between caustically comic and wrenchingly emotional, while the wry riffs on family tension and the sad state of Buffalo that appear throughout this fine first novel don't undercut the serious consideration of murder or mercy for terminal patients. Publisher’s Weekly
Buffalo native Greg Ames’s first novel is a stunning reminiscence of place—that big town at the eastern end of Lake Erie—and a poignant journey of the narrator, James Fitzroy, toward possible self-realization. . . . This brilliant first novel suggests that Greg Ames is a writer who will be heard from for many years to come. World Literature Today
In Buffalo Lockjaw, Greg Ames manages to evoke place and expose the complexities of character in a single swift phrase. It is a funny-sad, heartbreaking, hypnotically readable debut. Adrienne Miller, former literary editor at Esquire
Greg Ames has written a beautiful novel. It is infused with dark comedy and pathos and great, hardboiled prose. In Buffalo Lockjaw, love of one’s parents and love of one’s hometown mix powerfully with the mad undertow of loss that seems as inevitable in life as gravity. I’m honored to share a last name—no relation—with such a wonderful writer. Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!
Greg Ames, one of the funniest writers I’ve ever read, faces dead-on the most terrifying event in a person’s life. Buffalo Lockjaw is frightening, heart-rending, and beautiful. I pay it my highest compliment: I didn’t want it to end. Poe Ballantine, author of Things I Like About America
The story resonates of real lives, lived in a real place. Buffalo emerges as its own character and Ames writes of his city as of his other characters with a fondness for their flaws. USA Today