“Agita”: Talking with Alexander Sammartino

Alexander Sammartino’s debut novel, Last Acts, is a tragicomedy in two acts. The first is set in an antediluvian 2014. David Rizzo, the owner of a faltering gun shop at the tumbleweedish edge of Phoenix, brings on board his son, Nick, a recovering heroin addict savvy in digital marketing, in an attempt to resuscitate Rizzo’s Firearms. Together—as only Estragon and Vladimir or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are “together”—David and Nick embark on an absurd and earnest quest: to save their gun shop by saving lives. “Every time you buy a gun from us,” Nick says in the shop’s commercial (included in the novel as a screenplay), “we’ll donate a percentage of the sale to a local rehab center, halfway house, or NA chapter.” Inevitably, disaster ensues. (See act II.)