One Book In, One Book Out

The big news is that last Friday I sent the final (I think) draft of my third novel, The Revisionists, to my editor. I would have celebrated in writerly style, whatever that means (going on a bender? sitting down and reading all those books that had piled up during the many weeks in which I was absorbed in finishing? climbing Mount Kilaminjaro and other pursuits Hemingwayan?), but mainly I was just thrilled that a) I was done, and b) we Atlanta residents had finally reached the end of Ice Storm 2011. It was a crazy, crazy week in which all civilization shut down because we'd received four whole inches of snow the previous weekend. Which turned to slush when it rained on Monday, which was never plowed, which froze into solid ice Monday evening, and which remained solid ice on pretty much every roadway, including major highways, until Friday, due to freezing temperatures. So those of us with little kids (whose schools, of course, were closed all week!) were going a little batty by Day 3, let alone Day 5, of our captivity.



Wait, where was I going with this?



Oh yeah, books. I sent out Book 3 on Friday, and then, the very next day, the mailman (who was delivering mail again after vanishing for a few days -- aren't they supposed to work through wind and rain and sleet etc etc?) delivered to my door some hot-off-the-press paperback copies of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. For those of you who prefer paperbacks to hardcovers, your day is fast coming: Firefly Bros will be available in paperback on Feb. 8! The paperback edition looks strikingly like the hardcover, only lighter and cheaper, and adorned with lots of wonderfully fawning quotes from critics who dug it. (Is it terrible of me to admit that I like the paperback copies of my books better than the hardcovers, pretty much solely for this reason?).



Also the paperback has some end-of-the-book bonus features like an interview with me, some discussion questions for book clubs, and an author Q&A.



Mainly, I thought it was pretty cool how the book came in literally the day after the other one went out. And thus the circle of publishing life turns...



For those of you curious for some tidbits of information about The Revisionists, here's some marketing copy I cribbed from the good people at Mulholland Books, the new imprint from Little, Brown, which will be publishing it in September:



Leo, a disgraced former spy, and Tasha, a lawyer grieving for a brother killed in Iraq in mysterious circumstances, don't realize the impact their actions will have on the world, but the man known as Zed does. He's been sent back from a future utopia with a single mission: to ensure that a cataclysmic event, which will lead to never-ending peace in his own time, takes place. But there may be things Zed's superiors haven't told him...



Recalling dystopian classics like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, The Revisionists is a page-turning, mind-bending read.



Sounds just like The Last Town on Earth, right? True, my third novel will be a departure in terms of the time and setting: a contemporary novel following two historicals, set in modern-day Washington, DC, where I lived for seven years. And, yes, it has a time traveler. Which I admit can sound odd. But a number of people have commented on how ,Firefly Brothers had a science fictional element (I hadn't thought of it that way; it felt more magical realist while I was doing, but, ultimately, what's the difference? One term is implied to be more literary, the other more genre, but really they're both bending rules of reality and expanding our imaginative powers to tell a new kind of story). So this book continues the genre-bending, mixing a bit of dystopian fiction with a bit of espionage fiction with a lot of whatever you want to call my usual kind of fiction.



Look for it in eight months!



Go To Post