I have some author news and it sounds big, but it isn’t.
I finished the manuscript for a new novel.
For me, the work of a book breaks down as such:
40% writing the thing
20% getting it published
30% promotion
10% living with it for the rest of your life as one might with a ghost
And that’s if it goes well.
As I said, I’ve only done the first part.
Onto what I’ve been reading…
The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran
It’s more of a coincidence than a trend, perhaps, but this month and last month I launched this newsletter with a self-published title. Both authors — Jarett Kobek last month and Sara Gran today — are longstanding writers. Both are traditionally published, revered for innovation and novelty, and both live in California rather than New York. I don’t know what it means, but reading The Book of the Most Precious Substance feels mildly damning for big publishing. This is a commercial book, full of incident and forward momentum, and people are buying it. And yet, here it is, fresh from a print-on-demand machine.
Gran’s latest is the story of Lily Albrecht, an antique book dealer. Traumatised by the comatose state of her partner, and with medical bills piling up, Lily is on the hunt for a rare book of sex magic, sought after by a cohort of sinister elites. What the manual promises is power, and along the way Lily finds herself desirous and desperate.
As always with Gran, a grim noir air settles over proceedings and the reason to read this — and all her work, in fact — is the world-building. Her work exists in deeply idiosyncratic spaces: very gritty and real, but filled with its own lore and, in this case, a functioning magic system that I didn’t doubt for a second, despite it residing within a crime novel. That’s how subtly she threads the needle.
The Talent Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
What more is there to say about Highsmith’s first entry into the Ripliad? A canonised classic, The Talented Mr Ripley was published in 1955, and I’m tempted to describe it as contemporary, but it’s not, is it? The book is literary crime, character-focused, vivid and ornate. It feels like Donna Tartt in places. Which is a great pitch. Except, of course, it wouldn’t be published today. Ripley is too low-key in his villainy— his wound way too obscured — and he’s maybe gay, and maybe working class, and all that murkiness would demand some comment on who created him and why. To which, Highsmith is the last person a publicist could turn to. She was a drunken, misanthropic weirdo (I’m being generous). So now we have this book — a marvel — but also something travelling into the future with us on its own parallel track.
Friend of the Devil by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
I’m not a big comics reader, truth be told. The medium holds almost no allure, in and of itself. I read the best stuff I can find in my local library, but that’s about as much energy as I have for it. That said, I always read Brubaker and Phillips. Their Reckless and Criminal titles are rock solid crime stories, and I’m always impressed by the concision involved. On top of which, Brubaker’s writing — especially the first-person stuff — is noir to the bone. Every moment of these tales seems to exist in the civil twilight between regret and revenge.
Friend of the Devil is their occult hippie book. Think cults, secret nazis and runaways, and file this under Sixties-revisionism alongside other stuff I’ve mentioned lately.
That’s all.
— IAIN
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