Magazines were reviewing books for issues that would be coming out six months from now, publishers were signing up manuscripts that wouldn’t be in bookstores for years. What seemed like a good idea for a book in outline form now might well be irrelevant when the Times reviewed the finished version three years later, if the Times would even review it, if the Times would even have a book review section, no sure thing given the declining circulation numbers of newspapers nationwide; if the editor of the book would even still have a job at the publisher that had employed him or her when the contract for the book had been signed- if the publisher itself hadn’t been folded into some conglomerate or been driven out of business entirely. In the past half decade, half a dozen magazines about books had launched and folded, replaced, for the most part, by book blogs, which no one knew how to make money off of.
And in one long paragraph, Adam Langer summed up about three weeks of my summer publishing program at NYU.
Langer’s The Thieves of Manhattan, published by Spiegel & Grau, is a strange novel within a memoir within a novel that may or may not be true. Our protagonist is a familiar one- struggling writer stuck at a dead-end job at a coffee shop angry at the publishing world for opting to publish big sellers with no literary merit instead of his “small, quiet” stories. The novel starts off slow, sounding like countless stories submitted to college literary magazines by struggling writers, but it takes an interesting turn about thirty pages in when our young disgruntled hero meets “the Confident Man” and his slow decline is interrupted by the Confident Man’s story, and his plan for literary revenge.
What starts out slow picks up fast and becomes difficult to put down. Everything written about the publishing industry aligns with what the professionals in the industry lectured about during my program, which gives validity to an otherwise untrustworthy narrator.
It’s a fun story with many twists and turns, adventure, treasure maps, art, love, and an insiders look at the modern-day publishing industry that will leave you wanting to smoke vonneguts while woolfing through the pages and drinking a faulkner on your proust.*
*The author uses famous author’s names in place of common words, in this case vonneguts are cigarettes, woolfing is to go through quickly, faulkner is whiskey, and a proust is a couch. A glossary is in the back for your convenience, but you really become accustomed to his usage of these terms pretty quickly.
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