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What Pete Tarslaw wants is simple enough: a realistic amount of fame that will open new avenues of sexual opportunity; the kind of financial comfort that will allow him to spend his life pursuing hobbies such as boating or skeet shooting at his stately home by the ocean or a scenic lake; and—perhaps mostly importantly—the chance to humiliate his ex-girlfriend at her wedding. This is the story of how he succeeds in getting it all, and what it costs him in the end.
Narrated by an unlikely literary legend, How I Became A Famous Novelist pinballs from the post-college slums of Boston, to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattan's publishing houses, from the gloomy purity of Montana's foremost writing workshop to the hedonistic hotel bars of the Sunset Strip. The horrifying, hilarious tale of how Pete's "pile of garbage" called The Tornado Ashes Club became the most talked about, blogged about, read, admired, and reviled novel in America will change everything you think you know about literature, appearance, truth, beauty, and those people out there, somewhere in America, who still care about books.
"Biting, hilarious and improbably affectionate." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A satiric, facetious and laugh-out-loud funny first novel." - Kirkus Reviews
"[W]ill delight fans of 'loser lit' novels such as Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Michael Chabon's Wonderboys" - Booklist
"[S]lams the writing, publishing, bookselling, and book-reviewing world in a funny, thought-provoking, cynical story about being successful for all the wrong reasons." - Library Journal
This information about How I Became a Famous Novelist was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Hely is a comedy writer for David Letterman and the Fox cartoon comedy American Dad, and coauthor of The Ridiculous Race.
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