Excerpt from Less by Andrew Sean Greer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He is indeed a desperate man.

From behind the wall, he can hear the crowd chanting something. Surely the name H. H. H. Mandern. In the past month, Less has privately gorged on H. H. H. Mandern's works, those space operettas, which at first appalled him, with their tin-ear language and laughable stock characters, and then drew him in with their talent for invention, surely greater than his own. Less's new novel, a serious investigation of the human soul, seems like a minor planet compared with the constellations invented by this man. And yet, what is there to ask him? What does one ever ask an author except: "How?" And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: "Beats me!"

The escort is chattering about the theater capacity, the preorders, the book tour, the money, the money, the money. She mentions that H. H. H. Mandern seems to have come down with food poisoning.

"You'll see," the escort says, and a black door opens onto a bright clean room where deli meats fan across a folding table. Beside it stands a white-haired lady in shawls, and below her: H. H. H. Mandern, vomiting into a bucket.

The lady turns to Arthur and scans the space helmet: "Who the hell are you?"

Excerpted from the book Less by Andrew Sean Greer. Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Sean Greer. Reprinted by permission of Lee Boudreaux Books / Little, Brown and Company.