My Books In Sexy Brief, Part Four, "The Great Anti-American Novel"

My fourth book is scheduled to be published in early November. It’s complete, and right now we’re sending it out to be reviewed and such, so I finally feel comfortable talking about it.

This is the third novel—the one that long ago I told myself I would send out to be published, to announce my arrival to the world of words.

To be perfectly frank, I am extremely proud of all four of my books, but the three that are on the market right now are selling worse than Hitler’s used underwear, so my business partner and I decided that, considering the tremendous quality of the book I wrote between September of 2012 and February of 2013, I should send the manuscript out to various high-ranking literary agents, to see if I could sell the book to a major publisher and try to use that national exposure to drive up the sales of my previously published books.

And lo and behold, it gained the attention of two extremely prominent literary agencies, who, after I queried them, asked for copies of the manuscript.

After reading the book, both agents praised my writing all the way up to God’s nipples, and both said the project wasn’t right for them.

"April is the cruellest month," and between that rejection and the rejection I received from the Stanford/Stegner Fellowship (they said an MFA wasn’t required, and yet somehow all five winners had MFAs—and by the way, FUCK AN MFA; college professors are well-spoken narcissistic douchebags). Anyway, the entire month of April consisted of me being rejected by visionless cowards, and I will admit right now that those rejections, juxtaposed with how strongly I feel about the rare quality of this book, combined to produce a severe gash in my soul, from which, every day, there is blood and energy pouring out. 

I have now been rejected in every single way that a writer could possibly ever be rejected. 

And yet here the fuck I am.

I believe I’ve written one of the best books of this young century, and I am staking my artistic life on it, because if this book, like the others, vanishes into a dark and indifferent, well-reviewed oblivion, so will I.

I will stop presenting my unwanted writings to a distracted world.

Because ultimately, if my opus comes and goes, I’ll have reached the point that I could say, on my deathbed, that I really tried.

I tried, and I failed.

I’ll shut it down and take my genius to some other avenue of life, but even then, even as a shrugging loser with a deflated (but pure!) soul, I will remain fundamentally certain that, having written these books—TGAAN especially—I have already succeeded.

But sadly it’ll just be the sort of intangible success that’ll never pay the bills or get me laid.

Either way, I have done the thing.

The cover is above.

I took my pain, and I created something beautiful.