En cours de chargement...
I'd no sooner finished CARLA, my first book for Midwood Tower, than Harry Shorten asked for another. I'd just returned to Antioch College, where after two years as an undistinguished student I'd dropped out for a year to hang on to a summer job at Scott Meredith's literary agency and bucket shop. It was wonderful training, but after a year there I decided I should go back to school, where I had a chance to assume the editorship of the school newspaper.
So there I was in Yellow Springs, Ohio, taking a batch of English courses, and I had a publisher who wanted me to write a book. What'll it be, Larry-a paper on Tobias Smollett and the Great Chain of Being, or 50, 000 words of soul-searching and sex for Harry Shorten? 50, 000 words for which I'd be paid $600?No contest, really. The story concern a has-been writer trying to get back in the game, and all these years later I find it interesting that this young wannabe was already picturing himself on the way down and out.
A fellow named Craig said some nice things in his review, so I'll excerpt it here: "The protagonist Dan Larkin is an aspiring author, like Block himself, and it's downright eerie how many aspects of Dan's fictional life would end up paralleling the arc of Block's own life over the next 25 years: the progression from obscure pulp writer to eventual best-seller stardom, the women, the binge drinking, and the eventual spiral into alcoholism.