When I was in college, my boon companions and I planned a glorious hoax.
We’d all met at a Halloween party my sophomore year, talked, learned that some played Dungeons & Dragons and others wished to play, and soon we were all in a weekly Friday night roleplaying game. Most of the time it was D&D, but sometimes it was Traveller, and sometimes it was Empire of the Petal Throne, and sometimes it was something else. The first year we mainly played in the dorm room I shared with my friend Sue, but after that the games were usually over at UMass-Amherst, the flagship campus of the public education system in Massachusetts.
Monty Haul dungeons…epic quests…romances…strange alien worlds…we visited these, and many, many more. Some of the happiest, most contented nights of my life were spent sitting cross-legged on a bed, sewing away, while the Gamemaster stared intently at his dice before announcing what menace was behind that door or coming around the bend in the road. We were all friends, and we spent as much time joking and chatting as we did playing, but the game was the thing, and we liked to think that we had a much finer time with our dice and our character sheets than mundanes on conventional dates, or the frat boys sucking down the brew at Chi Psi.
I’m not sure how or when we first came up with the Hoax That Never Happened, or why we thought we’d have a prayer of getting away with it, but the rough outlines went something like this:
1. We would contrive to borrow my uncle Oscar’s car when my family visited for Parents’ Weekend in April. The car in question was one of my quiet, modest uncle's few indulgences, a gorgeous, glossy, silver-green 1972 Mercedes-Benz 280SE 4.5 that had cost as much as a small house and could go from zero to 100 with a whisper of gas. Why we thought Oscar would loan his pride and joy to a bunch of college students for a prank is unknown, especially since I hadn’t yet learned to drive.
2. Laurey, who could drive, would find a chauffeur’s uniform and pilot the Mercedes to the center of UMass’s enormous grounds, as close as possible to the hideous Brutalist hulk of Campus Center.
3. Mary, wearing a sensible blouse, sensible suit, clunky shoes, and a maniacal expression, would leap out of the front seat of the car and open the rear door for Jon, who would emerge wearing his best tweed topcoat (the one with the fake Astrakhan collar), a bowler firmly on his head, and twirl his cane in his best Clockwork Orange manner. Sue and I would follow, timidly hunched over our legal pads and trying our best to keep a straight face.
4. Mary would then stride up to the first person she saw, grab him/her by the lapels, and shout in her best fake Russian accent, “Where is Professor Pupinjay? Professor Heimat has come all the way from the University to meet with him at Am-herst College! What do you mean, this is not Am-herst College? Is this not Am-herst, Massachusetts? Where is Professor Pupinjay? Take us to him at once! This is an outrage!”
5. Jon would stand very still, not saying a word, occasionally blinking, while Sue and I looked worried and whispered behind our hands.
6. Eventually whomever Mary had grabbed would, if we played this right, take us to a security guard or a minor functionary, where we would continue to demand to see Professor Pupinjay until we either succeeded (unlikely, since we'd made him up) or they threw us out (very likely).
7. We would return the Mercedes to my doubtless horrified relatives, take off our disguises, and troop over to John M. Greene Hall for the Parents’ Weekend Pops Concert, where I’d wear an evening gown and try to look as sex-ay as a college glee singer can.
Although students have certainly done similar things, like the famous Dreadnought Hoax that managed to get a motley group of British university bloods disguised as “Abyssinians” onto a Royal Navy flagship, none of us except possibly Mary were good enough actors to have a prayer of pulling this off. I sometimes wish we’d tried, though. The memories would have worth it, and who knows? We might have gotten our very own Wikipedia entry!
Of course, the only reason anyone remembers the Dreadnought Hoax is because Virginia Woolf, complete with turban, caftan, and fake mustache, was the last “Abyssinian” on the left. None of us ended up famous, and the closest anyone we knew has come to being famous is Walter, who was thankfully at Bowdoin, four hours away. It’s doubtful that he would have participated regardless, although he had (and has) a fine sarcastic sense of humor and an impressive mustache that would have looked quite excellent on one of “Professor Heimat’s” colleagues.
That’s not to say that real, genuine, published writers don’t participate in hoaxes or practical jokes. The groves of academe are littered with the detritus left by writers playing tricks on each other, critics, or the public at large; I’ve already written about William-Henry Ireland working out his daddy issues by forging Shakespeare’s love letters, plays, and a curious conflation of God with a broody hen, and that’s only one of many examples down the centuries. An author’s club in early 20th century New York went so far as to create a fictitious Russian author to fool a stuffy critic, complete with relics, indecipherable manuscript, and touching souvenirs like faded clothing and a pressed flower, while a Georgian wag got back at an officious antiquarian by scrawling “HERE HARDICANUTE DRANK A WINE HORN DRY STARED ABOUT HIM AND DIED” on a roofing slate and convincing the hapless mark that it was the tombstone of one of England’s more obscure kings.
And then there are authors who have committed the ultimate hoax: writing a deliberately bad book and getting someone else to believe it’s legitimate.
Tonight for your dining and dancing pleasure I bring three deliberately terrible books by good writers. One is a joke run amok, one a deliberate slap at the bestseller lists, and the third written to expose a scam and avenge an insult. All are that most curious of productions, the Book Intentionally So Bad It's Good:
I, Libertine, by "Frederick R. Ewing" (Theodore Sturgeon and Betty Ballantine, from an idea by Jean Shepherd).
Jean Shepherd is best known today as the author and raconteur whose memoirs were the basis of A Christmas Story. This beloved and greatly overexposed movie tells the tale of how he had to overcome unsympathetic relatives, an adorably hideous bunny suit, and the worst lamp in the history of the universe to obtain a Red Ryder BB gun one memorable holiday season.
Few remember that Shepherd worked in the 1950s as an overnight DJ for WOR in New York. This was well before the days of Art Bell taking calls from earnest listeners convinced they’d seen Bigfoot in the towering rainforests of Kansas, or the Grim Reaper towering above the roof of St. James Infirmary in New Orleans, but late night call-in shows had their own special magic even then. Add in Shepherd’s penchant for storytelling, and the results could be, well, unexpected.
One night in 1956 Shepherd began complaining about the then-current method for determining whether a certain book got on the New York Times bestseller list. In those halcyon days before computerized inventories and sales figures allowed bookstores and publishers to know down to the dustjacket which books sold the most, the Times would call up bookstores and simply ask the clerks what books customers were requesting, and how often. They’d then tally up the requests, compare the numbers to what publishers’ sales figures they could get, and print the list.
Shepherd thought this was ridiculous. So did his audience. And in the way that a late night bull session can segue from “Professor Vorbretten’s pop quiz sucked rocks” to “gee, that statue of St. Grottlesex's mascot sure would look great painted to look like the Tammanany Tiger, only, y’know, mauve,” the conversation turned from grousing to indignation, from indignation to brainstorming, and from brainstorming to A Plan.
Within a few days Shepherd’s bleary-eyed listeners began visiting bookstores in and around Manhattan to ask for a brand new book. I, Libertine, by retired British army officer Frederick R. Ewing, was reportedly a "turbulent, turgid, tempestuous" romp through Georgian England, complete with pretty girls, dissolute rakes, and enough euphemisms for the delights of the 18th century demimonde to fly under the radar of the censors. In an era when Peyton Place was deemed pornographic and Forever Amber was banned in Boston, such a book – especially based on meticulous historical research, as I, Libertine reportedly was – promised hours of forbidden pleasure.
The booksellers of Manhattan were puzzled. Not one of them had ever heard of I, Libertine or its author. Worse, none of their colleagues in other cities had either. And as tallies began to pour into the Times of most requested books from across the country, it seemed that no bookseller, anywhere, from Pekin, North Dakota, to Father Knickbocker’s gift to the world itself, had heard of I, Libertine. Fortunately, there were rumors that the book was being published in the very near future….
And published it was, as soon as Jean Shepherd, his friends Ian and Betty Ballantine, and “Frederick R. Ewing” (known to posterity as Theodore Sturgeon), could rush the thing into print. What had begun as a joke on the part of Shepherd and his audience of Gotham night owls had quickly reached the point where people besides the faithful listeners who’d fanned out across New York (and then the United States, and then, thanks to a couple of mischievous transatlantic pilots, overseas) started asking for a book that didn’t exist. The Ballantines, no fools, sensed a priceless opportunity to skewer The Establishment when people at cocktail parties actually claimed to have read this wonderfully fictitious salacious book. They installed Sturgeon in their apartment to write I, Libertine as quickly as possible while pulp SF artist Frank Kelly Freas worked on the cover art.
Sturgeon, who went on to ghost-write several Ellery Queen mysteries as well as his own brilliant short stories, decided to write the entire novel in one sitting so he could make his deadline. He nearly succeeded, too; he’d finished all but the last chapter when Betty Ballantine found him passed out on the living room sofa from sheer exhaustion. She wisely decided that letting him sleep was better than forcing him to be coherent when he was doing a fine imitation of a corpse, and wrote the last chapter herself.
Publishing was a much slower process back them, when linotype operators chewed cigars and gossiped about the Yankees as they set each page of text in hot lead. Word that I, Libertine was actually a hoax inevitably got out, and by the time the novel reached the bookstores, The Wall Street Journal had revealed the truth. That didn’t prevent I, Libertine from selling briskly when it finally appeared, graced by a surprisingly good cover of a middle aged roue in a tricorn hat gazing pop-eyed at an off-stage woman while a plumply-bosomed whore lounges underneath a tavern sign decorated with, I kid you not, a fish that looks rather like a sturgeon. The words
“'Gadzooks!' quoth I, "but here's a saucy bawd!'”
appear in the lower left corner, just below the Libertine's right hand, while a photo of “Frederick R. Ewing” (
Shepherd, looking remarkably dissipated), occupies the back cover.
Shepherd went on to become known for being much more than a radio host. Freas won more Hugos than any other science fiction artist except Michael Whelan. Sturgeon wrote some of the best short stories of his generation of speculative fiction authors, and the Ballantines were lucky enough to publish the authorized edition of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which more than makes up for inflicting Lancar of Callisto on the unwitting public. I, Libertine was remembered, if at all, as a joke from their younger, hungrier days, when a radio show and an exhausted writer could produce a bestseller. Doubtless they would be shocked to learn that I, Libertine has become something of a cult object; there are several web sites devoted to the hoax, with photos, interviews, and detailed accounts of why and how the Libertine and his saucy bawds appeared.
Even better, some kind, dedicated insane soul read the entire book aloud and posted it on line. So though I, Libertine is long out of print, and copies scarce, expensive, and hard to obtain, fans of Jean Shepherd, Kelly Freas, Ted Sturgeon, and the Ballantines can enjoy this deathless classic.
Gadzooks, indeed.
Naked Came the Stranger, by "Penelope Ashe" (two dozen Newsday reporters, most of them male). The 1960s were justly called the Sexual Revolution. Thanks to Supreme Court rulings like Griswold v. Connecticut, contraception was available to more people than ever, while the Youth Revolution that swept through America meant shorter skirts, rawer language, and far, far less stigma attached to non-marital sex. The Rolling Stones could openly sing about spending the night together, movies could and did show a lot more than a post-coital cigarette over the breakfast table, and books –
Well. Books had been pushing the envelope for decades. Ulysses, Peyton Place, Tropic of Cancer - conservatives might complain about the explicitness of what poured off the press, but whether it was the zeitgeist, the Supreme Court, or simply the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, sexual content appeared in more and more books, from thrillers to serialized novels in Redbook. Tom Lehrer even wrote a song that mockingly called for “obscene murals, postcards neckties, samplers, stained glass windows,” and one might justly wonder if he was serious.
The flood of explicit novels came to include serious novels by rising stars like John Updike and Phillip Roth, whose Portnoy’s Complaint was greeted with outraged howls by those who had never dreamed that that would be the subject of a novel by a serious writer. There was even a modern take on Voltaire's Candide, Terry Southern's racy, spicy, sexy little romp Candy, about the sexual exploits of a naive young woman.
Alas, for every decent book that happened to contain some sexually explicit material, a dozen potboilers with plenty of what might be delicately termed “prurient content” between consenting adults hit bookstores. Several of these books were bestsellers despite clumsy writing and all but invisible plots, and critics and the more discerning members of the public wrung their hands and decried the death of American fiction.
In 1966 Mike McGrady decided to do something about this deplorable state of affairs. He was a columnist for Newsday, and after seeing how avidly the public snapped up the latest junk from Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins, he let it be known around the newsroom that he was looking for volunteers to help him co-write a sex novel. More than that, he wanted writers who would be willing to write a bad sex novel; the public’s taste for trash seemed insatiable, and he wanted to see just how low he and his collaborators could sink before anyone noticed. As McGrady himself told prospective collaborators:
As one of Newsday’s truly outstanding literary talents you are hereby officially invited to become the co-author of a best-selling novel. There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex. Also, true excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion.
Evidently McGrady wasn't the only Newsday staffer who was appalled by the rise of the sex novel. Before long he had rounded up two dozen fellow newspaper scribes (nineteen men, five women), including a multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, to the cause. McGrady and his friend Harvey Aronson assigned chapters, distributed a four page outline, and ran the results through their own typewriters to make the manuscript even worse than it originally was.
By 1968 the book was done. McGrady chopped out a great deal of non-sexual extraneous material, then sent the entire mess off to publisher Lyle Stuart, who had a reputation for being utterly fearless dating back to a 1950's war with Walter Winchell. Stuart was so amused by the idea of a deliberately terrible bestseller that he agreed to publish the book without reading it, stole found a sexy photograph for the cover art, and unleashed the pride of Newsday on the world in 1969.
Naked Came the Stranger, allegedly the pseudonym of a bored Long Island housewife named “Penelope Ashe” (portrayed by McGrady's sister-in-law Billie Young for publicity purposes), tells the oh-so-modern tale of Gillian and William Blake, radio co-hosts whose marriage is rocked when William has an affair. After learning the awful truth, Gillian decides that what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the saucy bawd goose, and proceeds to have sex with every other man in the neighborhood at the rate of twice per chapter for the rest of the novel.
If this sounds boring to you, gentle readers, be assured that the critics agreed. Although one or two found the book an amusing look at sexual dysfunction in suburbia, most found it boring, repetitive, and just plain bad. McGrady's careful attention to lousy writing had obviously born fruit, albeit fruit as tasty and satisfying as a desiccated stick of Fruit Stripe Gum purchased from Goober Pyle’s service station.
This did not prevent the book from being a hit. If nothing else, the provocative cover of a shapely, kneeling woman photographed from the back, clad only in her long, tousled hair, set tongues wagging at water coolers across the country. Add in that the cover model (an anonymous Hungarian porn model) was rumored to be the author, and the book was supposedly based on her own life, and it’s not had to see why Naked Came the Stranger eventually spent four months on the bestseller lists, right along with masterpieces like Valley of the Dolls and The Carpetbaggers.
Alas, the end came all too soon. Some of the co-authors had an attack of conscience that was not assuaged by their royalty checks, and soon it was common knowledge that “Penelope Ashe” was actually two dozen journalists, most of them middle aged men. The joke reached a sort of climax when Dick Cavett invited “Penelope Ashe” onto his hit talk show, and the male authors obediently trooped out for a joint interview while the house band played “A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody.” Pundits decried this as yet another example of the execrable taste of the average American, pop culture mavens snickered, and the public collectively shrugged and moved on to the Next Big Thing.
For all that, Naked Came the Stranger sold well enough that McGrady and Aronson were approached to write a sequel. They refused, but McGrady did write Stranger Than Naked, or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit, a book about how to write a sex-laden bestseller, in 1970. Ironically enough, he later ghost wrote Linda Lovelace's sensational autobiography Ordeal, an expose of her days as a porn star, and wrote restaurant reviews for Newsday well into the 1980s.
As for Naked Came the Stranger itself, it's long out of print. However, it eventually received the signal honor by being made into a pornographic movie in 1975 starring Darby Lloyd Rains and Levi Richards, with minor roles played by luminaries such as Kevin Andre ("Party Guy With A Candle"), Marc Stevens ("Party Guy With An Eyepatch"), and Rita David ("Harem Girl Waitress"). Reportedly made by an Oscar-winning documentarian, Naked Came the Stranger wasn't quite popular enough to ride the wave of "porno chic" movies like Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones, and The Opening of Misty Beethoven, but it did well enough to be released in Italy as La Staniera Nuda. It's now out on DVD, with much of the non-sexual material edited out, presumably because, like its original readers, anyone who'd watch a movie called Naked Came the Stranger is interested in something other than psychologically complex characters, good description, and a coherent plot.
Atlanta Nights, by "Travis Tea" (Robin Hobb, Brenda Clough, Allen Steele, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, James D. Macdonald, and several dozen other members of the Science Fiction Writers of America). "Of the making of many books there is no end," said Miguel Cervantes, commenting on the popularity of overblown chivalric romances in early modern Europe. Four hundred years later this perhaps unfortunate fact is as true as ever. Thousands of books are published every month, by thousands of publishers, and for every one that's good or great there are hundreds of less worthy volumes. One would think that cracking this market would be relatively easy for the aspiring writer, especially when one strolls past the book selection at the local Stop & Shop and gets a look at what publishers offer in exchange for one's hard-earned money.
One would be wrong. Despite the proliferation of small presses, e-presses, and blogs, getting that elusive first sale is no easier than it's ever been. Worse, a lot of people who aren't all that much better than Pedro Carolino submit their works to publishers large and small, where underpaid editorial assistants are scarred for life by what's lovingly called "the slush pile."
That's why vanity presses exist. These fine, upstanding corporations will accept pretty much anything for publication as long as the author is willing to pay for the privilege. Unlike self-publication, where the author controls and finances as aspects of the process, or print-on-demand publishers that list books on Amazon.com or their own web site, vanity presses do not usually attempt to market their product to anyone other than the author and his/her family. Editing is non-existent, the production values are either mediocre or far more luxurious than the book deserves, and all too often the author ends up with nothing more than a depleted bank account and several boxes of unreadable books stashed in the garage.
PublishAmerica is such a vanity press. Oh, they deny it - their authors are actually paid a token advance, with most of the author's costs coming from the alleged difficulty of actually getting the books into stores and listed on web sites - but the company is notorious for offering only bare bones production, editing, and distribution, sloppy accounting, and charging authors outrageous sums to purchase, distribute, and publicize their own books. Although PublishAmerica has been defended by some of its authors, it's hard take seriously a company that accepted a manuscript that repeated the same thirty pages ten times in succession, as happened a few years ago.
And then there's their attitude toward genre fiction. Imagine being an aspiring fantasy, science fiction, horror, or magic realism author shopping for a publisher and seeing this on the submission guidelines page:
Science-fiction and fantasy writers have it easier. It's unfair, but such is life. As a rule of thumb, the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction. Therefore, beware of published authors who are self-crowned writing experts. When they tell you what to do and not to do in getting your book published, always first ask them what genre they write. If it's sci-fi or fantasy, run. They have no clue about what it is to write real-life stories, and how to find them a home. Unless you are a sci-fi or fantasy author yourself.
Or this:
But, alas, the SciFi and Fantasy genres have also attracted some of the lesser gods, writers who erroneously believe that SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters. Obviously, and fortunately, there are not too many of them, but the ones who are indeed not ashamed to be seen as literary parasites and plagiarists, are usually the loudest, just like the proverbial wheel that needs the most grease.
Yes, gentle readers, that's what PublishAmerica has up on their
"Author's Market" page. It's a gratuitous, nasty little slap at non-mainstream fiction, and one would think that a vanity press would know better than to alienate potential
marks authors. It also flies in the face of reality, since some of the best, most interesting writers working today publish primarily in the despised "SciFi and Fantasy genres," like China Mieville, Iain Banks, Neil Gaiman, N.K. Jemisin, and so on.
Regardless of why PublishAmerica posted their ugly little screed, it has one good outcome: it led directly to perhaps the most...unusual book of the last ten years, Atlanta Nights.
This dazzling novel by one "Travis Tea," described by author Sherwood Smith as "surely to be the Great American Naval [sic]," was written by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). SFWA is legendary for hunting down and exposing crooked publishers, agents, and contests through its Writer Beware service, so the attack by PublishAmerica was even less welcome than the usual "it's not really literature" sneers from the literati.
A group of authors decided that the insult to their work and their genre could not go unpunished. Led by James D. Mcdonald, three dozen outraged SFWAns, including bestselling fantasist Robin Hobb, noted editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Hugo winning novelist Allen Steele, spent a long holiday weekend banging out chapters in a non-SF novel about one "Bruce Lucent," Atlanta socialite, and his associates.
As with Naked Came the Stranger, the collective that was "Travis Tea" took great pains to produce the worst possible book. Deliberate errors included non-identical chapters based on the same part of the outline, two identical chapters at different points in what passed for the narrative, two more chapters with the same number, and a blank space where Chapter 21 should have been. Characters died, reappeared, switched gender, and changed race without warning or explanation, and the climax came several chapters before the actual end of the book. One section wasn't even written by a human being, but was random text generated by a computer programmed to pick up on word patterns found in previous text. Best of all, the initials of the characters spelled out "PublishAmerica is a vanity press," which no one, including the staff of PublishAmerica, noticed until "Travis Tea" pointed it out.
And what, I'm sure you wonder, did Mcdonald and his merry band actually send to PublishAmerica? Here's a sample of the deathless prose of "Travis Tea," and if you're silly enough to eat or drink anything, including tea, while you read the following, don't come crying to me if your monitor is stained, your keyboard wrecked, or your children traumatized to the point that they will need decades of costly therapy:
Richard didn't have as sweet a personality as Andrew but then few men did but he was very well-built. He had the shoulders of a water buffalo and the waist of a ferret. He was reddened by his many sporting activities which he managed to keep up within addition to his busy job as a stock broker, and that reminded Irene of safari hunters and virile construction workers which contracted quite sexily to his suit-and-tie demeanor. Irene was considering coming onto him but he was older than Henry was when he died even though he hadn't died of natural causes but he was dead and Richard would die too someday. . .
Irene Stevens nibbled at her sauteed crab cake (it was nestled in a mild golden curry sauce and garnished with micro basil), and gazed at Bruce Lucent, who was sitting at the head of the 42-seat table with his wife, that positively ancient Callie Archer with her glossy raven hair (that had to Miss Clairol or Irene wasn't the reigning Georgia Peach Princess for 2003!) and her gravity-defying 38DD boobs. Bruce (who had the studliest body ever, but a face like a turnip, round and a little purple around the bottom where his skin was still recovering from the laser peel to get rid of those nasty acne scars) was in the midest of a long, boring presentation about his newest software package, LuceLips, an interactive speech-recognition program that could do everything from read you're morning newspaper to you to book you're lunch reservation.
One can readily see why PublishAmerica instantly snapped up this brilliant manuscript. Even better, they offered "Travis"
a whole dollar against future royalties! Isn't that a great deal? What new writer could possibly turn it down?
Fortunately for all concerned, the hive mind that made up "Travis Tea" had been published many, many times, and had the good sense to run PublishAmerica's contract past an attorney. The attorney took one look and told the hive mind that signing the contract would be grounds for having them committed was not advisable, and so "Travis Tea" went public in January of 2005, complete with a copy of PublishAmerica's acceptance letter.
Said acceptance letter was withdrawn within twenty-four hours.
Presumably PublishAmerica did this to attempt the minimize the damage to its alleged reputation, but too late! Not only had "Travis" made sure to publicize "his" sad experience far and wide, SFWA promptly added the story to Writer Beware, where it remains to this day, while Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden made sure to write at length about Atlanta Nights on her blog, Making Light.
Fortunately some good came of the Atlanta Nights disaster besides warning innocent writers against sending their work to PublishAmerica. "Travis" eventually did find a publisher, on-demand company Lulu.com, which not only listed Atlanta Nights on Amazon.com but allowed "Travis" to donate all proceeds to SFWA's Medical Emergency Fund. "Travis" could at last bask in the praise of his legendary prose from his fellow writers, only some of whom had assisted in the production of his deathless masterpiece:
"A note of caution: reading this thing may cause temporary brain damage." — Allen Steele (author of Chapter 8)
"I stayed upright reading it." — Jane Yolen
"Rich and varied as a feast of fried spring chicken, Coca-cola ham, corn fritters, and black bottom pecan pie, ATLANTA NIGHTS drools with style. Frankly my dear, you will give a damn...." — Catherine Mintz (author of Chapter 35)
"Don't fail to miss it if you can!" — Jerry Pournelle
"ATLANTA NIGHTS not only changed my life, it changed my mind. An astonishing read, worth it at half the price." — Robin Wayne Bailey
And perhaps the best of all:
ATLANTA NIGHTS: I haven't been this stunned since my colonoscopy." — Dennis L. McKiernan
Truer words were ne'er writ.
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So, o best beloved - what know you of deliberately rotten books? Did you pick up Naked Came the Stranger at a tag sale? Have you seen I, Libertine on Ebay? Did you turn down the chance to work on Atlanta Nights? It's a holiday weekend so take all the time you need.....