Lou Reed's Nephew's Author Gets a Book Deal

What happens now?

I, the author of Lou Reed’s Nephew—who is not to be confused with Lou Reed’s Nephew’s narrator and who has thus far never directly addressed you, the reader—have some news. I am trying very hard to buck societal inertia and not pair this news with the words “honored,” “humbled,” “amazing,” or—can you imagine?—“super-excited.” I am a serious grown up, after all, who likes his use of superlatives to mirror their frequency in nature, where I find them to be quite rare. Nevertheless:

I have heard from family members that some of the above is inscrutable mumbo jumbo, which means I’ve been in publishing too long. I recognize this—on a Pavlovian level, like the color red near the notification bell on Facebook—as the universal signal that “Someone got a book deal!!!” (I’m not alone. This signal pattern is so entrenched that Publishers Marketplace, even a after a recent redesign, allows you to download deal announcements in this “classic” format, lest your followers handle your news like counterfeit currency.)

But, despite my restraint of superlatives, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that this is a gratifying end to a very long trip. (I recently adopted “trip” as an archaic reanimation of the hackneyed “journey,” which has been entirely co-opted—along with “surreal”—by the citizens of Bachelor Nation and surrounding territories.)

How did this come about? Well, I will tell you. I have made three honest attempts at novels in my life. The first was even before my 2010 short story collection, Why They Cried, was published by Joyland and ECW Press. There were editors and agents who had seen my short stories and wondered if I might be able to write a novel. I wrote one to please them and it was terrible, because—you know what?—I don’t even like novels very much. I like weird little books with troubled publication histories—like Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot or Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan or Mount Analog by Rene Demaul—so six so years ago I set out to see if I could write one of those. I wrote one into the drawer, some remnants of which survive in Lou Reed’s Nephew, and then I wrote LRN, which I had been puttering with one way or another since 2012, when I launched a version of it on Medium as what I then described as “a webcomic without pictures.”

Along the way I met some important people. I tracked down my agent Jackie Gilbert because my friend Phil Campbell’s wife Emily Hall was among the first authors to be published by the reconstituted Dalkey Archive (you should read her book, The Long Cut, it’s terrific) and I saw that Jackie had represented one of the other books. I sent her LRN and she got it. And she sent it to a very large number of people who didn’t get it, but also to Jeremy Davies who totally got it, but couldn’t do anything about it until he wound up as executive editor at Coffee House Press earlier this year. Now LRN will appear there, alongside writers I admire like Ben Lerner and Eugene Lim, the latter of whose work I only recently became acquainted with after hearing him read from a little chapbook called Chorus. The hook of Chorus is a rephrasing of Bartleby that belongs on a t-shirt: “I’d prefer not to, but okay,” which pretty much sums up the way we live now, right?

By the way, Coffee House already has very, very good t-shirts.

So what happens now? When can you pre-order it? I know you’re dying to.

It will be a little while. The final manuscript is due in the spring and the book won’t appear until at least eighteen months after that, which I’m choosing to see as a perk. I know from back in 2010 that there is no better state for a writer to be in than having-a-book-coming-out.

Not-having-a-book-coming-out—where I’ve have spent most of my writing life—is of course the worst. You are basically not a writer in this state. I mean there are a lot of people and institutions and memes—lots of memes—that will tell you that you still are. That if you dream it, you can be it, as it were, but you know you’re not. You know you are deluded; that you are a crazy, irresponsible person.

Having-a-book-just-come-out is good, but not great, especially if you don’t have another book coming out, since it turns very quickly into not-having-a-book-coming-out, so see above. Plus no matter what happens, what happens when your book comes cannot possibly meet the expectations of your deliriously happy having-a-book-coming-out self.

So having-a-book-coming-out is the place to be. This stage was very short for my short story collection, maybe six months. For Lou Reed’s Nephew it will be much longer. Perhaps two years. Maybe longer. I hope it never comes out, actually. It would be the best for everyone.

How will I spend this magical, hopefully neverending time of having-a-book-coming-out? First, I will try to write another book so that when the unhappy event of this book coming out befalls me I can return to the state of having-a-book-coming-out as quickly as possible. And so on—like a heroin addict—until I am dead. Writing is so fun.

But I would also like to keep this Substack going. I enjoyed blogging back when that was a thing, and in a lot of ways I think Lou Reed’s Nephew is a happy synthesis of my fiction writing and blogging. There are things I have been wanting to write about, so I plan to send you an essay a month—starting in the new year—on topics ranging from post-punk to post-modernism. (A great name for a Substack about the stuff I’m going to write about would be “Remembrance of Things Post,” but too late to change horses now according to my branding consultants, who always seem to use that metaphor.)

Topics on my mind for future essays include Patricia Lockwood and David Foster Wallace, generational “theory,” The Fall, Chuck Klosterman’s book on the ‘90s, etc. If you’ve enjoyed LRN, you’ll probably enjoy the essays. I’m also happy to engage with topics or questions suggested by you, so shoot me an email or leave them in the comments.

Finally, be assured that your presence here—as a reader of LRN—when it is still just a book-coming-out (which is to say, practically nothing), has been duly recorded and I will try to do something nice for all of you should the sad publication date actually arrive. Until then.

best,

jim