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HOW I BECAME A FAMOUS NOVELIST
By: Steve Hely
Grove Press, Black Cat
July 2009
On Sale: July 8, 2009
Featuring: Pete Tarslaw
224 pages
ISBN: 0802170609
EAN: 9780802170606
Paperback
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Fiction Family Life
In this blistering evisceration of celebrity culture and literary fame, a roguish loser sets out to write the best-sellingest best seller of all time. When he actually pulls it off, he winds up tearing like a tornado across Americaβs cultural landscape.
What Pete Tarslaw wants is simple enough: a realistic amount of fame that will open new avenues of sexual opportunity; the kind of financial comfort that will allow him to spend his life pursuing hobbies such as boating or skeet shooting at his stately home by the ocean or a scenic lake; and—perhaps mostly importantly—the chance to humiliate his ex-girlfriend at her wedding. This is the story of how he succeeds in getting it all, and what it costs him in the end. Narrated by an unlikely literary legend, How I Became A Famous Novelist pinballs from the post-college slums of Boston, to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattan's publishing houses, from the gloomy purity of Montanaβs foremost writing workshop to the hedonistic hotel bars of the Sunset Strip. The horrifying, hilarious tale of how Peteβs βpile of garbageβ calledΒ The Tornado Ashes Club becameΒ the most talked about, blogged about, read, admired, and reviled novel in America will change everything you think you know about literature, appearance, truth, beauty, andΒ those people out there, somewhere in America, who still care about books.
 Media BuzzFresh Air - NPR - September 16, 2009
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