Keynote
Unhinged by piles of rejection letters, an author plots a desperate bid for an editor's undivided attention
Book Title
Tearjerker
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
- “Tearjerker has the claustrophobic power of a bad dream, but a scathingly funny bad dream. It is sure to give anyone who ever dreamed of being interviewed on “The Charlie Rose Show” the heebie jeebies. But with its wit, its candor, and its dead-on analysis of the way we live now, it should do that to us all.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Body
Until I bought one, I'd never touched a gun, never stood in front of a full-length mirror pointing a gun at myself. Bang, bang. Mine was a Magnum .357 purchased in New Jersey, much more svelte than I'd imagined a gun could be.
Evan Ulmer is not in an unusual position. Many writers deal with rejection-anonymous polite letters from publishers, written by interns who clearly had not read more than a page of the manuscript. But Evan takes things into his own hands by kidnapping a famous editor, Robert Partnow, and locking him up in his basement equipped with a TV, treadmill, and Port-o-Johnnie behind a chain-link fence. At last an unpublished writer and a high-profile editor can have a leisurely conversation.
Positioned on either side of the fence, Evan shares his novel-in-progress with Robert and together they watch the media spin the abduction that reveals Robert's once secret life. Teetering between fiction and real life, between sanity and insanity, Plotting Revenge unfolds in startling directions causing Evan to ask: "Was abduction a difficult and gutsy endeavor or, instead, the predictable last resort of the desperately stupid?"
In this menacing debut novel, Daniel Hayes brings perhaps every rejected author's and dejected editor's darkest thoughts to light.
Evan Ulmer is not in an unusual position. Many writers deal with rejection-anonymous polite letters from publishers, written by interns who clearly had not read more than a page of the manuscript. But Evan takes things into his own hands by kidnapping a famous editor, Robert Partnow, and locking him up in his basement equipped with a TV, treadmill, and Port-o-Johnnie behind a chain-link fence. At last an unpublished writer and a high-profile editor can have a leisurely conversation.
Positioned on either side of the fence, Evan shares his novel-in-progress with Robert and together they watch the media spin the abduction that reveals Robert's once secret life. Teetering between fiction and real life, between sanity and insanity, Plotting Revenge unfolds in startling directions causing Evan to ask: "Was abduction a difficult and gutsy endeavor or, instead, the predictable last resort of the desperately stupid?"
In this menacing debut novel, Daniel Hayes brings perhaps every rejected author's and dejected editor's darkest thoughts to light.
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About the Author
Praise
- “It’s perfectly accurate to call Tearjerker a creepily clever first novel. But it may be more helpful to describe it as a sly little Mobius strip of self-reflective narrative invention.”—Seattle Times
- “In this darkly humorous debut novel, Hayes explores the human reality behind the tabloid headlines and the pathos of failure and yearning in a culture of high-stakes celebrity.”—San Diego Reader
- “Fans of the recent films Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will enjoy Hayes’s similarly comic, cerebral storytelling, as well as the novel’s quirky, touching romance.”—Publishers Weekly
- “An offbeat and funny debut, in which the author probes the cantankerous loneliness of a confused and unfulfilled young many with the soul of an artist.”—Library Journal
