Goodwillie was one of the PEN American Center's "Best New Writers of 2006", and AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE is at once a perfectly observed chronicle of new media in the dawn of the digital age and a chilling story of domestic terrorism.

A small bomb goes off in a Manhattan office tower. Four days later, with no arrests and a city still on edge, Aidan Cole, a failed journalist-turned-blogger, opens an anonymous email to find a photograph of a young American woman. There is a chilling message: "This is Paige Roderick.  She’s the one responsible…."   

His reporter’s curiosity suddenly piqued, Aidan begins an unlikely journey – a story stretching from environmental radicals in the Smoky Mountains to a bomb factory in Vermont, from a wealthy enclave on Fishers Island to a safe house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. 

 

An ominous play on recent history, AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE explores the connection between our collective apathy and the roots of insurrection. Paige and Aidan are two Americans who, like many of us, are grasping for a foothold in a culture—and a world—that’s crumbling around them.  

Beautifully written and relentlessly suspenseful, AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE is a cautionary tale with a culturally adroit, hyper-realistic, and bitingly humorous voice.

 

*AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE is that rare novel that manages to truly thrill with its plot and dazzle with the quality of its writing: With its unnerving depiction of a band of domestic terrorists (their psychology, their methods, and the catastrophic results of their work) set in an economically recessed New York in 2010, where a young radical and a failed journalist become intertwined in the wake of a botched terrorist bombing, AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE terrifies and seduces in equal measure. But Goodwillie has a literary background, and his thrilling plot is matched by prose that soars.

 

*Author is highly connected in New York writing community: Goodwillie came to Scribner with the recommendation of Amy Hempel. Other literary friends include Dave Eggers, David Gates, Danielle Trussoni (whose forthcoming book ANGELOLOGY recently sold to Viking in a major auction), among many others. We expect very strong blurbs.

*Author to craft unique online marketing projects: Aidan, the book's main character, is a media gossip blogger for the fictional blog "Roorback.com." Goodwillie will obtain rights to www.roorback.com and, in the lead-up to publication, will blog as his main character--a way for the fiction of the novel to play with events in the real world. Goodwillie, who was once a blogger for www.deadspin.com (part of Nick Denton's blogging empire), is intimately acquainted with this world, and his efforts (and many connections in the blogging world) will garner great attention for the book.

*The journalist and the terrorist: two great characters: Like the protagonists of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities or Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, or, more recently, the cast of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, Aidan Cole, the failed journalist-turned-blogger in AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE brilliantly captures the zeitgeist of a particular moment in media culture (in this case: the twilight of print journalism, and the dawn of the professional blogger). His counterpart, Paige Roderick, rising star in a modern day Weather Underground, is an unforgettable character. Her transformation from innocent to terrorist, as part of America's disenchanted youth in the twenty-first century, is disturbing and unforgettable.

*Strong publicity connections: Goodwillie's personal connections extend to the reviewing/culture reporting sector, too. Among those in this camp include Jessica Coen (New York magazine online editor), Michael Crowley (New Republic), Stephanie Tuck (Best Life and Men’s Health), Leslie Robarge (Glamour), Laurie Sandell (Esquire/GQ/Glamour), among many others. We expect these connections to result in high-profile reviews and mentions.

*Author's continuing magazine gigs: The publicity attention given to his memoir helped land Goodwillie regular writing gigs for major magazines. His current projects include upcoming pieces for New York (an athlete profile) and Best Life (an examination of the indie music business). Goodwillie plans to have several magazine pieces published around the time of hardcover publication.

 

O autorze:

David Goodwillie is the author of the memoir Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (Algonquin, 2006), for which he was named one of the “Best New Writers of 2006” in a PEN American Center forum.  He was a contributor to the anthology My Father Married Your Mother (W.W. Norton, 2006), and has written for national magazines and newspapers including New York, Men's Health, Black Book, and The New York Post. Goodwillie has also played professional baseball, worked as a private investigator, and was sports memorabilia expert at Sotheby's. He graduated from Kenyon College and lives in New York City.

Prasa o książce:

"David Goodwillie is an exceptional and fine young talent. He can write. In American Subversive you will find him witty and ironic, funny, fast and sharp."--Alan Furst, author of The Spies of Warsaw

 

"Goodwillie's American Subversive reads like the unholy spawn of Tom Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It has all the white-knuckle pleasures of the political thriller--combined with a thoroughly postmodern love story. He has an insider's feel for New York's too-knowing new-media culture, and a writer's eye for its emptiness."--David Gates, author of Jernigan

 

“David Goodwille's writing is explosive, engaging and captivating. American Subversive will jolt you out of your seat.  After reading this powerful thriller you'll be looking over your shoulder, and down forested lanes, worried what's out there.”--Ridley Pearson, author of Killer Summer

"American Subversive is a searing portrait of failed idealism and social unrest. Brilliantly plotted and compulsively readable, Goodwillie's debut novel asks us to re-examine the nature of political action and private life. Unforgettable."--Danielle Trussoni, author of Angelology

 

"A new voice has entered the city--youthful, wise, and with an enthralling story to tell. Goodwillie's rendering of an American woman seduced by radicalism skillfully examines the enduring themes of our lives: politics, media, loyalty and love."--Gay Talese, author of A Writer's Life

Publishers Weekly

In Goodwillie’s debut novel (after his memoir, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time), an incisive depiction of radicalism’s seductive roots, the central characters are a good girl gone bad and a would-be journalist turned blogger who wants to do good. Paige Roderick, laid off from her think tank job and devastated by the Iraq War death of her beloved brother, is an easy mark for a shadowy cabal of homegrown terrorists who recruit her from the ranks of weekend environmental warriors. Separately, Aidan Cole, a failed journalism student turned Manhattan gossip blogger, is drawn into her radical orbit (and into a romance) by a phantom from America’s radical past: a former member of the Weather Underground. Part political thriller and part on-the-run love story, Goodwillie’s glimpse of the lapsed idealism that might be fueling America’s subversive underground falls somewhere between Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama and John Updike’s Terrorist. The mix of mocking the jaded hip—the Gawker-like blogging empire that Aidan works for serves as a frequent punching bag—and exploring cultural and social unrest results in a comic and unsettling two-pronged dissection of a subset of contemporary America.

 

Library Journal

After the bombing of a New York City office tower in 2010, jaded thirty something "professional blogger" Aidan Cole receives a mysterious email containing a picture of a striking young woman named Paige Roderick and the text, "She's the one responsible...." The message galvanizes him politically and romantically, and Aidan sets out to locate Paige, eventually tracking her to a Vermont town where she's part of a small ecoterrorist cell she joined out of anger over her brother's death in Iraq. Confronted with the picture, she realizes that she's been betrayed and sets about exposing the group. Paige winds up at Aidan's New York apartment, where her mere presence makes him a not altogether unwilling accessory to terrorism; before they can post their exposé, they're framed by the group and find themselves on the run. VERDICT: Combining biting comedy and deep seriousness and boasting literary antecedents ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Tom Wolfe to Jay McInerney, first novelist Goodwillie (Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time ) offers a remarkable tale of one man's search for meaning and purpose beyond the superficialities of contemporary urban life that will have wide appeal.

 

Autor: David Goodwillie

Data dodania: 2010-01-17