From July ’10 Spotlight: The highlight of this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest was a visit from Adam Langer, here to promote The Thieves of Manhattan, a new novel that takes aim at the New York publishing industry.
Fresh off his recent memoir My Father’s Bonus March, Langer explores the line between fact and fiction in Thieves: “One of the things I found very irritating when I was writing Bonus March,” he told me, “was how all this fakery [from false memoirs like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces to so called “reality shows” on TV] has changed what readers expect from a true memoir.”
“The truth is so murky and hard to get a hold of and so slippery that unfortunately it doesn’t make for great jacket copy. So there’s pressure to have definite answers—pressure from your publicity people and from the people interviewing you—when the truth of what I learned from Bonus March was all about uncertainty.”
Thieves is a great read, engrossing, quick, and funny, but look underneath the mayhem and you’ll find a thoughtful meditation by a hometown hero. Bravo!
Bonus Bonus: Click HERE to read more on Wikipedia about “The Bonus March.”
Click HERE to “Look Inside” Adam Langer’s My Father’s Bonus March on Amazon 🙂
