Publicist’s Alert: ‘Useless Information’

This blog receives many publicist alerts. Here’s the smartest, verbatim (message line included):

USELESS INFORMATON

Hello. I am David Manning’s underpaid literary agent and publicist. He refuses to send this email, so I am hijacking his books account to do it for him. Thanks to an anonymous donor, there is an ad in the latest New York Review of Books (expiring 10/11/12) featuring his dystopian satire A Brief History of the Recent Future. The ad also mentions the other two books: Dead Letters (a Carolina coast mystery) and Sylvia’s Violin (a young adult fantasy).

All three of his books (so far) are now available in both ebook and print editions (improved from the earlier galley edition). The epub/nook/kindle versions are only $2.99. (Did you know Amazon has a free Kindle reader you can download on your computer?) All versions can be found at lulu.com/dhmimpressions except the Kindles, which are, of course, available on Amazon (print is there, too).

I realize some of you have already wasted your money on David’s books, but the ebooks are a great chance for those who haven’t yet to waste even less.

Please don’t tell David I sent this.

Cyrano de Bergerac

I know it’s the smartest piece of useless information received here because it’s the only one my staff of thousands has ever persuaded me to post.

Worth quoting, too, is the author’s note for A Brief History of the Recent Future:

I wrote this book in the mid 1970s, at a time when the counter-culture was taking on down-home nineteenth-century agrarian ideals, the president was turning to petty theft for power, and everyone was wondering where all the energy had gone. The idea was to satirize the world as we thought we knew it by simply imagining the most bizarre possible future, such as garbage becoming a valuable energy source, the establishment of a credit-based economy, or the entire country’s collective consciousness succumbing to blatantly absurd propaganda. The result was a kind of verbally animated underground cartoon, falling in the general category of dystopian novels.

I submitted the first and only manuscript to the fireplace, immediately re-wrote it, then sat back and watched over the years as “reality” increasingly reflected images of the book’s underlying madness.

And it’s only $2.99?