Once more, no essay. The only one I’ve written lately – on the “feud” between Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia – is too long to send out so I’m trying to shop it around. But! There is something a lot more exciting.
My new novel, The Future Was Color, has a cover! I’m so proud of this book and can’t wait for everyone to be able to read it. While it’s still a ways out – June 2024 – we’ve officially entered the “it’s actually coming out” phase of publication, and I’m hideously excited about it.
Okay! Here we go, with some marketing copy thrown in for fun:
A dazzling novel about the inextricable link between the personal and the political set against the decadence of Hollywood and post-war Los Angeles. Coming in June 2024.
As a Hungarian immigrant working as a studio hack writing monster movies in 1950s Los Angeles, George must navigate the McCarthy-era studio system filled with possible Communists and spies; the life of closeted men along Sunset Boulevard; and the inability of the era to cleave love from persecution and guilt. But when Madeline, a famous actress, offers George a “writing residency” at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world is blown open. Soon Madeline is carrying George like an ornament into a class of postwar L.A. society ordinarily hidden from men like him.
What this lifestyle hides behind, aside from the monsters on the screen, are the monsters dwelling closer to home: this bacchanalia covers a gnawing hole shelled wide by the horror of the war and the glimpse of an atomic future. It’s here that George understands he can never escape his past: as György, the gay Jew who fled Budapest before the war and landed in New York, all alone, a decade prior.
Spanning from sun-drenched Los Angeles to hidden corners of working-class New York to a virtuosic climax in the Las Vegas desert, The Future Was Color is an immaculately written exploration of post-war American decadence, reinventing the self through art, and the psychosis that lingers in a world that’s seen the bomb.
A preorder link isn’t available just yet, but you’ll hear from me the second it is. I’m so grateful to Farjana Yasmin and Nicole Caputo for their design and art direction on this. If you do want to support my fiction, my first “evil-soaked novel” (says the New York Times) is available for purchase. Sorry again that there hasn’t been an essay in a while. I’ve been drowning a bit, but hopefully will be back on dry land soon, and back to being annoying in a different way. <3
This sounds good! Love the cover!!