BY STAFF WRITER
David Gordon is a Jewish writer in New York, and he's "Big in Japan,"
according to a snappy oped he recently wrote for the New York Times.
But more on that below.
First, meet Mr Gordon: a novelist on the way up, and if you never
heard of him yet, you will soon, and you are hearing about him right
now.
He's the author of the 2010 novel titled ''The Serialist'', and he's
published a few other novels, too. But how he became "big in Japan" is
a story right out of a Sholem Aleichem playbook. And it couldn't have
happened to a nicer guy.
You see, Gordon's novels had been translated into Japanese, and
severael other languages, too -- but not Yiddish, not yet -- and when
he went
to visit Tokyo last summer, he discovered that not only had his novel
been translated there, but there was a movie in release based on one
of the novel and he was famous. As in ''famous''!
David-san was invited to the premiere of the film at a swank theater
in downtown Tokyo and
found himself swamped by a friendly group of flash-bulbing paparazzi.
"The Serialist" (in translation in Japan) won a major Japanese literary
award, and then it won another and another, according to Gordon. Not
many foreigners win
three literary awards in Japan and not all in one year. And since the
main character of the
novel is a pulp fiction writer, the novel was titled “Niryuu
Shousetsuka” in Japanese which means "Second-Rate Novelist."
But that is not what David Gordon is. He's top-rate and he's going
places. This Japan thing was just the first stop. Just you wait and see.
Gordon is as good as gold in Tokyo.
And he flew there last summer to see a Japanese movie set in Tokyo,
with Japanese
actors speaking Japanese, even though the original novel he wrote features
Westerners and takes place mostly in Queens, New York. Go figure.
As Gordon tells it in the Times oped, which he was commissioned to
write for the Sunday Magazine:
"They made the movie very fast, in about six months, and invited me to
the premiere in June 2013. My Japanese publishers had contrived to
release my new novel, “Mystery Girl,” at the same time."
"At the airport, I was met by my editor and a TV crew, which, I assure
you, had never happened before,'' Gordon recalled. "I was put up in a
hotel where James Bond might have stayed, with a remote-controlled tub
that filled automatically and a giant button that opened the drapes --
futuristic, but a 1960s kind of future. As requested, I put on a black
suit and a tie ...and went to the premiere, where each member of the
cast, including the woman who sang the theme song, bowed and thanked
me.''
For a week in Tokyo, David-san, a Jewish kid from New York, did
newspaper and TV interviews, met movie critics and fans and visited
bookshops to sign his books for even more fans.
"I traveled everywhere with an entourage, signing books aided by two
assistants, one who held the book for me, another who blotted my
signature with tissue," he said. "People toasted me and applauded my ability to
eat with chopsticks."
Then Gordon flew back to New York and his daily routine of
writing, jogging, reading and visitng friends.
"I live alone in book-filled
rooms smaller than my Tokyo hotel suite," he wrote. "My bathtub doesn’t fill
itself. I sit and write all day in silence."
Such a life. Good things are bound to flow from it now.
========================
NOTES & REFS:
1. Our protagonist in THE SERIALIST is Harry Bloch, a hack writer who
specializes in trashy genre books written under a
variety of pseudonyms. These include: hard-boiled
detective novels, featuring Mordechai Jones, the
"ghetto sheriff," a Jewish African-American of mixed
Ethiopian and Native American ancestry; a series of
trashy science fiction novels (typical title: Whither
Thou Goest, O Slutship Commander?) ; and—Bloch’s
latest project—vampire romances, written under the
name of his dead mother. (Apparently vampire books
written by men are a dud in the marketplace.)
Excerpts of each of these genres are presented at
various points in The Serialist, and serve as comic
vignettes in a novel that otherwise is quite macabre
2.
David Gordon was inspired to write his first
novel after reading letters from convicted
criminals. As with the character Darian
Clay in The Serialist
, these prisoners often
complained about being
"wrongly incarcerated."
Gordon explains: "Many
asked for lawyers or to
have their stories told,
though they would have
settled for free magazines.
I also considered writing an article on the
disturbing phenomenon of women who
write to prisoners, particularly those locked
up for violent crimes, and become
enamored with them. These two ideas
formed the basic situation in my mind."
Before embarking on his new career as a
novelist, Gordon gained experience as a
ghostwriter, teacher, tutor, copywriter, poet,
scriptwriter, foot messenger, shipping clerk
and editor of adult magazines—the latter
job presenting him with the opportunity to
read letters from convicts. Most of these
professions find their way into his debut
novel, a postmodern detective story with
bits of sci-fi and vampire fiction thrown in
for good measure. Gordon was born in
Queens, studied writing at Columbia
University, and lives in New York City. He
is currently working on two projects, a "dark
comic love story" set in New York and a
thriller about a bookstore clerk turned
detective in Los Angeles.
3. Like Mystery Girl, The Serialist is narrated by a divorced Jewish ...
Like Mystery Girl, The Serialist is narrated by a divorced Jewish American writer who hasn’t achieved the fame he’s desired. But in this case, the writer, who is named Harry Bloch, has been slugging in the salt mines of anonymously written adult novels, vampire romance and urban action heroes. He’s used his mother’s name and picture for the vampire novels. But his life changes when he gets a letter from an inmate at a prison. It turns out one of his biggest fans is a convicted serial killer, sitting on death row. And he’s willing to have a book written on his life story.
Once again, this is an excellent novel. I’m astounded it was the first one published by Gordon. It’s not as stunning as Mystery Girl, but still worth your time. It kept me up late reading, which is always a plus.
4. interview
The way you describe your struggle with narrative and plot reminds me of the protagonist of Mystery Girl, Sam, who struggles as an experimental novelist.
Well, for some degree I always start with myself, because where else am I going to start? And I think I’m also lazy. I tend to think of the situation, and to have a protagonist be a nun in 12th Century Italy would require a lot of work. So why not have the guy be around my age, and why not make him Jewish? But then as the character grows, he takes off in different tangents from me and become not me at all. In The Serialist, the protagonist is someone who, if he were my friend, would be someone I admire. With Sam, though, Sam is someone who’s never been successful as a writer. It’s very different.
5 . interview MORE from BUSTLE
Have you lived in L.A.?
I lived there for much of the 1990s. While I was at Columbia, a screenplay I co-wrote got optioned. I took six months to go out to L.A. with my writing partner to see what happened.
6. DAVID GORDON is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Columbia MFA program and also holds a Masters in English and comparative literature from Columbia. He has worked as a screenwriter and a magazine editor. He lives in New York City.
7. SYNOPSIS: Failed author Harry Bloch writes a sex-fantasy column called "Slut Whisperer" for a HUSTLER-type magazine and ghostwrites student papers on the side. This darkly comic character offers a well-met challenge for narrator Bronson Pinchot. When Bloch is summoned by serial killer Darien Clay, who is on death row, to write his true confessions, Pinchot's storytelling ably transitions from the narrative voice of the self-deprecating Jewish author to that of the truly evil man in prison. Other characters who are well portrayed are Clay's hard-bitten attorney, Bloch's teenaged business manager for the ghostwriting business, and the stripper sister of one of Clay's victims, who becomes Bloch's lover. Gordon's thriller is interspersed with bizarre voyages into Bloch's soft-porn vampire and fantasy tales. Pinchot negotiates all these elements with alacrity and humor
8. THE SERIALIST swept all three MINOR AND BASICALLY INDUSTRY CREATED awards for foreign crime fiction in Japan (where the major motion picture adaptation premiered too in Japanese). They are not real literary awards but marketing gimmicks. Japan has more book awards than books!
9.
Now Gordon returns with his highly anticipated follow-up: MYSTERY GIRL: A Novel, a darkly comic literary thriller that combines razor-sharp satire, brilliant plot twists, and a loving homage to all things dark and weird.
The Jewish character Sam Kornberg is a failed experimental novelist with a collapsing marriage living in L.A. Desperate for work (or more accurately, desperate for a job to tell his wife about), he answers an ad from a portly (ok, obese), housebound private detective named Solar Lonsky, a man as brilliant and charismatic as he is (possibly) insane. Sam’s assignment to track a mysterious woman is the trigger for a tense, smart, and often screamingly funny story involving sexy doppelgangers, insane asylums, south-of-the-border shootouts, mistaken identities, video-store-geekery, and the death of the novel.
10. MORE JEWS: Synopsis:Sam Kornberg lives in L.A., his marriage is falling apart and it looks like he'll never be the novelist he dreamed of being. Looking for any job he might be qualify for , Sam gets a job as an assistant (he specializes in being an "assistant") detective to Solar Lonsky.
11. Agent Doug Stewart - editor Karen Thompson -- Seth Fishman ?
12.
"I showed up at the airport, [where] my editor was to meet [me], but there was also a TV crew waiting to interview me," he says. "[That's] not what normally happens when I hop on a plane in the US."
Gordon says the whole experice doesn't feel real — and that it was all over quickly.
"I've wanted to be a writer since second or third grade, and really dedicated my life to it. And for a long time, nobody really cared. At all," he says. "But to suddenly, weirdly, have rooms full of people applauding this thing that you've been doing on your own in a room by yourself for the last 20 years, is really intense."
Life back in the US is a bit strange for Gordon, where he's not recognized as that famous Japanese author.
"I have to teach a class this week. I'm definitely not a super star," he says.
13. Douglas Stewart
Doug has been an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic since 2003. Previous to joining SLL, he was an agent at Curtis Brown, Ltd. for more than seven years. Doug’s list is made up of primarily fiction and memoir, running the gamut from the innovatively literary to the unabashedly commercial. He is looking for work for all ages, for writers with unique voices and exciting stories to tell. Doug’s clients for the adult market include Matthew Quick, David Mitchell, Jami Attenberg, Carolyn Parkhurst, Michael Dahlie, Colin McAdam, Rebecca Lee, T Cooper, and Graham Joyce, among others. For the children’s market, Doug represents Jane O’Connor of Fancy Nancy fame, the team behind the bestselling Ladybug Girl series Jacky Davis and David Soman, as well as Dana Reinhardt, Melissa Walker, Gabrielle Zevin, Jennifer Allison, Tom Watson, and many others.
David Gordon is a Jewish writer in New York, and he's "Big in Japan,"
according to a snappy oped he recently wrote for the New York Times.
But more on that below.
First, meet Mr Gordon: a novelist on the way up, and if you never
heard of him yet, you will soon, and you are hearing about him right
now.
He's the author of the 2010 novel titled ''The Serialist'', and he's
published a few other novels, too. But how he became "big in Japan" is
a story right out of a Sholem Aleichem playbook. And it couldn't have
happened to a nicer guy.
You see, Gordon's novels had been translated into Japanese, and
severael other languages, too -- but not Yiddish, not yet -- and when
he went
to visit Tokyo last summer, he discovered that not only had his novel
been translated there, but there was a movie in release based on one
of the novel and he was famous. As in ''famous''!
David-san was invited to the premiere of the film at a swank theater
in downtown Tokyo and
found himself swamped by a friendly group of flash-bulbing paparazzi.
"The Serialist" (in translation in Japan) won a major Japanese literary
award, and then it won another and another, according to Gordon. Not
many foreigners win
three literary awards in Japan and not all in one year. And since the
main character of the
novel is a pulp fiction writer, the novel was titled “Niryuu
Shousetsuka” in Japanese which means "Second-Rate Novelist."
But that is not what David Gordon is. He's top-rate and he's going
places. This Japan thing was just the first stop. Just you wait and see.
Gordon is as good as gold in Tokyo.
And he flew there last summer to see a Japanese movie set in Tokyo,
with Japanese
actors speaking Japanese, even though the original novel he wrote features
Westerners and takes place mostly in Queens, New York. Go figure.
As Gordon tells it in the Times oped, which he was commissioned to
write for the Sunday Magazine:
"They made the movie very fast, in about six months, and invited me to
the premiere in June 2013. My Japanese publishers had contrived to
release my new novel, “Mystery Girl,” at the same time."
"At the airport, I was met by my editor and a TV crew, which, I assure
you, had never happened before,'' Gordon recalled. "I was put up in a
hotel where James Bond might have stayed, with a remote-controlled tub
that filled automatically and a giant button that opened the drapes --
futuristic, but a 1960s kind of future. As requested, I put on a black
suit and a tie ...and went to the premiere, where each member of the
cast, including the woman who sang the theme song, bowed and thanked
me.''
For a week in Tokyo, David-san, a Jewish kid from New York, did
newspaper and TV interviews, met movie critics and fans and visited
bookshops to sign his books for even more fans.
"I traveled everywhere with an entourage, signing books aided by two
assistants, one who held the book for me, another who blotted my
signature with tissue," he said. "People toasted me and applauded my ability to
eat with chopsticks."
Then Gordon flew back to New York and his daily routine of
writing, jogging, reading and visitng friends.
"I live alone in book-filled
rooms smaller than my Tokyo hotel suite," he wrote. "My bathtub doesn’t fill
itself. I sit and write all day in silence."
Such a life. Good things are bound to flow from it now.
========================
NOTES & REFS:
1. Our protagonist in THE SERIALIST is Harry Bloch, a hack writer who
specializes in trashy genre books written under a
variety of pseudonyms. These include: hard-boiled
detective novels, featuring Mordechai Jones, the
"ghetto sheriff," a Jewish African-American of mixed
Ethiopian and Native American ancestry; a series of
trashy science fiction novels (typical title: Whither
Thou Goest, O Slutship Commander?) ; and—Bloch’s
latest project—vampire romances, written under the
name of his dead mother. (Apparently vampire books
written by men are a dud in the marketplace.)
Excerpts of each of these genres are presented at
various points in The Serialist, and serve as comic
vignettes in a novel that otherwise is quite macabre
2.
David Gordon was inspired to write his first
novel after reading letters from convicted
criminals. As with the character Darian
Clay in The Serialist
, these prisoners often
complained about being
"wrongly incarcerated."
Gordon explains: "Many
asked for lawyers or to
have their stories told,
though they would have
settled for free magazines.
I also considered writing an article on the
disturbing phenomenon of women who
write to prisoners, particularly those locked
up for violent crimes, and become
enamored with them. These two ideas
formed the basic situation in my mind."
Before embarking on his new career as a
novelist, Gordon gained experience as a
ghostwriter, teacher, tutor, copywriter, poet,
scriptwriter, foot messenger, shipping clerk
and editor of adult magazines—the latter
job presenting him with the opportunity to
read letters from convicts. Most of these
professions find their way into his debut
novel, a postmodern detective story with
bits of sci-fi and vampire fiction thrown in
for good measure. Gordon was born in
Queens, studied writing at Columbia
University, and lives in New York City. He
is currently working on two projects, a "dark
comic love story" set in New York and a
thriller about a bookstore clerk turned
detective in Los Angeles.
3. Like Mystery Girl, The Serialist is narrated by a divorced Jewish ...
Like Mystery Girl, The Serialist is narrated by a divorced Jewish American writer who hasn’t achieved the fame he’s desired. But in this case, the writer, who is named Harry Bloch, has been slugging in the salt mines of anonymously written adult novels, vampire romance and urban action heroes. He’s used his mother’s name and picture for the vampire novels. But his life changes when he gets a letter from an inmate at a prison. It turns out one of his biggest fans is a convicted serial killer, sitting on death row. And he’s willing to have a book written on his life story.
Once again, this is an excellent novel. I’m astounded it was the first one published by Gordon. It’s not as stunning as Mystery Girl, but still worth your time. It kept me up late reading, which is always a plus.
4. interview
The way you describe your struggle with narrative and plot reminds me of the protagonist of Mystery Girl, Sam, who struggles as an experimental novelist.
Well, for some degree I always start with myself, because where else am I going to start? And I think I’m also lazy. I tend to think of the situation, and to have a protagonist be a nun in 12th Century Italy would require a lot of work. So why not have the guy be around my age, and why not make him Jewish? But then as the character grows, he takes off in different tangents from me and become not me at all. In The Serialist, the protagonist is someone who, if he were my friend, would be someone I admire. With Sam, though, Sam is someone who’s never been successful as a writer. It’s very different.
5 . interview MORE from BUSTLE
Have you lived in L.A.?
I lived there for much of the 1990s. While I was at Columbia, a screenplay I co-wrote got optioned. I took six months to go out to L.A. with my writing partner to see what happened.
6. DAVID GORDON is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Columbia MFA program and also holds a Masters in English and comparative literature from Columbia. He has worked as a screenwriter and a magazine editor. He lives in New York City.
7. SYNOPSIS: Failed author Harry Bloch writes a sex-fantasy column called "Slut Whisperer" for a HUSTLER-type magazine and ghostwrites student papers on the side. This darkly comic character offers a well-met challenge for narrator Bronson Pinchot. When Bloch is summoned by serial killer Darien Clay, who is on death row, to write his true confessions, Pinchot's storytelling ably transitions from the narrative voice of the self-deprecating Jewish author to that of the truly evil man in prison. Other characters who are well portrayed are Clay's hard-bitten attorney, Bloch's teenaged business manager for the ghostwriting business, and the stripper sister of one of Clay's victims, who becomes Bloch's lover. Gordon's thriller is interspersed with bizarre voyages into Bloch's soft-porn vampire and fantasy tales. Pinchot negotiates all these elements with alacrity and humor
8. THE SERIALIST swept all three MINOR AND BASICALLY INDUSTRY CREATED awards for foreign crime fiction in Japan (where the major motion picture adaptation premiered too in Japanese). They are not real literary awards but marketing gimmicks. Japan has more book awards than books!
9.
Now Gordon returns with his highly anticipated follow-up: MYSTERY GIRL: A Novel, a darkly comic literary thriller that combines razor-sharp satire, brilliant plot twists, and a loving homage to all things dark and weird.
The Jewish character Sam Kornberg is a failed experimental novelist with a collapsing marriage living in L.A. Desperate for work (or more accurately, desperate for a job to tell his wife about), he answers an ad from a portly (ok, obese), housebound private detective named Solar Lonsky, a man as brilliant and charismatic as he is (possibly) insane. Sam’s assignment to track a mysterious woman is the trigger for a tense, smart, and often screamingly funny story involving sexy doppelgangers, insane asylums, south-of-the-border shootouts, mistaken identities, video-store-geekery, and the death of the novel.
10. MORE JEWS: Synopsis:Sam Kornberg lives in L.A., his marriage is falling apart and it looks like he'll never be the novelist he dreamed of being. Looking for any job he might be qualify for , Sam gets a job as an assistant (he specializes in being an "assistant") detective to Solar Lonsky.
11. Agent Doug Stewart - editor Karen Thompson -- Seth Fishman ?
12.
"I showed up at the airport, [where] my editor was to meet [me], but there was also a TV crew waiting to interview me," he says. "[That's] not what normally happens when I hop on a plane in the US."
Gordon says the whole experice doesn't feel real — and that it was all over quickly.
"I've wanted to be a writer since second or third grade, and really dedicated my life to it. And for a long time, nobody really cared. At all," he says. "But to suddenly, weirdly, have rooms full of people applauding this thing that you've been doing on your own in a room by yourself for the last 20 years, is really intense."
Life back in the US is a bit strange for Gordon, where he's not recognized as that famous Japanese author.
"I have to teach a class this week. I'm definitely not a super star," he says.
13. Douglas Stewart
Doug has been an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic since 2003. Previous to joining SLL, he was an agent at Curtis Brown, Ltd. for more than seven years. Doug’s list is made up of primarily fiction and memoir, running the gamut from the innovatively literary to the unabashedly commercial. He is looking for work for all ages, for writers with unique voices and exciting stories to tell. Doug’s clients for the adult market include Matthew Quick, David Mitchell, Jami Attenberg, Carolyn Parkhurst, Michael Dahlie, Colin McAdam, Rebecca Lee, T Cooper, and Graham Joyce, among others. For the children’s market, Doug represents Jane O’Connor of Fancy Nancy fame, the team behind the bestselling Ladybug Girl series Jacky Davis and David Soman, as well as Dana Reinhardt, Melissa Walker, Gabrielle Zevin, Jennifer Allison, Tom Watson, and many others.