[23] Guest post by Anthony Caplan

ABOUT ANTHONY

Anthony Caplan is an independent writer, teacher and homesteader in northern New England. He has worked at various times as a shrimp fisherman, environmental activist, journalist, taxi-driver, builder, window-washer, and telemarketer, (the last for only a month, but one week he did win a four tape set of the greatest hits of George Jones for selling the most copies of Time-Life’s The Loggers.) Currently, Caplan is working on restoring a 150 year old farmstead where he and his family tend sheep and chickens, grow most of their own vegetables, and have started a small apple orchard from scratch His road novels, BIRDMAN and FRENCH POND ROAD, trace the meanderings of one Billy Kagan, a footloose soul striving after sanity and love in the last years of the last centur! y. His latest fiction effort, LATITUDES – A Story of Coming Home, to be released on Kindle, Nook and Smashwords and paperback in the summer of 2012, is a young boy’s transformative journey overcoming dysfunction. 

Find out more about him and his work at http://www.anthonycaplanwrites.com

Connect on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ - !/AnthonyCaplan1

Connect on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/home.php

The New Remembrance: http://thenewremembrance.blogpost.com 

 ABOUT HIS BOOK

LATITUDES – A story of one boy overcoming dysfuntion, dislocation and distance…When Father and Mother, a highflying young American lawyer and his party-hard bride, fall prey to the self-destructive lure of alcohol and sexual liberation, Will and his sisters pay the price in divorce and kidnappings that take them back and forth between the rain forest hideaways of coastal Latin America and the placid suburbs of Long Island. Will identifies with the oppressed workers laboring in his father’s fast food restaurant and longs for American freedom. Father remarries the daughter of a local aristocrat, and Will is sent off to the hothouse world of a New England boarding school.Swimming in a sea of Fair Isle sweaters and LL Bean boots, Will discovers a core of resilience in himself that allows him to survive, thrive, and ultimately embrace the flawed and varied worlds he inhabits. Will reconnects with Mother, sinking into a New York City world of Irish bars and one night stands he cannot save her from. With a little help from friends, and a high school Shakespeare class taught by the school’s closeted gay athletic trainer, Will begins to see the possibility of finding his true path. Latitudes charts the birth pangs of a quest for self and soul —  from a tropical childhood to a coming of age on the road.

Release Date: June 30, 2012 – Hope Mountain Press

GUEST POST

Push Those Shopping Carts Hard Suckers

“It would be like ‘The Road,’ ” one publishing executive in New York said, half-jokingly, referring to the Cormac McCarthy novel. “The post-apocalyptic world of publishing, with publishers pushing shopping carts down Broadway.”

 NYTIMES, 1/29/2012, Barnes and Noble Takes on Amazon as Publishing Industry Fights For Its Life


Personally, I can't wait. The publishing industry, in my experience, has combined the worst sort of clubby, insider elitism with a head in the sand lack of vision and courage. They don't deserve to prosper. Open the floodgates and let the people decide, I say.

I will always remember my meeting with Robert McCrumb of Faber and Faber in London when I was trying to publish my first attempt at novel writing, a book called Strange How I Miss You, half memoir, half travelogue. Mr. McCrumb took me into his office and shook my hand and said he liked my manuscript but would never publish it. My problem was I was an unknown writer and therefore unknowable. How does that work? I wondered to myself. Keep writing, said McCrumb. A couple of years later he suffered a heart attack and retired, a relatively young guy. I guess the pressures of living and working in such a Kafkaesque atmosphere got to him.

Then, amidst a flood of rejection letters, there was one, from the head of Random House at the time, Jacob Epstein. He said he liked Strange How I Miss You, but it read very much like a travelogue. It is a blanking travelogue, I yelled aloud when I read the letter. We were living in a shed in the west of Ireland with no running water or electricity. My wife just looked at me and shook her head. 

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Thank you Anthony! Leave a comment for him.:)

xoxo,

 disincentive