Who am I?
My name is D. Foy, and I'm a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Oakland. My work has appeared in Salon,
BOMB, Frequencies, Post Road, The Literary Review, and The Georgia Review, among others, and
has been included in the books Laundromat and Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper
Perennial. My debut novel, Made to Break, will be released on March 18, 2014 from Two Dollar Radio, the indie publishing house that Kyle Minor recently said is "the hippest, most adventuresome publisher in America today."
Why am I raising funds?
I want my novel in the hands of as many people as I can reach. If you're reading this, it's likely that you want that, too.
Bringing attention to a book in a hyper-promotional world is hard enough. Without the support of booksellers and readers alike, the chances for a book's success are exponentially reduced.
The writer Ann Patchet couldn't have made this pickle any clearer when she said, "The only thing worse
than going on a book tour is not going on a book tour."
Since I want to increase the chances for my book's success, I'm taking a tour through nearly 30 cities around the country, from February 26 to mid-April.
Here's why I need your help:
As
with most indie publishing houses, once they've invested in the book itself, there's little money left to promote
them the way large publishers can, much less to send their authors on book tours. While Two Dollar Radio is quite literally changing the face of American letters, its promotional activities are confined by a micro budget.
The truth is, the financial burden of this tour rests on me alone.
The $3500 I'm hoping to raise with this campaign will cover a fraction of the actual costs a national tour will incur, things like a rental car, gas, and a few nights in a hotel when I’m not staying with the kind souls who’ve offered to host me along the way.
For a full inventory of the costs your contribution will help to meet, check out the section below, "What your contribution will support."
Made to Break, the novel
Made to Break
recently made Flavorwire’s 15 Most Anticipated Books of 2014, and Anthony Swofford says, “Reading D. Foy's prose
is like watching Robert Stone and Wallace Stevens drag race across a frozen
lake at midnight.”
Two days before New Years, a pack of five friends—three men
and two women—head to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe to celebrate the holidays.
They've been buddies forever, banded together by scrapes and squalor, their
relationships defined by these wild times.
After a car accident leaves one friend sick and dying, and
severe weather traps them at the cabin, there is nowhere to go, forcing them to
finally and ultimately take stock and confront their past transgressions,
considering what they mean to one another and to themselves.
From Two Dollar Radio’s jacket copy:
“With some of the most luminous and purple prose flexed in
recent memory, D. Foy is an incendiary new voice and Made to Break, a
grand, episodic debut, redolent of the stark conscience of Denis Johnson and
the spellbinding vision of Roberto Bolaño.”
What they're saying about Made to Break
“D. Foy’s writing is
so rich, so saturated in both life and literature, that one is tempted to
strain for comparison, to find whatever madcap equivalencies (“It’s X meets
Y!”) might begin to describe it accurately. Yet its whorl and grain, the
fantastical strangeness of Foy’s sentences and the astonishing accuracy of his
perception, amounts to something I can only call new. Made To Break is
that rare thing: a truly original, and ferociously necessary, book.”
—Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine
“D. Foy’s Made to
Break is a fiercely engrossing story of isolation, decaying friendships,
and what people are capable of when they become, in body and in soul, trapped,
all set against a dangerous winter landscape. These characters are so richly
alive, these sentences so stormy and beautiful, this novel reads less like a
debut than an assured, indelible work of art.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth
“Made to Break
is a fearless exploration of fragility–the fragility of friendship, the
fragility of romance, the fragility of human life–but the book itself, trussed
by D. Foy’s lavishly constructed sentences and astute psychological
observations, is built to last. Think: Celine. Think: Burroughs. Think: Denis
Johnson. Or better yet, think: D. Foy, poet laureate-elect of that marginal
America filled with junkies and drunks, where death is omnipresent, and
the refuge of an open diner on a stormy night is the closest one gets to the
American Dream.”
—Adam Wilson, author of Flatscreen and What’s Important Is Feeling
“Stand back—D. Foy
has ignited a big bad bacchanal where the sentences—if not whole pages—sear
your skull. And buckle up, too, because the characters in Made to Break
don’t. Here is a novel to cheer and to foist upon others.”
—Terese Svoboda author of Tin God, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, Bohemian Girl
“While reading Made
to Break I just couldn’t believe it was the author’s first novel. The
characters are deadly, troubled, vibrant, and their world is suffused with
evil—not the manufactured evil of a Hollywood horror movie, but the carefully
paced malevolence of a world doomed to swallow its inhabitants, consuming their
shallow, fucked up memories in a swell of amoral darkness. D. Foy is not just a
writer. He’s the kind of archangel Stanley Kubrick would have built wings for.
Don’t just read this book. Revel in it. I swear you won’t be able to stop.”
—Samuel Sattin, author of League of Somebodies
“Made to Break
is a debauched Decameron for the punk and pills age. The group of
friends in this excellent debut novel hit bottom together, and hit it hard. D.
Foy sets his characters in motion and sends them reeling, one sure hand on the
reader’s throat in a gorgeous, exhilarating tumble.”
—Cari Luna, author of The Revolution of Every Day
“If Jonathan Ames,
David Lynch, and Jack Kerouac banded together to pen a cautionary tale about
Peter Pan and his drug- and alcohol-addled Lost Boys-as-Donner Party refugees,
it would look like Made to Break. In D. Foy’s hands, men and women
too old to behave like the impetuous teens they once were still cling to the
dying code of what made their youth survivable. This book is one wild,
wild ride.”
—Christian Kiefer, author of The Infinite Tide
The tour
The official launch date for Made to Break is March 18, but I’ll be
kicking off my national tour starting with AWP Seattle on February 26, where I’ll read
with Jeff Jackson (Mira Corpora), Matt Bell (In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods),
Sean Madigan Hoen (Songs Only You Know), and that great insurgent
siren, Cari Luna (The Revolution of Everyday). This event is sponsored by Two Dollar Radio, Soho Press, Bookforum Magazine magazine. I'll also do two other gigs at AWP with a giant crew from Lazy Fascist Press (and others). You can see the full slate of venues and writers for all of the Seattle events here.
As for Cari Luna: immediately following the lollapalooza
that is AWP, she and I are going to do a Bonnie-and-Clyde on the
northwest, taking the region by storm. The itinerary will include Bellingham,
WA, Vancouver BC, Olympia, WA, and Portland, OR, at
Powell’s. More details are forthcoming on these, too. We can assure you,
however, that the ride will include videos, goofy or otherwise, podcasts, radio
shows, and blog entries, then—in all likelihood—a joint, post-recovery,
tell-all essay about our adventures. I'll also be blogging about my adventures once a week over at Electric Literature's site The Outlet.
While Cari may be headed back home after all of that fun,
however, I’ll only be getting started. From Portland, I’ll roll into the Bay
Area, where the ass-kicking Joshua Mohr (Damascus and others.) and I will appear “in conversation” at San
Francisco’s famed City Lights Books. I’ll do the same with Samuel Sattin at Green Apple Books in SF and with Christian Kiefer at Books Inc.
in Alameda, as well. After these appearances, I head to the Kreuzberg Cafe in San Luis Obispo, an
oasis on Cali’s central coast and the town of my conception, and from there to LA
to rock it out at two different events, one in conversation with God of Letters
Matthew Specktor (American Dream Machine) and another with a
couple of Two Dollar Radio’s living legends, Grace Krilanovich and Karolina
Waclawiak.
At home in NYC for two days, I’ll be joined by Anthony Swofford
for a talk/reading/Q&A/signing at SoHo’s McNally Jackson Books,
followed by a racous sort of event with Paula Bomer and Sean H. Doyle at Brooklyn’s own BookCourt,
hosted by the boys from Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Jason Diamond and Tobias
Carroll.
From Brooklyn, I head straight to Philadelphia and from
there to Richmond and a number of events in North Carolina. Columbus, OH
(hometown of Two Dollar Radio) is the first town I'll hit in the Midwest, followed by Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Iowa City. After these, I head to Washington, D.C. for a literary conference and reading at Three Tents Reading Series.
Back at the ranch again on April 7, I’ll read at the now
world-famous Franklin Park Reading Series, hosted by Penina
Roth. Dates in Providence, Boston, and Portsmouth will follow. On April 28, I'll hit the STARTS HERE! Reading Series in Baltimore, and, finally, on
May 1, I’ll get on the stage at Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn with Ben Dolnick.
Whew!!!
What your contribution will support
HOTELS
Seattle:
$448
Bellingham: $100
SF: $200
Philly: $99
Iowa City: $82
Total:
$930
CAR RENTAL
$965
GAS
$954.20 (at $3.67
per gallon)
http://fuelgaugereport.aaa.com/?redirectto=http://fuelgaugereport.opisnet.com/index.asp
MILEAGE
West Coast
Seattle/Bellingham:
89 miles
Bellingham/Vancouver:
52 miles
Vancouver/Olympia:
203 miles
OIympia/Portland:
113 miles
Portland/SF:
636 miles
SF/SLO:
231 miles
SLO/LA:
189 miles
East Coast, Midwest, and East Coast Redux
NYC/Philly:
95 miles
Philly/Richmond:
250 miles
Richmond/Greensboro:
202 miles
Greensboro/Charlotte:
290 miles
Charlotte/Chapel
Hill: 140 miles
Chapel
Hill/Columbus: 457 miles
Columbus/Cleveland:
148 miles
Cleveland/Ann
Arbor: 167 miles
Ann
Arbor/Chicago: 241 miles
Chicago/Minneapolis:
409 miles
Minneapolis/Iowa
City: 304 miles
Iowa City/Columbus: 534 milieus
Columbus/DC:
402 miles
DC/NYC:
225 miles
NYC/Providence:
181 miles
Providence/Boston:
50 miles
Boston/Portsmouth:
57miles
Portsmouth/NYC:
264 miles
Total: 5,929 miles
At
approximately 23 mpg (Subaru Outback 2005!), I'll use 260 gallons.
$3.67
x 260 = $954.20
PARKING
$200
MISCELLANEOUS
$500
GRAND TOTAL: $3,550
Other ways you can help
You may not be able to contribute, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help. I'll love you all forever and a day if you:
-
Get the word out about me, Made to Break, and the tour I'm taking to support it
-
Holler at others about my campaign to raise funds for the tour
-
Buy Made to Break from Two Dollar Radio or from your local indie bookseller
I thank you all in advance for any help you may offer and for your energy and your eyes!
Big hearts!
D
