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The Secret Society of Demolition Writers

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Overview

What would you write if no one knew who you were?

In the spirit of the demolition derby, where drivers take heedless risks with reckless abandon, welcome to the first convocation of the Secret Society of Demolition Writers. Here is a one-of-a-kind collection by famous authors writing anonymously-and dangerously. With the usual concerns about reputations and renown cast aside, these twelve daredevils have each contributed an extreme, no-holds-barred unsigned story, each shining as brightly and urgently as hazard lights.

Unconventional and unapologetic, this publishing equivalent of a whodunit features an eclectic group of fictional characters, including a delusional schizophrenic narrator, an egg donor with second thoughts about her decision, a pharmacist who forms a weird crush on a woman who beat both of her parents to death, and a little girl who understands that an old safe is the threshold to another, ghostly, world. Equally diverse and surprising are the authors themselves: Aimee Bender, Benjamin Cheever, Michael Connelly, Sebastian Junger, Elizabeth McCracken, Rosie O'Donnell, Chris Offutt, Anna Quindlen, John Burnham Schwartz, Alice Sebold, Lauren Slater, and Marc Parent, the editor of the collection. Never before has such a wide-ranging and talented group of authors been assembled to such explosive and entertaining effect.

The Secret Society of Demolition Writers is an intriguing puzzle in itself, but it's also an important addition to the careers of some of our finest storytellers-even if we never really know who wrote what. Its boundary-smashing fiction offers exhilarating proof that for an artist, withholding your identity can mean gaining your freedom.

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Author Information

Bio of Marc Parent

Marc Parent is the author of "Turning Stones: My Days & Nights with Children at Risk" & has written for the "New York Times" & "USA Today" among other publications. He lives in rural Pennsylvania with his wife & two sons. 010

Bio of Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender lives in Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in Granta, GQ, Story, Harper's, The Antioch Review, and several other publications. She is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.

Bio of Benjamin Cheever

Benjamin Cheever is the author of The Plagiarist and The Partisan (Editor's Choice of the New York Times Best Books of 1994). A former editor at Reader's Digest, he has written for the New York Times, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He edited The Letters of John Cheever. He lives in Pleasantville, New York.

Bio of Michael Connelly

MICHAEL CONNELLY decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing--a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews. After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. You can read this story at the Sun-Sentinel web site. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper echelons of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and landing him in the city about which Chandler, his literary hero, had written. After three years on the crime beat, Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992, and later won the Edgar Award for best first novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly followed up with three more Bosch books, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, before publishing The Poet, a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist, in 1996. In 1997, he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music, and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work, was published. Blood Work was inspired in part by a friend's receiving of a heart transplant and the attendant "survivor's guilt" the friend experienced, knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live. Connelly has been interested and fascinated by those same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about years before. Blood Work is soon to be released as a major motion picture in early fall 2002 starring Clint Eastwood, Anjelica Houston, and Jeff Daniels. Angels Flight was released in 1999 and was another entry in the Harry Bosch series. Void Moon, was released in 2000, and introduced a new character, Cassie Black, a high-stakes Las Vegas thief. His 2001 release, A Darkness More Than Night, united Harry Bosch with Terry McCaleb from Blood Work, and was named one of the Best Books Of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times. Michael Connelly was also one of the creators, writers, and consulting producers of Level 9, a TV show about a task force fighting cyber crime that ran on UPN in the fall of 2000.. Connelly's books have won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Nero, Maltese Falcon (Japan), .38 Caliber (France), and Grand Prix (France) awards. He lives with his wife and daughter. - Bio courtesy of www.michaelconnelly.com

Bio of Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger is the author of A Death in Belmont and Fire. He has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism. Most recently, he has been reporting on the war in Afghanistan for Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

850.27 KB

Number of Pages

256

eBook ISBN

9780307432629

Excerpt from: The Secret Society of Demolition Writers by Marc Parent

It seemed the sun never sank that summer. All day long the air was thick and the river running through our town was just a dead gray snake with a sulfurous smell. Without wind, the tops of the trees drooped and when you fanned your face, the air was like a wall of water barely moving over you. People complained. Air-conditioning units banged, and the ice from a Slurpee was cool blue heaven before it melted on the pad of your tongue.

I didn't want to get a job selling Slurpees, the way so many others my age did. I certainly didn't want to be a lifeguard, hoisted high in one of those chairs with an emergency cross blazing at my back. I look eh in a bathing suit. I'm twenty-one, sun sensitive, my skin as white as milk in a blue china cup. I am the kind of person who seeks shady places and books; I like any book that has to do with houses and their insides. I like the old books about Boston houses--Edith Wharton and a man named James write about those--and I like the new books you get in the paperback rack in the drugstore, books where living rooms have velvet drapes and people are in love for two seconds tops. I've been in love a few times, but nothing worth noting here.

I live with my mother. In our town, most of us do. We go to the high school, a big industrial brick building with rows and rows of slick red lockers, and then we graduate up to the community college where huge elms shade the campus and there's an archway you have to drive through that says something important and Latin on it. At the community college, most of us major in physician's assistant training programs, which means you learn to draw a lot of blood and read pressure. Others do something with software architecture. I knew right from the start these career paths were not for me. I knew, and always have, that I wanted to do interior design, to make homes as beautiful as they possibly could be, to understand the subtle but serious distinction between mauve and merlot, or how to bring light to a row of wavy glass windows, to choose a carpet that complements the color of wood that soaks up the shine from the beaded chandelier, the one I chose, swinging from its root in the freshly spackled ceiling.

The summer of heat, the summer before my junior college year, my mother's cancer returned, after ten years' remission. My father left us a long time ago, for Florida. At first my mother felt just a small ache in her bones and then the ache turned into a limp and she finally had to admit the pain grinding and grinding at her hip was not arthritis. The doctor confirmed it with a CAT scan. He showed us the recurrence, there on films so gray they looked covered with cobwebs, there on the furniture of my mother's bones, her architecture all wrong, chips and calcifications, black stains where the malignancy was. The body is a house. Make no mistake about it. The body is a house and the organs are the plush parts and the bones are the scaffolding and bed frames and bookshelves on which you hold your memories, your disappointments.

We came out of the doctor's office, into a blast of heat. My mother waved a rolled-up patient information sheet in front of her face, perspiration lining her lip. "I'll do the chemo," she said. I wanted to put my arm around her, draw her in close, oh mom, but it's not that way between us. We get along, but if you were to give us a personality test, you'd get opposite results. She's loopy and eccentric and has little sense of style. She wears bedroom slippers a lot. I shop at all the outlets for Joan and David shoes and Talbot's clothes. My mother has a knot in her hair, and instead of combing it, she just lets it get bigger and bigger until at last the lady at the salon just has to cut it out. She lives off my father's alimony and spends her days reading horoscope charts and smoking cigarettes until the ash gets so long it drops off onto the carpet. Frankly, I have higher aspirations. A woman should. I'd like, for instance, to accumulate some wealth. I say to my mother, "Don't you need a retirement plan?" and she takes a deep suck off her cigarette, her cheeks collapsing inward and says, "Whoop de doo, I'll be gone before then."