Sold a MESSIAHS and a CHEESESTEAK. The buyer was a 30/40-ish-year-old attorney, who had been in the tech-financial field and was now waiting to see where life would take him. (He got a t-shirt for his wife.)
In other news…. (Which is where most of the action was.)
1.) My café pal Glory reports her mother hasn’t started LOLLIPOP yet because she has a stack of NYTs to get through. She has, however, read the “Puddles” chapter in CHEESESTEAK four times. “She thinks you are so funny.” Glory knows I went to a Quaker school and was herself in a Quaker mental hospital. Why are the Quakers so into education, she wonders, and “How did they get into oats?”
2.) Felice, an e-mail friend and author of true-crime paperbacks, wrote that she had tried to put a review of MOST OUTRAGEOUS on Amazon but was denied permission because she hadn’t bought it there. Since she wrote that my book was for “anyone interested in true crime, gender relations, comics, the First Amendment, sex crime victims, (and) really most anyone who can read,” I tried to help her. In the course of this effort, I learned that MO had been acquired by sixty-some libraries, including half-a-dozen law libraries (Yale and Penn included. I was frankly flabbergasted. I also found a 10-year-old review at GoodReads, from someone named “Andrew,” which was better and more flattering than anything I could have written. He called me “scrupulous,” “brave” and “wise” and says the book is clearly written, intellectually honest, and has moments where the prose “sings.”
I have to admit MO is the book I fewl most sheepish about. It is the one I least frequently lay out on my café table. But now I thought I might write about its writing, including a never-written story that stemmed from it. So I took another look and – BOY! – is it good!
3.) Coincidentally, just yesterday I received an email from a cousin who usually limits herself to hoping Adele and I are well. I do not know if she has read my most recent book or listened to the “Amusing Jews” podcast, but she wondered “what drew (me) to twisted, violent, misogynistic, sadistic comic artists in the first place.” Outwardly, I seem “calm… but inside must be a seething cauldron.”
I’ll work this into my new piece too.
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.