This Is Your Captain Speaking

April 9, 2012
Methven’s buoyant debut fictionalizes Captain “Sully” Sullenberger’s emergency water landing, the renowned Miracle on the Hudson, and asks “what, if anything, it has to do with celebrity ejaculate,” specifically John Lennon’s. Fugitive semen trafficker Normal Fulk has smuggled a vial aboard the Air Wanderlust flight that Capt. Hank Swagger water-lands off Manhattan’s Pier 66, bringing Fulk back into the viewfinder of Rory Genius-Temple, a violent thug and producer of the reality show Semen Pirates. While Swagger’s heroics may reverse the airline’s financial nosedive, his evacuation ass-slapping draws the suspicions of another passenger, Celebrity Twitter Beat anchor and Sandra Bullock look-alike Lucy Springer. Noting that the rescue is too orderly, the boats too swift, and the passengers too good-looking, Springer smells a hoax. As Fulk, Swagger, and Springer execute—and sometimes botch—their missions, a man called Blackie Spin sits in the shadows, pulling the strings. Fans of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency will relish this frequent contributor’s snappy farce about publicity, celebrity culture, and a ne’er-do-well’s attempt to save some crippled orphans by way of one Beatle’s frozen swimmers. Agent: David Patterson, Foundry Literary + Media.

June 1, 2012
What if the "Miracle on the Hudson" were completely faked by an unscrupulous airline company in order to boost prices? And what if we got a guy to write the whole thing up just like Carl Hiaasen? Frequent McSweeney's contributor Methven employs a very familiar menagerie of misfits, misanthropes and damaged goods in his episodic debut novel. Told over the course of seven days, the book chronicles the epic story of Air Wanderlust Flight 2921. In the midst of a routine flight, the plane loses both engines in a "birdstrike," and Captain Hank Swagger brings the flying brick to a miraculous halt in the Hudson River, saving all 162 souls on board. Except that it's all a ruse, an invention designed to save the company and turn its alcoholic cowboy pilot into a national hero. To lend the book comic heft, Methven follows two additional passengers. The first, Normal Fulk, is a con man who recently faked his own death and is mourning the loss of his most prized possession--a vial containing the frozen sperm of John Lennon. "And really, passengers, was it not inevitable that it would come to this--the general citizenry, those with a little cash left and looking to burn it on a new vice--wanting to own the genetic code of their most beloved celebrities?" Methven asks. Where the book ratchets up the absurdity is in the story of Lucy Springer, a media darling whose two loves were her banker husband and a doppelganger named "Ava Tardner," the puppet costume she was wearing when she shot up her cheating husband's office. This leads a judge to sentence her to wear the puppet at all times, even on air. It's Lucy who begins pulling at the frayed edges of the Swagger story, unraveling it bit by unhinged bit. Don't miss Methven's psychotic, if interactive, reading group guide at the end. A quick-witted comedy about celebrity a bit too tongue-in-cheek for its own good.

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May 1, 2012
In his scathing debut, Methven offers a Pynchonesque, offbeat parody of American media coverage and celebrity. After staging his own death, Normal Fulk haphazardly chose Air Wanderlust flight 2921 in an attempt to flee his complicated career as a semen trafficker and the TV mogul who wants to make him a reality star. Unfortunately, AW2921 crashes into the Hudson River. Everyone survives, but things seem a little off. There's the overly prepared crew, the unusually beautiful passengers, and the calm pilot, who seems to instantly know he's a hero. But Captain Hank Swagger doesn't feel like a hero because he knows the truththe crash was staged in order to boost airline stock prices. And then there's passenger Lucy Springer, a washed-up celebrity-gossip journalist who may have found her chance to reclaim her career. As Normal desperately attempts to retrieve a prized vial of John Lennon's semen from the plane's flooded wreckage and disappear forever, the characters' lives tailspin into a smart, fast-paced farce in which Methven ably satirizes America's signature take on reality and culture of greed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)