The Thieves of Manhattan

Starred review from April 19, 2010
Langer (Crossing California
) delivers an über-hip caper that pays homage to and skewers the state of publishing and flash-in-the-pan authors. Aspiring writer Ian Minot toils in a New York City diner, enraged because he can't get published. His jealousy is pushed to the edge because he suspects the bestselling memoir about drug addiction and being in a gang by no-talent Blade Markham is a fake. Then Ian's Romanian girlfriend, Anya Petrescu, easily finds a publisher for her short stories. Ian becomes the latest author to be embroiled in a headline-making literary scam when he can't resist a scheme in which he passes off another man's novel about a valuable manuscript as his own memoir. The consummate con game takes a deadly turn after Ian realizes he doesn't understand the ramifications of his book nor does he control his emerging career. Part Bright Lights, Big City
, part The Grifters
, this delicious satire of the literary world is peppered with slang so trendy a glossary is included.

April 15, 2010
A dizzyingly clever novel from Langer (My Father's Bonus March, 2009, etc.) that explores the thin line between fact and fiction, and between memoir and novel.

Narrator Ian Minot, a frustrated writer, is angry that a hack named Blade Markham is being celebrated for a memoir about growing up on the mean streets of New York City, a memoir Ian is convinced Markham made up, his street cred being limited to copping an attitude and inserting"yo" at the end of every sentence. Soon Ian links up with Jed Roth, a fellow writer who's penned The Thief of Manhattan, a novel about stealing a valuable copy of The Tale of Genji, burning down the library that housed it and murdering a couple of book fanatics. Jed persuades Ian to rewrite the novel, alter a few incidents and submit it to publisher Geoff Olden as a memoir. The plan is to have it become a bestseller and then publicly humiliate Olden (who'd published Markham's book) when it's revealed to be a fake. Ian's life is complicated by his attachment to his girlfriend, Anya Petrescu, whose memoir about growing up in Romania, We Never Talked About Ceausescu, is creating buzz. Eventually Anya drops Ian and hooks up with Markham. Meanwhile, Ian scores a deal with Olden, famous for reading only the first and last pages of a manuscript. Ian's"memoir" is published under the title The Thieves of Manhattan...but it turns out that Roth's original manuscript is in fact based more on truth than on fiction and that Roth may have been manipulating Ian the entire time.

Lots of fun.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2010
Aspiring New York novelist Ian Minot's career is going nowhere. He has a day job in a coffee shop and a Romanian girlfriend, Anya, whose about-to-be published short stories have her poised for literary stardom. He is likewise enraged at the easy success of Blade Markham, whose bogus ( la James Frey) memoir has skyrocketed to the top of the best sellers list. Thus, he's ready to listen when Jed Roth, an embittered former editor, presents him with a scheme to take Roth's unpublished novel, "A Thief in Manhattan", call it a memoir, try to publish it under his own name, and reap the fame and fortune that will soon come his way. The carefully plotted ruse goes swimmingly until just before the publication date, when the events of the so-called memoir inexplicably begin to become real. VERDICT A dizzyingly inventive comic thriller that is at once a sardonic take on the hypocrisies of the publishing world and an exploration of the sometimes fluid boundaries between the real and the imaginative in literature. Smart, original, and highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 2/15/10.]Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2010
The famously false memoirs of James Frey may be yesterdays news, but as this funny riff reminds us, literary fakes are as old as literature itself. Ian Minot is an aspiring writer who labors over short stories that seem destined to remain unread. His beautiful Romanian girlfriend, Anya Petrescu, finds success more easilyand leaves Ian for Blade Markham, a bloviating ex-gangbanger whose so-called memoir is a best-seller. When Ian is approached by ex-editor Jed Roth, who wants Ian to publish Jeds pulpy tale of book theft and murder as a memoir, then renounce it, its a chance for both of them to get revenge: Jed on his former employer, and Ian on the world. Although Langer may be too cute for some (he employs made-up slang in which a penis is a portnoy), he does an engaging job with the hall-of-mirrors plot. And if readers can predict that the book theyre reading is the one that Ian ends up writing, theyll never guess the ending. Just when you want a surprising twist, Langer delivers several. The truth is, hes got a wild imagination.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)