P.F. Kluge's Novel of Saipan, THE MASTER BLASTER, in The New York Times

P.F. Kluge's new novel The Master Blaster was reviewed by Janet Maslin in The New York Times yesterday:

A Far-Off Island Where the American Dream Curdles

The main character in P. F. Kluge’s stingingly funny new novel, “The Master Blaster,” isn’t a person. It’s a location: Saipan, a very small island with a big, bizarre place in history. Saipan is one of the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, north of the Solomons and west of the Marshalls. It was a site of brutal fighting during World War II, grimly commemorated by one cliff nicknamed Suicide and another called Banzai. Its neighbor is Tinian, the island from which the Enola Gay took off to bomb Hiroshima.

When Saipan became a United States Commonwealth in 1978, it took on a different kind of strategic advantage. The island was conveniently exempted from usual American tariffs, the minimum wage and immigration laws. And up sprung factories, exploiting low-paid immigrant workers. Cheap clothing manufactured there could be labeled “Made in the U.S.A.,” and was; tourism and the sex trade also thrived. “The Master Blaster” begins in 2005, when the Saipan boom had begun to go bust.

The Master Blaster is a mysterious figure who runs a Saipan-disparaging Web site that runs a contest. (Look it up. There really is one.) The goal is to provide a slogan for Saipan, and the best of many entries is this: “It’s not the heat, it’s the cupidity.” A runner-up: “The Other West Virginia.”

Mr. Kluge, who went to Saipan as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1967 and has made repeated visits ever since, makes a fine alter ego out of the Master Blaster. Both the writer and his troublemaking character are seasoned ironists, expert connoisseurs of corruption.

In a book that is a long, bewitching love letter to an utterly maddening place, Mr. Kluge introduces a group of Saipan newcomers who don’t yet know the lay of the land. They arrive on the same plane and make a bet about who will stay longest. Least likely to win this bet is George Griffin, a travel writer who has appeared in Mr. Kluge’s fiction before. George is the best kind of hack: a smart one, able to understand lousy writing even as he cranks it out. George caters glibly to the kinds of travelers who leave home “picturing the moment they drive back up the driveway, pronouncing that there’s no place like home.”

He regards his readers with a beguiling blend of cynicism and affection, just as Mr. Kluge sees Saipan. “My people,” George muses to himself. “They traveled scared, which somehow made them braver than the cocky adventurers who preceded them. They wrote postcards, not journals. They worried about what they ate. They tipped too much or too little because they never figured out the monkey bucks. Not a word of language, not a scrap of history, no more guidance than what I provided. God love them! It took guts to go out into the world without a clue.”

Also on the plane is Stephanie Warner, an academic recruited for a college on Saipan. (What does it say about this college, she wonders, that its only advance meeting with her was conducted at the food court in a mall in Honolulu?) Then there’s Mel Brodie, a real estate developer dispatched by Washington’s most powerful lobbyist, nicknamed Maximum Lou. (He is a stand-in for Jack Abramoff, whose sticky fingers also reached as far as Saipan.) Last and least, status-wise, is Khan, a laborer from Bangladesh who will wind up in virtual slavery.

One site visited by Khan’s work crew sounds like the abandoned home of Larry Hillblom, the runaway billionaire who indulged his every perverse whim on Saipan until he disappeared in a small plane that took off from there. In the likely event that “The Master Blaster” prompts further curiosity about this part of the world, read James D. Scurlock’s nonfiction “King Larry” too.

“The Master Blaster” coalesces as the main characters explore the island and one another. Without a heavy hand Mr. Kluge makes their paths plausibly collide. George starts teaching at Stephanie’s school. Mel gets the idea of building a retirement home for Americans with the moniker “Patriot’s Rest.” But he does not understand exactly what land rights on Saipan entail. “You would need a genealogist, a DNA expert, a local historian, you’d need a subpoena and a syringe of sodium pentothal to be absolutely sure about a title search,” Mr. Kluge explains.

That voice — jaundiced, seasoned, amused and vibrant as it is — gives “The Master Blaster” added allure. This is not a young man’s book; it’s the work of a writer who has seen the world, literally and figuratively, for a long time. “The Master Blaster” is tinged with thoughts of mortality, but they are offset by a bon vivant’s occasional flash of gratitude and beauty. When George thinks about clichés and observes that “what drum solos were for rock concerts, what dream sequences were for movies, sunsets were in nature.” But he also says that “a sunset, well watched,” lasts as long as a whole feature film.

Of course this story has a deeply somber side. Saipan’s history as a bloody battleground is examined, most memorably when a visiting congressman decides to tour the caves where Japanese soldiers were trapped. Detritus left behind by the soldiers gives that scene gravitas, but the book also notes darkly that if the congressman were a senator, more aides would have been willing to follow him into these tombs. The scene is capped by one devastating detail, totally unexpected, that will change the congressman’s self-image forever.

Mr. Kluge uses a shrewd local fixer called Big Ben to comment on the caves’ import too. “Until Saipan, the Japanese tried to stop the Americans on the beaches,” he says. But the Japanese yielded and retreated for this fight and let the invading Americans gain ground. “It’s the way it is on the islands,” Big Ben says. “Let them land, settle in, raise their flag ...”

And then, when the intruders are entrenched? “You cannot prevent their coming,” Big Ben says. “There’s no way. But you can affect — how to put it? — the quality of their stay.”

A CALL FROM JERSEY Paperback Out Next Week, P.F. Kluge Interview

Many may know New Jersey as the setting of popular TV shows such as The Jersey Shore, The Real Housewives of New Jersey and The Sopranos, or for it's famous musicians including Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, but New Jersey has more to offer than just reality TV backdrops and anthemic rock ballads. New Jersey is the birthplace of some of literature's finest writers, including Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Overlook's own P.F. Kluge. Kluge's A Call From Jersey will be published next week (11/29) in paperback, and to honor the occasion he is with us today answering questions about his acclaimed father-son story of 20th Century German immigration set in the Garden State.

OP: A Call from Jersey follows the life of Hans Greifinger, a German-American who immigrates to the United States and builds a life for himself and his family in New Jersey. You were born and raised in New Jersey. To what extent is this story based on your own experiences of growing up there?

PFK: New Jersey is my home state, from birth through college years and, though I don't live there now, the place is in me. A certain kind of humor, a certain attitude. I can't shake it. Wouldn't want to. A lot of my family history is in, and between, the lines of A Call From Jersey. The German-American experience. If you open presents on Christmas Eve, can sing a few lines of "Silent Night" in German, value wheat beer and pumpernickel bread, and your family includes some relatives who were on the wrong side of World War II, A Call from Jersey is for you.

OP: The book spans more than half a century, taking place between 1928 and 1984. Why did you choose to set your story in this particular period of time?

PFK: My parents had been in America for almost twenty years before I was born. I missed their green-horn years, their discovery of America. I've always wondered what those first years were like---what they were like---before they knew me. I've wondered about how the war felt. I heard the stories. I needed to use, and adapt, and add to them. And then to cover my years with them, their growing old, my growing up. Then, how they left, and how they left things, later on. Years later, I missed conversations we never quite got around to.

OP: Hans’ son George Griffin is a journalist and travel writer. Are you a world traveler as well? In your experience which cities are the best to visit?

PFK: I get nervous if I don't have at least two trips ahead of me, all the time. I like long stays. And here's a rule: for every hour of travel (airplane and airport) you need to spend at least 3/4ths of a day on the ground, at your destination. There are places I keep going back to. At one point my Peace Corps islands of Saipan and Palau, for instance, and Altaussee, in the lake country of Austria at another. The cities I return to are Singapore, Sydney, Vienna and Istanbul. I always need to see them again.

OP: In the novel George leaves New Jersey to pursue a new life, but is drawn back home to attend a class reunion. Have you ever attended one of your own high school reunions?

PFK: To me, attendance at a high school reunion is a moral imperative. That goes for the Jonathan Dayton Regional High School Class of 1960. I love these occasions. The memories, the reflections, the connections. The staring, which isn't rude, it's required. And the unanimous conviction that our music, back then...doo-wop, doo-wop, is far better than the stuff the kids are listening to now.

OP: Before he moves to New Jersey, Hans begins his journey in the United States working as a janitor in New York City. Today you are Writer in Residence at Kenyon College, but how did you pay the bills before you were a teacher and published author?

PFK: Before I was ready to write books, I worked as a journalist, on newspapers and magazines. A journalist is a good thing to be, while you're waiting for life to give you fictional material. You learn an unneurotic approach to writing, a respect for deadlines, a way of asking questions and following up on them. You learn to value conciseness and abhor bullshit, unless it's bullshit of a superior kind.

Praise for A CALL FROM JERSEY

"Absorbing ... as much about the 20th Century experience as it is about brothers, fathers, and sons." - Publishers Weekly

"[P. F. Kluge] sketches a difficult but ultimately loving father/son relationship with a rare sincerity and welcome humor. Heartfelt, funny and poignant." - Kirkus Reviews

"We're very fond of books set in New Jersey. And, since our grandparents were immigrants, we're very fond of books about those 'tempest tossed' souls." - Asbury Park Press

"This book's sense of place is authentic." - Newark Star Ledger

Interviews and more with P.F. Kluge for A CALL FROM JERSEY!

Recently, it seems that New Jersey's place in popular culture has been solidified by the TV popularity of shoes like Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

But for New Jersey native P.F. Kluge, now a professor and writer-in-residence at Kenyon College in Ohio, it's the place where he grew up, and a perfect setting for a novel about how the American dream has changed through generations.

The Newark Star-Ledger and Cleveland Plain Dealer both reviewed Kluge's new novel, A CALL FROM JERSEY, this week.

The Star-Ledger's interview offers more insight into the creation of this literary novel and the thought processes Kluge had while writing. Read the full article here, but our favorite excerpt is below.

"The book is really about conversations with my father I never got to have," Kluge said. “I have tried to imagine his experience as an American, and as a German in America, especially between the two world wars."

The son, too, is culturally adrift. He is a second-generation American, suddenly trying to understand his parents’ life and re-connect with their lost old-world ways.

“As I grow older, and the number of years since my parents have died grows larger, I grow closer to them,” Kluge said. “As I get older, I miss the sound of their voices, the sound of German being spoken around me, and the stories they told. I miss the beer parties and German songs sung into the night. I miss mother’s potato pancakes.”

The book’s sense of place is authentic. Kluge writes about “13 Bumps,” (Johnston Road in Watchung), which climbs the mountain above Route 22 and has been a teenage makeout place for generations, from Model As to Mitsubishis. And Snuffy’s in Scotch Plains, gone from “roadhouse to Parthenon.” Old Hans even recalls Madame Bey’s, the old Passaic-side boxing training camp on River Road in Summit, where Schmeling once trained.

Only one of Kluge’s previous seven novels was a Jersey story, and it was his most famous.
“I set ‘Eddie and the Cruisers,’ in South Jersey. I spent the summer of 1962 working as a college intern at the Vineland Times Journals, and I found South Jersey so fascinating, and so different from here I was from. You could smell whatever they were canning that day in the air.”

The Plain Dealer's article, which you can read in full here, calls A CALL FROM JERSEY an "engaging road novel" and also comments on Kluge's ability to vividly describe a particular location.

In P.F. Kluge's "A Call From Jersey," characters travel to the highest point of the Watchung Mountains at night, park the car, turn out the lights and strain to glimpse Staten Island in the distance. New Jersey is the place from which Kluge's characters flee, Manhattan being "in the direction of my dreams," says George Griffin, co-narrator, with his father, Hans, of this engaging intergenerational story.

Kluge, a wry and underappreciated novelist who teaches at Kenyon College, wrote 2008's beguiling "Gone Tomorrow" and "Eddie and the Cruisers."

Here, he illustrates how difficult George finds it to get entirely away from New Jersey. Even if you are away your entire adult life, the roads of the Watchung Mountains, George says, still "become part of you so you feel you could find your way along them in the dark forever."

...

Then, like all great road trips, Hans and George's ends in an epiphany. Kluge handles these passages deftly, allowing for the bonds of siblings, and Hans' lingering questions: Was my brother a monster? Or was my brother me?

Stay tuned for more news and reviews for P.F. Kluge and A CALL FROM JERSEY.

Meet Overlook Authors Peter Quinn, Frank Deford, and P.F. Kluge at Book Expo America

Book Expo America is just around the corner, and we are thrilled to have a trio of novelists joining us for the festivities: Peter Quinn, Frank Deford, and P.F. Kluge. All will be be autographing galley copies of their new books at the Autographing Sessions area, as well as meeting booksellers at The Overlook Press booth (#3552).

P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW and BIGGEST ELVIS Now Available in Paperback

Just released in paperback are two literary gems from P.F. Kluge: Gone Tomorrow and Biggest Elvis. A longtime writer-in-residence at Kenyon College in Ohio, Kluge has written seven acclaimed and beloved novels. He also works as a journalist, writing for magazines such as National Geographic Traveler, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Islands, Playboy, and Reader's Digest. And we're thrilled that Overlook will be publishing a new novel by P.F. Kluge, A Call From New Jersey, in September 2010.

Here's what Kluge says about Biggest Elvis, originally published in 1995, and now back in a print with the one of our coolest covers ever!

"What began as one Philippines-based novel, then another, became a trilogy with Biggest Elvis. In this case, journalism led to fiction. I visited the mammoth U.S. Naval base at Subic Bay twice, once on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine, once for Playboy. The place was unforgettable: a neon wilderness, a sexual vanity fair, a high water mark of American military and cultural power. There was more there than a pair of magazine articles could accommodate. Then my friend Lazarus Salii (see The Edge of Paradise) told me of a trio of singers who had come to Palau and been stranded there, broke. The three men were an Elvis Presley show, each incarnating a stage of the king’s life. The idea of three Elvis’s knocking around the world was appealing to me. A novel—which ought to be a movie—was born. It had music, sex, romance, politics, exotic locations. It was an American Year of Living Dangerously. Of all my books, this was the most fun to write. Every day, the question from manuscript to author was: what kind of fun are we going to have today? I think it shows.”

P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW Wins Ohioana Book Award for Fiction

P.F. Kluge has won the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction for his 2008 novel Gone Tomorrow. He will be honored at the Ohioana Day Awards Ceremony on October 17 at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. The novel, now available in paperback, earned praise in reviews around the country and was included on lists of the best books of 2008 by National Public Radio and the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio. "Kluge has dozens of gorgeous, wrenching passages, details, throw-away observations," said the San Francisco Chronicle. "He can really write, like a man who means it." According to the New York Times, Gone Tomorrow is "a sharply observed yet tender novel of academic life and its many sand traps." Gone Tomorrow was among finalists who "represent the finest in the literature of our time," said Linda R. Hengst, executive director of the Ohioana Library. Finalists in the fiction category included novels by Toni Morrison and Curtis Sittenfeld. Kluge is the author of seven novels, including Eddie and the Cruisers and Biggest Elvis, and is writer-in-residence at Kenyon College.

P.F. Kluge's EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS and Those Wild Summer Nights

Jeff Schwachter of Atlantic City Weekly has written a wonderful article on the 25th anniversary of the classic rock and roll film Eddie and The Cruisers, based on the novel by P.F. Kluge. Here's a brief excerpt about the book behind the film:

"Many things inspired novelist, freelance writer (Rolling Stone, Life) and northern New Jersey native Kluge to pen the 1980 novel. "Two or three things came together," says Kluge from his office at Ohio's Kenyon College where he has been a teacher for more than a decade. "I always loved early rock 'n' roll ... doo-wop groups basically. ... Those songs just kind of worked their way into me and I've never lost them. I carry them with me [and] the way that they could come back to you all through the rest of your life and haunt you intrigued me. And the second thing was wondering about what happens to the survivors of a group after its star, its leader, perishes."
"[Eddie] is about some tapes that were supposedly made way back when [and] going back into the past to retrieve something, to consider what happened to other people, and what has happened to you and what might have been," says Kluge.

Another inspiration for Kluge's book was southern New Jersey, a landscape the young writer caught only a glimpse of one summer, long ago. "In the summer of 1962, I worked as a reporter -- a sort of summer job -- on the Vineland Times Journal," says Kluge. "And this acquainted me with a New Jersey that was quite different from the New Jersey I knew. Because the northern part of the state is sort of within the field of force of New York City. ... the southern part was entirely different. It was rural. It was eccentric. It was a little mysterious to me: the diners, the traffic circles, the little crossroad towns, the odd pockets of ethnic groups."

"I always liked the fact that the filmmakers did two things," says Kluge. "They stuck with the flashback structure [of the novel] -- so you're cutting back and forth between the present time, where Frank Ridgeway, the Wordman, is a high-school teacher in early middle-age, and going back to the summer on the Jersey Shore maybe two decades or so before. ... I like that they had the integrity to stay with that so that the past and present could play off each other.
"The other thing is [they] could have made it about a surf group in California and they made it in New Jersey," says Kluge. "That pleased me." Kluge always wanted his main character to be from South Jersey. "I think when I sat down to write Eddie in 1980, I realized that I didn't want him to be a suburban kid who was going into Greenwich Village on weekends," says Kluge. "I wanted him to be from that New Jersey 'down south.' And I thought Vineland was a good town for him to be from."

More Love for P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW

Book blogger Terry Weyna has a lot of love for P.F. Kluge's acclaimed novel Gone Tomorrow: "I’ve always loved academic novels. Perhaps it’s because academia was a career choice I reluctantly abandoned in order to go to law school; perhaps it’s because I still would like to get that Ph.D. in English someday; perhaps it’s because my husband is a university professor. Or maybe it’s just because academic novels are set in such an interesting milieu that I just can’t resist, a place where (based upon the fiction I read, not contacts with my husband’s colleagues) backbiting, backstabbing and gossip battle it out with intellectual passions, eccentric personalities and interesting conversation. Most academic novels seem to be satires, but this one is different: it is a sort of rueful love letter to academe. . . I saw much of my own college in this book. I attended a small private college on the western edge of Illinois that I loved with all my heart while I was there, and still love today, though I haven’t been back in decades. This book awakened in me all the joy I took in that place, in its glorious fall colors, its stubbornly tardy springs, the many, many books I read while I was there, how I learned, more than anything, to ask questions (I seemed to graduate with few answers, but oh, I knew so well how to ask questions!). I remembered the professors like Canaris, who would casually mention a book that I should read, a book that would become one of my lifelong favorites; my creative writing teacher, Don Erickson, whose notes on my adolescent scribbling I still have today; drinking beer and eating cheese popcorn at a horrible little bar with the chairmen of the English and Speech Departments and the president of the college, solving all the world’s problems. Kluge perfectly captures the love and joy that my student experiences embody, though from the viewpoint of those for whom I was simply another soul passing through. And he captures a life, too – one different from what the man who came to the campus in 1970 thought he was going to live, but one that was precious in every moment nonetheless. . . .Gone Tomorrow is a marvelous book, a genuine pleasure to read. Few books have reached my heart so completely. Sharply observed, wryly told, with pellucid prose, Gone Tomorrow deserves a wide audience. Kluge is a new author to me, but I will certainly be reading more from his pen, as he toils away at the small Ohio college (Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio) where he is a writer in residence."

Librarian's Choice: P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW

P.F. Kluge's beloved novel Gone Tomorrow has been selected as a May pick by the San Francisco Public Library: "P. F. Kluge's affecting new novel, Gone Tomorrow, is the story of George Canaris, a writer who spends his career not writing but rather as a creative writing teacher at a small, bucolic Ohio college. (The college is, I suspect, not unlike Kenyon, where P. F. Kluge not only attended as an undergraduate, but where he has taught for a number of years.) This tale of the blessing and curse of an academic life for writers is framed by the search for a long-awaited, possibly non-existent, new novel of Canaris's. He wrote one novel in the 1960s, which brought him fame, fortune, a permanent place on the list of greatest works of fiction of all time, and a tenured position at a small but prestigious college. Then his agent and his publisher, not to mention the president of the college, the head of his department, his students, and his legion of fans, waited--in vain, as it turned out--for the appearance of a second novel, supposedly called The Beast. Finally--and against all the rules of tenure--the college decides to replace Canaris with a younger, more with-it (and productive) writer. What follows forces Canaris (and us) to think about fame, about what's important in life, and about love, loyalty, and the nature of creativity. Canaris is a simply wonderful character; the story of his life is moving, honest, tender and--occasionally--very funny. (When George meets John Henry Mallon, the wunderkind writer of gargantuan novels who replaces him, George reports this exchange in his journal: "'I've read your books,' he said. 'Great.' 'I've lifted yours,' I responded. 'Heavy.'") This is a good choice for readers who enjoy character-driven novels, but it's a must read for anyone who's spent any time in the world of academe. Kluge knows whereof he writes."

P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW Featured in The Weekly Standard

David Skinner takes a look at Gone Tomorrow, the new novel by P.F. Kluge in The Weekly Standard: "P.F. Kluge is an accomplished writer with a number of good books under his belt. Eddie and the Cruisers, which is being reissued by Overlook Press, is a delicate work about the jagged soul of rock 'n' roll music and the type of introverted writer who wants nothing more than to be its amanuensis. Biggest Elvis was another rock 'n' roll novel, an often riveting take on the U.S. military pullout from the Philippines, the exporting of American culture, and the adrenaline rush of stage performance. So Kluge remains affectionate toward the pop culture of his youth, but he has filed more than a few complaints about the kids of today. A professor who teaches writing and postwar American literature at Kenyon, he's used his perch in Gambier, Ohio, to observe and criticize the coddled American college student, whom he suggests would be much better off if his behind were kissed less often by administrators with dollar signs in their eyes and U.S. News & World Report rankings where their hearts used to be. Such thinking--in Alma Mater, his book on the life of a liberal arts college, and a rather tough essay entitled "Camp Kenyon" that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education--has made Kluge a magnetic and yet crotchety character at the school of which he is both a critic and an old friend. . . Gone Tomorrow is thoroughly pleasurable: a solid academic comedy; a moving consideration of what it means to join a community and say, despite reservations, Here is Where I Belong; and a warm thank-you note to writers famous and forgotten for the reader's reward of a good lean book."

P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW is Named one of the Best Books of 2008 by Cleveland Plain-Dealer

Karen Long, Book Editor of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and member of the National Book Critics Circle, has selected her choices for the Best Books of 2008. Included on the list is Gone Tomorrow, by P.F. Kluge: "Anyone who has ever set foot in Gambier will instantly recognize "a small college on a hill in central Ohio" as Kenyon College, where the author teaches creative writing and sets his beguiling story. It tells of English professor George Canaris, once a wunderkind who bogs down in a 'college ate my masterpiece' syndrome. The novel unspools into a wry, wise and literary pleasure."

Photo courtesy of Ruth Smilan.

P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW a Bookseller Pick on NPR's Morning Edition

Susan Stamberg of NPR's Morning Edition talked to independent booksellers across the country this morning about their picks for the holidays. On the list is P.F. Kluge's Gone Tomorrow: "In the tradition of Richard Russo's Straight Man, P.F. Kluge alternates between humor and poetic examinations of the academic pursuit, along the way touching on the basic elements of love, commitment to career and friendship." Click here to read an excerpt, and listen to Morning Edition's Bookseller's Picks for Holiday Lists!

P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW in San Francisco Chronicle

More praise for P.F. Kluge's Gone Tomorrow this week. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a lengthy review: "The candor and sensibility of the author of a novel about memory and about memorialization makes him successfully risk and resist sentimentality. On this score, Kluge has dozens of gorgeous, wrenching passages, details, throwaway observations. He can really write, like a man who means it. He captures a boxing match, red-light Manila, English department politics, the secrets of a great cigar, the seasons turning, the teachable moment, the surprise that is falling in love, the banal bureaucracy of betrayal, the need to be admired, the wish to be remembered - and so on and so on."

EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS is Back in Print: Now Let's Get on With the Music!

We love Sarah Weinman's Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog on crime fiction and mysteries, and we are thrilled that one of her picks of the week is P.F. Kluge's legendary Eddie and the Cruisers. Now available in a new paperback edition from Overlook, with an amazing introduction by Sherman Alexie, this is essential reading for the rock and roll generation. Here's Sarah's thoughts: "How many ways can I recommend what ought to be a permanent resident of the modern canon? I'll stick to one: I was browsing in an independent bookstore and thought I'd read the first chapter. I ended up storming through the first 2/3rds before I had to leave, buying in haste and in a cranky and foul state because I couldn't finish it up until later that night. The writing is pitched perfectly and the pacing is sublime, but most of all, it puts in your head the kind of music that makes you want to rise up and do something amazing with your life."

P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW in The New York Times

Janet Maslin reviews Gone Tomorrow in The New York Times: "A sharply observed yet tender novel of academic life and its many sand traps, P. F. Kluge (himself a writer in residence at Kenyon College, which is the subject of his nonfiction book “Alma Mater”) uses the persona of Canaris to describe the dangers that a writer-teacher faces. Even that job description defies reason. Why is it that “in the same way that people assume an opera singer can handle folk music or a four-star chef can preside over a short-order grill, it is assumed that a writer can teach writing”? The first and perhaps greatest danger about which Gone Tomorrow warns is that of getting too comfortable inside a college’s cozy microcosm. Finally, in a turn that might have tickled Canaris had he lived to see it, “Gone Tomorrow"is a good title. Too good. Mr. Kluge’s “Gone Tomorrow” is already being outsold on Amazon.com by Lee Child's “Gone Tomorrow,” a Jack Reacher thriller that doesn’t come out until May. Should any of Mr. Child’s devotees order the wrong novel by mistake, they’ll still get a book about a sharp-eyed, solitary troublemaker. They probably won’t be sorry."

P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW in Entertainment Weekly

Jennifer Reese gives Gone Tomorrow a high grade in this week's Entertainment Weekly: "George Canaris, the narrator of P.F. Kluge's sparkling new novel Gone Tomorrow, is a famous writer who takes a job teaching at a small Ohio college — and for the next three decades talks about (but fails to publish) his next big book, a mysterious project that he refers to as ''the Beast.'' What, exactly, has Canaris been doing all these years, and what is the nature of the Beast? These are the questions Kluge entertains in this witty and astute tragicomedy about academia and the trajectory of an artist's life. B+ "

P.F. Kluge Presents "First and Not Quite Last Thoughts On a Small College in Ohio" in NYC on October 7

P.F. Kluge, author of the forthcoming Gone Tomorrow and Writer-In-Residence at Kenyon College, will speak at Bloomberg News in New York on October 7 at 7pm. Kluge will present "First and Not Quite Last Thoughts On a Small College in Ohio," which, coincidentally, is the setting for his new novel. For more information on this event, please visit the Kenyon College site.

Rave Reviews for P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW in Booklist and Kirkus

P.F. Kluge's new novel Gone Tomorrow is reviewed in the October 1 issue of Booklist: "Without pretense, Gone Tomorrow offfers an insider's view of the politics of academia and all it entails. Kluge buoys the novel through to the end with intimate details about personal and professional failure, set against success in small doses, and he anchors the tale in a vivid rendering of the passage of time." Kirkus Reviews notes: "Kluge offers a fictional, expansive and discursive take on a teacher's writing life at a small, unnamed college in Ohio. His sharp writing and vivid descriptions elevate what could have been another novel about a frustrated writer's second act."

Gone Tomorrow, along with a new paperback edition of Kluge's classic 1980 novel Eddie and the Cruisers will be available in bookstores in November.

Advance Praise for P.F. Kluge's GONE TOMORROW

Early reviews are arriving for P.F. Kluge's new novel Gone Tomorrow, which will be published in November:

"The novel is suffused with Kluge’s obvious affection for books, and has some cleverly aphoristic things to say about the joys of teaching, the pitfalls of academic infighting and the tragedy of artistic expectations left unfulfilled. This novel combines elements of Citizen Kane and Goodbye, Mr. Chips for a satisfying resolution." - Publishers Weekly

"In his ninth book, acclaimed writer/professor Kluge cleverly combines an affectionate memoir with some elements of suspense. Readers learn about an interesting group of characters who've intersected a man's life, many of whom ring true as individuals and as archetypes of literature students, academics, and small-town inhabitants. Kluge also provides insight into a successful writer's fears about writing a failed novel and the pressures to publish continually. Effectively shunning pedantry, Kluge dispenses lively gems of wisdom about the writing process itself while sprinkling the narrative with references to contemporary culture, giving the story a worthwhile bounce. Recommended." - Library Journal

P.F. Kluge, author of GONE TOMORROW and EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS, Profiled in Columbus Dispatch

P.F. Kluge, author of Eddie and the Cruisers, Biggest Elvis, and the forthcoming Gone Tomorrow (Fall 2008) was recently profiled by Joe Blundo of the Columbus Dispatch. Novelist, journalist, and teacher, Kluge is writer in residence at Kenyon College.

His new novel, Gone Tomorrow, received this notice from Publishers Weekly: "In Kluge’s thoughtful new novel, Mark May, a young professor at an Ohio college, is surprised to be named the literary executor of a recently deceased colleague he barely knew. George Canaris was a literary sensation in the 1960s, but hadn’t published anything in 30 years. At the time of his death, he was rumored to be working on his magnum opus, but there is doubt the manuscript exists. While inspecting the dead man’s house, Mark finds the manuscript of Canaris’s memoir, which provides insight into the man and his work, and even if Mark has doubts about its veracity, it pushes him to arrive at some important decisions about his own life. The novel is suffused with Kluge’s obvious affection for books, and has some cleverly aphoristic things to say about the joys of teaching, the pitfalls of academic infighting and the tragedy of artistic expectations left unfulfilled."