How to Sell

"A Canadian in 1987 goes to Texas and gets crushingly corrupted in Martin's sexy, funny and devastating debut. Bobby Clark is 16 when he leaves a dead-end setup with his single mother and grass-is-greener girlfriend, Wendy, and heads to Fort Worth to get into the fine jewelry business under the stewardship of his salesman brother, Jim. In no time, Bobby and Jim are snorting lines, Bobby's moving in on (and smoking crank with) Jim's mistress, Lisa, and getting a crash course in amazingly crooked business. Scams, bait-and-switch deals, bogus jewelry and startling treachery are day-to-day at the jewelry store, until the store's gregarious owner gets into trouble at the same time Bobby tries to save Lisa from a massive flame-out. Years later, Bobby's back in Fort Worth, married to Wendy (and with a child) and still in the jewelry business with Jim when Lisa reappears, engaged in an equally questionable if older profession. Bobby's helplessly honest narration is a sublime counterpoint to the crooked doings he's complicit in. Reading this is like watching one man's American dream turn into a soul-sucking nightmare." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"How to Sell is a funny, unforgiving novel about how we buy and sell everything merchandise, drugs, sex, trust, power, peace of mind, religion, friendship, and each other... A genuinely fresh, disconcerting voice." Zadie Smith

"A tender yet hardboiled coming-of-age story; a vivid, sometimes philosophical portrait of yearning and greed, of human love and human spoilage ؙ all of it mirrored in stripped-down, addictive prose. Clancy Martin has written a scary, funny blaze of a book." Sam Lipsyte

"The feeling you get from the moment you open Clancy Martin's superb novel is one of inevitability. This is the inevitability of truth-telling, of tragedy, of the setup to a good joke, and, very possibly, the inevitability of the classic." Benjamin Kunkel

Bobby Clark is just 16 when he drops out of school to follow his big brother Jim into the jewelry business. What follows is the story of a young man's education in two of the oldest human passions, love and money.

Clancy Martin worked for many years in the fine-jewelry business. He is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri. He has translated works by Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard and is currently at work on a translation of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.