How to Sell

Clancy Martin's critically acclaimed debut novel about a pair of brothers working the counter of a Dallas jewelry store is a veritable handbook of cons and dirty deals — A Mamet-ish piece of intelligent noir that's perfect for paperback.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Novelist Richard Powers has called the forces of commerce that shape our culture the "rhinoceros at the table." It's a rhinoceros steadfastly ignored by the majority of American novelists working today, many of whom have been in the comfortable embrace of the academy for most of their adult lives. Clancy Martin's How to Sell, a novel that gets its hands dirty with deal making and dollar signs, is an up-yours to the financially fastidious crowd. Beginning in the late 1980s and drawing from the seven years Martin spent in the jewelry business before earning his Ph.D. in philosophy, it's the tale of two Canadian brothers who move to Texas to stake their claim to the American Dream in diamonds and gold. Their lifestyle of drugs and matter-of-course sex may put some in mind of Jay McInerney's 1984 tale of youthful debauchery set in New York, Bright Lights, Big City. But while the arcs of the stories bear some striking resemblances, How to Sell makes that earlier cocaine-laced tale read as innocently as Good Night, Moon.

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.