Ray of the Star

1. Marketing efforts will include BEA promotion, wholesaler advertising through Baker & Taylor, and viral promotion through the internet (see Selling Points). 2. Our publicity efforts will include a large galley mailing, focusing on lit blogs, alternative weeklies, adventurous independent booksellers, and speculative fiction fan sites and 'zines, including Jeff VanderMeer at Amazon.com's Omnivoracious blog. 3. Excerpts from this book have or will appear in Western Humanities Review and Mandorla, and the author is a frequent contributor to The Believer, Bookforum, and Rain Taxi. 4. The novel will be presented with French flaps. 5. Author web site: www.lairdhunt.net

An atmospherically intense love story and a thrilling, fantastical tale of lost souls in peril.A tender love story related in the dark, stylish noir of continental cinema and overlaid with a patina of Surrealism, this is also a mediation about how we cope with unimaginable tragedy (like those of the main characters, one of whom lost their entire family and the other who lost a lover to unspeakable violence) and how we battle the demons that accompany it. The main character describes the buildings of this Barcelona-like, nameless city as “designed by the sort of visionary / crackpot who every generation or so arises in great metropolises and pulls fistfuls of the future out of his pockets and smears them all over the present.” The same could be said of Laird Hunt, a visionary writer, whose work, like Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, heralds the future. Laird Hunt has developed a tech-savvy cult following and is a favorite among literary bloggers. A reading from his debut novel was one of the first live, literary web casts, and the promotion for his previous book included an official filmed trailer (viewable at YouTube) and a video, shot by lit blogger Bud Parr (viewable at Chekov’s Mistress). For this novel, the main characters will be on Twitter and we’ll do some Facebook promotion. Theater students will also film reenactments from the novel for broadcast on YouTube.