The Business of Naming Things

Co-op available Significant bound galley printing for media and booksellers. Additional eGalley distribution to media, booksellers, and librarians through Edelweiss National print, public radio, and online campaigns, targeting NPR; coverage in all major newspapers; literary magazines (New Yorker, Harper’s, etc.); and literary / pop culture magazines (Believer, Rain Taxi, etc.) as well as popular literary websites and blogs, including Bookslut, Rumpus, Nervous Breakdown, Largehearted Boy, etc. Because the author’s own story of adoption is notable, we will also seek off-the-book page coverage in parenting and adoption outlets and because this is the author’s debut collection, we will aim for special coverage in the trade publications and in magazines such as Poets & Writers Tour will include bookstore events in New York and other New England bookstores. If there’s enough interest from booksellers, the tour will expand to the West Coast and Southern United States Featured title at Book Expo America and program advertising at the ALA Midwinter conference Reading group guide development and book club outreach Simultaneous eBook publication and promotion Postcards available Pre-publication serial excerpt confirmed in the Summer 2014 BOMB magazine “First Proof” supplement Promotion through the Bookslinger app and, possibly, through the Storyville app Promotional support from Conjunctions and the New England Review, where some of these stories first appeared in print Giveaways through Goodreads and LibraryThing Blurbs in from Jay Parini, Frederic Tuten, and Edmund White, and possible from Jaimy Gordon and Colum McCann Author website in development Promotion through BLP’s social media networks and website (www.blpress.org) Marketing and publicity efforts supported by Molly Mikolowski of A Literary Light

Poignant tales of fathers, sons, and the search for connection from a wise new voice in American fiction"Riveting ...vibrant and unsparing." --Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review) "Superb...Startlingly original." --Library Journal (starred review) "Once I started reading these stories, I couldn't stop. They absorbed me thoroughly, with their taut narratives and evocative language--the language of a poet." --JAY PARINI, author of Jesus: The Human Face of God and The Last Station "Sherwood Anderson would recognize this world of lonely, longing characters, whose surface lives Coffey tenderly plumbs. These beautiful stories--spare, rich, wise and compelling--go to the heart." --FREDERIC TUTEN, author of Self Portraits: Fictions and Tintin in the New World "Whether [Coffey is] writing about a sinning priest or a man who's made a career out of branding or about himself, we can smell Coffey's protagonists and feel their breath on our cheek. Like Chekhov, he must be a notebook writer; how else to explain the strange quirks and the perfect but unaccountable details that animate these intimate portraits?" --EDMUND WHITE, author of Inside a Pearl and A Boy's Own Story Among these eight stories, a fan of writer (and fellow adoptee) Harold Brodkey gains an audience with him at his life's end, two pals take a Joycean sojourn, a man whose business is naming things meets a woman who may not be what she seems, and a father discovers his son is a suspect in an assassination attempt on the president. In each tale, Michael Coffey's exquisite attention to character underlies the brutally honest perspectives of his disenchanted fathers, damaged sons, and orphans left feeling perpetually disconnected. Michael Coffey is the author of three books of poems and 27 Men Out, a book about baseball's perfect games. He also co-edited The Irish in America, a book about Irish immigration to America, which was a companion volume to a PBS documentary series. He divides his time between Manhattan and Bolton Landing, New York. The Business of Naming Things is his first work of fiction.