With a foreword by Lee Child.
Andy Martin spent a year in the company of Lee Child, creator of tough-guy hero Jack Reacher. With Child is the diary of their adventures, tracking the publication and reception of Make Me, the writing of Night School at an apartment in Manhattan, the filming of Never Go Back in New Orleans, all the agony and ecstasy of the creative process and the sheer hard work of selling a bestseller. They go on the road together, from TV studios to bookstores, from Harvard to Stockholm, amid literary conferences and gunshows, rivalries and reviews ranging from adulatory to murderous. We meet fellow writers like Stephen King and David Lagercrantz and Karin Slaughter, and dissect the latest novel from Jonathan Franzen. But Martin also reaches out to Child’s legion of readers in America and around the world. He tracks down a woman in Texas whose name appears in the home invasion scene in Make Me; he goes up a mountain in Montana in search of the only reader who thinks Reacher is a “lightweight”; and he talks to obsessive fans from Europe to South Africa who find salvation or consolation in the colossal form of Jack Reacher.
This compelling account of life on the road with Lee Child demonstrates that readers are just as important as writers in the making of modern fiction.
By:
Andy Martin (University of Cambridge)
Foreword by:
Lee Child
Imprint: Polity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 196mm,
Width: 130mm,
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9781509538225
ISBN 10: 1509538224
Pages: 290
Publication Date: 06 September 2019
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Foreword Before: ‘A Lot of Writers are Like That, They Start with Dialogue’ Fall 1 The Gorgeous Feeling 2 The Dearth of the Author 3 Before Midnight 4 Like a Cockroach 5 The Zipless Fuck 6 Mysterious 7 The Pressure Keeps Building 8 I’m not an Author 9 Having an Orgasm, Standing Up 10 Stephen King is Shocked 11 A Frustratingly One-Way Telephone Conversation (Except Just at the End) 12 Attempt at an Exhaustive Description of People at Barnes & Noble Who were Having their Photographs taken with Lee Child 13 The Deranged, Obsessive Fan 14 Lunch with Lydia Lair 15 On Tour with Lee Child: Publisher’s Schedule 16 Comment on that ‘Gruelling’ Publicity Schedule 17 A Novel without Reacher 18 Lee Child’s Ultimate Nightmare 19 Inside Fort Z 20 In the Four Seasons, Washington DC 21 Where did you get the Folding Toothbrush from? 22 Precursors of Reacher 23 How to Say ‘Said’ 24 Is Make me Funny? 25 Reacher The Reader 26 Breakfast, Sunday, 27 September 2015 27 A Binary Praxis of Antagonistic Reciprocity 28 Back to School 29 Can I Help you? 30 Cup of Tea, With a Side Order of Napkin 31 ‘You’re not Going to Believe this, But …’ 32 Jouïssance 33 On the First Chapter of Lee Child’s Make me 34 His Dying wish Winter 35 Carl (1) 36 Elsa (The Opposite of the Toothbrush) 37 The Man who Refused to Read Make me 38 Mamma Mia! (× 5) 39 Jack Reacher vs Lisbeth Salander 40 Carl (2) 41 Misery 42 Book Ends 43 Sam 44 Clueless 45 Karina 46 Zeno and the Art of the Head-Butt 47 Reacher vs West Germany 48 But who is Going to Play Lee Child in the Movie? 49 Two New York Scenes, On the Same Day, Containing Antithetical Reactions to Lee Child 50 Ennui 51 The Woman who Hated Reacher 52 Tom 53 Psychosocial Acceleration Theory (Never go back) 54 While Reacher Sleeps 55 Fanmail Spring 56 The Fortune Cookie 57 Fear and Firearms in Las Vegas 58 The Letters Pages of the London Review of Books 59 A Blonde Walks through the Door with a Gun in her Hand 60 The End of that Conversation, In which Lee Compares himself to Homer 61 Tweets 62 300 Pages, One Insight 63 The Function of Crime 64 Crimethrillergirl 65 The End of the Novel After: In Case you Wanted to know What Happened to that Romance with Chang Acknowledgements
Andy Martin is the author of Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me. He writes for The Independent and The New York Times and teaches at the University of Cambridge. His book on surfing, Walking on Water, is a cult classic
Reviews for With Child: Lee Child and the Readers of Jack Reacher
You don't even have to be a 'Reacher creature' (as the fans are known) to enjoy this sly, fly-on-the-wall take on the blockbuster production line. The Sydney Morning Herald
