Book cover for How to Sell: A Novel by Clancy Martin

How to Sell

A Novel

2009 Released
306 Pages
5-6 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Farrar, Straus and GirouxISBN 9781429989602

Bobby Clark is just sixteen when he drops out of school to follow his big brother, Jim, into the jewelry business. Bobby idolizes Jim and is in awe of Jim's girlfriend, Lisa, the best saleswoman at the Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange. What follows is the story of a young man's education in two of the oldest human passions, love and money. Through a dark, sharp lens, Clancy Martin captures the luxury business in all its exquisite vulgarity and outrageous fraud, finding in the diamond-and-watch trade a metaphor for the American soul at work.

Clancy Martin

Clancy Martin's debut novel How to Sell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2009 (chosen by Craig Raine), and a Best Book of 2009 for The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, The Kansas City Star. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, Lapham's Quarterly, Ethics, The Believer, The Journal of the History of Philosophy, GQ, Esquire, Details, Elle, Travel + Leisure, Bookforum, Vice, Men's Journal, and many other newspapers, magazines and journals, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Martin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, and is Professor of Business Ethics at the Henry W. Bloch School of Management (UMKC). He also holds the position of Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Ashoka University. Martin has also won a German Academic Exchange Service Fellowship and the Pushcart Prize. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine.

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