A piquant coming-of-age novel for late-blooming romantics
Still Alive, LJ Pemberton
Our first book of 2024 is LJ Pemberton's debut novel, Still Alive (979-8987465448). It's available to order from Asterism Books, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. It was our top seller at AWP. People are saying nice things about it. Like this:
“It’s a piquant coming-of-age novel for late-blooming romantics.”
—Publishers Weekly
And this:
“I keep thinking of Still Alive as a queer Fight Club (1996) for the millennial generation...If Fight Club touted moralistic dogma and material deprivation as a path to liberation, Still Alive laughs in the face of such naïve confidence in easy solutions.”
—Jason Christian, Full Stop
This too:
“Wryly smart, intensely, erotically hot, and with observations that routinely hit with the force of a revelation, Still Alive introduces the world to a literary voice that is utterly engrossing and from whom I can’t wait to read more. Through the course of a young woman's relationships, friendships, and family dramas, this is a novel that deftly explores the lassitude and the joy of Figuring Things Out, the sense that you are deeply lucky and beautiful while existing in the middle of heartbreak or loss, and where your simmering potential is never unlived but ultimately enlivens you. I love it very much and can't recommend it enough.”
—Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten
There’s a lot to love about this book. For me, it was the sentences. LJ writes good sentences. The book could have been about anything and I would have wanted to work on it.
Here’s another nice thing someone said about LJ’s book:
“Here is the highest compliment I can pay a fellow artist—when I reached the last page, the last line, the final word of LJ Pemberton's Still Alive, it was enough. A love story rendered in a pointillism so wholly convincing it might as well be photo-realism with just that remove—'It is a comedy, youth,' 'it is easier to admit how sad I am if I call myself a fool'—that allows us to near the flame and have our own wounds cauterized, not burned. Like watching a skilled surgeon tend to those wounds—figure out 'what is a cut and what is just blood'—and not know which it is that commands the attention, the hurt or the healing. This is what it's like when, sometime between getting out of bed and returning to it, you encounter a owrk of art. This is what it's like when someone else's truth reads like your own. This is what it's like to feel less alone.”
—Guillermo Stitch, author of Lake of Urine
LJ is working hard on a small book tour, with readings in Chicago and New York. And other places too! Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to catch her at a reading. If not, may I recommend you order a copy of her book. We are sold out, but Asterism (an independent book distributor that we are proud to work with) has at least a few signed copies available.
Writing a book is hard. Writing cover copy for a book is harder. Here’s what we came up with for Still Alive:
A hero's journey through a dying empire. On the Road for a beaten generation. After V meets Lex, a butch painter, at an underground punk show, they enter a multi-year relationship that ranges from Portland, Oregon, to New York City, and finally Los Angeles, with V’s family of origin ever interjecting with dysfunction and neediness. Her brother has retreated into a hodgepodge of Eastern religiosity and their mother’s addictions are worsening. Meanwhile her father is busy building a new family, as sunny as V’s childhood was grim. Leroy, V’s gay best friend, has chosen rural peace, but V can’t find the same satisfaction – anywhere. Ever in search of love, meaning, and temp work, V hurtles across the US, resisting the store-bought narratives of mainstream life to create a freedom all her own.
This text was a joint production, co-written over the course of four-to-six weeks by LJ and me. Went through multiple drafts. (The first two sentences are 100% mine, and I’m sort of proud of them.)
Hopefully some of this—the nice things people have said about the book, the nice things I’ve said about, the compelling cover copy—will make you want to buy the book. If you can’t drop $19 for the paperback (I feel you), you might be able to swing $3 for the ebook.
Another great option would be to borrow the book from your local library. If your local library doesn’t have a copy, you can easily request one. If you mention it was reviewed favorably in Publishers Weekly I’m 99% certain your library will order a copy. I don’t know how much reviews do for retail sales, but one thing I’ve learned is they do lead to library sales.
I try not to do a load of buy-this-book newsletter posts, but this one, obviously, is a pretty naked buy-this-book newsletter post. Speaking of nakedness (stop reading if you don’t want to hear about sexy stuff; I guess also don’t buy the book if you don’t want to read about sexy stuff): at AWP (big writing/publishing conference, held this year in Kansas City) Scott Mitchel May (author of Awful People) came up with the idea of ranking our books by horniness. (Sorry if you didn’t want to read that, but I did warn you.) So here are our top 5 horniest titles:
The thing about Still Alive, like all our books really, is it’s good, but it doesn’t necessarily fit in to the molds it’s supposed to fit into in order to be a saleable book. LJ wrote a book that is true to her life, her worldview, her aeshetic, and there’s something very honorable in that, because it’s risky. As writers we’re supposed to be tailoring everything to do to fit the tastes of a fickle market that never actually knew what it wanted to begin with because markets are abstract concepts. Rather than aping the hot books that agents and editors are horny for, LJ just sat down and wrote the book she wanted to write. And now Malarkey has gone and published it, in the hope, in the knowledge actually, that there are people out there who want to read it. That’s all we can do.
—AG
PS: Read it!