Here’s the shtick: it’s a (very fine) first novel by a (very talented) young American author that concerns the love affair between its two eponymous characters, Maynard Gogarty and Jennica Green. It’s set in New York, it’s seriously funny, it’s inspired, it’s incredibly accomplished, it’s razzmatazz, it’s all these things and more, and it’s yours for nothing.

Click on image to hear about Maynard and Jennica by Rudy Delson (September, by 4th Estate)

No write me 100 words saying why you deserve it, just be quick, write in with your address to editor@fifthestate.co.uk or leave a comment here, and we’ll post you a copy. Beautiful.

And à propos of nothing, here’s the book’s, and author’s, website: http://www.rudolphdelson.com/maynardandjennica/

Enjoy

Its brilliance lies in the way it opens up these washed-up, retired superheroes and exposes them to the banality of everyday existence which us non-superheroes have to endure. You get to follow these once great, talismanic figures as they fall out of social favour, then memory and eventually end up scrounging round as directionless vigilantes, trying to relive the glory of their heyday. You can read it any number of ways: as a metaphor for life after celebrity, as a cautionary Icarus-like tale, or as a straight forward adventure comic. Genius isn’t too strong a word.

Some bastard nicked my copy. Agggghhh, the humanity.

That said, I shamefully managed to stick it out to the end. Now, I only bring this up on a literary blog because in the film, Affleck’s character (also irritatingly named Ben and thus unnecessarily fuzzing reality and fiction) makes his living writing book blurbs for jackets.

I mean, come on. Making your living off book blurbs??!!! Like hell. Not if you want to eat or own clothes you don’t. Not since the advent of Bennifer and the crime that was Gigli have I been so outraged by a nonsense in a film.

I can be pretty certain in saying that if there’s one thing a publisher won’t do, it’s pay some Handsome Joe to write the jacket copy — yo Affleck, the blurb is the promotional ‘Damagingly compelling, delicately courageous and achingly beautiful…I worshipped it’ plug from other authors — that appears on the inside flaps of hardbacks or the backs of paperbacks.

It’s a job that normally falls to the editor, unless the writer has made a particular request to have a crack at it, which they rarely do. It’s a skill you’re never taught nor ever really know if you’re good at, much like eating. You just get on with it and hope that no one comments on your style, as invariably any feedback will tend towards the negative.

As I understand it, it’s meant to be intriguing without giving too much away, colourful without being too exotic and laudatory without reverting to the gush. So, how hard can it be? Depends on the book, but sometimes distilling 300,000 words into 200 can be testy, especially when you’ve got some twisty, interlinked, time-travelling narrative with twenty different characters or some genre-defining work of genius you don’t want to misrepresent. The thesaurus becomes your best friend at such times: how many words can there be for ‘wonderful’ or ‘interesting’ or ‘moving’? Well, you’d be surprised.

And then, once completed, there’s the pleasure of clearing it with the author. Sometimes you’ll get a modest compliment, but mostly you’ll get a perfunctory ‘fine’ and good night. Rarely will you be reprimanded. That said, a fellow editorial assistant at another publisher was once asked by an internationally-acclaimed, award-winning author whose book she had written the copy for whether she had actually ever read a word he’d written. She had, and wasn’t amused.

So, all in all, it’s a little bit of guesswork, mixed with a little bit of talent, and a lot of procrastinating. But it’s also a lot of fun — it is after all your shtick that may entice the leisurely browser to the till. More likely however, it’s the blurb, which bloody Ben Affleck writes, and supposedly gets paid for. Man, life’s a bitch.

What in the modern world, can be considered true fame? With hosts of “celebrities” bungee-jumping round the Australian jungle, frolicking half-naked on Fijian islands, Waltzing, Foxtrotting and American Smoothing (yeah, I watch Strictly Come Dancing) it round Wood Lane to rabidly tip-tap their way to their 15 minutes, surely the qualifying of celebrity has been made redundant by the demands of Saturday night TV programming?

Not so. Well, not quite. Happily, we can count on one show, the longest running US sitcom and quite possibly the best television show ever made, to act as our guides through the maze of modern celebrity. Yes, thankfully there still remains one accurate fameometer in these absurdist days: the special guest appearance of The Simpsons. It is an honour not bestowed lightly by its creator Matt Groening, reserved for the cream of the A-List, and comprises a roll-call of inarguable cultural megaliths: Tony Blair, Mel Brooks, Paul McCartney, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Johnny Cash, Jack Lemmon, Barry White, Bette Midler, Adam West (TV’s Batman). In one unlikely coup, they even staged the first “public” appearance of the famously retiring Thomas Pynchon.

So it is with a great and honest (and not least humbling) pleasure that we can announce that two of 4th Estate’s finest authors — Michael Chabon (The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Wonder Boys) and Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, The Discomfort Zone) — making their Simpsons appearance this weekend in the US on Fox.

They are two of the big-hitters of the “next” generation of American writers (post-Bellow, Roth, Updike, Vidal, Wolfe, and the like), both of them writers of internationally acclaimed and prize-winning best-sellers, one of them a famous Oprah-opter-outer, the other the screenwriter for the stupidly successful Spiderman 2, but surely their cameos in cartoon form, however long they might be, will top it all.

Or… maybe not — what do I know? Still though, they’ve just achieved my No.3 Lifetime Ambition, so they better be damn happy about it.