Donald Ray Pollock's underdog story
BOOKS & IDEAS
The 53-year-old fledgling writer's book of hardscrabble short stories is drawing critical raves but only modest sales.
ON the rainy night of March 18, the day that Donald Ray Pollock's book of short stories came out, about 14 months after his agent sold the collection to Doubleday, Pollock did a reading in Cincinnati at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.
"Knockemstiff" is a linked series of elegantly written stories that take place in a terrible small town in Ohio, where fat boys enjoy being dartboards and youngsters incesting in the woods are murdered, and many, many drugs are sold and consumed. (Something like Harmony Korine meets Raymond Carver.)
"What was great was that he didn't realize the New York Times had written this incredible review," said Barb Hudson, the store's events coordinator. (The store had advance copies of the New York Times Book Review where the review was to appear on March 23, the same day as a rave in this paper and a few days after another in USA Today.)
"Do you want a couple copies for your scrapbook?" she said she asked Pollock.
"Well, yeah, thanks, that'd be great," Pollock said. Had he had a chance to read it? "Oh, no," he said. "I'll probably pull off the side of the road and read it on the way home."
About 20 folks were at the reading.
"Love him! Love him. Love him, love him, love him," Hudson said. "He's magnificent. He is off the charts. Every one of our booksellers, they have signed a testimony and put it up by his book."
On Thursday, March 20, he read at that store's outpost in Lexington, Ky.
"I've talked to people who are a lot more famous and a lot less nice," said Brooke Raby, that store's PR/events coordinator. (They even went out for a drink later that night and talked about A.M. Homes and local government.)
About eight people attended that reading.
Raby looked up the store's sales numbers. "Well, the book's not done great, honestly," she said. "I do think that it's going to be kind of a sleeper."
For most of its first week on the market, "Knockemstiff" was the top-selling book on Amazon.com in the category "Literature and Fiction / Short Stories / United States," until sometime on the 25th, when it was bumped to No. 2 by the new Jhumpa Lahiri collection, a position it held through its second week. And for the majority of its first week, it easily cracked the top 200 in books overall.
That translates into sales figures that are respectable but modest. As of March 30, according to Nielsen BookScan, which counts about 75% of books sold, he moved 2,000 copies.
