ADVANCE RE ADING COPY
NOV EMBER 2021
Dear Reader, Here are three things I learned while writing Seven Down: First, in Guantánamo Bay, interrogators tortured detainees by playing, repeatedly and at high volume, a variety of pop songs, jingles, and television themes, including Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty,” the song from the Meow Mix commercials, and the theme from Sesame Street. Second, the men who killed Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko by spiking his tea with polonium-210 left a trail of radiation all over London. The bar where they poisoned him, their hotel rooms, the airplanes that brought them to England. Even a seat in the stadium where one of them had taken in a soccer match, pre-assassination, was dangerously contaminated. Third, Jhanisse Vaca Daza, a key player in the 2019 far-right coup in Bolivia, is a loudand-proud member of “the Echelon,” a fan-club-cum-cult built around My So-Called Life actor Jared Leto and his rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars. All of which, I guess, is my way of saying that it’s a deeply strange world we’ve created for ourselves, and our struggle to live meaningfully within it is honestly kind of heroic. Thank you so much for taking the time to read my book.
SEVEN DOWN David Whitton In a series of interviews, seven hotel employees — all, it turns out, sleeper agents — puzzle out the events of a botched assassination attempt. Publication: CANADA November 2, 2021 | U.S. November 30, 2021
FORMAT 5.5 in (W) 8.5 in (H) 200 pages
Paperback 978-1-4597-4857-6 Can $21.99 US $19.99 £ 14.99
EPUB 978-1-4597-4859-0 Can $10.99 US $10.99 £7.99
PDF 978-1-4597-4858-3 Can $21.99 US $19.99 £ 14.99
KEY SELLING POINTS A fantastically puzzling literary debut novel about the lives of seven hotel employees —
all, it turns out, sleeper agents
Following the epistolary style, the narrative unfolds in the transcriptions of interviews
conducted with the seven moles involved in a botched assassination attempt
For readers of Jennifer Egan and David Mitchell Author's previously published story collection showcased his gift for different voices in
first-person narratives
BISAC FIC065000 – FICTION / Epistolary FIC052000 – FICTION / Satire FIC037000 – FICTION / Political
ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Whitton is the author of The Reverse Cowgirl, a story collection. His short fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Darwin's Bastards, Best Canadian Stories, and The Journey Prize Stories. He is a graduate of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA program. He lives in Toronto.
SevenDown
@davidwhitton
whitton
MARKETING AND PUBLICITY Publicity campaign to targeted media and influencers Representation at international trade shows and conferences Consumer, trade, and/or wholesaler advertising campaign
Social media campaign and online advertising Email campaigns to consumers, booksellers, and librarians Digital galley available: NetGalley, Edelweiss, Catalist
RIGHTS World, All Languages ABOUT THE BOOK Seven ordinary hotel employees. Catering, front desk, management. Seven moles, waiting for years for a single code word, a trigger that will send them into action in a violent event that will end their dull lives as they know them. The event has failed: the action was a disaster. Each employee is being debriefed by an agent of an invisible organization. These are the transcripts of these interviews. What they reveal is not just the intricate mechanism of an international assassination, but the yearnings inside each of its pawns, the desperation and secret rage that might cause anyone of us to sign up, sell out, and take a plunge into darkness. Both sinister and absurd, this set of interview transcripts is a puzzle to be solved, a comedy, and a panorama of life. At once sociological, satirical, and scary, it paints portraits of the mundane human failings behind geopolitical machinations.
For more information, contact publicity@dundurn.com Orders in Canada: UTP Distribution 1-800-565-9523 Orders in the US: Ingram Publisher Services 1-866-400-5351
AN IMPRINT OF DUNDURN PRESS
dundurn.com @dundurnpress
Copyright © David Whitton, 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright. All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: XXX | Editor: XXX Cover designer: Sophie Paas-Lang Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: xxx Names: xxx Description: xxx Identifiers: xxx Subjects: xxx Classification: xxx
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada. Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions. The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher. Printed and bound in Canada. Dundurn Press 1382 Queen Street East Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4L 1C9 dundurn.com, @dundurnpress
For Jonathan Dewdney
March 11, 2024 Nadja, Well here we are, you and me, like the old days, that noxious little office on the corner of Zambak and Istiklal. How did we get anything done? The relentless street hustle, the fossilized plumbing, dust motes streaming through the blinds. All those goddamn cats. Good times, good times. So we’ve escaped the “lay-offs” once again. Who would have thought it would be us, the last men standing? Would you ever have given odds for such a development? It speaks, I guess, to the soft power of keeping your head down and saying nothing and contradicting no one. The Board has once again invoked the Peter Principle; we have risen to our level of incompetence, like the suckers before us and the dipshits before them. Life is a continuum. And while I’m grateful to be able to make my mortgage payments, it also means that every single moment of my work week is an affliction. Here are those interviews you wanted, all the civilian assets we burned in Operation Fear and Trembling, compiled for your convenience in one slim blue binder. I’ve had a chance to listen to some of the tapes, and from what I can tell, these transcripts are solid product. Someone said once that life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. So it is with these accounts. You’ll notice that I’ve arranged them out of chronological order, and also out of the order in which they were filed, but, I hope you’ll find, to some poetic effect. Pay close attention, therefore, to the date on each transcript.
Like everything else related to the operation, this binder has been a nightmare to assemble. The interviews were conducted over a two-year period, with the last one, incredibly, taking place a little over three weeks ago. Why, you ask? Because we lost that particular contractor. No, I’m not shitting you. One of the asset coordinators lost her contact details, and no one in the department could remember where she’d been placed, or if she’d even existed. I am deeply embarrassed for us, Nadja. You know my thoughts on this. There were too many points of failure. Whoever designed the operation — Berger and his sycophants? this stinks of them — failed to account for the unaccountable. Just read the transcripts; even our assets understood it, and they knew screw all about what was going down. Humans are little whirlwinds of chaos. We who have transcended humanity can laugh at them all we want, but we depend upon their labours and must respect their fearful power. Here’s a story for you. A few years ago, I decided to go back and visit the city I grew up in. It’s not close to here, took some doing, connecting flights, et cetera et cetera. I’d had a happy childhood there, and a rowdy but good-natured young adulthood. My parents were solid and kind and they let me Be, in the Platonic sense. They let me become the person I was destined to be, for better or — actually, just for worse. In my teenage years I had fine girlfriends and a cohort of chums who I understood and who understood me. I was something of a bohemian, I’m not ashamed to say; I took psychedelics and listened to dissonant music. I had drunken dalliances in the alleyways outside of rock clubs, I aspired to become a painter in the mold of the great Basquiat. The city was burnished in my mind, a peaceful beginning to an otherwise somewhat brutish life. And particularly in later years, as I progressed in my career, and saw and did the things I saw and did, this place and the person I was inside it took on an outsize importance. I longed to return to it. So, a few years ago, in the wake of some viii
professional embarrassment or another, I went back, what the hell, and strolled the streets and sidewalks of a city that still felt so unresolved to me. I walked past the downtown movie theatres that I’d snuck into when I was a kid, where I’d seen Red Dawn and Cheech and Chong and Superman II — I forget all the pictures I saw, there were so many — but the point is that those flickering palaces in which I’d whiled away all those afternoons were long gone, demolished, or else turned into “event spaces” or internet cafes. I walked past the old library, a handsome limestone edifice that would soon be gutted so that a tower of condominia could rise from its innards like a great glass dildo. Eventually I worked up the nerve to undertake a pilgrimage to my old neighbourhood, to the house where I’d grown up, those endless summer days riding my bike through the parks and trails, the winters spent sledding down the slopes of a disused quarry. But I found, after I got there, that my childhood home had been torn down, erased, replaced with a weed-strewn metered parking lot. The blue spruce in the front yard, gone. My dad had planted it the day I was born. We long to return to a prior state, Nadja, one of innocence — but that state is forever gone, if ever it existed, and if we wish to press on, we must radically accept the new reality: of grand Victorian houses razed for parking lots, of toy stores turned into strip clubs, of golf courses cutting through endangered Carolinian forests. The world is on fire, Nadja, and humanity has gone insane. We must find a way to be good with that. Enjoy the attached.
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