A terrible book that was almost published.

[Lies]

BLURB:

Maybe once in a lifetime, there comes a book with such extraordinary characters, thrilling plot twists, and uncanny insight, that it comes to embody its time. ATLANTA NIGHTS is a book.

"Bruce looked up. The tits belonged to a beautiful face carved out of ice and whipped cream, with a pair of glowing emerald eyes.  Around that perfect face was brown hair like one of those super models, all puffed up"

Atlanta Nights is a collaborative novel created by a group of science fiction and fantasy authors, with the express purpose of producing a bad piece of work of unpublishable quality to test whether publishing firm PublishAmerica would still accept it. It was accepted, but after the hoax was revealed, the publisher withdrew its offer, and the book was not published at that time.

The primary purpose of the exercise was to test PublishAmerica's claims to be a "traditional publisher" which would only accept high-quality manuscripts. Critics have long claimed that PublishAmerica is actually a vanity press which pays no special attention to the sales potential of the books they publish since most of their revenue comes from the authors rather than book buyers. PublishAmerica had previously made some highly derogatory public remarks about science fiction and fantasy writers, because many of their critics came from those communities; those derogatory remarks have influenced the decision to make such a public test of PublishAmerica's claims.

http://books.google.com/books?id=MZxhbX4vGncC&dq=atlanta+nights&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=fr&ei=RUeJSs_nLMPIkAWg9tW5Bw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false

[Kai]

Sounds like those guys who tested an academic journal with complete bullshit.

[Requia ☣]

Sounds like those guys who tested an academic journal with complete bullshit.

Details?

This makes me wonder how Eye of Argon was published.

[Cain]

I think Kai is referring to the Sokal Hoax and the (admittedly craptastic) Social Text journal.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That was delightfully terrible! Fuck.

[Epimetheus]

I am ing while reading this.

[LMNO]

The tits belonged to a beautiful face carved out of ice and whipped cream...

[Kai]

I think Kai is referring to the Sokal Hoax and the (admittedly craptastic) Social Text journal.

Yes. 'Twas a good social experiment.

[Cain]

Yeah.  Unfortunately it has been adopted by certain hacks to prove that all PoMo philosophy is cretinous rubbish, as opposed to the far more reasonable conclusion that (like with the Yale English Dept's adoption of a debased form of deconstruction) American literary theorists and philosophers - in particular those who wrote and edited Social Text, were mostly cretinous producers of rubbish.

But Sokal himself is not responsible for that, and the American PoMo scene did need to get their heads out of their collective arses.  Its the fault of journalists with agendas and those who do not understand campus politics, not picking up on the nuances.

[Requia ☣]

PoMo?

[LMNO]

Post Modernist.

[Cain]

Postmodernism.

I prefer PoMo.  It sounds cuddly, and less pretentious.

[LMNO]

Also, Post-Modern.