The Appetite Factory
As head of the crisis management team at a Madison Avenue PR firm, Leonard Lundell spends his days counseling executives whose reputations have been ruined by scandal. But Leonard has been managing a strange and debilitating crisis of his own that’s held him captive his entire adult life: Leonard likes to eat soap, pencils, paint chips—anything with no nutritional value.
For years, he’s kept his compulsion hidden behind a professional veneer. But when he signs an important client, an antisocial file clerk unwittingly discovers Leonard’s secret and blackmails him into accommodating her own bizarre culinary indulgences.
A picaresque set against the backdrop of Madison Avenue’s marketing machine in the months leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, The Appetite Factory examines the earliest days of our post-truth era, where a scandal-obsessed news cycle and social media’s rise as an information platform have given birth to a culture addicted to recreational outrage and hell-bent on finding the next public figure to disgrace to keep ourselves entertained.We earn a commission for purchases made through the following links.
Book details
- Author
- Jon Gingerich
- Imprint
- Keylight Books, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
- Published
- Formats
- Paperback, Hardcover
- Subjects
- Fiction › Absurdist
Fiction › Dystopian
Fiction › Literary - Topics
- absurdist fiction · dystopian fiction · public relations · Madison Avenue · blackmail · compulsive behavior · picaresque · capitalism satire
- ISBN-13
- 9781684428700 (Paperback)9781684428694 (Hardcover)
About the author
JON GINGERICH is a fiction instructor at the Gotham Writers' Workshop in New York and editor of O'Dwyer’s, a position he has held since 2006. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School.
Gingerich’s short stories have appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Malahat Review, Pleiades, Grist, Stand, Oyez Review, and The Helix. His freelance writing covers politics, culture, and writing craft in trade and consumer magazines and online publications.
Jon lives in New York City.