Since 2000 Brian Sweany has been Director of Acquisitions for Recorded Books, one of the world's largest audiobook publishers. Prior to
that he edited cookbooks and computer manuals and claims to have saved a major pharmaceutical company from being crippled
by the Y2K bug. Brian has a BS in English
and History from Eastern Michigan University, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1995. A former semi-professional student, his collegiate tour included stop-overs
at Wabash College (the all-male school that reputedly fired Ezra Pound from its faculty for having sex
with a prostitute), Marian University (the former all-female school founded by Franciscan nuns that if you don't count Brian's
expulsion has fired no one of consequence and is relatively prostitute-free), and Indiana University (via a high school honors course he has no recollection of ever attending). Brian has spent most of his life in the Midwest and now lives near Indianapolis with his wife and three children.
This page serves as a repository for his idle musings during his ongoiing quest to publish his debut
novel EXOTIC MUSIC OF THE BELLY DANCER as well as the sequel-in-progress MAKING OUT WITH BLOWFISH. Brian is currently represented
by the Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency, who has his work on general submission to several publishing houses. Questions?
Comments? Smarmy hate mail? Inappropriate stalking? Feel free to email Brian at bsweany@comcast.net or follow him on Twitter
@briansweany. 
My morning gets off to its usual start.
I wake up. Masturbate.
Eat some bacon and eggs. Drink a cup of heavily creamed and sugared coffee.
Have a frank
discussion with my father about his testicles.
And so goes another day in the over-sexed, drunk, occasionally
well-intentioned, occasionally Catholic teenage life of Hank Fitzpatrick. His young adulthood has its dark moments, but it
isn't dark. It has its tragedies, but it isn't tragic. Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer speaks to those nostalgic
readers young and old who can quote John Hughes films, recite Guns N' Roses lyrics, and are still pissed off that Freaks
and Geeks got canceled. These readers want to see the homecoming king fall flat on his face, implode in spectacular fashion,
dust himself off, and then do it all over again. And if somewhere along the way they're reminded of the redemptive power of
a belly dancer's love--well, that's okay too.
Advance praise for
Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer "Brian Sweany has re-invented the coming of age novel with Exotic
Music of the Belly Dancer, a bawdy, unfiltered snapshot of adolescence. Hank Fitzpatrick, the hormonally challenged narrator
of the story, has a remarkable capacity to be both nihilistic and tender--think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets
Leave It to Beaver--minus the literary pretense and relentless self-awareness of so many other protagonists in the
canon."
-William McKeen, author of Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson "Exposing
the belly of the male beast is a brave thing to do. Brian Sweany writes like an American Martin Amis, and that's a great thing."
-Alexandra Fuller, author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight "For anyone who ever wonders about that guy in school who has more fun, more girls,more drinks, more sex, drugs,
and rock and roll, more luck (and bad luck) of the Irish, Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer tells all. But behind
every party is the hidden truth: that the world, if given time, will break your heart."
-Keith Donohue, author of The Stolen Child "Exotic
Music of the Belly Dancer is funny and tragic, occasionally even a warm, homespun homage-to-me-familia, but it is the
dark and subversive stretches that burned deeply into my psyche and kept me turning the page."
-Sonny Brewer, author of The Poet of Tolstoy Park "Prepare yourself for a nostalgic, strikingly honest trip back to your yearning youth. Exotic Music of the
Belly Dancer is more than a romp, and it will do more than jog your memory: it will run your memory over with a
juggernaut of hormones, teen confusion and dawning awareness." "During an auction
for the audio rights to my new novel, Dracula in Love, my editor forwarded me an e-mail from Brian Sweany, who was one of the bidders.'This book is so hot that I can't wait to get home to my wife!' he proclaimed, and then outbid everyone else and presumably went home and made his wife happy." -Karen Essex, author of Dracula
in Love
|
Thursday, July 7, 2011
LITERARY VS. COMMERCIAL: THE GREAT DIVIDEFull disclosure: I've been in the acquisitions side of the publishing business for 11 years and my reading
tastes trend towards literary, but not so much that I turn a blind eye to the latest Stephen King, Dennis LeHane, Elmore Leonard,
Walter Mosley and Michael Connolly. While I steer readers looking for great character development and set pieces towards guys
like Foer and Franzen, I'll swear on a stack of Dickens' first editions there is no Pulitzer winner, living or dead, who can
write better dialogue than Robert Parker. That being said, does anyone ever get the sense that literary
fiction sometimes is a little too full of itself, that literary novelists can be almost incestuous in their craft, writing
to one another as opposed to their readers? What's more, there seem to be a lot of editors who cater to this element. Compare,
say, visual media with literature. Many of the great "pop art" movies and TV shows--the entire John Hughes canon
in the 80s, Freaks and Geeks in the 90s and Glee right now--are set in the Midwest. They possess a groundedness, an everyman
quality that appeals to a large group of people. Today's literary novelists and editors would have us believe there's something
more genuine in taking that football helmet off Finn (one of the male leads in Glee), handing him a cricket bat, and turning
him into an Upper Eastside trust fund baby who'd rather spend 50 pages in high-minded introspection and/or brooding melancholy
about a girl's beauty as opposed to just trying to get in her pants like the 95% of teenage boys in America who think with
their phalli and don't have an MFA vocabulary. Not looking to start a fight here. It's just some of the
stuff I have to sift through in my Inbox--fiction and nonfiction--strains even my literary tastes. Why are independent publishers
like Akashic and Two-Dollar Radio thriving? Because the low-hanging fruit has become the Fuji apple in a storefront of Red
Delicious. Because the best authors are being found in the trade paper aisle while the old school publishers continue to churn
out self-indulgent 700-page hardcover biographies about dead fashionistas, artists or (cue gag reflex) editors who only 12
people in LA and Manhattan give a crap about. And thus endeth the rant.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
THE CHARLIE SHEEN MANIFESTOby Charlie Sheen I'm bayonets. I'm battle tested bayonets... I'm so tired of pretending like my life isn't just perfect and just winning
every second, and I'm not just perfect and bitching and just delivering the goods at every frickin' turn. Look what I'm dealing
with, man. I'm dealing with fools and trolls. I'm dealing with soft targets, and it's just strafing runs in my underwear before
my first cup of coffee ... they lay down with their ugly wives and their ugly children and just look at their loser lives
and then they look at me and say,'I can't process it.' Well, no, and you never will! Stop trying! Just sit back and enjoy
the show. If you think about it dude, I'm 0-for-3
in marriage, but like in baseball, the scoreboard doesn't lie. Never has. So what we all have is a marriage of the hearts.
And to sully, contaminate, or radically disrespect this unit with a shameful contract is something I'll leave to the amateurs
and bible grippers.
I have cleansed myself.
I closed my eyes and in a nanosecond, I cured myself... It's the work of sissies. The only thing I'm addicted to is winning.
This bootleg cult, arrogantly referred to as Alcoholics Anonymous, reports a 5 percent success rate. My success rate is 100
percent. Do the math ... another one of their mottoes is 'Don't be special, be one of us.' Newsflash: I am special, and I
will never be one of you! I have a disease? Bullshit! I cured it with my brain, with my mind. I cured it, I'm done ... you
don't look like you're having a lot of fun. I'm gonna hang out with these two smoking hotties and fly privately around the
world. It might be lonely up here but I sure like the view.
I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time -- and this includes naps --
I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.
Guys, it's right there in the thing, duh! We work for the Pope, we murder
people. We're Vatican assassins. How complicated can it be? What they're not ready for is guys like [me] and all the other
gnarly gnarlingtons in my life, that we are high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks. Boom. Print that, people. See where that
goes. I'm on a
quest to claim absolute victory on every front. I'm proud of what I created. Why wouldn't I be? I exposed people to magic.
I exposed them to something that they otherwise would not see in their boring normal lives. And I gave that to them!
Dying is for fools. Amateurs. Resentments are the
rocket fuel that lives in the tip of my saber. [I was] bangin' 7-gram rocks and finishing them because that's how I roll.
I have one speed, one gear ... go!
I mean,
what's not to love? Especially when you see how I party. Man, it was epic. The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards
all of 'em just look like droopy-eyed armless children.
What's the cure, medicine to make me like them? Not gonna happen. I'm bi-winning. I win here, I win there. Now what?
If I'm bipolar, aren't there moments when a guy like crashes?"
You borrow my brain for five seconds and just be like 'Dude, can't handle it! Unplug this bastard!' ... It fires in
a way that is perhaps not from this terrestrial realm. I am on a drug, it's called 'Charlie Sheen.' It's not available 'cause
if you try it once you will die. Your face will melt off, and children will weep over your exploded body.
I wanted to watch 'Jaws' on the ocean in the dark and be afraid. It's been
a tsunami. And I've been riding it on a mercury surfboard.
[How do I avoid relapsing?] I just don't do it. I will not believe that if I do something then I have to follow a certain
path because it was written for normal people. People who aren't special. People who don't have tiger blood and Adonis DNA.
[Will I someday be embarrassed to have to explain
my behavior to my children?] God, no. Talk about an education. And then, like, this, and then that's the guy, and that's our
dad and we can get all the answers and the truth? Wow...WINNING!
I'm tired of pretending I'm not a total bitchin' rock star from Mars.
|
|
|
2011.07.01 |
2011.03.01 |
2011.02.01 |
2011.01.01 |
2010.11.01
|
|
|
|
|
