Our old pal Will Clarke--about whom we've written, oh, just a little in the past--is officially Hot Shit. Well, that's not entirely accurate, but awfully close. In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, which I don't even have yet even though I am an inexplicably loyal subscriber, Clarke's been named...Hot Pop Prophet. No kidding. He's on The Hot List. Seriously. (Don't I get Hot Pop Prophet Prophet, since we put Clarke on the cover of the paper version of Unfair Park more than a year ago? No? Fine.)
And since we don't have that issue yet--the one with Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas on the cover--we thought we'd be kind enough to share with you what Rolling Stone has to say about the advertising man who seems to get a movie deal every time he publishes a novel. It's after the jump.
"America's latest cult comic novelist is Will Clarke, 36, a sometime adman who lives in Texas, admires Kurt Vonnegut and Sarah Vowell but writes like Mark Leyner, and consults astrology books when he needs to flesh out his characters. His novels blend the improbable with the really fucking weird. Clark published his first two novels himself, selling thousands of copies on Amazon, showing that these days, you can have cult success with readers scattered across the world, from India to New Zealand. Soon after, Paramount optioned Clarke's first book, and Simon & Schuster signed him up.Clarke's first novel, Lord Vishu's Love Handles, is the story of a beer-drinking Internet entrepreneur who gets offered a d eal to get out of an IRS audit: Come work for the feds as a psychic secret agent. His second book, The Worthy, is about a frat house during pledge season haunted by a rightly vengeful ghost. Oh, and there's a girl with stigmata and a goat in red lingerie in this one, too. He is currently writing his third bizarre saga, about somebody who never sleeps. 'I was always that weird kid who told lies unnecessarily,' Clarke says."
In related news, Fergie is not hot. Or Hot. --Robert Wilonsky