Available from Asterism, Amazon, B&N, Powell’s, Your Local Indie Bookstore, or Kindle.
On June 16, 2024, the brave and honorable Sagging Meniscus published Like It Matters.
Here’s the official summary:
Every Bloomsday, six male writer reader drinker friends gather at a bar to talk about life and literature and to celebrate the idea of the masterpiece more than the masterpiece itself. All are frustrated to the point of desperation. But this Bloomsday will prove different: one of the most celebrated younger writers in the world, with the power to potentially unlock their careers, is expected to join them.
It’s about ambition, creation, delusion, success, failure, submission, acceptance, rejection, idiocy, anger, idealism, persistence, and the excessive consumption of exceptional beer. It’s also about walking and reading, the gestation of literary and literal offspring, and the joys and sorrows of writing with intent to publish.
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Here’s the first review — by Jay Innis Murray.
“Klein has structured this book with the care of an expert screenwriter, so that, while it may seem plotless (writers sitting in a bar drinking craft beers, talking about writing), it has a build and seductive momentum that pulls the reader along to a last act that contains a launch (no other word for it) like something from the wild US fictions of the 1960s and 1970s. I loved every minute of it.”
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Eric Bies managed to convince the editors at Full Stop to run an interview with me, mostly about Like It Matters, posted November 12, 2024.
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On the Beyond the Zero podcast, Ben and I chat about a seminal instance of manual manipulation’s influence on Ulysses plus other stuff related to Like It Matters.
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Here’s an excerpt from an email from Adam Levin, author of The Instructions (check the sweet new two-volume paperback 13th anniversary Bar Mitzvah edition from McSweeney’s), Hot Pink, Bubblegum, and Mount Chicago:
“So far, it is my favorite of the three Lee Klein books I’ve read . . . I believe it is the only book I’ve read that nails being post-school in a city while being a writer and a member of our generation who cares, Gen-X-ily, a lot about his friends. By nails, I guess what I mean the most is: brings across the joy of that period, which I think is overlooked, and didn’t even know to think of as overlooked before I read LIKE IT MATTERS. As in: I overlooked it. You lit the whole thing up. Formerly, it went: Syracuse, a big blank, then man with a published book, then married. Now I remember I had eyes to see and ears to listen and stuff to say and a brain to intoxicate during the intervening seven-eight years. It was fun!”
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Here’s the first texted response from a grad-school friend:
“It’s for sure enjoyable on the gossip/Lee has alarmingly acute laser critiques level, but it’s also like you’ve done a magic trick here — the book is saying what it’s not doing while it’s doing it, so like ripping on the WRITING ADVICE old standards while demonstrating how to use them. Also the sentences were very you, but the overall style felt maybe a little more immediately accessible to a non-Lee reader than other recent-ish stuff, and the whole thing was just very smart and also fun. I don’t know, I just really loved it.” 😀
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Five stars from the wife-type person!
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Here’s an image of Like It Matters (and JRZDVLZ) chillin’ on a serious bookshelf, plus some excerpted email communication, from Ben Bloch, author of the poetry collection, The Narrows, and translator of And the Shark, He Has Teeth by Ernst Josef Aufricht (original producer of “The Threepenny Opera” in Germany in the ’30s):
“Lee, I took Like It Matters with me on vacation to Vietnam and read it there in a few sittings. It really speaks to me. As a writer, and in a big way as a reader. Even as a critiquer; I’ve had a very similar thing with giving single-spaced pages worth of comments to people, subjecting them to what really was more of a labor of artful commentary, for me. Your book is the only thing I have ever read that so aptly describes the absurd position we literary aspirers/soldiers find ourselves in. Thoughts of comets hitting the earth riddle my hard-won composure anytime I’ve managed to feel OK about what I’m doing. My writing is no exaggeration 99% editing/revision. It’s crazy to me that it ends up producing anything at all. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for the amazing sense of co-celebration and commiseration your book gave me. Hope it means something to you, also, that your book has gone tropo and was being read in a downpour next to a hotel pool in Vietnam in July.”
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And here’s an excerpt from an email from MJ Nicholls of Glasgow, author of eight novels and counting from Sagging Meniscus and the world’s foremost poster of playful, insightful, precisely worded reviews on Goodreads:
“At a time when I’ve reached a moment of apathy, doubt, and writerly self-pity, this book really was a rallying cry for me, it reminded me to rethink exactly what made writing so pleasurable and essential to me for so long, and to cut through the pity and return to appreciating these little universes of the imagination we create, not everything that orbits around them. This really is one of the best books on being a reader and writer I’ve read. It should be fucking bedecked in plaudits, if there was any remnant of logic left in this backsliding spheroid.”
And here’s an excerpt from MJ’s GR review: “An absolute triumph to be read with a crate of Weihenstephaner Hefeweizen that will lift the spirits of the most embittered of writers. Skol!”
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From Avner Landes, author of Meiselman: The Lean Years:
“If you’re a writer you should read this book. If you’re a reader you should read this book. If you’re someone who frets about the value of your avocation, whatever it may be, you should read this book. It’s a book about friends who get together every Bloomsday, and my persistent thought when reading this beautiful book was that I’m going to adopt the custom of reading it every June 16th because it’s nearly impossible to store all the staggering riffs in one’s head and you’ll want to. I kept telling myself to slow down and take it all in, but that proved difficult.”
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Images below are linked to something related to the readers who sent them:
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Here are the back-cover blurbs:
“Forges in the smithy of its soul the uncreated conscience of the disillusioned fiction writer.”
—Lao Guardian, author of One with Nature
“Sui generis! Condenses, in an expansive way, a lifetime’s reflections on reading, writing, drinking, and being stuck in one’s head while out in the world.”
—Addison Oates, author of Death by Jacaranda
“Riffage FTW. Almost funny at times. Surprisingly loveable characters (especially that poor boy from the Great Northeast).”
—Kevin Snare, author of Shattering Windows with Rocks
“Audacity, authority, execution, oomph, and—when it comes to the bit about quitting writing—maybe even some heft.”
—Francis Gibson, author of A Birth at Home
“Undiscourageably diffuse.”
—John England, author of Restoration Road
“Not much happens until the end but it’s worth the wait.”
—Jonathan David Grooms
Available from Asterism, Amazon, B&N, Powell’s, Your Local Indie Bookstore, or Kindle.