People Like You Countdown: 7 Days to Publication!

In advance of the official November 17th release of Margaret Malone's People Like You, we're featuring a series of posts about this phenomenal debut, which The Oregonian recently hailed as "Stunningly composed."

Today we share our letter to early readers included in the advance editions of People Like You. Because we meant every word, and because in releasing this book we're about as excited as a publisher can be!

(By the way, People Like You is already in stock at Atelier26 HQ and can be ordered here. All orders ship within 24 hours!)


Dear Reader,

It's a thrill and an honor to introduce you to the work of Margaret Malone, a writer of such fresh and urgent talent that I envy you the exhilarating opportunity of discovery you now hold in your hands. Excitements like this are what keep us reading.

Writers do not come out of nowhere, of course. Over the years Malone has published to quiet acclaim in a number of great literary magazines, such as Swink and The Missouri Review. But with People Like You Malone delivers a debut so beautifully controlled, so provocatively alive to its own truth, that its arrival is almost sure to be received as an electrifying surprise.

I've been hugely gratified by the early response to People Like You from many different gifted writers, all of whom have articulated with almost uncanny exactitude my own convictions about Malone's stories. I feel so strongly about this book, in fact, that I'm significantly expanding the operations of Atelier26 on the basis of its release.

All at once funny, unsettling, subtle, and moving, People Like You is a book to launch a career, and I hope that together we can do it the honor it deserves. I hope you will give it your special attention for a review, a feature, or, if you're a bookseller, for a solid display, book club, or possible author event.

Please keep in touch.

Yours,
M. Allen Cunningham
founder & publisher, Atelier26 Books

Fun addendum: here's Malone's own account of how People Like You came to be, and how she came to publish with Atelier26, from her recent Connotation Press interview with Meg Tuite:
Tuite: Can you share the path that brought this collection out into the world for us lucky folk to read?

Malone: Yes, that length of time was partly due to me being a slow (deliberate is the nice word for it) writer; part of it was that life got in the way; and part of it was procrastination. A few of these stories were first written, in different form, about twelve years ago, around the time I first started writing. Many of the writers I admired were mainly storywriters, so I knew early on my initial goal was to put together a collection, not to write a novel even though I was told repeatedly a novel was the only thing that made good career sense. I have a bit of an anti-authoritarian streak to me, so everyone saying I should write a novel was the perfect thing to push against. So I kept writing, adding new stories to this abstract, amorphous “collection” of mine, taking other ones out. Then for a couple years, life gave me a swift kick and I stopped writing fiction altogether and wrote only memoir. When I was ready to dive back into the stories, I edited them over and over, growing them, shrinking them, sometimes alone at my desk, sometimes in a workshop. Then in the autumn of 2014 I realized, Oh my god, Margaret. Enough!, and I knew I had to find a way to get the collection out into the world. I sat down to query my first small press on October 14, 2014, and on the very same day I received a thoughtful, eloquent email from someone I’d never met named Mark Allen Cunningham, the publisher and editor at Atelier26 Books, who said he’d heard me read at Powell’s Bookstore and he liked my work, and had I ever considered putting together a collection. And I was like… Um, well, funny you should ask… 
We like how that worked out!

Read the whole Connotation Press interview -- and see a video of Malone reading the entire title story HERE.