Dear Everyone: 

This is to announce that I'm posting my new novel, Alt. Country, online next month, as explained below.  I'm looking for mentions, traffic from literary blogs, links from friends' web sites, word of mouth, confirmation, or a low pitiful whistle.  After much thought, this just seems the right decision now.  (Or else no one's being honest enough to talk to me out of it--and I've really, really asked.)  

Please forgive the group email!  I'll update you as the date approaches.

With thanks--

Alan

TITLE:  Alt. Country (read at www.alanrifkin.com)

Former Details/L.A. Weekly contributing editor and PEN-USA Award finalist Alan Rifkin will post the full text of a new novel on his web site beginning March 19th.  Rifkin has not yet found an agent for the book, and he would like the manuscript viewed by as many eyes as possible before he serially courts publishers, six months at a time, in a confused and increasingly unimaginative book industry. 

The Los Angeles Times Book Review called Rifkin's first fiction collection, Signal Hill, "[H]auntingly beautiful, the work of a gifted storyteller with a sharp eye but a tender heart."  Kirkus Reviews wrote, "Rifkin is what might have happened had Nathanel West lived on and been even more talented . . . . Exquisite."  Time Out New York wrote: "Rifkin writes with such startling originality and authority that you have to believe he'll be the next darling of the literary world." 

Rifkin has been a finalist for both the 2004 Southern California Booksellers Award in Fiction and the 2003 PEN-Center USA Award in Journalism.  He describes the new novel as "a post-partisan love story of the culture wars." 

A story of hard-won, compromised but still magnetic love, Alt. Country tracks the modern legend of Harvey Kooper, a former alternative-country singer-songwriter trying to live right.  Haunted by the mistakes of a lifetime, he runs from near-fame, leads spiritual fasts in the San Fernando Valley ("Country Music's Salinger," a bartender calls him), finds Jesus, marries a radio host who spins musical dreams of half-remembered pasts . . . and then recreates all the chaos and tragedy he had tried to break free of.  Meanwhile he is shadowed by a faded, possibly delusional, Rolling Stone reporter who believes that the artist's slide to obscurity is a story for our times.  250 pgs.

Synopsis and chapter installments will post at www.AlanRifkin.com

CONTACT: ALAN RIFKIN 562-505-9759