Three-Martini Lunch

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Suzanne Rindell



Cliff

1

Greenwich Village in 58 was a madman s paradise.  In those days a bunch of us went aroundtogether drinking too much coffee and smoking too much cannabis and talking allthe time about poetry and Nietzsche and bebop. I had been running around with the same guys I knew from Columbia giveor take a colored jazz musician here or a benny addict there and together wewould get good and stoned and ride the subway down to Washington Square.  I guess you could say I liked my Columbiabuddies all right.  They were swellenough guys but when you really got down to it they were a pack of poserwannabe-poets in tweed and I knew it was only a matter of time before I outgrewthem.  Their fathers were bankers andlawyers and once their fascination with poetic manifestos wore off they wouldsettle down and become bankers and lawyers, too, and marry a nicedebutante.  I was different from theseguys because even before I went to college I knew I was meant to be an artist,even if I didn t know just yet exactly what form I wanted my creativity totake.  As far as I was concerned academiawas for the birds anyhow, and the more I spent time below 14thStreet, the more I realized that the Village was my true education. 

When I finally threw in the towel and dropped my last classat Columbia, My Old Man came poking around my apartment in MorningsideHeights.  He ahemmed quietly to himself and fingered the waxy leaves of theplants in the window and finally sat with his rump covering a water-stain on ahand-me-down Louis XVI sofa my great-aunt had deemed too ugly to keep in herown apartment.  Together we drank acouple of fingers of bourbon neat, and then he shook my hand in a dignified wayand informed me the best lesson he could teach me at this point in my life was self-reliance.  His plan mainly involved

Suzanne Rindell is the author of The Other Typist. She has published her short fiction and poetry in Conjunctions (online), Nimrod, storySouth, Crab Orchard Review, and Cream City Review. Rindell lives in New York City.

Praise for Three-Martini Lunch

Think of it as the publishing industry s take on Mad Men: a gripping fictional dispatch from the world of talented writers and editors with big dreams, secrets, and booze bills. Entertainment Weekly

Packed with narrative surprises... Rindell keeps the suspense strong as we wonder if Eden and Cliff and Miles are fated for success or doomed to failure. CT Post

A rollicking period piece that builds to a magnificent crescendo. With an excellent ear for the patter and cadence of the time, Rindell expertly brings a bygone era to life, though the struggles of her trio feel anything but dated. While blackmail and backstabbing keep things suitably scandalous, Rindell also explores deeper issues of race, sexuality, class and gender in ways that feel vital and timely. The end result is a moving novel that proves provocative in more ways than one. BookPage

Sprawling across more than 500 pages, the new novel Three-Martini Lunch captures the excesses as well as the inhibitions of New York City in 1958, from the eponymous meals of the big Manhattan publishing houses, to wild drinking-and-drug bouts in Greenwich Village, to the lingering paranoia of McCarthyism, to the casual racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism among the professional class. New York Journal of Books

Compulsively readable melodrama about life in the Manhattan publishing world of the 1950s [Rindell] does it with such high style and draped in such alluring, gin-soaked detail that we overcome our critical selves and root like hell for Eden to become an editor, for Miles to accept his love for Joey, and for Cliff to quit being a jerk. Booklist

[Three-Martini Lunch] offers a captivating look into the vibrancy of mid-20th-century New York City through the eyes of three flawed and therefore, fascinating young characters. Library Journal

With its vivid historical setting and the narrators' distinct voices, this ambitious novel is both an