Handling It: How I Got Rich and Famous, Made Media Stars Out of Common Street Scum and Almost Got the Girl: Includes Ferman's Devils and Boddekker's Demons

by Joe Clifford Faust

Meet Boddekker, a typical mid-21st century advertising copywriter-underpaid, overworked and absolutely frantic. His wants are a dream house in Princeton (if the bank would just approve his 100-year mortgage), the beautiful Honnicker in Accounting (who barely seems to know he exists) and keeping the Old Men of his agency happy. The last thing he wants is to be attacked by a street gang who will spare his life only if he promises to put them in a TV ad. But it happens, so he casts Ferman's Devils as (what else?) a gang of vicious thugs who beat up a has-been star in the ad that launches NanoKleen, the nanotech laundry soap. And watches in horror as they become the biggest (and worst behaved) media stars in the history of Madison Avenue.

567 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Joe Clifford Faust is an American author best known for his seven science fiction novels primarily written during the 1980s and 1990s, including A Death of Honor, The Company Man, the Angel's Luck Trilogy (all published by Del Rey Books), and the satirical Pembroke Hall novels (published by Bantam Spectra). His novels are known for their tightly controlled plots and their sense of humor. Like many authors, he draws inspiration from previous and current occupations, including projectionist, record store clerk, radio announcer, sheriff's dispatcher, and advertising copywriter. He currently works in advertising, but keeps his hand in writing and through other creative projects such as occasional forays into cartooning and songwriting.

On February 16, 2011, Faust announced on his blog that he had created a publishing company called Thief Media as an organ to distribute his out-of-print novels in ebook formats. Releases are scheduled to begin in March 2011 with "A Death of Honor" and will include two previously unpublished novels, "The Mushroom Shift" and "Trust."