Some exciting news! The Kindle version of my short novel The Promotion is now available for just ninety-nine cents!

Why now? Well, August is a good month for reading (and not much else), and I support readers and reading everywhere….but that’s not the real reason.

What are we really celebrating? In the world of law schools and Big Law this is the season for a particular insanity known as On-Campus Interviews. Law students everywhere will spend a few days this month in some hotel or conference center, drifting from room to room, interviewing with firm after firm after firm, like zombiefied overachieving speed daters. Except there’s nothing like love or intimacy at the end of this rainbow. It’s a lot of work in a professional setting. A marriage between Work Originators and Billable Hours. Turtles all the way down.

So students are eager and try to appear as if they’ll be reliable and competent, and recruiters are trying to be realistic and informative and somehow not stomp all over the youthful enthusiasm. This will wind up leading to a beautiful relationship, hopefully, which in this context means one that’s going to exist for a few years so we may as well make the best of it, dammit. (Nice marriage if you can get it.) And the twenty minutes at the Doubletree will be followed by a round of callback interviews and the incredible phenomenon known as the Interview Lunch, and it lasts for a few weeks and then it’s all over and you’re left wondering what the hell just happened, until you go to the firm and do it all again from the other side and it is equally as strange.

The Promotion tells the story of a washed-up, beaten-down lawyer asked to serve as his firm’s Director of Attorney Development and Recruiting. (The “development” part is a fiction, he’s told – merely included in the title “for marketing purposes.”) And so he launches into a series of luncheon interviews with his assistant directors, a humorless woman who cannot maintain a conversation  with reasonable humans and a hostile partner determined to insult every candidate who walks through the door, when he’s not tearing down the firm to them (“truth-telling,” he calls it).

And at the same time the recruiter starts to lose his grip on his sanity and chases a woman to the ends of the earth, or at least rural Wisconsin, which in this case amounts to the same thing. (Said with affection and nostalgia!)

It’s easy to make fun of all this. But I have a deep residual sympathy for the people who go through it, on both sides. There’s nothing nefarious about it. It’s not evil. It’s just very, very strange. And whenever a fiction writer encounters something strange, the antennae start twitching, and you start thinking Jeez, what an odd setting, the people here are not asked to act normal, and maybe I can do something with this... And here we are! The Promotion! Available on a Kindle for just 99 cents! (For a limited time!) Previews are free!

Don’t have a Kindle? Don’t worry! You can read it on your phone or tablet as well. And the paperback is still somewhere under five bucks, depending on the Amazon discount.

So enjoy the book at the deeply reduced price. If you’re part of this world, enjoy the humor. If you’re not part of it, enjoy that too. And for all my readers, there are plenty of other elements to keep you going. And if politics is more your thing (another bizarre setting, antennae twitching again…) feel free to check out my other book The Race, about a former governor of Wisconsin recovering from a sex scandal. Not discounted. But still cheap.

Onward and upward! And Happy Merry On-Campus Interview Season, everyone!