Constance Eakins

Clever people are so clevery.

The Paris Review, as you all no doubt know, has a Q & A or two with some genius writer in each edition. (This quarter, it features my particular favourite gent Kazuo Ishiguro — excitement!) These interviews are lengthy and often gently earth-shattering — I read one with Joan Didion which has helped me immeasurably as I've muddled through my own piece of shit book*.

In 1958, the Paris Review interview featured the syphilitic American writer Constance Eakins, author of the Saposcat, America, The Rude Violence of the Poor, inter alia. Eakins — lover of Rita Hayworth, turner-down of the Pulitzer Prize, adventurer — was declared dead in 2001, thirty years after simply wandering off, in Italy.

Except none of that happened. Constance Eakins is a character in Nathaniel Rich's novel The Mayor's Tongue.

Except that it all kind of did happen. Nathaniel went to such great lengths to create Eakins, to make him real, that covers from his old paperbacks have started popping up around the internet. See the author's site. See the Eakins covers pool at Flikr. These two are designed by Joanna Neborsky, but there are many others. Really, really excellent others.

A writer that doesn't exist. A man's name that sounds like a girl. A spontaneous art project. A book cover that perfectly replicates the aesthetic of Penguin in the 1960s. It's everything that's rocks, isn't it? I gotta get to a bookstore.










* Sorry. Bit depressed at the moment. The editor is suggesting changes, thereby shattering the illusion that it was perfect.