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First Ever Second-person Future Book, ‘You Will Behave,’ Makes Literary History

Gaithersburg, MD (PRWEB) November 3, 2005

SuckerPunch Press has made literary history by publishing the world’s first ever second-person, future tense book, “You Will Behave,” by Matt Getty. In the groundbreaking novella, Getty accomplishes a literary feat many, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, once thought impossible.

“You Will Behave” is told from the perspective of an angry mother chastising her son for raping his sister’s Barbie Doll with Darth Vader’s light-saber. She reprimands him for the crime of playroom passion and then goes on to tell him his entire life story. The result is a dark and uproarious tale of love, violence, and what little difference there is between the two — told entirely in the second-person future.

“It’s astounding, really,” says SuckerPunch Press Editor Jack Brickman on the history-making book. “It’s a much needed shock to the literary world. The whole thing is ‘you will this’ and ‘you will that,’ and it never comes off as a gimmick. You just go along for the ride.”

Critics and authors agree. Esquire calls “You Will Behave” “breathtaking.” Not an Exit (www.notanexit.net) editor Bret Schlyer recommends the novella as “quite funny.”

Richard McCann (www.richardmccann.net), author of Mother of Sorrows says, “Remarkably inventive and remarkably funny, Matt Getty’s ‘You Will Behave’ is a remarkably dead-on exploration of what it means to grow up male in middle America, rendered in a prose that’s as sharp and fine as it is original. Matt Getty is the real thing.”

Says SmokeLong Quarterly (www.smokelong.com) editor Dave Clapper, “You Will Behave truly is a sucker punch. Narratively cute, it pulls the reader into an ugly world wherein violence and sexuality are forever intertwined. It questions that link and doesn’t flinch from honest answers. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s funny as hell.”

The idea for the highly acclaimed novella arose when Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Henry Taylor told Getty that it would be impossible to write a story both in the second person and in the future tense. “About two weeks before that Henry also told me that any writer worth his salt would immediately try to do something once he’d been told it was impossible, so what else was I going to do?” says Getty. “Though I can’t really take much credit for it as a literary feat. I came up with a premise that would work, and then ‘You Will Behave’ pretty much wrote itself — I think that’s why it doesn’t seem forced. It’s a story that could only be told this way, and it’s a story that has to be told.”

Matt Getty, the self-proclaimed “world’s best writer ever,” has written fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for Tatlin’s Tower, Poet Lore, The Washington Times, Pindeldyboz, and several other literary magazines. “You Will Behave” is his first novella. A graduate of Gettysburg College, he lives in Maryland and works at American University in Washington, D.C., where he earned his graduate degree. He teaches writing at American University and the University of Maryland University College. For more information on Getty, visit www.mattgetty.com.

SuckerPunch Press is an independent literary publishing house specializing in “books that hit hard and leave a bruise.” For more information on SuckerPunch Press and other SuckerPunch authors visit www.suckerpunchpress.com.

To request a review copy of You Will Behave, contact Violet Kennedy.

You Will Behave

Matt Getty

68 pages | 6 x 9 Perfect Bound

2005 | ISBN 0-9774186-1-8 | $ 12.95

www.suckerpunchpress.com

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