How to Sell, Clancy Martin's hard-nosed debut novel, came out in 2009, but he really owned 2011. The man listed on the University of Missouri–Kansas City's website as chairman of "Continental Philosophy, Nietzsche, 0x000AKierkegaard and Business Ethics" (so, yeah, it's Dr. Martin to his students) won a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, for starters. But he's not your typical suede-elbow-patched academic. This Indiana Jones of local polymaths spent the winter and spring filing far-flung reports and travelogues with Details magazine and the Paris Review's website, among other outlets. For the former, Martin embedded himself in the hot-yoga-and-hotter-sex world of Bikram, with wickedly entertaining results. The three-part Paris Review piece channeled Hunter S. Thompson with passages like "Maybe my soon-to-be ex-wife was right: perhaps I am bipolar and incapable of recognizing when I am in the midst of a manic episode. ... The bars were beginning to be populated, and the cold beers and tall, colorful potions and modest glasses of cheap red glistened their eyes at me like snakes or flying monkeys." We wanna hang with this guy. And then maybe hire his agent.
