The Requisitions: A Novel

A Query to the Substack Community

Dear Reader,

In many ways, I’ve been preparing to write this letter since I first started if not, Paris on January 17, 2022.

These were the first words I ever wrote on this space:

“One of the downsides of writing novels is it can take years to finish a project, let alone share it. The goal with this space is to ensure the exact opposite : to eschew the traditional publishing model in favor of writing for the here and now.”

689 days, 106 posts and 937 Substack subscribers later and I’m eschewing another traditional publishing model, not by querying a literary agent or a publishing house, but by querying you, fellow reader, with the hopes that you might be interested in purchasing my latest novel this holiday season.

The Pitch

“When the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café.”

September 1, 1939: the Polish city of Łódź is on the brink of invasion.

The Astoria Café really did exist, but the professor is only a figment of a boy’s imagination.

Many years later, our author unearths a story that reignites his childhood obsession with Viktor Bauman, a disillusioned academic forced into the Łódź Ghetto, Elsa Dietrich, a captive Gestapo secretary, and Lieutenant Carl Becker, a troubled policeman whose fixation with Elsa is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty.

The Requisitions is a 62,000 word historical metafiction about history, memory, and a novelist writing himself back into the lives of those who once lived.

The Story

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Back in 2012, I was in the midst of a master’s program studying the dark side of the human condition at University College London. While working on my dissertation, The Humanness of Cruelty: Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl and the Psychology of Genocide, a single sentence visited me from the depths of a Kentish Town winter that would take me over a decade to understand:

“When the sirens began, the professor was sitting at the Astoria Café.”

So began a decade-long journey to write a novel I could be proud of, a book that would serve as the culmination of my two degrees in Holocaust studies, but which could also illuminate the beauty of the human experience within the darkness of the human condition.

2

In 2015, I published my debut novel, Slim and The Beast, attended a prestigious writers’ conference and went on a book tour, thus scratching my twenty-something ego in all of the right ways.

Having been told that I’d “made it” because I’d given a talk at Paris’ Shakespeare & Company and done a reading at McNally Jackson’s in New York City, I was surprised to learn that “making it” as a young writer meant rescinding 85% + of my rights to my publisher (1,300 books sold/$2500 made). If you’re interested in the details of how I bought back the rights to Slim and The Beast last year, you can find the story down below.¹

3

The first draft of The Requisitions, finished in 2016, clocked in at 136,000 words, a wordy tome of historical fiction whose characters were immature, just like me.

The second draft was just under 100,000 words, which was still entirely too long, and after a fourth draft in late 2017, I lost momentum on the novel and knew I needed to rethink everything. Serendipitously, that year I was accepted to the MFA program in creative writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

For the next two years of my writing life, I kept The Requisitions locked away, all-but-convinced that it was destined for the dustbin of history. But the word “requisition” comes from the Latin requisitio (the act of searching), from requirere (to seek or to ask) and it wasn’t until a global pandemic changed the course of my life that I realized just how important the book’s title was to me.

During the pandemic, I temporarily lost my three jobs (as a touring musician, teacher, and tour guide) and fell in love with Augusta Sagnelli, who was living across the ocean at the time.² Between March-May 2020, I realized The Requisitions wasn’t a fait accompli, it just needed to be re-seeked.

a small window into an ocean of change

I rewrote the novel from scratch, opening a folder each day that read RE-SEEK THE REQUISITIONS. This time, the story wasn’t a bog-standard historical fiction novel with a detached narrator, but a metafictional history about a writers’s attempt to reconnect with his eight year old self, who’d climbed up on a bookshelf and inexplicably pulled down The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, thus beginning a lifelong fascination with the most destructive war in human history.

4

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m publishing The Requisitions on my own terms. My wife Augusta Sagnelli and I set up our own imprint, Kingdom Anywhere Publishing, so that we can work with artists and professionals who we respect and also believe in: my friend Saskia Meiling, a talented book designer; the Alabama-born, Paris-based poet Carrie Chappell for editorial; and Escourbiac Printing, a Paris printer which has been operating since the sixties.

There are two main reasons I’m publishing The Requisitions independently. First, after years of working with a music label, I’m convinced that when artists don’t retain control over the majority of their intellectual property, the disempowerment is nearly impossible to reconcile.

Secondly, The Requisitions has been the most personal and challenging project of my life, and I want to share it with the world the way I see fit, not the least because it’s about two of the most sensitive subjects in all of Holocaust studies: the Nazi-imposed system of Jewish councils in Poland (I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on this subject) and the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi Germany’s mobile killing units (the subject of my MA dissertation).

signed, sealed & almost delivered at Paris’ Escourbiac Printing

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