About
Born in Richmond, Virginia, and carted back and forth between Virginia and Baltimore, I blame my rootless, restless personality on my father. He was and is a traveling salesman with a keen gift of gab, great wit, a ready joke, and could sell white tennis shoes to coal miners.
It was during these sojourns up and down the east coast I soaked up the stories that would later be Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways. I think authors should exploit their family history before raping the rest of the culture for material.
Dad finally got tired of the east and moved to the Midwest when I was fourteen. We settled outside of Chicago. It is here I came of age and went off to college for seven years -- two degrees and one novel later I returned to Chicago and lived in many different apartments, trying to get a little two hundred page manuscript called Ripples published.
When a local printer said he would take a chance on my book, I jumped and had my first novel published by a man who had never published anything. Great reviews and moderate sales put me back to my jobs as a janitor, baker, waiter, construction worker, teacher, real estate tycoon, mortgage broker, professor, security guard, salesman -- anything to make a buck and keep writing. The printer lost his mind and published my second novel, too. That landed me with Bantam after some rave reviews and a paperback auction for my second novel, Tobacco Sticks.
A third novel, Mica Highways, was sold on less than one hundred and fifty pages to Bantam and then I did a strange thing -- I settled down to writing in Ernest Hemingway's birthplace in Oak Park, Illinois. I have since been looking for the Great American Novel up in the old red oak rafters and I think I might have finally found one... we'll see.
Size Zero (Visage Book 1)
Description
<p style="margin:0px 0px 14px;padding:0px;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;"><strong>"A somber, disturbing mystery fused with a scathing look at the fashion industry. </strong><strong>Mangin writes in a confident, razor-edged style."</strong><strong> - Kirkus Reviews</strong></p><p style="margin:-4px 0px 14px;padding:0px;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;"><strong>Condom dresses and space helmets have debuted on fashion runways.</strong></p><p style="margin:-4px 0px 14px;padding:0px;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;">A dead body becomes the trend when a coat made of human skin saunters down fashion's biggest stage. The body is identified as Annabelle Leigh, the teenager who famously disappeared over a decade ago from her boyfriend's New York City mansion.</p><p style="margin:-4px 0px 14px;padding:0px;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;">This new evidence casts suspicion back on the former boyfriend, Cecil LeClaire. Now a monk, he is forced to return to his dark and absurd childhood home to clear his name. He teams up with Ava Germaine, a renegade ex-model. And together, they investigate the depraved and lawless modeling industry behind Cecil's family fortune.</p><p style="margin:-4px 0px 14px;padding:0px;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;">They find erotic canes, pet rats living in crystal castles, and dresses made of crushed butterfly wings. But Cecil finds more truth in the luxury goods than in the people themselves. Everyone he meets seems to be wearing a person-suit. Terrified of showing their true selves, the glitterati put on flamboyant public personas to make money and friends. Can Cecil find truth in a world built on lies?</p><p style="margin:-4px 0px 0px;padding:0px;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;"><strong>In high fashion modeling, selling bodies is organized crime.</strong></p>
Story Behind The Book
Mica Highways picks up where Tobacco Sticks left off twenty years later. 1968 brings Martin Luther Kings assassination and a crime that is hushed up for twenty more years. When a young man decides go down South and find out about the mysterious circumstances of his mother's death-we are led into a sort of who done it mystery. But Mica Highways is really about love triumphing over tremendous pain. Charlie Tidewater stays with his old grandfather who is on the last weeks of his life and we see his life spin out during his nocturnal journeys. We follow granddaddy as he races bootleggers, start a business, lose everything, then we watch as his wife slowly goes mad. Through it all this there is a central crime, a central wrong that was committed during the worst of the Civil Rights movement. But granddaddy perseveres and puts forth his simple ode to life-it is what we make it. So it is.
