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Atlantic is to publish Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson, after securing the "smart and deliciously engrossing" novel at auction.
James Roxburgh, publishing director for Atlantic Fiction, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, for the novel from Sophie Lambert at C&W, on behalf of Anna Stein at ICM. It will be a lead title for the indie press, publishing in hardback and e-book in spring 2022. A paperback will follow in spring 2023.
The synopis explains: "Mouth to Mouth is a smart and deliciously engrossing story of confession and moral compromise. Two former classmates—a wealthy art dealer and a struggling writer—bump into one another in an airport lounge and, over delayed flights and a free bar, one of them begins to recount his life story to the other. [It's] about how, many years ago, he pulled a dying stranger from the sea and resuscitated him on the sand; and how, as the stranger slowly became an intimate, and as rescue turned into something closer to entrapment, he started to wonder whether he should have just let the man drown."
Wilson has written two novels and his work has appeared in the Paris Review, Story Quarterly, and Best New American Voices. He is a contributing editor of the literary magazine A Public Space as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books, and lives in Los Angeles.
Roxburgh said: "Mouth to Mouth reads with the intellectual clarity of Don DeLillo and the dark compelling energy of The Girl on the Train. It’s brilliant on a kind of basic moral determinism, the inevitability and irresistibility of money and power, and in its portrayal of Francis, a famous asshole art dealer, it shows how the behaviour of men like [Harvey] Weinstein or [Andrew] Cuomo is systematically excused and forgiven, bullying repackaged as passion, sexual intimidation as charisma. I think Antoine Wilson has written one of the smartest, most addictive novels of the year."
Lambert added: "I first read this in one greedy gulp and was immediately compelled to press it into as many hands as possible, which is exactly what I know James and Atlantic Books will do. Mouth to Mouth is sharp, provocative and unputdownable."