Author Description

"Leonard Lundell leads the crisis management team at a Madison Avenue PR firm, spends his days counseling executives whose reputations have been ruined by scandal. But Leonard has been managing a crisis of his own, a strange and debilitating urge that's held him captive his entire adult life: he likes to eat things with no nutritional value-soap, pencils, paint chips, you name it. He's been able to hide these compulsions behind a professional veneer, but when he signs an important client, an antisocial file clerk unwittingly discovers Leonard's secret and blackmails him into accommodating her own bizarre culinary indulgences. A picaresque set in the months leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, The Appetite Factory examines the earliest days of our post-truth era, where a scandal-obsessed news cycle and social media's rise as an information platform gave birth to a culture so addicted to recreational outrage we now shame a different public figure each week to keep ourselves entertained. Set to the backdrop of Madison Ave.'s marketing machine-the ne plus ultra of a capitalist society-The Appetite Factory presents an all-too-familiar dystopia where public perception precedes reality, and asks what role individuality plays in a world where we increasingly define ourselves by what we consume"--