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Carcanet signs Burt's 'unflinching' personal and political memoir
Carcanet has scooped Every Wrong Direction: An Emigré’s Memoir from Dan Burt.
Managing director Michael Schmidt acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, directly from the author. The memoir will be published on 27th October 2022. Rutgers University Press will publish in the United States.
Every Wrong Direction recounts Burt’s life as a lawyer, businessman and author while examining contemporary political history and the specifics of the US political system. It is a "personal journey in search of home where success affords its own side effects, with an unflinching account of the price to be paid for one’s hubris".
The synopsis reads: "Every Wrong Direction follows the author from the rough, working-class childhood that groomed him to be a butcher or charter boat captain, through America, Britain and Saudi Arabia as student, lawyer, spy, culture warrior and expatriate, ending with a photo of his college rooms at St John’s College, Cambridge. Between this beginning and end, through a Philadelphia commuter college to Cambridge, then Yale Law School, across the working to upper-classes, three countries and seven cities over 43 years, it maps his pursuit of, realisation, disillusionment with, and abandonment of America and the American Dream."
Schmidt commented: "Carcanet has published Dan Burt’s remarkable poetry since 2008. He’s always been a vivid storyteller and I urged him to write down his eventful life. Every Wrong Direction is the result: a harsh Philadelphia childhood, a chequered education that ended up at St John’s Cambridge, political years that touch on Vietnam’s cruellest secrets, the opening of Israel-Saudi contacts, art collecting and romance are entailed. What emerges is an account of the illusions and instructive disillusions of a life lived to the full. In flight from the American Dream, he has found himself. It’s an unexpected privilege to share his journey."
