A little over a week ago, an 11-year journey came to an end when Little, Brown, the publisher of so many fine books, including my first Pynchon, Vineland, purchased my novel, Sweetness #9. In the first few days that followed the sale, I’d pause whatever I was doing every now and then, as if to question if it had really happened.

Well, yes, apparently it has, because Publisher’s Marketplace announced the news yesterday. Here’s the description of the novel that went out to the subscribers of this industry trade paper:

Stephan Eirik Clark’s SWEETNESS #9, a darkly comic novel about a flavor chemist whose failure to blow the whistle on the side-effects of a new artificial sweetener has profound consequences for his family and American culture at large, in an imaginative debut that moves between Hitler’s Germany, Nixon’s America, and into our post-9/11 age . . .