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  Praise for Sibella & Sibella

  “Joseph Di Prisco’s fearlessness always impresses me, and his latest novel is no exception. Invoking satire and silliness, bad puns and good ones, hijinks and hilarity, Sibella & Sibella takes on the absurdity of publishing, narrated through the lens of a young woman working as a junior editor at a San Francisco publishing house. Fortunately for readers, Di Prisco embraces the absurdity, and the result is this wonderfully crafted and bitingly funny critique that never fails to entertain.”

  —Lori Ostlund, award-winning author of After the Parade

  Praise for Pope of Brooklyn

  “A literary son traces his fugitive father in a pulpy yet cerebral memoir… This sprawling narrative is punctuated by Di Prisco’s reflections on literature, faith, mortality, and his own tangled romances and outré experiences, ranging from cocaine addiction to mentoring adolescents…. Deft, amusing, and tough.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Praise for The Alzhammer

  “Part Mafia thriller, part comic farce, part lament about the anguish of dementia and all hyperkinetic…. Fast-paced and often charming.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Di Prisco writes with humor and a great sense of character, poking fun at things that would leave a lesser author cringing. Think Cuckoo’s Nest meets The Godfather. He interweaves all these elements with the skill of a master writer.”

  —Anne Hillerman, New York Times bestselling author of

  Spider Woman’s Daughter and Rock with Wings

  “Di Prisco delivers a brilliant portrayal of a wise guy who faces his biggest arch enemies…time and Alzheimer’s. The last tango of power, fear, loyalty, and love is beautifully danced for us right to the very end.”

  —Vickie Sciacca, manager of Lafayette Library

  “Great, funny lines on every page. Am I recommending The Alzhammer? As the protagonist Mikey might say, ‘Eggs ackly.’”

  —Jack Handey, author of Deep Thoughts

  Praise for Sightlines from the Cheap Seats

  “Musical, muscular, romantic, wise, Joseph Di Prisco’s new collection of poems, Sightlines from the Cheap Seats offers an expansive view of the landscape, taking us on a curvy trail out of the stadium that leads to our hearts and minds—a poetry adventure that kicks down doors to hidden rooms filled with sunlight.”

  —Kim Dower, Last Train to the Missing Planet

  Praise for Subway to California

  “A beautiful, heartfelt, sometimes funny, occasionally harrowing story of a man making his way through the minefield of his own family history. Di Prisco has lived more lives than most of us, and managed to get it all down in this riveting book.”

  —Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight

  and Bad Sex On Speed

  “Di Prisco delivers thoughtful contemplation of the human condition and plenty of self-examination that reveals how he made it to where he is, and why he survived when others didn’t. His sharp wit and hard-won wisdom make Subway to California a story that anyone who’s risen out of a hardscrabble life with the odds stacked against them will love and learn from.”

  —Foreword Reviews

  “[Di Prisco] can break your heart recalling the most romantic memory of his life or make you laugh out loud when, for example, he defines the Catholic notion of Limbo: ‘not a horrible place, not a great place, sort of like parts of Staten Island.’”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  ALSO BY JOSEPH DI PRISCO

  Novels

  Confessions of Brother Eli

  Sun City

  All for Now

  The Alzhammer

  Memoirs

  Subway to California

  The Pope of Brooklyn

  Poetry

  Wit’s End

  Poems in Which

  Sightlines from the Cheap Seats

  Nonfiction

  Field Guide to the American Teenager (Michael Riera, coauthor)

  Right from Wrong (Michael Riera, coauthor)

  EDITED BY JOSEPH DI PRISCO

  Simpsonistas: Tales from the Simpson Family Literary Project

  This is a Genuine Vireo Book

  A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Di Prisco

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address:

  A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Set in Dante

  epub isbn: 9781644280027

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Di Prisco, Joseph, 1950-, author.

  Title: Sibella & Sibella : a novel / by Joseph Di Prisco.

  Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition. | A Vireo Book. |

  New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781947856318

  Subjects: LCSH Publishers and publishing—Fiction. | Work—Fiction. |

  Authors—Fiction. | Women—Fiction. | Humor fiction. | Humorous stories. | Satire. | BISAC FICTION / Literary. | FICTION /

  Humorous. | FICTION / Satire.

  Classification: LCC PS3554.I67 S53 2018 | DDC 813.54—dc23

  For the Lafayette Library and Learning Center

  &

  For A Great Good Place for Books

  “What country, friends, is this?”

  “This is Illyria, lady.”

  “And what should I do in Illyria?”

  —Twelfth Night, or What You Will

  Contents

  Part One

  Sibella of the Baskervilles

  Wuthering Sibella

  The Heart is a Lonely Sibella

  Sibella the Scrivener

  Their Eyes Were Watching Sibella

  Sibella with the Dragon Tattoo

  A Streetcar Named Sibella

  The Purloined Sibella

  The Red Badge of Sibella

  Sibella Revisited

  Bonfire of the Sibellas

  Sibella Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

  Part Two

  Sibella Budd

  Sibella’s Ashes

  A Clockwork Sibella

  Band the Sibella Slowly

  The Sibella Jar

  Sibella of the D’Urbevilles

  Part Three

  Breakfast at Sibella’s

  The Princess Sibellissima

  Tender is the Sibella

  The Naked and the Sibella

  A Passage to Sibella

  The Incredible Lightness of Being Sibella

  Wide Sibella Sea

  Part Four

  For Whom the Sibella Tolls

  Bright Lights, Big Sibella

  Sibella’s Web

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  Sibella of the Baskervilles

  Don’t call me.1

  Once upon a time, I was the junior editor at my three-ring publishing house answering the fucking office phone because the senior editors were too busy making smooth moves on Mortal Kombat or Tinder to answer the fucking office phone.

  You would be wasting your breath on me, however, if you were some hotshot sociopath author, or a big-time smack-talker slash agent hawking a p
age-turner beach read, or if you were scheming to lock up a blockbuster movie deal over martinis at Chateau Marmont, or if you were bellyaching about our trademark bogus marketing blitzes. Now you’re going to whine? Bogus marketing blitzes are what made our upstart crow company famous. The publisher himself left no doubt he was all that and wasn’t taking your call, so no wonder his house-on-fire success pissed off the book-biz heavyweights otherwise occupied throwing hands during Manhattan fight club nights.

  But say you got me, perish the thought. And pretend I got all goosebumpy hearing from the star your publicist tells you that you are. You still needed to get through the wormhole to the publisher. Bon voyage, Einstein. Legend was that Myron Beam hadn’t answered the fucking phone since the crash. Not that crash, the one before that crash. But he was the publisher and the company owner, the one you needed to talk to who wasn’t going to pick up the fucking phone for whoever you may think you are.

  I didn’t know to an immoral certainty what a junior editor was supposed to do, but I’d been doing my job for a while—at least, when I wasn’t answering the fucking phone, I assume I’d been doing whatever may have been the junior editor job. To me it didn’t seem all that different from what senior editors did, but I did it faster and cheaper and better, and as far as all those senior editors sneaking off to yoga or spinning classes were concerned, more irritatingly.

  I was assured a job description would be on my desk on day one. No such document appeared on that day or any other, but to be fair, neither did a desk upon which it could materialize. Instead, I operated upon a sturdier-than-it-looked LEGO-like construction of interlocking red and blue plastic milk crates. Myron saved a buck wherever and whenever he could. For stability sake, my crates were propped against what seemed to be a bullet-riddled, pockmarked wall, which might have furnished clues as to the fate of my extinguished predecessors. It was also where somebody other than I would have plenty of space for graffiti or for tacking up precious photos of pet pugs and tabbies and significant others. I am pathetic when it comes to photos, but I am a champ when it comes to cultivating insignificant others.

  If I may continue.

  One ancillary aspect of my junior editor job seemed to be answering, as I may have in passing mentioned, that fucking phone. Suavely, I ferried the snarling pack of snark monsters over to the mineshaft of Myron’s voice mail, which in my time had rarely not been full, its need-to-know location in the howling heath that time and Myron continually forgot along with his password. (I hinted to Myron: “Rhymes with subpoena… No, not hyena, but good try.”) Which is why he instructed me to transcribe the messages—including the hysterical sourpuss lawyer legalese—left for him, but why he had a voice mailbox in the first place was another mystery because the same sort of people left the same frantic, threatening messages over and over again.

  Then there was this call. In a sane publishing house it would have set off warning bells, but in our publishing house it should have been viewed as a harbinger of things to come.

  Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ri…

  “Hard Rain Publishing, may I help you?”

  “Tell’m I sez fuck off en don’t wanna talk ’bout it.”

  I had grown accustomed to the antagonistic tenor and the inscrewtability of messages left for the esteemed publisher. Still, that was an odd way to initiate communication, by saying he was calling so as not to talk, but upon reflection that might have been the counterintuitive winning strategy for dealing with a publisher who would never answer his fucking phone.

  “If you would like to leave a voice mail for…”

  “Tell Moron that Fig sez I’m through wit duh sonuvabitch. Got that, Missy Sweet Pants?”

  Thus I begat. Ms. Sweatpants couldn’t forget what the man said or the voice in which he said it. Half frog, half crow. Let’s call it a frow. Better yet, a crog.

  First opportunity, I handed Myron the note on which I had inscribed the deftly nuanced dispatch. I intuited that the communication had to be of course from none other than Mr. Figgy Fontana, the house’s star, a mega-selling author whose latest novel was scheduled for imminent release, the lead title for the season, and orders were pouring in ceaselessly, as expected, and units were rolling out in a flood tide. In case you don’t know this, publishers call books units. So yes, another Hard Rain hit on the horizon. As for the horizon, if I knew then what I know now, I might have been binge-watching the Weather Channel when I recalled the title of Fontana’s forthcoming blockbuster: Swimming Buck Naked in the Hurricane.

  Myron read the transcribed message over and over, as if it conveyed some secret, coded import, and based on his response, I gather it did.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “Been a while since old Fig reached out.”

  And Myron Beam’s French Foreign Legion of detractors claimed he lacked people skills.

  ✴✴✴

  I am an invisible woman.

  Though FYI I get rowdy when startled or provoked.

  Like “Don’t call me,” “invisible woman” constitutes another obvious literary collusion. Literary allusion or literary reference—these namby-pamby terms don’t cut it for me. For ease of collusion identification, I was tempted to insert gorgeous, helpful asterisks. I love asterisks almost more than LEGO. To my eye, they sparkle on the page. But even if I did * it, my senior editor colleagues will still thrash about helplessly on the deck of their sinking careers. And if one day I abracadabra my way into an ISBN number, they will Byromaniacally descend like the fucking Assyrians who poetically came down like wolves on the fold and rip my book to shreds anyway. They call me show-offy and babestruse, and I’ll endeavor to keep the obscure to a minimum, but no promises.

  Whenever anybody probed me during enhanced interrogation and I confessed beneath the naked, swinging lightbulb that I was a junior editor, I reflexively thought of Junior Mints or Junior Leaguer. Not sure which I like less. One is a candy and the other is minty fresh. Tell me, whoever grows up dreaming to become Junior Anything? On this score, I wish I could eradicate one other disturbing association.

  My all-through-college boyfriend addressed his darling appendage by the name of Junior, in this sense referring both to the branding opportunity (ouch) as well as, to be blunt, the gone-but-not-forgotten-enough Johnson. And enlighten me, please. Query Nation: What’s with guys’ pet names for their package? As children did they gnash their teeth and gwail when at Christmas time they were denied the pooches and gerbils they dreamed of?

  Why, yes, as a matter of fact I do have a black belt in TMI. As far as you may be concerned, Too Much Information has a payoff: you can unconditionally trust me, I have nothing to hide, and if I did, I would conceal it in plain sight.

  Speaking of college, I didn’t graduate summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa like Junior’s Keeper. I was too busy reading books (when I wasn’t captaining my D1 college basketball team to another sorry season in the Northeastern snow belt) to attend scrupulously to the required courses necessary to grasp the marvels of derivatives and mitosis and the War of the Roses (the historically glorious escapade I mangled into the War on the Roses, which sounded quite mean-girlish) and otherwise achieve a well-rounded education, or receive a grade higher than C in any class other than Lit. I myself graduated magna cum nada and Phi Beta Mash Kappotatah. Later on, I did pinch a creative writing MFA, about which I am less proud than my dalliance with Junior, and the less said on this topic by this Mistress of the Fine-ish Arts the better.

  But speaking of those Juniors idolized by old boyfriends snappily married currently to trust fund snap pea princesses and residing in lah-de-dah Park Slopeshod, this year he actually won the Yale Younger Fucking Poets Prize, which I continue to struggle to believe, and which depressed me more than my apartment’s latest punitive rent increase, which was utterly unbelievable. Besides, I was getting older, and it was time to get serious about my life, which was wasting away, though my chances o
f snagging the Yale Decrepit Poets Prize were perhaps escalating. I was twenty-six already. I had been planning to quit this job as soon as something better came along.

  But that’s a lie. Not the part about quitting. That’s true. But I was not twenty-six, I was twenty-five. I graduated from college at the ripe old age of nineteen. I skipped a bunch of grades on my magnificent journey through the precious deformative high school years, and it was trouble-free for me to be shuttled to the next higher class because I was always by far the tallest girl at an all-girls K-12 school. I was also what the private school counselors labeled “precocious.” That insult was margarinely better than others I heard—lanktoid, dork, geek, talltard. I think the counselors meant I had a ridiculous vocabulary from having started reading chapter books while briskly gestating in my sabbaticalized professorial mother’s Guggenheimlich Maneuver of a womb. Did they bestuff Mom with that fancy fellowship so she could have her very own baby subject upon whom she could do her groundbreaking research? I have no understanding of Smackademia. Who does? From that embryoyo point forward, I kept reading anything and everything, figuring why stop now? More than any other factor, the high school kept oonching me up the food chain insofar as they needed a lanktard jizzface to play center on the basketball team ASAP because the rest of us girls who suited up resembled gnomes.

  ✴✴✴

  At this stage of my alleged career, therefore, I was at this publishing house and answering the fucking phone for two years. I was surrounded by non-junior editors, all of whom were getting way, way up there, thirty-ish.

  In the case of Hard Rain Publishing where I was ungainly and on the verge of being unemployedly, the publisher’s name was, as I said, Myron Beam. To gauge by all the hot shot authors and agents he blew off, you have probably heard of him. He was a very big deal in the book world.

  You might speculate that a big kahuna like Myron, who effortlessly enraged A-listers, would cut an intimidating figure. That white noise stillness of crickets would seep like nerve gas into any room he surveyed. That the indigenous book people would run for the hills when he strutted in to claim their village like a fuckwad conquistador. To the contrary, he looked more like the methodical guy in the back room of the jewelry store repairing watches and replacing batteries. Myron dressed in the same undaring fashion every day, using “fashion” loosely. Wrinkled white shirt, sleeves rolled up above the elbow, and a skinny black tie hanging below the untethered top button. Navy blue blazer (draped on the back of his chair) that had seen better decades and was missing the bottom button, which dejected detail spoke volumes as to his threadbare domestic life. He wore gigantic black rectangular glasses, but he hardly used them for their ostensibly intended purpose: to see. They functioned mostly as a prop, and they seemed to be in perpetual motion: sliding down his nose, hoisted high up on his domed forehead, or cast down onto the desk—which I came to discover was a bad sign you didn’t want to see: a sign he was pissed. As he often was. Fascinatingly, during the act of reading was the one time his glasses were not on or in the vicinity of his head. Overall, to me, he gave the impression of a man impersonating a book publisher. Which is, I hear, the image most powerful book publishers tend to project.