What's in a Signature?

My old homeboy, a VICTIM tour, and more.

Substack fam! Hello, I’ve missed you. For real. 

As I write this, we are less than two weeks out from VICTIM’s release date, which is insane. I’ve got thirty hardcover copies of my novel in my house, which feels quite pretentious, but also cool. I also have a small tour coming up, which I wanted to let you know about, in case you happen to be in proximity to any of the events, and are willing to come out, say hi, and meet IRL.

I, of course, would love this. 

Saturday, March 16th: I’m kicking things off here in Miami at the legendary Books & Books in Coral Gables. I’m honored to be in conversation with Dwyer Murphy, the author of two extremely stylish and well-written literary noir novels, AN HONEST LIVING and THE STOLEN COAST (highly recommend you peep both). RSVP if you’d like, or just roll through! 

Tuesday, March 19th: My next stop is the cradle. My heart, and my hometown, the boogie down Bronx. Catch me at the Lit.Bar in the South Bronx, an incredible store—and the only bookstore in the entire damn borough. If that blows your mind, it should. I wrote about this problem for The New Yorker way back when, and mentioned Noelle Santos in the piece, the owner of the Lit.Bar. Back then, in 2016, she was just a hungry Latina with a dream and a Kickstarter. But today she’s kicking ass, taking names, and bringing amazing literary events to the BX. I couldn’t be prouder of her, and couldn’t be prouder to present VICTIM to my peoples back home. 

I’ll be in conversation there with the OG Ernesto Quiñonez, author of BODEGA DREAMS. I’ve been paging through his classic novel again recently, to prepare for our chat, and it’s been such a joy. When I first read it, as a 19-year-old thinking about trying to become a writer, it functioned sort of like a gateway drug, just like DROWN by

Junot Díaz

did. In Ernesto’s book I saw myself, my community, and a master who was able to spin a yarn that felt authentic and true to the life I was living. To say that it is an honor to have him alongside me is the understatement of the century. So if you’re in NYC, please do come out! This is sure to be a special stop. Tickets, I should add, are required for this event. One ticket includes the purchase of a copy of VICTIM. Buy yours here.

Wednesday, March 20th: I’m venturing out into Brooklyn to read at the Books Are Magic Montague Street location (there are two stores in BK, which

Ross Barkan

astutely pointed out to me, and which likely saved me the embarrassment of showing up to the wrong one—so thanks, Ross). This, too, will be a homecoming of sorts, as I have a whole clan of family out in Brooklyn that I hardly ever get to see because according to New York City geography, the distance from the Bronx to Brooklyn is basically the distance from the Bronx to Australia. But now I’ll have a reason to be in their backyard, and I’m looking forward to seeing my peoples there, as well as so many of you who’ve already told me you’re coming by. I truly can’t wait. 

I’ll be in conversation with the wonderful and wildly talented, Xochitl Gonzalez. Xochitl will be in the midst of her own tour, for her sophomore novel, ANITA DE MONTE LAUGHS LAST, a follow up to her celebrated, New York Times bestselling debut, OLGA DIES DREAMING. I’m so honored she’s making the time for me and for VICTIM, and can’t begin to tell you how cool and generous she’s been since she first read my novel to blurb it. It’s the kind of generosity that has been extremely instructive, and that I can’t wait to reciprocate to another author in the future. So, yes, if you’re in Brooklyn, or anywhere close by, please come out! This is sure to be a fun, very Boricua, very NYC event and I’d love to have you there. (Also, it’ll be livestreamed here for those who can’t make it!)

Thursday, March 21: I’m hopping on a plane, likely hungover, and heading back down to Florida to read at a lovely indie in St. Petersburg (right outside Tampa) called Tombolo Books. I had the pleasure of visiting them around the holidays last year, and they’re an awesome shop and have been so supportive of VICTIM. I’ll be in conversation alongside the incredible, and hilarious, Kristen Arnett, the bestselling author of novels such as MOSTLY DEAD THINGS and WITH TEETH. I’m honored to share a stage with her, and so looking forward to her questions.

Pretty much my entire Puerto Rican family has migrated from the island to Tampa over the last couple decades, so I’m excited for this one because it’ll also be a homecoming, too. For many summers my mom shipped me out to Tampa while school was out because she was afraid of me getting in trouble in the streets of the Bronx, which, looking back, was probably a smart move. I spent big chunks of my childhood in Tampa, and often take my kids up there now, too to see family. It’ll be cool to return there as a fancy author guy now, and get to show off to my abuela, and my tios, and my titis, and my cousins, and most importantly my youngest, impressionable, generation of cousins. Perhaps now they’ll see me as more than just the older cousin who cracks jokes and asks them weird questions about the new slang terms they use! Perhaps. 

So yes, if you’re in the Tampa/St. Pete area, please come out! 

Wednesday April 10th: I’ll be ending this first little tour right outside Dallas, Texas, at the University of North Texas-Denton. I’m thankful to my man Daniel Peña, author of BANG, who helped get this together and who I’m so looking forward to seeing and chatting with him about VICTIM. I’m also looking forward to hearing from students on campus. It’ll be my first university event as an author person, and I can’t wait for it. I love sharing with students and listening to their concerns, and being in the position of, hopefully, helping to ease some of them (as I wrote about in my last post). The event is open to the public. If you’re anywhere in the area, please do come out!

---

If you come out to any of these events (thank you, for real), and buy a book (thank you, again), and come up to get it signed by me (please do, because I’m so excited to do this), you’ll see me lay this signature on the page. 

I thought it might be interesting to write a bit about it, because a few people have noticed it as being a bit different from a traditional author signature. 

What this is, is my old graffiti tag. Something I developed in middle school, which is when my brief career as a graffiti writer took place. I feel uncomfortable even referring to myself as a graffiti writer, to be honest, because I highly respect the craft and the masters of it.

Really, what it was is that for a year or so I went around writing this tag on the back of public bus and train seats, on some walls, bathroom stalls in school, desks, etc. No spray paint or nothing crazy, just a fat marker I kept in my bookbag. 

I did this because I was inspired by my homeboy back in middle school, who I’ll call M.

M was a true artist. Had an extensive knowledge of spray paint as a 13-year-old, and would spend his own time painting furniture in his bedroom, and walls in his house, as well as walls out in the world, too. He was my best friend at the time, and I was in awe of him, so basically, I just tried to do a bit of what he was doing. That is, until he astutely pointed out that my tag was not only kind of wack, but incriminating, because AMB are my initials.

Duh. 

M pointing that out, and M later getting into trouble with the law, and our school for his artwork, effectively put an end to my brief tagging career. But for the rest of my days, I’d often practice my little tag in notebooks when I was bored in school, or in my journals when I didn’t know what to write. As I’ve gotten older, the tag has meant more and more to me, because it’s a representation, to me at least, of where I come from, and the kid I used to be, and the kid that, in many ways, I still am. 

So that is one part of why I decided to use it to sign my books. Because VICTIM is an authentic representation of what I’ve been chewing on over the last decade, and therefore it only feels right to sign it in a way that feels real and meaningful to me. 

But the other reason is because of M, and because of friends like him that I’ve made over the years. He’s someone I, sadly, lost touch with around the time I made the jump to college. We saw each other on the 4 train last, after he’d dropped out and been kicked out of a number of high schools. I had just recently gotten accepted into Cornell, and he was dealing drugs, and learning how to tattoo. We hadn’t seen each other in years because we’d ended up going to different high schools. I remember how it felt like we were worlds apart in that moment, heading on two very different trajectories, even though we’d been walking the same path just a few years before. 

There are a few kids I grew up with that I can tell that story about. And I thought about all of them while working on VICTIM, and especially the earliest versions of it. There’s a lot of M, and kids like him, in Gio, and in the rest of the novel.

So partly, the signature is also an ode to them, too. Part of me hopes that one day M might see the book, see my signature on it, and smile to himself, thinking, this dumb motherfucker! He’s still using that wack ass tag, huh? 

Peace, 

Andrew 

COOL THINGS 

In lieu of a traditional recommendations list, I wanted to hit you with some cool things that have happened in VICTIM world since we last spoke. 

• Both TIME magazine (what!?) and Nylon magazine named VICTIM as a book you should read in March. 

• Today, Literary Hub, has an excerpt of VICTIM that you can go read! It’s a section that I think helps make clear the tone and style of the book, and that I’ve been told is funny. I hope you enjoy it. 

• I was honored and grateful to chat with

  Catherine Baab-Muguira
  about my long publishing journey, and some of the things I’ve learned along the way. I had fun with this Q&A and hope some of you in the midst of your own publishing grind find something to take away from it. 

• Ya boy was on TV! (In the Bronx at least.) I’m honored to have chopped it up with BX legend Gary Axelbank on BronxNet, our local public access channel that I used to watch as a kid. A real full circle moment, and a lovely interview full of a lot of Bronx love. Check it out.