'Death of a Gentleman' lands Monday

Out for everyone on the 15th. Already here for Founders—trailer and all.

I’ve finished a book. That sentence still costs me something to write, because finishing a book at sixty-seven, on the particular wiring I run, is less an achievement than a slow act of attrition that happens to leave a book at the end of it. But it’s done. I’m proud of it. And I’d like to tell you about it.

It’s called Death of a Gentleman, and it comes out on Monday, the fifteenth—on Amazon, from that morning.

If you’ve spent any time around here, you’ll know the territory. It’s a book about the kinds of suffering a man can’t see from inside, because they’re the air he’s been breathing rather than anything that happened to him on a particular Tuesday. It’s about the operating system most of us were issued young—what to do with feelings, with money, with women, with other men, with failure, with the body—and what happens when you’re still running it decades later in a world that quietly swapped out every environment it was built for. The argument, across fourteen chapters, is that a great many men aren’t broken so much as mismatched: good software, wrong hardware, wrong country, wrong sky. It’s serious where it has to be. It’s also, I’m assured, funny in most of the places it can get away with being, which turns out to be more of them than the subject would suggest.

That’s Monday. For everyone. I’ll point you straight at it on the day.

Now, a small and honest note for anyone who’s ever wondered whether the paid thing is worth it.

If you’re a Founding member, the book is already yours. Not Monday—now, today, sitting in your library while the rest of the world waits for the weekend to end. And because I appear to be a man who can be talked into anything, provided it’s by one of his own ideas, I also went and shot a trailer for it, which Founders can watch this minute. Those of you who have heard me swear, repeatedly and at some length, that I would never make videos may enjoy the sound of me eating my words. Once. I made one. We’ll see whether it becomes a habit; I’m betting against.

This is the start of something I mean to keep doing. Every book I publish from here reaches Founders a full thirty days before anyone else can buy it. Death of a Gentleman is only a few days early, because the launch was already bearing down on me by the time I built the arrangement. The next one will be the clean month.

So—two honest paths, and I don’t much mind which you take. You can wait until Monday and buy it on Amazon like a sensible person, and I’ll be genuinely glad you did. Or, if you’d like it now, with the trailer, and every future book a month ahead of the queue, the door to the Founder tier is open and you’re welcome through it.

[ Read it now—become a Founding member → ]

Either way: the book exists, which a year ago was by no means a sure thing. Thank you for being here while I got it made.

Monday, then.

— Lee
Đà Lạt, Việt Nam