“I drink, I hurt myself and the people around me, and then I write.” Brett is in Central America, away from her husband, when she begins a love affair with his friend, Eduard. Tragedy and comedy are properly joined at the hip in this loosely autobiographical book about infidelity, drinking, and the postponing of repercussions under the sun. Though coming undone is something we all try to avoid, Martin reminds us that going off the rails is sometimes a part of the ride.

Clancy Martin's profile page

Clancy Martin is a Canadian philosopher, novelist, essayist and translator. His debut novel How to Sell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was a Times Literary Supplement "Best Book of 2009", and a "Best Book of 2009" for The Guardian, Publisher's Weekly, The Kansas City Star. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, and is Professor of Business Ethics at the Bloch School of Management (UMKC). His writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, Ethics, The Journal of the History of Philosophy, GQ, Esquire, Details, Bookforum, Vice, Men's Journal, and many other newspapers, magazines and journals, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. He has also won DAAD Fellowships and the Pushcart Prize. He just published a book of essays with FSG called "Love and Lies." He has three daughters, Zelly, Margaret and Portia. He is married to the writer Amie Barrodale.

Praise for Bad Sex:

"I loved this novel. It's dark and sexy and unrepentant. The story of a relapsed alcoholic having an affair. No more and no less. Brett is a flinty character. The narrative voice is spectacular." –Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

"Laugh-aloud funny...painfully honest." –The New York Times

"[Martin] wants to question our assumptions, and his own, about what love means, how it operates, the demands of living for other people and living for ourselves." –L.A. Times

"Bad Sex is great fun." –BookForum

"Martin's short, darkly comic novel is a glorious descent into destructive indulgence." –Interview Magazine

"A great book of bad behavior." —Publishers Weekly

"Bad Sex is a taut, fast-paced read about the intricacies of love and the inability to decide and then deal with the consequences of our indecisions/bad decisions. Martin is a master of the candid, brutally honest approach, and his skills are in full swing in this short, humorous, and somewhat gloomy novel." –Vol.1 Brooklyn

“Martin manages to elegantly imbue his simple little book with complex insights and layers of meaning. That is the novel’s chief pleasure: knowing it should be so bad, but finding it so, so good.” –Electric Literature

“One thing I really like about the book is how fun and quick a read it is, on one hand, and how nuanced and careful it is on the other.” –Adult Mag

“Clancy Martin’s tense, beautiful new novel Bad Sex navigates the emotional nuance in loving two people but not yourself, a conscious spiral of little bad decisions that can define the course of a life.” –The Kind

"Bad Sex is the kind of story that punctures the deepest recess of your psyche, only to realize,'Dear God, there are others out there like me.' And this notion, like the novel, is equal parts terrifying and comforting." –Entropy Magazine

"[Bad Sex] records the spiral, the ripple effect, of transgressive behavior, the way that once we slip the bounds of propriety, it can be ever more difficult to find a passage back." –Portland Press Herald

“BAD SEX is like a diamond, cut clean, dangerously sharp, brutally hard and yet paradoxically beautiful, ruthlessly honing in on the plight of a woman caught in the throes of alcoholism, desire, marriage and adultery. Like Camus in The Stranger, Martin digs into the philosophical through precise narrative, exposing the big questions for the reader to answer.”
-David Means, author of Assorted Fire Events and The Spot

"A flushed and riveting account of some desperately, deliciously bad choices." ––Daniel Handler, author of the national bestseller, We Are Pirates

"Money, sex and deception is an irresistible combination, and "Bad Sex" is un-put-downable. Brett is a lovable heroine--a lusty, wrongheaded writer, flawed and rueful, yet charging ahead. She wants everything she knows is bad for her--alcohol, drugs, and to have violent, lurid sex with her husband's rapscallion banker--and we root for her all the way." -Rebecca Curtis

"Read in one sitting. Or drank. Or inhaled." –Wendy Ortiz

"Tension creates its own pleasure, & Martin is a master at it." –San Diego City Beat

"I loved this book through and through." –Culture Vultures

"When the blackouts arrive you should take cover. Heavy cocktails flood the novel and it is a glorious ride. I think you will like, dare I say love this book, but it is a lot like watching your skydiving partner step out at twenty thousand feet sans parachute." ––Three Guys One Book

Praise for the work of Clancy Martin:

“A revelatory, sometimes disturbing, look at the many stages of love, an elephant-in-the-room topic that rarely gets such in-depth treatment.” –Salon

"A central pleasure of Love and Lies—an unsettling one at times—is realizing, I know that fantasy; I've been burned by that hoodwink; or, I told my man an equally selfish lie yesterday." –ELLE

“'Love and Lies' is a delight to read. Martin is erudite without being pedantic, and when he slips into raconteur mode the book adopts a conspiratorial tone." –The Boston Globe

“With engaging prose, genuine insight and often hilarious stories, Clancy Martin uses the best writers among philosophers—like Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer—and the best philosophers among writers—like Shakespeare, Proust and Adrienne Rich—to show us that intimacy and eros are much more complex and deceptive than most of us would like to admit. Perhaps paradoxically, this is one of the most honest books I have read about love.” —Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers

“Martin has a poetic sensibility. . . . He gives a mesmerizing appeal to the setting of an alexandrite necklace and the delicate artistry involved in shaping a diamond.” —The New Yorker

“How to Sell is a bleak, funny, unforgiving novel. It’s a little like Dennis Cooper with a philosophical intelligence, or Raymond Carver without hope. But mostly it’s like itself. It is about how we buy and sell everything—merchandise, drugs, sex, trust, power, peace of mind, religion, friendship, and each other. It’s written extremely finely, with wit and enviable self-control. A genuinely fresh, disconcerting voice.” —Zadie Smith

“Crisp, cinematic . . . Martin writes with no-nonsense punch, detailing the schemes—fake certificates, ‘antiques’—shady jewelers have been running for centuries. If the sentences in How to Sell feel lived-in, well, that’s because the author himself is a former con man, borrowing liberally from the gem-scam life before going straight (He’s a philosophy professor now; go figure.) By the time you’re hooked on the book’s insidious plot twists, concerning sibling rivalry and a meth-addicted mistress who sleeps better hooking than she does selling Faux-lexes, you’re blissfully unaware you’re downing a metaphor: No commission can buy you a soul.”—Adam Baer, GQ

Praise for Bad Sex:

"I loved this novel. It's dark and sexy and unrepentant. The story of a relapsed alcoholic having an affair. No more and no less. Brett is a flinty character. The narrative voice is spectacular." –Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

"Laugh-aloud funny...painfully honest." –The New York Times

"[Martin] wants to question our assumptions, and his own, about what love means, how it operates, the demands of living for other people and living for ourselves." –L.A. Times

"Bad Sex is great fun." –BookForum

"Martin's short, darkly comic novel is a glorious descent into destructive indulgence." –Interview Magazine

"A great book of bad behavior." —Publishers Weekly

"Bad Sex is a taut, fast-paced read about the intricacies of love and the inability to decide and then deal with the consequences of our indecisions/bad decisions. Martin is a master of the candid, brutally honest approach, and his skills are in full swing in this short, humorous, and somewhat gloomy novel." –Vol.1 Brooklyn

“Martin manages to elegantly imbue his simple little book with complex insights and layers of meaning. That is the novel’s chief pleasure: knowing it should be so bad, but finding it so, so good.” –Electric Literature

“One thing I really like about the book is how fun and quick a read it is, on one hand, and how nuanced and careful it is on the other.” –Adult Mag

“Clancy Martin’s tense, beautiful new novel Bad Sex navigates the emotional nuance in loving two people but not yourself, a conscious spiral of little bad decisions that can define the course of a life.” –The Kind

"Bad Sex is the kind of story that punctures the deepest recess of your psyche, only to realize,'Dear God, there are others out there like me.' And this notion, like the novel, is equal parts terrifying and comforting." –Entropy Magazine

"[Bad Sex] records the spiral, the ripple effect, of transgressive behavior, the way that once we slip the bounds of propriety, it can be ever more difficult to find a passage back." –Portland Press Herald

“BAD SEX is like a diamond, cut clean, dangerously sharp, brutally hard and yet paradoxically beautiful, ruthlessly honing in on the plight of a woman caught in the throes of alcoholism, desire, marriage and adultery. Like Camus in The Stranger, Martin digs into the philosophical through precise narrative, exposing the big questions for the reader to answer.”
-David Means, author of Assorted Fire Events and The Spot

"A flushed and riveting account of some desperately, deliciously bad choices." ––Daniel Handler, author of the national bestseller, We Are Pirates

"Money, sex and deception is an irresistible combination, and "Bad Sex" is un-put-downable. Brett is a lovable heroine--a lusty, wrongheaded writer, flawed and rueful, yet charging ahead. She wants everything she knows is bad for her--alcohol, drugs, and to have violent, lurid sex with her husband's rapscallion banker--and we root for her all the way." -Rebecca Curtis

"Read in one sitting. Or drank. Or inhaled." –Wendy Ortiz

"Tension creates its own pleasure, & Martin is a master at it." –San Diego City Beat

"I loved this book through and through." –Culture Vultures

"When the blackouts arrive you should take cover. Heavy cocktails flood the novel and it is a glorious ride. I think you will like, dare I say love this book, but it is a lot like watching your skydiving partner step out at twenty thousand feet sans parachute." ––Three Guys One Book

Praise for the work of Clancy Martin:

“A revelatory, sometimes disturbing, look at the many stages of love, an elephant-in-the-room topic that rarely gets such in-depth treatment.” –Salon

"A central pleasure of Love and Lies—an unsettling one at times—is realizing, I know that fantasy; I've been burned by that hoodwink; or, I told my man an equally selfish lie yesterday." –ELLE

“'Love and Lies' is a delight to read. Martin is erudite without being pedantic, and when he slips into raconteur mode the book adopts a conspiratorial tone." –The Boston Globe

“With engaging prose, genuine insight and often hilarious stories, Clancy Martin uses the best writers among philosophers—like Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer—and the best philosophers among writers—like Shakespeare, Proust and Adrienne Rich—to show us that intimacy and eros are much more complex and deceptive than most of us would like to admit. Perhaps paradoxically, this is one of the most honest books I have read about love.” —Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers

“Martin has a poetic sensibility. . . . He gives a mesmerizing appeal to the setting of an alexandrite necklace and the delicate artistry involved in shaping a diamond.” —The New Yorker

“How to Sell is a bleak, funny, unforgiving novel. It’s a little like Dennis Cooper with a philosophical intelligence, or Raymond Carver without hope. But mostly it’s like itself. It is about how we buy and sell everything—merchandise, drugs, sex, trust, power, peace of mind, religion, friendship, and each other. It’s written extremely finely, with wit and enviable self-control. A genuinely fresh, disconcerting voice.” —Zadie Smith

“Crisp, cinematic . . . Martin writes with no-nonsense punch, detailing the schemes—fake certificates, ‘antiques’—shady jewelers have been running for centuries. If the sentences in How to Sell feel lived-in, well, that’s because the author himself is a former con man, borrowing liberally from the gem-scam life before going straight (He’s a philosophy professor now; go figure.) By the time you’re hooked on the book’s insidious plot twists, concerning sibling rivalry and a meth-addicted mistress who sleeps better hooking than she does selling Faux-lexes, you’re blissfully unaware you’re downing a metaphor: No commission can buy you a soul.”—Adam Baer, GQ