Brat by Gabriel Smith
Reading Brat, I couldn’t escape the feeling that the ghost of publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano was following me. On the back cover of the book, Gabriel Smith declares that he “was mentored by the late Giancarlo DiTrapano.” I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a mentor credited on a book’s front or back cover, not even Gordon Lish, the notorious writing teacher whose course DiTrapano took, and whose son’s first novel was published by DiTrapano. A few years ago, The Wall Street Journal asked me to review Fuccboi, by Sean Thor Conroe, another mentee of DiTrapano. And then there was the very long late night I spent with the man himself a decade ago, discussing, among several thousand other things, the 2018 autobiographical novel Cherry, by Nico Walker, an Iraq War veteran, bank robber, and drug addict, which DiTrapano edited.
DiTrapano, who died under mysterious circumstances in 2021, at 47, was the publisher of Tyrant Books, where he supported writers whom, as he said, “the big publishing houses wouldn’t touch.” (Full disclosure: my friend Matthew Johnson, proprietor of Fat Possum Records, became a co-owner in 2013.) Brat, though, is published with plenty of fanfare by Penguin Press, which definitely counts as a “big house.” Brat, along with several other of Tyrant’s unpublished titles, was acquired by big publishing houses after DiTrapano died.
