From mom-and-pop general stores to big-box, strip-mall chains, it is impossible to consider the American experience without thinking about the buying-and-selling retail culture: the sales and the stockrooms, the shift managers, and the clock punchers. The Customer Is Always Wrong is a tragicomic and all-too revealing collection of essays by writers who have done their time behind the counter and lived to tell their tales. Jim DeRogatis, author of Let It Blurt, for example, describes hanging out with Al himself at Al Rocky’s Music Store, while Colson Whitehead explains how three summers at a Long Island ice cream store gave him a lifelong aversion to all things dessert-like. This book not only shines a light on the absurdities of retail culture but finds the delight in it as well.
Jeff Martin is an author and editor. His first book, a collection of poetry, has been read by almost no one without a genetic connection. His second book, "The Customer is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles" was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also a book club selection for Foreword Magazine and selected as a Shelf Awareness Book of the Year. His follow-up book, "My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize: The Fabricated Memoirs of Jeff Martin", was released in the fall of 2009. The Onion praised it as a "garden of lush lies". And James Frey, the notorious author of "A Million Little Pieces" says "Jeff Martin is a first-class liar. Even better than me."
His next book, "The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books" will be released in March 2011.
He is a frequent contributor to The Millions, GOOD, Publishers Weekly and National Public Radio He is the founder of the literary organization Booksmart Tulsa. www.booksmarttulsa.com
Jeff lives with his wife in Tulsa, OK.
