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Molly Tanzer

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The Pleasure Merchant (The Molly Tanzer Collection) Kindle Edition

by Molly Tanzer (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 29 ratings

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Back in print after some time, this new Author's Preferred Edition of The Pleasure Merchant features refreshed content, new introductory material and notes, and a new Matthew Revert cover!

When apprentice wig-maker Tom Dawne's greatest creation is used as part of a revenge scheme against a powerful gentleman, he is dismissed by his embarrassed master and forced to abandon his dreams of completing his training, setting up a shop of his own, and marrying his master's daughter. Determined to clear his name, Tom becomes the servant of the man he suspects set him up. Tom finds himself caught up in a web of ambition, deceit, mesmerism, sex, and power... and at its center, a man able to procure pleasure for anyone--for a price--and a woman whose past has been stolen.

From Molly Tanzer comes The Pleasure Merchant, a novel of despair and desire, equal parts psychological thriller and sensual parlor drama.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Decadent and smart, artistic without being pretentious, and completely captivating from start to finish, Tanzer's The Pleasure Merchant is the very best sort of literature: a rare pleasure indeed. --Electric Literature

"Covering the course of a single year, this fascinating novel subverts Pygmalion, rags-to-riches and boy-meets-girl tropes to memorable effect, turning Tom into a tragic figure whose increasing rage against people on the margins of respectable society turns against him in the end. The narrative style is a delightful pastiche of Georgian and Victorian suffused with striking sensuality and modern sensibilities.... The voice of the Pleasure Merchant's apprentice will stay with you for days. --The Monitor

About the Author

Molly Tanzer is the author of the Diabolist's Library trilogy: Creatures of Will and Temper, the Locus Award-nominated Creatures of Want and Ruin, and Creatures of Charm and Hunger. She is also the author of the weird western Vermilion, an io9 and NPR "Best Book" of 2015, and the British Fantasy Award-nominated collection, A Pretty Mouth. Her critically acclaimed short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Transcendent: The Year's Best Trans and Nonbinary Speculative Fiction, and elsewhere. Follow her on Instagram @molly_tanzer or @wickedmilkhotel on Twitter. She lives outside of Boulder, CO with her cat, Toad.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B095195QFM
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Word Horde (May 25, 2021)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 25, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4104 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 281 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #2,881,426 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #10,656 in Historical Fantasy (Kindle Store)
- #20,366 in Historical Fantasy (Books)
- #57,606 in Horror (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.3 29 ratings

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Molly Tanzer

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Molly Tanzer is the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award-nominated author of Creatures of Will and Temper and the forthcoming Creatures of Want and Ruin, as well as the weird western Vermilion, among other titles. She is also the co-editor of Mixed Up: Cocktail Recipes (and Flash Fiction) for the Discerning Drinker (and Reader). For more information about her critically acclaimed novels and short fiction, visit her website, mollytanzer.com, or follow her @molly_the_tanz on Twitter or @molly_tanzer on Instagram.

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4.3 out of 5

29 global ratings

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D. S. Atkinson

John Waters falls asleep on a copy of "David Copperfield," oil from his hair soaks into the pages and warps the text

Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2015

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I've been waiting for a while to get my hands on this to read and dug it even more than I thought I was going to. I'm imagining an astral explanation for how the book came to be consisting of John Waters falling asleep with his head on a copy of "David Copperfield" so that the oil from his hair soaks into the pages and warps the text in new and interesting ways. The characters are bold and compelling, the story is mystery and suspense and salaciousness, and the whole thing is fresh and rewarding. I found myself wondering as I read about the fact that it is historically set but doesn't feel language-wise and such as a book of the time period. The more I thought about it though, I didn't want it to be. I don't think it would have worked that way, this being a twisted reflection version of the period. Making the language and such too period would have made the people and events throw me out of the narrative because they would have seemed so out of place with my image of that time. The way it is actually written works perfectly though, fitted completely to a kind of alternate past. Maybe I'm not making any sense, but I think you can get that I really enjoyed the book.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Liv

Pleasure comes in many forms.

Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2016

Verified Purchase

Amazon would like me to pick one word to describe the mood, but The Pleasure Merchant is difficult for me to categorize so simply. It is a complex blend of light-hearted, dark, serious, erotic, and mysterious. Though beautifully set in 177- London, I was delighted to find certain contemporary issues at the heart of the tale and suspect that where you stand on those issues will determine whether you consider the ending happy or sad.

If you're a fan of Tanzer's prior work, you should enjoy this novel.

Helpful

Stephanie Lehenbauer

Tanzer is the modern Brontë sister in The Pleasure Merchant.

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2015

If you’ve read and loved Jane Eyre or A Tale of Two Cities, I think you will absolutely adore Tanzer’s voice in this book. She’s the modern Brontë sister here. Completely different from her previous novel, Vermilion, which surprised and impressed me. This lady has some serious skill.

Tom wasn’t a particularly likeable hero. He was foolish, vain, lustful, and sometimes downright rude. He didn’t really make a huge growth in character, either. However, I adored him. His story as told by the narrator (I won’t spoil who that is) is kind of addicting, in much the same way that Jane Eyre’s story is. Recounting the events for a summary seems a bit boring, but it’s one of those “You have to be there” moments. Tom’s observations about the people around him, the way he draws conclusions, and his fearless attempts to better himself despite his situation, were worth turning the page. The rest of the cast drew equally strong reactions from me, but most of them are spoilers!

As with Vermilion, Tanzer plays with gender expression like a maestro conducting a beautiful symphony. It’s never used disrespectfully, nor as a cheap plot device. Sex is a frequent guest in The Pleasure Merchant (shocker, with that title), so perhaps skip this one if you don’t wish to be privy to a teenage boy’s thoughts about burying his head between as many thighs as he can find.

Above all, I was impressed with the mystery. Again, I can’t help but compare it to Jane Eyre or a Charles Dickens novel. The mystery builds slowly, against a backdrop of Victorian upper class manners and fringe science theories. (Hypnosis!)

At times funny, at times creepy, and in the end, profoundly touching, this book is definitely worth picking up.

6 people found this helpful

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Ichabod

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2018

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Didn’t begin reading the book , thinking I would end up loving it! A definite morality tale!

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2017

Great book!

Smart, witty and a little exhausting

Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2016

I don't know exactly how to assess a numerical value to my enjoyment of this book because it was both witty and fast flowing and quite a headache. THE PLEASURE MERCHANT is definitely clever, but its amorphous point of view and its insanely accurate (yet probably satirized) knowledge of era etiquette exhausted the crap out of me to the point I lost the plot a couple times and had to work my way back into it.

Don't get me wrong, THE PLEASURE MERCHANT was fun and challenging and you might very well enjoy it better than I did although I had a begrudging appreciation for it. It's a very accurate (sometimes to a fault) era novel with very modern ideas, which creates a quite bold ideological clash. It's just that Molly Tanzer will make you work for it :)

2 people found this helpful

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Michael Kelly

A Title for People of Taste

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2016

How lovely to find a book which is so spell-binding and enthralling, so charming and so decadent, so refreshingly difficult to pin a genre label on.

In some ways it's a comedy of manners, as we observe apprentice wig-maker Tom climb the social ladder. He's mostly a likeable fellow, his failings are ones we'd doubtless all be prone to, but it's difficult to miss the fact that his strokes of good fortune are all accidents of chance, not accomplished by deeds of his own doing. This realisation is quite lost on Tom himself, however, for the one crucial time he DOES decide to accomplish something on his own ... well ... let's not spoil it, shall we?

The narrator of the novel is not Tom, however, but another character, who remains a mystery for the first half of the story. All of the supporting cast are wonderfully rich and eccentric, as are the manifold vices and virtues on display.

A wickedly humourous story, one I will definitely read again at a time when I need something to charm me, with an ending that I wasn't expecting AT ALL, shocking and satisfying at the same time.

Helpful

M. Griffin

naughty and fun. At the beginning of the book

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2015

Clever, naughty and fun. At the beginning of the book, I guessed wigmaker's apprentice Tom was an innocent done wrong, and that he would through resourcefulness and pluck climb his way back to the station he deserved... and that's not what happens. Molly Tanzer is creating her own territory, bringing a forward mindset (particularly about matters of sex and gender) to settings and characters that feel authentically old-fashioned. I might have wished the book spent more time with the "fun people" than the "dull people," but still I recommend The Pleasure Merchant, yet another very smart and enjoyable piece of work from Tanzer, who is certainly one of the more interesting and distinctive writers happening at the moment.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Technophile

A pleasurable and classy romp

Reviewed in France on February 25, 2019

Verified Purchase

A worthy distraction filled with delightful prose and primly debauched characters. Lyrical, smart, and occasionally scandalous, we meander through the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of the victorian cast all the while aching for a bit of luck and a healthy bit of revenge. All this praise from a reader who could do without sense or sensibility.

Michael Kelly

A Title for People of Taste

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2016

Verified Purchase

How lovely to find a book which is so spell-binding and enthralling, so charming and so decadent, so refreshingly difficult to pin a genre label on.

In some ways it's a comedy of manners, as we observe apprentice wig-maker Tom climb the social ladder. He's mostly a likeable fellow, his failings are ones we'd doubtless all be prone to, but it's difficult to miss the fact that his strokes of good fortune are all accidents of chance, not accomplished by deeds of his own doing. This realisation is quite lost on Tom himself, however, for the one crucial time he DOES decide to accomplish something on his own ... well ... let's not spoil it, shall we?

The narrator of the novel is not Tom, however, but another character, who remains a mystery for the first half of the story. All of the supporting cast are wonderfully rich and eccentric, as are the manifold vices and virtues on display.

A wickedly humourous story, one I will definitely read again at a time when I need something to charm me, with an ending that I wasn't expecting AT ALL, shocking and satisfying at the same time.

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