TMoP

[Lawrence Bryan]

If Madison Avenue were running a campaign for readers of The Master of  
Petersburg, my guess for an excerpt would be:

"If he were more confident of his French he would channel this  
disturbing excitement into a book of the kind one cannot publish in  
Russia - something that could be finished off in a hurry, in two or  
three weeks, even without a copyist - ten signatures, three hundred  
page. A book of the night, in which every excess would be represented  
and no bounds respected ... With a chapter in which the noble  
memoirist reads aloud to the young daughter of his mistress a story of  
the seduction of a young girl in which he himself emerges more and  
more clearly as having been the seducer. A story full of intimate  
detail and innuendo which by no means seduces the daughter but on the  
contrary frightens her and disturbs her sleep and makes her so  
doubtful of her own purity that three days later she gives herself up  
to him in despair, in the most shameful of ways, in a way of which no  
child could conceive were the history of her own seduction and  
surrender and manner of its doing not deeply impressed on her  
beforehand."

However this is a serious group of readers and using such an excerpt  
to gain readers is something I would never do.

Lawrence