christopher bundy

Christopher Bundy straddles lines just to show you how they hardly exist in the first place. His debut novel, Baby, You’re a Rich Man, is a lost-and-found-in-translation story about a restless white man living in Japan. Blending comedy, metaphysical inquiry and comic-book illustrations, the book testifies to Bundy’s originality and thirst for exploration in fiction. 

—Mack Hayden, PASTE MAGAZINE “10 Authors from Georgia You Should Read Now”

Baby, You’re a Rich Man (C&R Press 2013), illustrated by Max Currie, follows the story of Kent Richman, a down-on-his luck, B-level variety star on Japanese television who is forced to go into hiding when he becomes the target of an escaped prisoner. Kent winds up at a Buddhist retreat where he embarks on a journey of mishap, paranoia, desperation, and self-discovery that leads to an illuminating showdown as he attempts to right the wrongs of his past.
Rich Man offers a unique look into contemporary Japan and the ubiquitous struggle for a place to call home.

 

Praise for Baby, You’re a Rich Man

Bundy writes vividly, and he engages. He can riff—we find funny, gruesome, unexpected, interesting and entertaining scenes all handled with equal skill.

 — R.P. Finch, PASTE MAGAZINE

Baby, You’re a Rich Man is part picaresque, part noir, part tale of a (not so) innocent abroad, part send-up of the ridiculousness of made-for-TV consumer culture. Kent Richman’s fall and rise and fall and rise is as weird and unlikely as his childhood infamy and his adult fame, and Christopher Bundy’s masterstroke is to make of that weirdness a heartfelt novel for the new century, a novel in which everything and anything is possible: love, loss, and maybe even redemption.

— Josh Russell, author of A True History of the Captivation, Transport to Strange Lands, & Deliverance of Hannah Guttentag

Christopher Bundy’s Baby, You’re a Rich Man is as much a satire of contemporary media culture as it is one man’s attempt to escape his notorious past. And there are many pleasures here: the beauty and contradiction that are the Japanese landscape, the restrained humor mixed with slapstick, the comic book drama, and the unforgettable characters that drive this story to its surprising end.

—Karl Taro Greenfeld, author of Speed Tribes and Triburbia

From the first page, Christopher Bundy’s Baby, You’re A Rich Man drew me seductively into its world and never let go. This engrossing novel is filled with the spark of adventure and a hero whose relatable pains are rendered with striking originality. Mark your calendars, make room on your bookshelf: Baby, You’re A Rich Man is worth your time.

— Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth

 

Part expat story, part whodunit, part celebrity expose, part graphic novel, Chris Bundy’s debut chronicles the heavy and the light for a man who’s staked his career on being a John Lennon look-alike in Japan, sweating his latest and maybe last shot at being somebody, someone, anyone at all. These pages have plenty to say about who we are while chasing our dreams and what it means, if it does, to catch them.

— Hugh Sheehy, author of The Invisibles

 

With sensitive nuanced writing, and an eye for the absurd as well as the tragic, Bundy has located the unexpected core of humanity and hope in the ludicrous maelstrom of the modern celebrity culture.

— Man Martin, author of Paradise Dogs

 

If there’s any justice in the literary world, Baby, You’re a Rich Man will be big in Japan and America. Christopher Bundy is a writer worth your time.

— Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory and Praying Drunk

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE BOOK or SET UP A READING WITH CHRIS,
WRITE TO HIM in C/O of C&R PRESS:

chad [AT] crpress [dot] org