Dana "D-Nasty" Vachon's Mergers and Acquisitions

The new Riverhead catalog (which is also online or available as a PDF) has some fun info, including a book tie-in site a la Anonymous Lawyer author Jeremy Blachman's Anonymouslawfirm.com, about what I think is the biggest blogger book deal yet, Dana "D-Nasty" Vachon's $650,000 for two novels, the first being Mergers and Acquisitions, which comes out in April 2007. From the catalog (font oddness courtesy of Riverhead, not me, and note Dana hasn't lost his sense of humor with his bio):

mergers
&
acquisitions
is the story of Tommy
Quinn, a recent Georgetown grad who has just
landed the job of his dreams as an investment
banker at J. S. Spenser, and the perfect girl,
Frances Sloan, the daughter of one of New York’s
oldest moneyed families. As he travels from
the most exclusive ball rooms of the Racquet
and Tennis Club to the stuffiest boardrooms of
J. S. Spenser, from the golf links of Piping Rock
to the bedrooms of Park Avenue, and from the
debauched yacht of a Mexican billionaire to the
Ritalin-strewn prep-school dorm room of his
younger brother, he finds that the job and the
girl are not what they once seemed.
Sharply written, fast-paced, and bitingly wit-
ty,
mergers
&
acquisitions
is a compulsively read-
able story of Manhattan’s young, ambitious, and
wealthy. Set against the backdrop of money, lust,
power, corruption, cynicism, energy, and ex-
citement that is Wall Street, it is suffused with an
authenticity that only an author who lives in that
world can provide. A former investment banker
at J. P. Morgan, Vachon offers an insider’s point
of view on the financial scene, and he
knows the moneyed turf of Manhattan
inside out.
I wound up on Wall Street more through contacts than merit.
an early admission: I got accepted into the training program
at J. S. Spenser through my father, brian Quinn, a squat man
with a broad, freckled, forever smiling face, who was not too
many generations removed from his potato-farming Irish
progenitors. In three decades he had traveled from the
lower-middle-class sprawl of long Island to the lower-up-
per-class ennui of Westchester (bronxville, to be geograph-
ically exact). I grew up in a large white house on a large
hill full of green oaks, silver range rovers, and chocolate
labradors. my father is partner in a small law firm that you
have never heard of—tullis, Schacter & Scott. he ended up
there after failing to make partner at a large law firm that
you most likely have heard of—cravath, Swaine & moore.
he was a litigator, and by most accounts a very good one,
and after eight years at cravath had been told by many that
he was certain to make partner. but something went wrong,
and of the four remaining associates from his class he was
the only one to be politely asked to leave at age thirty-nine,
after giving his best decade to the most prestigious law firm
in manhattan. no matter how well he did after cravath, it
was never well enough, because his thirst for the trappings
of success was always greater than his success. So it was a
painful and selfless act, bordering on love, when he mined
his buried cravath connections to help me land at a major
bank, despite a Georgetown transcript notable only for its
Gpa of pi.

a StylISh and hIlarIouS novel
about the lIveS and loveS of Well-to-do
younG manhattanIteS In theIr fIrSt year on Wall Street,
deStIned to become one of the year’S
moSt buzzed-about debutS.

DAnA VAcHOn was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, and raised in Chappaqua, New York. He attended Duke University, graduating, as he claims, “cum nihilo” in 2002. Following graduation, Vachon landed a job at J. P. Morgan as an analyst and began work on this novel. His writing has appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Men’s Vogue, The New York Times, and Salon. He lives in New York City.