The Official Rodes Fishburne Hub

All good first sentences have a kind of energy … wrote Slater Brown in his yellow notebook as he was being peddled erratically down Market Street.

And all good first sentences have a kind of sincerity, he continued, adjusting his pencil as the wheels of the rented rickshaw bounced beneath him.

But what kind?”

So begins Rodes Fishburne’s new novel, “Going to See the Elephant.” It tells the story of Slater Brown, a young man who believes himself to be the greatest writer in the history of the world.

Only he hasn’t published anything yet.

Twenty-five year old Slater lays siege to San Francisco-until he crashes headlong into reality. Out of money and prospects, he applies for a job at a moribund weekly newspaper called “The Morning Trumpet” and unwittingly begins the adventure of a lifetime.

Advance Praise

“Rodes Fishburne is a marksman hunting down first-novel fame, and he never misses” –Tom Wolfe

“Going to See the Elephant” is a vivid, giant mash note to the city by the bay. It’s an adventure story, a love story and a story about growing up.”—Front page review, “Voice of the West,” in the Sunday “San Francisco Chronicle” 1/4/09.

*”Going to See the Elephant” has been selected by Amazon.com as one of the “Best 7 Books” of the New Year.

*”Going to See the Elephant” is an “Editor’s Pick,” of the “Denver Post” 1/4/09

*”Rodes Fishburne has no interest in front-page realism—magic realism is more his thing. He’s a fantacist, and his sweet comic novel is as light as a bright balloon, and just as appealing.” USA Today, 1/8/09

“Going to See the Elephant will delight anybody who has ever written a first novel, wanted to write a first novel, and especially those who cherish reading unforgettable first novels. It is both funny and wise.”
–James Patterson

“Slater Brown, the wide-eyed young hero of Rodes Fishburne’s delightful debut novel, is just the man I’d want to lead me through the streets of San Francisco and regale me with its stories. Going to See the Elephant is a rollicking good tale with an old-fashioned sense of fun; one can’t help falling in love.”   –Michelle Richmond

“Rodes Fishburne is onto something here. If you’ve ever been young you’ll recognize the wide-eyed innocence he serves up, if you’ve ever lived in a city you’ll recognize the fun house he mirrors, and the madcap ambition, the roll of the brave and shaky dice, the lightning-chord changes that leave everyone gleaming, and the luminous sucker punch of first love and first loss-all that’s our own. The closer you get to Going to See the Elephant the more we all see ourselves.” –Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snickett

“Every single page of this book brought a smile to my face. Rodes Fishburne is a keen observer of the world with a rosy imagination and a mammoth heart.Going to See the Elephant is an absolute winner.”–Davy Rothbart, creator of Found Magazine

“Rodes Fishburne has written a wildly energetic, engaging, and smart first novel, set in a city he clearly knows and loves. From start to finishGoing to See the Elephant is top- drawer fun, and an impressive debut.”–Tom Barbash author of The Last Good Chance

A January 2009 selection of the Indie Next List!

The Indie Next List, drawn from bookseller-recommended favorites from around the country, epitomizes the heart and soul of passionate bookselling.

“Great Reads from Booksellers You Trust”

“Slater Brown arrives in San Francisco with dreams of writing the great American novel. However, fate has different ideas, handing Slater the ability to find great stories and restore a newspaper to its former glory. Throw in a beautiful woman and a mad scientist, and you have a debut novel that’s hilarious, unpredictable, and lovely.” –Meaghan Leenaarts, Island Bookstore, Corolla, NC

Booklist STARRED REVIEW:

*Going to See the Elephant.

Jan 2009. 293 p. Delacorte, hardcover, $22.00

Fishburne’s passion for progressive journalism and longing for the heyday of newspapers shape his smart, frolicsome, and charming first novel. Starry-eyed and clueless, Slater Brown arrives in San Francisco intent on becoming a writer, and, like all good bildungsroman heroes, stumbles upon unlikely mentors and fecund coincidences. Thanks to the peculiarities of the city’s electric buses, he also acquires mysterious powers and soon far exceeds expectations as a star reporter who rescues an all but moribund newspaper.

As earnest and fumbling Slater becomes the talk of the town, the scandal-ridden mayor indulges in gourmet, life-threatening gluttony while sending his minions out to thwart the now dapper upstart. Meanwhile, the “smartest man in the world,” Milo Magnet, fills the mad-scientist role by whipping up mini-weather systems that escape the lab to wreak surreal havoc, while Slater falls in love with a beautiful chess player held captive by her stern father.

With a lively, shrewdly stylized Jazz Age tone, this oldfashioned yet newfangled tale puts a clever, global-warming-era spin on the superhero story. Delightfully visual, full of whimsy, adventure, and blithely caustic social commentary, Fishburne’s sweet and funny debut novel offers comic-book-like entertainment with an iron core. –Donna Seaman

Here’s a story I wrote for the New Yorker, which they just put online:

Bullwinkle’s Revenge

Last March, Rob Forbes was driving from San Francisco to his weekend house in Glen Ellen, California, when he spotted a trailer pulled over on the side of Route 121. According to stencilled letters on the side of the rig, it was selling “Antler Lighting.” Forbes, the founder of Design Within Reach, the contemporary home-decor chain, is a man with a philosophic approach to design (“People know me for making connections that aren’t obvious”) and a penchant for sourcing unusual products (“My best find this year is a pair of vintage green Oaxacan candlesticks”). He pulled over. He recalled recently, “I thought, What is this guy doing selling antlers in a place where most people would be ashamed to kill a deer?”

The man selling antler lamps—white-tail deer chandeliers, elk wall sconces—was Spud Fulford, a resident of West Nine Mile Creek, Montana, who travels four to five times a year to Northern California to sell his wares. “I do pretty good in areas where people have built mountain homes and are looking to decorate,” he said.

What caught Forbes’s eye was a single moose-antler lamp, with two brass light-bulb fixtures, for three-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars. “Every once in awhile I’ll see something natural and say, ‘That’s just incredibly beautiful design,’” he said. “It’s not gilded, or painted white, or wrapped in glass and ceramic. It’s just a piece of pure nature and you can’t do better.” Forbes asked if he could buy the moose antler by itself, without the light bulb fixtures.

Fulford explained that he wasn’t in the antler-selling business; he was in the antler-lamp-selling business. So Forbes asked where he got his moose antlers, on account of their being some of the best design objects he’d ever seen, superior to anything Eames or Gehry created. (“They have a decorative baroque character—they are Nature’s Big Bling,” he later wrote.) Fulford, impressed by the intensity of this moose appreciation, put Forbes in contact with his antler broker. “At this point I didn’t know what I was going to do with moose antlers,” Forbes recalled, “but I knew I had to track them down.”

In June, Forbes flew to Helena, Montana to see the antler broker, Roy Rasmussen. Each shed, barn and stall on Rasmussen’s property was crammed with different varieties of antler: elk, white tail, mule deer, moose, the occasional red deer. “All combined, we probably have seven or eight tons of antlers,” Rasmussen said. “We’ve got ten thousand pounds of just elk antlers.” As for moose, Rasmussen explained, they don’t have antlers; they have paddles. And, because moose shed their paddles in December and January, they can be plucked from the ground by entrepreneurial pickers who comb the countryside after snow melt. The pickers then funnel their finds to brokers like Rasmussen, who sells them from five to twenty dollars per pound, depending on the quality of the paddle. Forbes recalled, “As we were talking, Roy was picking up the moose paddles and throwing them around to separate them and I kept saying ‘Be careful,’ and finally he says, ‘You do realize that moose fight with these things?’”

After selecting seventy-seven pounds of the most aesthetically pleasing specimens, Forbes hosed them off and shipped them back to San Francisco. “I totally scored,” he said. “It felt great.” The moose paddles sat in a closet for several months, waiting for inspiriation to strike. In mid-August, it did. Forbes recalled, “I opened a newspaper and it was filled with all this moose stuff about Sarah Palin and I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’”

Forbes, an Obama supporter, decided to donate his private stash of moose paddles for a one-of-a-kind Democratic fund-raiser. He posted photos of the moose paddles on his design Web site under the headline, “Support Moose and Obama—Quickly,” for prices ranging from fifty-two dollars to three-hundred-and-eight dollars. “Our Moose and Caribou cousins have received national media attention in the run-up to the election,” the Web site read. “Their position has been exaggerated and sometimes even deliberately mischaracterized (though I would not want to imply that Moose are a monolithic voting bloc), so we are re-purposing the Moose this election year.” The goal was to send all proceeds—not just profits—to the Obama campaign. “Your Moose paddle will hopefully serve as a reminder that a person like Obama did get elected despite all that he (and we) have been through,” Forbes wrote. “Spud might not know that his work is serving a political cause, but Bullwinkle would be proud.” Soon orders poured in from California, Florida, Oregon, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New York. Forbes shed all his paddles—in the amount of eighteen-hundred-and-eight dollars—in two days.

Original story can be found here: