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Giancarlo DiTrapano, founder, editor, and publisher of Tyrant Books, died last weekend at age 47.
I met him at a bar 13 or 14 years ago in Hells Kitchen.
He lived then on the West Side.
He had started a new magazine,New York Tyrant, the sort of thing Im always interested in.
It was impossible not to want to impress him.
How silly: He was the gentlest of men, the sweetest.
Im romanticizing my friend, but he was a romantic guy.
How else do you start a magazine and then a press from nothing?
Someday came with Tyrant Books, which he launched in 2010 (I think).
He helped shepherd Nico Walkers novelCherry, written in prison,into being.
Then he passed it to Knopf.
Nico is only gonna have one shot as a writer, Gian told me.
I had to give him up to someplace big so he could be big.
There were lots of little books from Tyrant that I love, likeBad Sex,by Clancy Martin.
It seemed to be coalescing into a movement that will outlast him.
Attached was the manuscript of a novel,Fuccboi,by Sean Thor Conroe.
Wasnt respected as a thru street.But walking it.Kept things interesting.
That alienated American yelp was what kept Gian interested, kept him reading when others might have stopped.
The other young genius he had recently found is Honor Levy.
Her first story ishere.
I never asked Gian why he called his magazine and his press Tyrant.
Around that time, there were a lot of little magazines asserting their bigness.
There was some irony in the name Tyrant.
Gian was an enlightened despot of the little literary kingdom he built.
He was a liberator for many writers and saw editing and publishing as a moral duty.
How can we entrust our literature to international corporations?
Is this not obviously insane?
He cared about getting readers for his writers.
Dont even really know how he found me, Sam says.
Gian had come to New York from West Virginia, and he was good at hunting things down.
Or is it a castle?
I never got to visit.
He had an olive-oil business.
A bottle of the stuff with his name on it is on top of my refrigerator.
His life was storybook all the way.
He had lots of plans.
A friend of ours in L.A. tells me Gian had just sent him a script hed written.
I used to put Gian in touch with writers.
The natural thing was to hug him, a feeling hewroteabout, a tough man but eminently huggable.
He had hustle, and he had integrity.
He followed his very rigorous tastes and never compromised.
It would never occur to him to do so.
When all youve got is an ear and a perfect one thats also all you need.
The writers he published knew if he believed in them they were the real thing.
He had the cynical and ironic view of the world thats the mark of a true idealist.
We used to stay up late laughing and smoking cigarettes, and Im gonna miss him.
