Publishers Marketplace: David Meth

This writer is looking for an agent.

I am a novelist and award-winning playwright who writes about people caught between cultures and New York City, as well as a children's picture book author.

My plays have been produced nationally and internationally. My fiction covers areas that are provocative and challenging, just as my drama and non-fiction does. There is much to explore on my website: DavidMeth.com, as you will see from descriptions below.

THE TICKET is about an international crisis created when the quest for freedom crosses cultural borders that are not only separated by oceans, but by religion and forbidden love: A Saudi Arabian Princess driving a $3,000,000 Custom designed McLaren with diplomatic plates gets a ticket in front of an unmarked building down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and must now find a way to convince a Jewish cop from Brooklyn to make it disappear. As she navigates her way from her Sutton Place mansion to “old” Brooklyn, from champagne and caviar, to bagels and lox, The City becomes a major character in the novel. Thus, a scandal begins a growing conflict that escalates between the worlds of uninhibited wealth and privilege, flaunting international politics, the United States, the sovereign state of Saudi Arabia, and the state of mind in Brooklyn, County of Kings, whose residents cannot forget that most of the hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center came from Saudi Arabia. As a result, a class and culture war breaks out and begins the disintegration of American society.

My next novel is WHEN SHADOWS SCREAM about the growing love between two homeless teenagers who are running away from terrible problems and are trying to find themselves. In the process of survival, they discover they have very special powers and enter into a battle with The Disembodied, souls that have been banished after death and infused for eternity into the bedrock of New York City. But souls do not die, especially those infected with evil. It is a multi-level novel in which characters speak to themselves and inhabit each other’s minds in multiple voices and hallucinatory tense changes. Is it a dream? Will the characters wake up from an epic battle between good and evil, or does this age-old conflict last throughout time? The next book in the series is called THE YEAR OF THE BLOOD and takes its title from a horrifying chapter in New York history.

I published my first novel, A HINT OF LIGHT, independently to 5-stars on Amazon and in South Korea because I like to hold a hard copy in my hand and experienced a lot of out and out racism from from editors when I wrote this novel many years ago, even though I had a major agency representation. It is the story of a black-Korean Amerasian boy orphaned to the streets of Seoul from the time he is born and traces his life, with his white-Korean female companion, along the gutters and back alleys of the marketplace, through whorehouses and hotels, to Japan in the service of a wealthy Korean exporter's wife, and finally to New York City. Unlike any work of fiction on the market to date, it is raw and uncompromising. Based on three years of research including two years in Korea and Japan where I saw many of these children, I also interviewed many of these children, as well as people who cared for them.

My drama has been produced nationally and internationally. In 2009, I received and Artistic Fellowship from the State of Connecticut for TO THE DEATH OF MY OWN FAMILY, in its early stages, which has had startling reactions here and abroad. My play, 9/12, about the loss of civil liberties after 9/11 was part of Culture Project's (NYC) first Impact Festival and won the 2008 Writing International Award. During the intermission and after the play, people came up to me to ask if what they saw could happen: It is now occurring daily with shattering impact and devastating results. My play, ARTY'S POOLROOM (formerly THE BROKEN DOWN VALISE), was an O'Neill finalist. I am also working on another play called, FACES, to challenge the ethics of killing abroad, as America polices the world with our military and our morality. QUESTION 54 is a play in the development stages about a Chinese couple in their 80’s applying for a Green Card here to be with family who are American and only the father is being denied. This, too, is an intensely dramatic non-linear play, based on careful research and interviews, and a good deal of background with regard to immigrants and refugees.