Resurrecting The Godfather

By Chauncey Mabe
Books Editor

November 14, 2004

Mark Winegardner, the man who holds the fate of the Godfather franchise in his hands, lives in a leafy, affluent suburb not far from downtown Tallahassee, where he's head of the creative writing program at Florida State University. On a crisp Sunday afternoon, he opens the front door of his house dressed in an equally crisp coat and tie. He looks more like a mob lawyer than a novelist.

"I'm trying to vary my wardrobe so Steve has something slightly different to shoot," Winegardner says, nodding toward the photographer, here to take pictures of the author on the fourth freelance assignment of the past two weeks.

In the backyard, Winegardner strikes what are for him familiar poses -- thoughtful in the gazebo, smiling by the outdoor pool table, brooding in front of the tiny writing cottage -- with the patience and professionalism of a media star.

Winegardner knew he would be facing scrutiny two years ago when he won a competition to find a successor to Mario Puzo, creator of The Godfather, who died in 1999. Indeed, this kind of attention is one of the main reasons he was willing to set aside his own work to take up the saga of the Corleone family.

The result, The Godfather Returns, goes on sale Tuesday.

"I didn't need the money," Winegardner says. "I could have quit teaching already if I'd wanted to. My last novel, Crooked River Burning, did that for me. What The Godfather Returns will give me is a higher profile. It will shed a positive light on my other books. I won't have to worry about getting my next three or four published."

The Godfather Returns will do that, and more. Random House shipped a first printing of 350,000, which all but ensures best-seller status. Additional print runs are a virtual certainty. Puzo's original, The Godfather, has sold some 21 million copies since 1969. It's hard to imagine readers will be able to resist the Godfather brand.

Nor should they, according to Publishers' Weekly: "This is a phenomenally entertaining, psychologically rich saga that spans the entire Godfather years imagined in novel and film by Mario Puzo." Newsweek was more dismissive: "Tinkering with a cultural totem, Winegardner ties himself and his book in knots."

A little competition

"If I didn't think Random House was interested in getting a good book, I wouldn't have done it," Winegardner says. "They could have done the cynical thing and gone after a famous crime writer and not had to worry about what was between the covers."

While not a household name, Winegardner was an established writer with an enviable critical reputation when he opened his e-mail one day to find an invitation from Random House editorial director Jonathan Karp, who was seeking candidates to pen a sequel to The Godfather. Karp was Puzo's editor for the last decade of the writer's life.

"I used to call Mario and beg, plead, wheedle -- anything to get him to return to the Corleone saga," Karp says. "And he was very firm, very polite. He always said no."

Eventually, however, Puzo offered to let Karp do anything he wanted with The Godfather after the author's death. Puzo wouldn't be around to care, and he wanted to continue providing for his family from beyond the grave.

"I was walking in Central Park one day when I wondered what the Corleone family was up to," Karp says. "I went back to the office and called up Mario's agent, Neil Olson, and told him I'd like to bring the Corleones back and I think there's a creative way to do it."

As Karp points out, it would have been a simple matter to keep publishing Godfather books under Puzo's name despite the inconvenience of the author's death -- consider the posthumous careers of V.C. Andrews and Robert Ludlum -- but he wanted to find "a writer to bring as much originality and vision to the Corleone saga as [Francis Ford] Coppola did in his classic movies."

Karp and Olson put out a "discreet" inquiry to a select group of agents, but of course within 24 hours the story had been leaked to The New Yorker. Soon Karp was fielding interview requests from Time, the BBC and morning shock-jock radio shows. One publication, Karp recalls, called the competition "Italian-American Idol."

A flood of unsolicited proposals followed, but Karp focused on 12 writers he had selected from the beginning. Karp's idea was to find a writer who was roughly the same age and at the same career stage that Puzo was when he started The Godfather: early 40s, with two critically acclaimed but obscure novels behind him. Winegardner fit the bill perfectly. Crooked River Burning was already one of Karp's "favorite" books, and his first novel, the baseball story Veracruz Blues, is highly regarded.

"But Mark won the contest fair and square on the strength of his proposal," Karp says. "There were a lot of qualified people who could have done a good job. It was a tough decision."

Like Puzo -- whose first two novels, The Dark Arena and The Fortunate Pilgrim, enjoyed respectful reviews and low sales -- Winegardner had never written crime fiction before turning to the Godfather saga.

"We did not want a by-the-numbers crime novel," Karp says. "We wanted an ambitious popular novel, and for that you need a big talent like Mark. He's also got huge cojones, which you need to tackle an iconic American myth like The Godfather."

An eye for details

"When they first contacted me, it didn't leap off my computer screen as something I should drop everything and do," Winegardner says. "But after I did the reading and wrote the proposal I saw how I could write a good novel. By the time they picked me, I was hot to do it."

Karp knew he had chosen a winner when he received the first 100 pages from Winegardner. "When I saw the scenes with Kay and Michael together, I shivered," Karp says.

Winegardner eschews the obvious track, which would have been to pick up the story at the end of Coppola's The Godfather III -- all three movies were written by Puzo, and therefore must be considered part of the canon -- and simply bring the Corleone family up to the present.

Instead, Winegardner read The Godfather closely, and watched the movies again and again. He found significant gaps in the story, and he was intrigued by marginal characters he felt could be brought to the forefront.

For example, Winegardner wondered whatever happened to Johnny Fontaine, the Sinatra-inspired character; and what was the backstory with Tom Hagen, the family's brilliant and loyal Irish-American consigliere; and where did Sonny's orphaned family disappear to; and what exactly was the nature of Fredo's betrayal of his brother Michael?

Looking closely, Winegardner also found implausibilities that gave him entree into the story. For example, what doctor would have been stupid enough to perform an abortion on the wife of Michael Corleone? Frequently hailed by critics for his ability to write from the female point of view, Winegardner jumped on that one.

By the same token, Fredo's betrayal rang false to Winegardner, as did Michael's decision to have his brother whacked. In a subculture so obsessed with family, it seemed unlikely he would murder his brother no matter what Fredo had done.

"I never understood exactly the nature of Fredo's betrayal," Winegardner says. "A lot of it doesn't make sense. In The Godfather II, the story is carried by the astonishing acting and by the power of the mythology. Details are lost in the popcorn. Part II is a great movie, but what could Fredo have known that couldn't have been uncovered by some two-bit private eye, let alone a powerful rival family?"

In addition to mastering and extending the familiar characters, Winegardner has also created some equally powerful new ones, led by Nick Geraci, an up-and-coming thug in the Corleone family who proves Michael's smartest and most formidable rival.

The real Mafia

Apart from the writing itself -- getting on top of Puzo's magisterial omniscient voice and making it his own -- Winegardner's biggest challenge was weaving in real information about how the Mafia works without violating the enormously effective operatic mythology Puzo created.

As Winegardner points out, Puzo always said that everything he knew about the Mafia he learned at the New York Public Library, which meant primarily newspapers. The only book about the inner workings of the Mafia at the time was The Valachi Papers, an unreliable account by a low-level gangster who had turned government witness. Only five years before, Winegardner says, J. Edgar Hoover was still insisting there was no such thing as the Mafia.

Largely because of interest spurred by The Godfather, there are now thousands of nonfiction books about the Mafia. As a result, anyone who "watches four episodes of The Sopranos" probably knows more about how the mob works than Puzo did, Winegardner says.

The shelves behind Winegardner's desk are filled with books he used for research: Nick Tosche's biography of Dean Martin, Dino; Donnie Brasco, an undercover memoir by Joseph D. Pistone and Richard Woodley; New York crime writer Nicholas Pileggi's two mob biographies, Casino and Wiseguy, among many others. These represent only a fraction of the books he read.

"To me the saga of the Corleone family exists in a mythologized parallel universe," Winegardner says. "As great as the original is, it left out lots of real Mafia history, like the Appalachian raid, the Mafia attempts at assassinating Castro. You never see anyone initiated into the Corleone family, and you never read about a Mafiosi being a `good earner.' That's the kind of thing I wanted to do.'"

Filling in the gaps Puzo left in the '50s and early '60s also appealed to Winegardner because that's the period when the Mafia was at the height of its power and influence. Crusading federal agents and U.S. attorneys, using wiretaps and the power of the RICO statutes, began weakening the Mafia in the late 1970s.

"The great thing about the novel and the first two movies is the depiction of the heyday of the Mafia," Winegardner says. "By the 1980s, the mob was in decline. A lot of the most interesting things in Mafia history happened back in those mid-century years. That's what I wanted to get my hands on."

A Godfather V?

As Winegardner gears up for the media blitz sure to accompany the publication of The Godfather Returns -- Random House is said to be tutoring him on how to look good on television -- he insists he's the same writer he always was. He doesn't expect this foray into pop fiction to diminish his critical reputation.

"I never wanted to be the kind of writer, and I know writers like this, who think popularity is unseemly," Winegardner says. "I've never thought it a virtue to be inaccessible. Writing is hard work and I hope people read my books."

He's even interested in writing another Godfather book, should Random House want one. But he thinks it's a good idea, even from a commercial point of view, for him to write something else for a while.

"My agenda as a novelist hasn't changed," Winegardner says. "My audience has changed, but not my agenda. I want to continue working as a novelist. It's what I do.

"I hope The Godfather Returns is not seen as merely an entertainment. But I'll tell you, the first run alone will sell more than all my other books put together."


Resurrecting The Godfather: South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Author Chang found dead aged 36

Best-selling US author Iris Chang has been found dead at the age of 36.

The writer was discovered in her car on a highway near Los Gatos in California and had a gunshot wound to her head.

Authorities believe the injury was self-inflicted. Chang had recently been treated in hospital after suffering from depression.

Chang was renowned for her books about the Japanese occupation of China as well as the history of Chinese immigrants in the US.

She was best-known for her 1997 international best-seller The Rape Of Nanking, which described the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during their occupation of the former Chinese capital in the 1930s.

'The best historian'

Chang started her career as a journalist, but left to pursue writing and published her first book at the age 25.

Thread Of The Silkworm told the story of Tsien Hsue-shen, the Chinese physicist who pioneered China's missile programme during the Cold War.

Her agent Susan Rabiner said she suffered a breakdown during research for her latest book about US soldiers fighting the Japanese in the Philippines.

She continued to suffer from depression after leaving hospital, and in a note to her family asked to be remembered for the person she was before she fell ill.

The late historian Stephen Ambrose described Chang as "maybe the best historian we've got".

"She understands that to communicate history, you've got to tell the story in an interesting way," he added.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4002289.stm

A Rant about Early Voting in Palm Beach County

My library, my place of employment where I spend 40+ hours every week, was one of eight early voting locations in Palm Beach County, Florida. Yes, that Palm Beach, home of the hanging chad & the butterfly ballot and the place where the courts get to decide who the people really voted for. Although the supervisor of elections was run out of office, it didn't happen until August of this year - making her the lame duck super lame supervisor of elections and the person in charge of this presidential election.

Her solution to the butterfly ballot/hanging chad problem was to get rid of the punch card voting system used in the 2000 election. She sold the units on ebay, made a few bucks for the county. Then she bought electronic, touch screen voting units. They seem like they work pretty easily, most people can figure out what to do. They seemed like a good idea, except for one little detail - there is no paper trail. And by the time this got dragged through the courts, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

If that doesn't scare you, try this: the average number of voting machines at each of those eight early voting locations is five. 5. Let's do some simple math (it has to be simple, I'm an English major). 8 locations X 5 machines = 40 machines for the population of Palm Beach County who choose to vote early. The population of Palm Beach County is approximately 1,216,282. Granted, lots of those people aren't eligible to vote, they're children or felons or they're not citizens or they didn't bother to register to vote. But if even half are eligible and registered to vote, that invokes another simple math problem: 1,216,282 divided by 2 = 608,141 people who can vote on 40 machines over a two week period. What all this math comes down to is this: lots of waiting. The average waiting time to vote at the early voting location in my library started out at about 2 hours but within a couple of days, it jumped up to 4 hours. Lots of people came and went, refusing to wait. Lots of people kept coming back, trying time and time again, only to get more and more frustrated as the wait lengthened instead of shortened.

To add to the confusion, there was an historically large number of requests for absentee ballots, the last number I heard was well over 100,000. But lots of those folks never received their ballots. My mother, for example, has voted absentee for several years now because she is not well enough to wait on line to vote on election day - and the wait then is usually no more than 30 minutes or so during peak voting times. She got her absentee ballot for the primary, but it never came for the general election. So she called the supervisor of elections' office a week after they were mailed and she hadn't received it. She was told they would mail out another one. That one never showed up either. And she is not alone. Lots of people in the early voting line are there because they never received their absentee ballot and they cannot vote on election day. But other folks are there because they have nothing else to do and gives them something to bitch about, or because they don't know any better and their friends told them they should do it, or the campaigners called and offered them a ride to early voting, or for a myriad of other reasons. And it is close to impossible to get through by phone to the supervisor's office due to the sheer volume of calls.

All I know is my job has been much more difficult for the past two weeks. More frustrating. Louder. And much more stressful. I think I'll go read a book.

News Watch
Ex-Girlfriend Can Press Claims Against Best-Selling Author


New York Lawyer
November 5, 2004

By Mark Fass
New York Law Journal

A lawsuit charging popular novelist James Patterson with breach of contract and copyright infringement will proceed following a Southern District judge's partial denial Wednesday of Mr. Patterson's motion to dismiss.

Christina P. Sharp met Mr. Patterson in June 1996 and they soon planned to marry.

"In tandem with their romantic relationship, Sharp alleges, the two 'developed a close professional relationship,' in which Patterson discussed problems with his writing, and Sharp helped by acting 'as a sounding board and [making] suggestions,'" wrote Judge Gerard E. Lynch.

Mr. Patterson ended the relationship in April 1997. Following his publication of his bestseller "Cat and Mouse" (which allegedly incorporates Ms. Sharp's work into the text) and "Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas" (allegedly based on her idea), Ms. Sharp filed suit.

The court dismissed seven other charges, including misappropriation and unjust enrichment, letting stand the charges of copyright infringement and breach of express or implied contract. Sharp v. Patterson, 03 Civ. 8772, will be published Wednesday in the New York LAw Journal.



Ex-Girlfriend Can Press Claims Against Best-Selling Author

BOOKBITCH VIRGIN IN THE NEWS...

The Little Song Reader That Could

When Book Sense announced its 2004-2005 Reading Group Suggestions, it designated six novels as "amazing debuts": The Dive from Clausen's Pier, Everything Is Illuminated, The Lovely Bones, The Song Reader, The Time Traveler's Wife and White Teeth. The only long shot on this list--not a Today Show Book Club selection, a big prize winner or even reviewed by the likes of the New York Times--was The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker. This wasn't the first time Tucker's debut had exceeded expectations.

Published in May 2003 as a trade paperback original by Downtown Press (S&S's "chick lit" imprint), The Song Reader quickly proved to be more Secret Life of Bees than The Devil Wears Prada. In a starred review, PW called the story of two sisters in Missouri "an achingly tender narrative about grief, love, madness and crippling family secrets." Excerpted by Seventeen, chosen for Border's Original Voices and a July/August Book Sense Pick, the novel went back to press five times last year and became a regional bestseller. This year, in addition to making the Reading Group Suggestions list, The Song Reader has been chosen by the American Library Association as a popular paperback for young adults and again by independent booksellers as an "Adult Book Recommended for Teen Readers," along with books such as Catcher in the Rye and Girl with a Pearl Earring. With more than 70,000 copies in print, Pocket plans to expand the readership for Tucker's novel still more by publishing a special YA edition next June.

The Song Reader has also done surprisingly well in several foreign markets, especially in Germany, where Eichborn's July 2004 hardcover release was both a critical and commercial success, leading to a heated auction for the paperback recently won by Goldman/Bertelsmann. Reached by phone, Tucker said she is "thrilled" by her German reviews. "My German editor sends over stacks of them at a time, from highbrow newspaper book sections to magazines like Elle and Glamour," she told PW Daily. "I love the way they talk about Song Reader. To the Germans, it's a psychologically serious novel that's well written. A literary novel, as we would call it, but they don't seem to classify the way we do, where literary is defined in opposition to popular."

What's next for Tucker? This year saw the release of her second novel, the more suspenseful Shout Down the Moon, about a jazz singer and her son. She also had a story in Lit Riffs, alongside Jonathan Lethem and Neal Pollack. She's currently working on two new books. "One of them is about a father who has disappeared from his life and headed to New Mexico, hoping to hide his children from a dangerous world, " Tucker said. "The other is about a 19th-century physicist working on the nature of reality.... I doubt that anyone would mistake them for chick lit," Tucker added with a laugh.

Whatever she publishes next, Tucker can count on independent booksellers to help her get the word out. "I love Lisa, " Deb Wehmeier of Garden District Book Shop in New Orleans told PW Daily. "She came here and signed books for our New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that benefited our children's book bank for kids who don't have access to books. I do a book group for a dozen women in a women's shelter and Pocket donated copies of her second novel for the group. Lisa asked me the names of all the women in the group, and a short time later we got 12 copies of The Song Reader personalized to each women in that shelter. She deserves all good things."
--Kevin Howell
PW Daily for Booksellers (Thursday, November 4, 2004)

October 31, 2004
QUESTIONS FOR CHRISTINE SCHUTT
Prize Fight
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

What is it like to be attacked by your fellow novelists for having written a novel that reportedly sold only 100 copies? Thomas McGuane said publicly that the National Book Awards underwent a ''meltdown'' by selecting finalists as obscure as you.

It surprises me very much. It surprises me that Tom McGuane could damn my book without having read it. And by the way, ''Florida'' has actually sold at least 1,099 copies.

The critic John Leonard suggested that a prize winner should be someone who has put in time and paid his dues.

I am 56. I have taught literature at a girls' school in Manhattan, Nightingale-Bamford, for more than 20 years. My first collection of short stories was titled ''Nightwork'' because I wrote it at night while I was divorced and raising two sons. How else can I pay my dues?

All the finalists in fiction this year are women. Do you think this has anything to do with the response you're getting?

Would they be doing this if we were five unknown men?

What do you think the award should stand for besides, obviously, literary excellence?

I do think you should honor some work that is trying to be a clean, hard object.

That could describe a washing machine.

True, it could. But what I mean is that a piece of writing should be hard and clean in the sense that there is nothing extraneous about it, no feathery adjectives.

You initially published with Knopf, which is known for its devotion to serious fiction, but ''Florida'' was published by a small academic press.

I was hoping that Knopf would take it, but they didn't. It was Gordon Lish at Knopf who bought my first stories, and he was fired before the stories came out. I think publishers are afraid of taking a risk on something that is different.

But ''Florida'' is not so radically different. It tells the story of an orphaned girl who finds refuge in books. Why, do you think, have orphans been such a powerful presence in Western literature?

Well, what is it to be an orphan? It's always to have to say ''please'' and ''may I?'' You are always spending the night at someone else's house. You don't want to make a mistake, or do anything wrong, or ask for too much.

You yourself seem timid, but in your short stories in particular you take on such bruising events as incest and dead bodies under beds.

There is a story of mine that has always upset people. It is called ''What Have You Been Doing?'' and it's about a woman who teaches her son how to kiss.

Is it based on actual experience? Have you ever kissed either of your sons amorously?

My older son, Nick, was very much an actor, and he did things that sometimes sort of shocked me. Sons forget their size and their bodies.

Are you saying you actually kissed your son? I'm horrified!

No, no, I never did that. I once tried to teach him how to dance. When you write, you always make it a little bit bigger and bolder than it is in life.

That's a relief.

I can be very bold and brave and nasty on the page.

Better on the page than in life! What did your sons, who are now in their 20's, think of the story?

They just laughed. It's wonderful having boys, isn't it? They're very forgiving of their mothers.

Yes, certainly more forgiving than the American literary world.

It doesn't matter what anyone says. If the work is good, eventually it will be found. I used to imagine that my work would be discovered after I am dead, but it's much nicer to be recognized in one's lifetime.



The New York Times > Magazine > Questions for Christine Schutt: Prize Fight

Harlem School's Book Shortage Stirs Industry

When Phillip Lefevre, an English teacher at Harlem's Frederick Douglass Academy II, wanted his seventh graders to read Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (Arte Publico Press, 1984), about a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago, he faced one major hurdle: the school had no books.

A teacher in suburban Boston for the last 13 years, this was his first foray into the inner city teaching experience. "I expected the student body to be different, of course," he said. "I just was totally unprepared for how much less the district would actually provide."

FDA II, whose 420 students are predominantly black and Hispanic, opened its doors in September 2000, still has no library. What's more, the 115th St. New York Public Library branch across the street has been shut since 2002 because of budget cuts. In order for Lefevre to teach his 62 students a book recommended by the city school system, he had to look elsewhere.

Lefevre appealed to his friend Lee Isles, a data analyst at Barnes and Noble.com, for help. Isles managed to get a discount on the books and set up a fundraising Web site to donate to the cost. Isles then sent the link to his old job site, All Media Guide in Ann Arbor, Mich. (a company that provides content data to online retailers), sparking former co-worker Matthew Tobey's interest. Tobey in turn told his friend writer Neal Pollack about it. Pollack, who said he feels strongly that "no one should be denied the opportunity to read books just because their school is under-funded," shot an e-mail over to Susan Bergholz, Cisneros's literary agent. Bergholz contacted Martin Asher, editor-in-chief of Vintage Books, and 10 copies of the book were sent directly.
But perhaps not fully satisfied with this Band-Aid solution, all the major players decided to go one step further. Bergholz is sending three books for every 20-odd authors she represents, as well as overstock and galleys to the school. Pollack posted a "call to arms" on his Web site, donated money from his own pocket and is currently in talks with Tobey and Isles about ways in which to continue raising money for such future efforts.

"I think the real issue here has to do with how the New York City school system spends its money," Isles said. "I have a hard time believing that every school has these same issues."
As of this date, $748 have been collected, an amount just $102 short of the required funds. Lefevre is planning to use any additional money raised to fund a Harlem Renaissance unit for his class, and said he's "incredibly amazed" by the feedback Isles has received. "You have to understand, these kids are not used to books they can take home," he added. "This is foreign to them."

Though grassroots efforts like ones initiated by Isles (he was also responsible for raising enough money last week to supply Lefevre's students with copies of The Old Man and the Sea) provide learning materials where federal, state and local governments fall short, they also hold greater promise. "It's like Latasha [Greer, the FDA II principal] said to me," Lefevre recounted. "This is how things get going. This is how movements begin."

To donate money, visit Isles's site. To donate books, clearly mark packages "book donations" and send to:

Frederick Douglass Academy II 215 W. 114th St. New York, N.Y. 10026

--Raya Kuzyk
PW Daily for Booksellers (Wednesday, November 3, 2004)

NANCY DREW’S FATHER
by MEGHAN O’ROURKE
The fiction factory of Edward Stratemeyer.
Issue of 2004-11-08
Posted 2004-11-01

The summer I was seven, a sudden adventure shanghaied my parents, and they hastily deposited me at my grandmother’s home, in suburban New Jersey, for the weekend. I was sitting mournfully by the back-yard pool, without the prospect of a playmate, when my grandmother came down the flagstone path, a box in her hands, and announced, with an air of genial relief, “I’ve found your mother’s old Nancy Drews.” Warped and moldy, “The Bungalow Mystery,” on top of the box, appeared unpromising—and, at two hundred pages, long. But desperation will drive a child to great lengths. I began to read and, it now seems, didn’t look up for several years.

What I was reading were dozens of variations on a single story, which went something like this: Nancy Drew, a sixteen-year-old girl in the suburb of River Heights, visits a friend and learns of a mystery, typically involving a lost treasure or a missing heir. An anonymous note slipped under her door warns her, “Keep off the case, or else”; high jinks and a car chase ensue. While sleuthing, Nancy gets knocked out by a crook, and comes to in an elegant old mansion (“Nancy saw lovely damask draperies, satin-covered sofas and chairs”), where she partakes of a refreshing tea service and cinnamon toast; renewed, she discovers a secret passageway, thanks to a cunning knob of some kind, rapidly solves the mystery, and restores social order.

As Bobbie Ann Mason points out in her excellent 1975 history, “The Girl Sleuth,” Nancy Drew is a paradox—which may be why feminists can laud her as a formative “girl power” icon and conservatives can love her well-scrubbed middle-class values. She climbs fences like a tomboy but cries “How dainty!” upon spotting a gold bracelet. Her friends have marvellous weddings, but Nancy never frets about her future; more than a kiss from Ned Nickerson, her worshipful beau, would only interrupt her sleuthing. Like many juvenile heroines of her time, she is missing a mother. (Hers died when she was three.) But there are no shadows behind her “sparkling” bright-blue eyes. The shadows are in the world, and they are easily detected and vanquished, for they have squinty eyes, poor grammar, badly mended clothes, and a habit of wearing too much rouge.

Next year, Nancy turns seventy-five, and, having sold more than two hundred million books, she has been rewarded with a twenty-first-century makeover. “Nancy Drew Girl Detective” is a new series launched last spring by Aladdin Paperbacks, a division of Simon & Schuster. The contemporary Nancy is more attuned to emotional issues than the old Nancy, as one can only expect in our therapeutic age. But her gaze remains unshadowed.

I don’t remember wondering much about Carolyn Keene, the book’s putative author, although I must have eventually asked how she could write so many books; I recall my father gently suggesting that Keene had been replaced by a ghostwriter. This concerned me for one reason: what if the books changed? I needn’t have worried. The truth is that Nancy Drew, like her comrades-in-sleuthing the Hardy Boys, was never the creation of a single mind. From the start, she was the product of a corporation—a literary syndicate. The man who created the syndicate was not a feminist or a brilliant writer. But in his own unassuming way he was, like Nancy Drew, a phenomenon.



Edward Stratemeyer was born in 1862 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His parents, Henry and Anna, were middle-class German immigrants with a staunch work ethic. Henry was a tobacconist, and Anna, who had been married to Henry’s brother before his death, reared six children; Edward was the youngest. As a boy, he idled away his time reading the popular rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger and William T. Adams (a.k.a. Oliver Optic). As a teen-ager, he had a printing press and amused friends by printing broadsheets and stories, including an early effort titled “Revenge! or, The Newsboy’s Adventure.” His father spoke to him of wasting time. According to Deidre Johnson’s “Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate,” he was twenty-six when he sold his first story, “Victor Horton’s Idea,” to Golden Days, the beloved boys’ magazine, for seventy-five dollars—about six times the standard weekly wage. Later, he liked to claim that he had written the story on brown wrapping paper in the tobacco store, and recalled showing the magazine’s check to his father, who promptly said, “You’d better write a lot more for them.”

He did. He wrote “Poor but Plucky” as Fred Frisky. He wrote “Dashing Dave, the Ever Ready Detective” as Captain Ravell Pinkerton, of the U.S. Secret Service. He wrote “Joe Johnson, the Bicycle Wonder” as Roy Rockwood. He also worked as a stationer—he did not sell enough stories to support himself—and then, later, became an editor at Good News, where his heroes Alger and Optic published their work.

Every Horatio Alger hero’s rise to riches depends on a lucky break. Stratemeyer’s was his proximity to Alger himself. In 1898, the older man, in failing health, wrote to Stratemeyer at Good News and asked him to complete a story that he was too ill to finish. “Can you take my story and finish it in my style?” he inquired. “You will divide the proceeds equally with me but I shall retain the copyright. . . . I fancy it would be easy work for you as you have a fluent & facile style.”

In truth, Stratemeyer’s style was much like Alger’s; each was of the “Maggie, for this was the name by which she was universally known” school of circumlocution. Stratemeyer took on the job and ultimately completed several of Alger’s unfinished manuscripts for posthumous publication. (Alger died in 1899.) Then, in the late eighteen-nineties, Gilbert Patten began publishing his stories about Frank Merriwell, America’s first fictional schoolboy hero. The success of the Merriwell dime novels is hard to conceive of today: they sold a hundred and twenty-five million copies over two decades. Stratemeyer, who had given Patten his start at Good News, decided that he could improve on the invention. The result, in 1899, was “The Rover Boys”—the schoolboy exploits of three wisecracking brothers named Tom, Dick, and Sam. It was an immediate hit.

Stratemeyer’s timing was superb. The spread of primary education had spawned a host of independent young readers, and juvenile fiction was on the verge of becoming hugely popular. The dime novel, which had emerged in 1860, had created an appetite among children for more exciting fare than Sunday-school moralism. What Stratemeyer brought to this burgeoning market was not literary brilliance; the early Rover Boys books are crudely written at best. But he had two essential gifts: a knack for coming up with ideas, and organizational genius. As Henry Ford was revolutionizing the auto industry, Stratemeyer was revolutionizing the way children’s books were produced. The boy who had played at the printing press had learned how to put his single-mindedness to work for him.



The most daunting obstacle facing publishers at the turn of the century wasn’t finding good stories but figuring out how to package and distribute them. Advertising was relatively uncommon, and, in any case, children didn’t read the newspaper. Salesmen travelled around the country, selling books from publishers’ lists, but this system was highly inefficient.

New printing techniques had made it easier to manufacture good-looking books for less than ever before. Most “quality” hardcover juvenile fiction cost a dollar or a dollar twenty-five, but it was still primarily instructional. The most famous of these was the Rollo series, about a boy who travelled through Europe with his uncle, learning the virtue of honesty. For excitement, people had the Deadwood Dicks and the Lone Star Lizzies, low-end dime novels aimed at working-class men and read on the sly by boys—and some girls—everywhere. (Publishers assumed that girls would happily read boys’ books, but not vice versa.)

In 1906, Stratemeyer had his first big idea. The Rover Boys had sold tens of thousands of copies, but Stratemeyer had hopes for more. He went to a publishing firm with a radical proposal: his new series, “The Motor Boys” (the Rover Boys with more speed), would cost fifty cents but, with its cloth hardbound covers, look like it cost twice as much. The “fifty-center” would bridge the gap between the nineteenth century’s moralistic tradition and the dime novel’s frontier adventures. Because the fifty-center was a hardback, unlike the dime novel, it seemed respectable to parents. And it was within range of a boy’s allowance, or his wheedling skills.

At first, the publishers worried about the scant profit margin—probably three to five cents per book. But Stratemeyer thought that the books would make up in volume for the diminished profit margin per unit. He was right. The Motor Boys series quickly became “the biggest and best selling series for boys ever published,” according to a publisher’s blurb. When Stratemeyer repackaged the Rover Boys series in the same format, it, too, grew into a bona-fide phenomenon, selling more than six million copies by 1920. Years after Stratemeyer’s death, boys were still writing to say things like “I think you write the best books ever. You know how to put that touch in them that gets boys. . . . I will always try to imitate the Rovers as much as I can.”

The fifty-cent books had an advantage over their more expensive, single-volume counterparts: you could release a “breeder” set of three at once—a strategy that Stratemeyer had pioneered with the Rover Boys—to test the waters, and, if the set did well, you had immediately generated an audience for the sequels. Sequels to one-off books, in contrast, tended to sell relatively poorly. By the time a fifty-cent series reached ten volumes, it was considered successful; it had captured enough faithful readers to bring in good money for writer and publisher alike.

Stratemeyer could not keep up with the demand for his stories. This prompted his second big idea: he would form a literary syndicate, which would produce books assembly-line style. From his days of working at Good News, he was acquainted with the best juvenile writers, and knew that “any one of them could have built up a 70,000-word novel from a comma, if required,” as one such writer put it. By the time the Stratemeyer Syndicate was incorporated, in 1910, he was putting out ten or so juvenile series by a dozen writers under pseudonyms, and had more series in development.

Stratemeyer would come up with a three-page plot for each book, describing locale, characters, time frame, and a basic story outline. He mailed this to a writer, who, for a fee ranging from fifty dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars, would write the thing up and—slam-bang!—send it back within a month. Stratemeyer checked the manuscripts for discrepancies, made sure that each book had exactly fifty jokes, and cut or expanded as needed. (Each series had a uniform length; the standard was twenty-five chapters.) He replaced the verb “said” with “exclaimed,” “cried,” “chorused,” and so forth, and made sure that cliffhangers punctuated the end of each chapter—usually framed as a question or an exclamation. Each series was published under a pseudonym that Stratemeyer owned. As Fortune later noted, it was good business for children to become attached to a name, but it would be bad business for that name to leave the syndicate with the ghostwriter.

There were a few missteps in the early years. In 1906, G. Waldo Browne, an enthusiastic contract writer, wrote Stratemeyer that he had completed the first book of the “Young Builders” series that Stratemeyer had commissioned, and excitedly outlined his ideas for forthcoming volumes, including “The Young Mechanics: How They Earned the Money to Build a School House,” “The Young Mill Owners: How They Lifted the Mortgage from the Old Red Mill,” and “The Young Manufacturers: How They Won the Great Financial Battle.” Alas, Browne was informed, he had not quite “hit the nail” with Stratemeyer.

Through the first years of the century, Stratemeyer and his publishers engaged in an epic publicity effort that included buying up lists of children’s names and addresses, circulating a catalogue of books, and seizing every chance to cross-promote his books. Each series volume, for instance, contained a paragraph plugging the volume preceding it and the volume to come, known as the “throw-ahead.” The sheer number of books that Stratemeyer produced meant that he had more leverage with publishers (he worked with several, and would move from one to another when dissatisfied) than the average author, and could better orchestrate his distribution efforts among their salesmen. He pushed cost-averse publishers to invest in a higher number of illustrations per book, and in better covers. And he kept looking for ways to expand his readership. In 1910, the formation of the Boy Scouts of America meant an open line to Stratemeyer’s core audience. Immediately, he began a series about Boy Scouts, to the dismay of Scoutmasters, who complained, according to the Fortune reporter, that boys were turning up their noses at “mundane” tasks like tracking woodchucks.

None of Stratemeyer’s innovations would have mattered had he not known what kids wanted to read about—“that touch in them that gets boys.” The Stratemeyer fifty-center was an adventure story aimed at children between the ages of ten and sixteen; it assumed that kids, like adults, were captivated by the new technology of the twentieth century, and, generally, tried to keep up with trends in adult fiction. Stratemeyer had, in his own prankish way, the muscle memory of children’s enthusiasm for novelty. “The trouble is that very few adults get next to the heart of a boy when choosing something for him to read,” he wrote in a letter to a publisher in 1901. “A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby-pamby, or with that which he puts down as a ‘study book’ in disguise. He demands real flesh and blood heroes who do something.”

Stratemeyer’s heroes—among them the Motor Boys, the Outdoor Girls (the first girls’ series, Dorothy Dale, was introduced in 1908), the Motion Picture Chums, Tom Swift, and the Bobbsey Twins—dashed about in six-cylinder racing cars or jets or balloons. “Swift by name and swift by nature” was Tom Swift’s motto. Most strikingly, Stratemeyer abandoned the model of self-improvement that informed both Alger’s and Patten’s best-sellers. His children were already perfect—solidly middle-class “Übermenschen,” as one syndicate partner later termed them. “Manly” and “wide awake,” they succeeded at whatever they turned their hand to and enjoyed utter freedom (in contrast to “firmly guarded” nineteenth-century types), typically exposing the schemes of ne’er-do-wells hoping to siphon away the fortune of an innocent orphan. Stratemeyer understood that twentieth-century children wanted a fantasy posing as reality. As Patten aptly put it, the new model was a story about “the boy that every kid would like to be. Not, mind you, the boy that every kid ought to be. That was the Horatio Alger idea.”

Stratemeyer was a micromanager. During the syndicate’s golden years, Stratemeyer, who lived in Newark with his wife and two daughters, would arrive in his Manhattan office at nine every morning, dictate two chapters, and then fire off a series of letters to publishers. No detail was too minor to escape his attention; once, while preoccupied with an important business deal, he noticed that a publisher had sent him a cover on which a Japanese life preserver bore an English name printed in tiny type, and immediately sent off a letter requiring a correction. He repeatedly accused his publishers of laziness and indifference to the success of his books, yet he had that particular gift for caustic woundedness that made other people want to do more for him. At the end of the most cutting of letters, he would sign his name in a spidery fashion, as if to suggest that his native enthusiasm had been dealt a great blow. In an early letter to W. F. Gregory, an editor at Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, he practiced this to great effect:

Dear Mr. Gregory,
I received yesterday the package of books and have looked the two volumes over with interest.
I think “The Fort in the Wilderness” is exceedingly good. . . . I wish I could say as much for “Dave Porter” but I cannot. To me the pictures are very poor and will do the book more harm than good. Every one of them lacks life and action. The race on the ice is tame and the knock-down blow in the gym simply awful. And what life is there in the automobile scene? I suggested lots of good things—the feast, the “rough house,” the boys on the run-away trolley, the serio-comic initiations, etc., but none were used. Some day when I feel rich I am going to ask you to put in two or three new pictures at my expense.


We don’t know if Stratemeyer ever felt rich, but certainly by 1920 he was rich. His books had sold in the tens of millions of copies. His writers were still struggling to make a living—they knew that the syndicate could dispose of them at any time—but he was enjoying the fruits that come to the chairman of any successful company.



In 1926, ninety-eight per cent of the boys and girls surveyed in a poll published by the American Library Association listed a Stratemeyer book as their favorite, and another survey showed that the Tom Swift books, which the syndicate launched in 1910, were at the top of the list. Thirty-one series were in full swing. Yet Stratemeyer still wasn’t content. He had noticed the growing popularity in the twenties of adult detective fiction and of pulp magazines like Black Mask,which wasfounded by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. As the journalist Carol Billman points out in “The Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate,” Stratemeyer saw that this detective fiction, grafted onto an adventure story, might appeal to children. In 1926, the year that S. S. Van Dine’s “The Benson Murder Case” introduced Philo Vance to the world, Stratemeyer wrote the outline for the first three volumes of a series that proved more popular than any that had come before: the Hardy Boys.

If the Hardy Boys emerged at roughly the same time as hardboiled detective fiction, they were also a distinct counterpoint to it. Where private dicks like Sam Spade were wise, urban, cynical, hard-drinking, and suspicious of “dames,” Frank and Joe Hardy were innocent, suburban, fresh-faced, and clean-living. They have an amiable, distant relationship with women; their mother packs a delectable picnic lunch, and no one seems to notice when her name changes briefly, in mid-series, from Laura to Mildred. Iola Morton and Callie Shaw—Frank and Joe’s “special friends”—turn up primarily to be saved from danger and to praise the boys. (“Oh, I really think Frank and Joe are too wonderful for anything!”)

As Marilyn S. Greenwald tells it in a new biography, “The Secret of the Hardy Boys” (Ohio; $32.95), Stratemeyer found the Hardys’ first ghostwriter, the young Canadian newspaperman Leslie McFarlane, through a classified ad in a trade paper. Stratemeyer sent him outlines, cautioning McFarlane to remember that these books were less flashy than their cheaper counterparts: “You perhaps understand our cloth books go in a different field from the paper volumes and the stories are not quite so melodramatic.” The books were to be two hundred and sixteen pages and twenty-five chapters. For the first one, “The Tower Treasure,” McFarlane would be paid a lump sum of a hundred and twenty-five dollars—a figure that required Stratemeyer to sell sixty-two hundred and fifty books in order to make a profit, assuming that the royalties were around two cents a book. As for McFarlane, he later wrote, “I greeted Frank and Joe Hardy with positive rapture. . . . There was, after all, the chance to contribute a little style.”

Stratemeyer’s initial Hardy Boys outlines were two pages long, and set the breezy tone for the books. The first began:

Joe and Frank Hardy are on their motorcycles on an errand for their father, Fenton Hardy, the famous detective. It is Saturday, a holiday from the Bayport High School which they attend, springtime. . . .
The shore road, the rocks below—the racing auto—will it hit them? Narrow escape—anger of a middle-aged man who ran car and anger of boys. “A road hog,” they say.


A cast of characters sent to McFarlane dictated that the boys’ Aunt Gertrude be “peppery and dictatorial” and that the mother, Laura, be a “sweet singer.” Frank is dark, Joe blond. The boys are to have a barn with a gym; Fenton Hardy is equipped with a James Bond-worthy library full of dossiers on jewel thieves and an extensive wardrobe of disguises. (These more fanciful plot elements dropped away in later volumes.)

In 1930, Stratemeyer decided to follow up with a girl detective, whom he called Nancy Drew. The women’s movement of the time had energized girls’ fiction, creating an audience for female characters with spunk (in contrast to Stratemeyer’s early girl heroines, like Honey Bunch, who “knew exactly how to do a washing for she had watched the laundress many times”). Stratemeyer had signed up a young college graduate named Mildred Wirt, and he sent her the outline of “The Secret of the Old Clock.” Wirt went on to write twenty-three of the first thirty Nancy Drews. From the start, the series sold better than any other Stratemeyer series, overturning the conventional publishing wisdom that boys’ series outperformed girls’.

Wirt gave the early volumes a “New Woman” flavor, but the core of Nancy’s appeal is similar to the Hardys’. The mode is adventure with a flourish of mystery. The plot is furthered by coincidence. Nancy discovers “clues” everywhere: A tire tread? “A clue!” A ransom note with a fire-dragon crest? “It may be a clue,” Nancy cries. Needless to say, these “clues” don’t function as a puzzle that the enterprising reader can piece together for herself, as they do in Sherlock Holmes or Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. Instead, they are reassurances that order reigns behind the scenes. Nancy later happens to walk into a store in Chinatown and discovers that the store sells notepaper with a fire-dragon crest. Happily, the owner recalls not only that Nancy’s suspect had been in the store several months earlier but also his name and build. The message is confidence-inspiring: The world is rife with crooks, but it is negotiable, and fundamentally rational. Hard work pays off. The damned remain damned—unless they repent—and the wronged (long-lost maharajas’ sons, heirs to candlemakers’ fortunes) are restored to their rightful life at the intersection of High and Elm, among the rangy Colonials and the tall trees.

Nancy was Stratemeyer’s final creation, and she lived far longer than he did. In May of 1930, the year that Nancy made her début, Stratemeyer fell ill with pneumonia. While he was sick, he had a dream that he was a character in one of his own baseball series. He died of a heart attack shortly thereafter.



Even as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were invading children’s bookshelves, there was one place you couldn’t find them: the library. The Stratemeyer Syndicate came under attack from educators and librarians from the start. As early as 1914, Franklin K. Mathiews, the chief librarian for the Boy Scouts of America, published a damning article, “Blowing Out the Boy’s Brains,” about series fiction. “Parents who buy such books think they do their boys no harm. The fact is, however, that the harm done is simply incalculable,” he argued. The series books would “debauch and vitiate” a child’s imagination.

Early on, librarians condemned the syndicate’s series as tawdry, sensationalist work taking children away from books of moral or instructional value. Decades later, some educators began to argue that the books were a stepping-stone to more sophisticated literature, a way to get kids reading in the first place. (Television was now the real problem.) In either case, librarians seemed uncomfortable with the idea of reading as pure entertainment. Nancy Drew was long banned from many public libraries.

The syndicate’s production methods didn’t help matters. Mathiews made much of the assembly-line process: “The public will, I am sure, be interested in knowing just how most of the books that sell for from twenty-five to fifty cents, are not written, but manufactured,” he pronounced scathingly. “There is usually one man who is as resourceful as a Balzac so far as ideas and plots for stories are concerned. He cannot, though, develop them all, so he employs a number of men who write for him.”

Mathiews assumed, rightly, that the very word “manufactured” would make people squirm with distaste. But Stratemeyer’s assembly-line method surely made his series better, not worse. The rapid rate at which the syndicate was producing fiction allowed Stratemeyer to learn from his mistakes more swiftly, making his series more sophisticated than many of the series penned by individual authors. Furthermore, when it came to refining a catchy story, two heads often proved to be better than one.

Stratemeyer realized that the way to move books was to keep them constant. The “manufactured” nature of the series was curiously reassuring to kids, who felt that there was an endless supply of goods they knew and liked coming their way. Children, of course, love repetition, as any parent who’s had to watch “Finding Nemo” ten times knows. But so do adults. The hardest thing about selling what economists call “experience goods”—like books or movies—is persuading people to try something they can’t be sure they’ll like. That’s why a handful of brand-name fiction writers (often writing books with continuing characters) dominate the best-seller lists and the shelves of airport bookstores: in some way they’re a known quantity. As the Stratemeyer Syndicate grew, a snowball effect could be seen: the more books that appeared in any given series, the more children bought them, confident that supply would not run out.

Though collaborative effort doesn’t seem strange to us when it comes to making television shows or movies, even today we resist it when the resulting narrative is bound between hard covers. Yet Stratemeyer’s books really were meant to be simply another form of mass entertainment. His closest peer wasn’t another writer—say, L. Frank Baum—but his near-contemporary Irving Thalberg, the “boy wonder” movie producer who worked at Universal and M-G-M in the nineteen-twenties and helped pioneer the studio system. Like Stratemeyer, Thalberg devoted obsessive attention to every detail of his products, and believed in staying out of the public eye; his first screen credit was a posthumous one.



Why did Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys survive when their peers did not? As the social historian John G. Cawelti has noted, some formulas are more enduring (and instructive) than others. A “good” formula creates an integral fantasy world, one that is both entirely like and entirely unlike the culture that produced it. The most lasting formulas not only reveal something about the culture that shaped them but in turn shape the culture that comes after them. (Consider the profound influence of the Western on the American psyche.) If Alger’s rags-to-riches stories didn’t last, it was essentially because they were too literal—too specific an expression of working-class ambitions of the eighteen-seventies and eighties.

The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew endured, in part, because they avoided overt adult moralizing, and because they were more complex than their juvenile forebears. Generally, multiple plots unfold at once, and the connection among them becomes clear only at the book’s end. The mystery formula elegantly embodies children’s two conflicting impulses: the search for order and security, and the appetite for novelty and risk-taking. Consider the ritualized cliffhanger at the end of each chapter, which represents order and excitement at the same time—“Nancy flew from the saddle and hit the ground so hard she blacked out!”

The series also survived because they were rewritten over time. In 1930, the syndicate was inherited by Stratemeyer’s daughters, Edna Stratemeyer and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. The daughters shut down the Manhattan office and opened one in East Orange, New Jersey, where they worked at rolltop desks throughout the Depression. They dramatically reduced the number of series in production: in 1935, fourteen series were circulating; in 1940, nine; by 1980, when the syndicate was in its final years, only four. But these four accounted for nearly six million dollars in sales. Edna retired after a decade, but Harriet had inherited her father’s single-mindedness, and took over the bulk of the writing of the Nancy Drew series herself, remaining at the syndicate until her death, in 1982.

Harriet’s primary inspiration was to update the most promising of the existing properties—the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew. She sent out all the extant volumes for reëvaluation. Some needed complete rewrites; others only a deft touch-up. In 1959, the new Nancy Drews began rolling off the assembly line. Nancy’s age, like the Hardys’, was revised upward. She was now eighteen, not sixteen—the driving laws had changed—and she motored around in a convertible instead of a roadster. On the cutting-room floor lay scenes that had contained offensive stereotypes of blacks, Jews, and other ethnic groups. And the books were shorter—twenty chapters instead of twenty-five. It is these versions, not the originals, that most people today have read. The collaborative project was complete: what Stratemeyer had conceived, and ghostwriters had executed, had been streamlined and improved upon by Harriet.

Ultimately, Edward Stratemeyer was a conventional-minded businessman with a radical idea that would not have been radical in any other industry. It was to give his customers, who happened to be children, what they wanted, not what he thought they should want—and to make a product that was better than his competitors’. He understood, as George Orwell later wrote, that there was such a thing as the “good bad book”—one that “has no literary pretensions but remains readable when more serious productions have perished.”

As Nancy has aged, children’s-book publishing has become more sensitive to psychological “issues,” and Nancy’s quick-footed efficiency is now thought to be intimidating for young readers. And so, in “Nancy Drew Girl Detective,” the new Simon & Schuster series, Nancy relates her adventures in the first person, acknowledges her flaws, and shows herself to be a more empathetic and inclusive soul than the old Nancy. But if I were sitting by the pool again, in search of distraction, I would pick the old Stratemeyer formula over the new one. Stratemeyer understood, in the end, that children want their heroes to have an air of mystery. A young reader isn’t trying to discover the ways in which she’s ordinary; she’s trying to discover just how to banish the shadows so that the afternoon lasts a little longer


The New Yorker: The Critics: A Critic At Large

October 28, 2004
Beyond 'Da Vinci': A New Clue
By EDWARD WYATT

Fans of Dan Brown, author of "The Da Vinci Code," have been obsessed with his next book since he revealed earlier this year that the "Da Vinci Code" cover contains clues about his next novel.

What it does not contain is the title, which will be "The Solomon Key," a nugget Mr. Brown's publisher, Stephen Rubin, let slip during a lunch yesterday with reporters who cover the book industry.

The book, whose release date has not been announced, is likely to be the most anticipated novel to hit stores in years, not least because "The Da Vinci Code," published in March 2003, is still selling tens of thousands of copies a week.

Mr. Rubin, president and publisher of Doubleday, has continued to exploit the "Da Vinci Code" phenomenon. It recently passed nine million copies, and a $35 illustrated version goes on sale Tuesday.

Typically, new books are published in paperback within about a year.

But with the hardcover "Da Vinci Code" still regularly in the top five on every national best-seller list, Doubleday keeps pushing back the paperback date.

"The Solomon Key" will be the third novel by Mr. Brown to include the character Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of religious symbology who follows trails of clues from one murder to the next.

The new book's primary focus will be the Freemasons, the secretive fraternity that has included some of the nation's founding fathers, and it will be set in Washington.

In first discussing the subject of the book last spring, Mr. Brown mentioned that the architecture of Washington is rich in symbolism, something that he is using in the novel. The author has been holed up at his residence in New Hampshire for months working on the new book.



The New York Times > Books > Beyond 'Da Vinci': A New Clue

The cover-up Kidd

His flamboyance and bravado -- not to mention those Upper East Side parties -- have made Chip Kidd more famous than many of the authors whose book jackets he's designed, writes GUY DIXON

By GUY DIXON

UPDATED AT 9:40 PM EDT Saturday, Oct 23, 2004

He's been called "the closest thing to a rock star" in the otherwise sequestered world of publishing, a "path-breaking designer" and even, a little oddly, an "inky colossus."

The fact is that Chip Kidd, who just turned 40 and passed his 18th anniversary as a designer at Knopf in Manhattan, is more famous than many of the authors whose book covers he designs. Certainly he has created some of the most recognizable covers of the 1990s, from the dinosaur-bone image for Jurassic Park to the black-and-white photograph of a horse's mane below a white header on the cover of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. He has even written his own novel, 2001's The Cheese Monkeys, as if flouting the notion that he should be contained on a jacket.

The end result is that Kidd is probably the only designer that many book buyers can actually name, giving him a celebrity status, at least in publishing houses and graphic-arts departments, of rock-star proportions. "Oh, were it only true!" says Kidd, with a theatrical quaver in his voice. "Being in New York and knowing several famous people is good because it helps you keep your perspective, and you realize that, no, you're really not all that high up on the totem pole."

Modesty aside, Kidd has said that all the attention can get a little ridiculous -- that it's akin, as he has put it, to being described as the world's most famous plumber. And he hasn't been alone in trying to temper some of it. In a monograph on his work published last year by Yale University Press, Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief at Knopf, is quoted as saying, "I admire Chip immensely, but I want to be sure that you understand that Chip is not the only great designer at Knopf."

Véronique Vienne, who wrote the essay and who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where Kidd also taught for six years, notes that his fame hasn't always sat easily with his peers in the tiny New York community of book designers. "On the one hand," she writes, "they envy his bravado and his willingness to be flamboyant in a field that used to be the domain of tweedy practitioners." But then there's the feeling that they now have to act more like Kidd -- and be thought of as equally effusive, multitalented and charming.

In part, Kidd was able to ride a nineties wave of new interest in designers as personalities. Just as he was making his mark with jackets for such bestsellers as Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, notes Vienne, the cult of celebrity turned its eye on designers in general, with major profiles appearing on such people as Fabien Baron, the former art director of Harper's Bazaar (who helped establish fashion retailing's trend toward black-and-white minimalism),and Tibor Kalman (particularly known for his work editing Benetton's deliberately provocative magazine, Colors).

If it were ever traceable, the tipping point in Kidd's own widespread recognition seems to have started with such articles as Janet Froelich's 1996 piece on him in The New York Times, which was perfectly timed to Kidd's work on illustrated books such as Batman Collected (an exhaustive look at Batman memorabilia, which Kidd collects). Then there's the simple fact, as Kidd says, that his subfield "is one of the few areas of graphic design where graphic designers get personal credit for what they do. You open the book, and there it is on the back flap: Jacket design by Chip Kidd."

One thing leads to another, and a reputation gets built. And since young designers -- like every entry-level job in publishing -- start out making barely enough to afford to live in a city like New York, freelancing is accepted, if not encouraged. The work of a tiny group of book designers in Manhattan therefore proliferates across publishing houses, and, if the conditions are right, their exposure quickly grows.

When asked how many covers he has done since arriving at Knopf in 1986, straight out of university, and where he's still a staff designer, his usual response has been in the neighbourhood of 1,200, based on rough calculations. But while helping to amass his past work for the Yale book, and now a larger, more comprehensive retrospective of his work to come in two years from art publisher Rizzoli, he says it's actually closer to 750 book jackets.

Whatever the right number, it's a huge, widely acclaimed collection of work. Some authors, such as Oliver Sacks, have it written into their contracts that only Kidd will work on their books. Kidd is also an editor-at-large at the Knopf imprint Pantheon, where he acquires and edits graphic novels and illustrated books. His own coffee-table book for Pantheon, 2001's Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, is a highly praised, vibrant appreciation of Schulz's life and work.

Kidd's graphics have a kind of inviting directness, drawing in the reader and summing up the essence of a book, while asking as many questions as they answer. Why, for instance, on the cover of Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, is the face on the doll looking so wary, and peering to the side?His metaphors may be a little heavy-handed for some, like the upside-down -- perhaps dropped? -- stuffed bunny on the cover of Paul Golding's The Abomination. But these are covers obviously intended for the bestsellers table.

"I try to avoid having any kind of signature style," he says. "Which is not to say I don't repeat myself. I do. But I try not to. I really try to employ various kinds of techniques and visual approaches to the jackets in order to keep them fresh."

Is that hard after designing so many? "Yes," he says, "you do have to consciously fight it."

A frequent lecturer, Kidd is also known, at least from accounts in New York magazine, for his parties at his Upper East Side apartment. He says it's because his place is conducive to entertaining, simply because it has a terrace, which is unusual in crowded upper Manhattan. Still, it all adds to his celebrity.

In the meantime, he's working on his second novel. Writing doesn't pay the bills, so he can't see it superseding his design work any time soon. But he also doesn't let on that he has much fear of criticism or, for that matter, the envy of peers -- or even any just-trying-to-be-helpful feedback from his partner, poet and essayist J. D. McClatchy.

"The book I'm working on now is in the first person, as was The Cheese Monkeys," says Kidd. "And I remember I worked on a long, difficult passage of it, and he looked at it and said, 'Well, maybe you should be writing in the third person.' Of course that was pretty much the last thing I wanted to hear."

But for all the restraint with which he describes his work, there are clues, too, about how much control he's willing to cede, particularly in his design work. The retrospective book to be published by Rizzoli is largely a response to the Yale University Press monograph, he says emphatically.

"I strangely really wasn't part of the process of putting [the Yale book] together," he says, other than to help collect some of his past works.

But what really got away on him was the book's cover, which has neither a central, straight-on image nor tells a mini, metaphorical story on its own. "I'm not," says the designer, "terrifically crazy about it."




The Globe and Mail

Publishers Say Weak Borders Sales Could Reflect Fundamental Problems

Borders Group executives earlier this month tied the company's failure to hit its financial targets to hurricanes and elections. But interviews with a wide range of publishers--many at mid-sized houses as well as at some large publishers and micros--found that the problems at the country's second-largest chain may run a lot deeper. A culture shift, the departure of key employees and old inventory systems have led to widespread publisher puzzlement, and sometimes discontent, with the company. They're changes that could have more than just emotional repercussions--they could be responsible for a number of problems at the chain, from lower sales to higher returns.

All the interviewed, understandably, requested anonymity. But the directness of their comments--and the similarity of their concerns--indicates issues that go well beyond the seasonal factors suggested by the company. The reporting forms the backbone of a larger investigative piece in next week's magazine, but in advance of that, we thought we'd run some excerpts.

A recurring theme among publishers was a lack of coordination between headquarters and stores, as well as tension between executives and buyers. One prominent publisher decried what "seems to be a weird disconnect" between Borders's upper management, which of course these days comes outside the book business, and its more traditionalist buyers. "Years ago, in its heyday, Borders was staffed by really knowledgeable book people who cared about each store," said the president of another publisher. "They still have incredible variety in their stores, and the shopping experience is good. But the book buyers are not given the tools needed to get books into the stores right away."

Publishers said much of their concern involved Border's lack of responsiveness--both to interest in executive-level meetings as well as to instances when titles began to move in other accounts. "There's a great deal of frustration within the marketplace about dealing with Borders right now," said an executive. "If you build a culture where you're implementing a system that's above the market and not really interested in what's doing in the rest of the marketplace, then you're going to have a culture where it's difficult for anything to happen quickly." A drying up of publisher summits also proves that Borders has not been "so welcoming" in hearing thoughts and concerns, as has the departure of buyer Dan Meyer (for B&N) and Phil Olilla (Ingram).

Perhaps not surprisingly, one the biggest areas to suffer when relationships deteriorates is backlist. It is, after all, relatively easy to stay on top of the latest bestseller; keeping up with or reacting to subtle changes on older titles requires a more honed form of communication.

While the company does not officially distinguish between front- and backlist, publishers were almost uniform in suggesting that it is the latter where they have seen the steepest drops. One house attributed Borders's weak backlist to its old inventory systems. Another said: "Borders can compete on sales with Barnes & Noble for a certain period of time, and then I don't know what happens."

Publishers are prone to making many unfavorable comparisons with Barnes & Noble. They said that despite uncertainty over the chain's moves into the publishing world, that store remained, at heart, a place where both the culture and executives were primarily about books. Borders, they said, had not always distinguished itself that way in recent months. "When you go out with Barnes & Noble, at some point the discussions always come back to books. That's not always the case with Borders," said one publisher. He added that the lack of faces associated with the company--or with book culture--compounded the problem. "When you talk about Barnes & Noble it's Len and Steve and Bob Wietrak and Antoinette Ercolano, and ten or twelve people I can name right off the bat. Borders is an enigma."--Jim Milliot, Steven Zeitchik and John Mutter

from PW Newsline for Thursday, October 21, 2004

Garcia Marquez book creates frenzy in Latin America, Spain

October 21, 2004

BY JOHN RICE

MEXICO CITY -- The first novel in a decade by Nobel Prize author Gabriel Garcia Marquez went on sale across the Spanish-speaking world Wednesday, a launch pushed forward because counterfeiters were already selling copies of Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

The long-awaited novella, called Memoria de Mis Putas Tristes in Spanish, explores love, sex and life by telling the story of a male journalist who decides to celebrate his 90th birthday by having sex with a young virgin.

At a news conference in Mexico City, where the Colombian-born Garcia Marquez lives, editors said demand for the book has been so strong that they were already in the process of publishing a second edition of 50,000 to add to the initial Mexican release of 100,000 in softcover and 30,000 in hardcover.

Street vendors began selling pirated copies of the book last week in Colombia, prompting publishers to push up the Oct. 27 release date.

Braulio Peralta, an editor at Random House Mondadori, said publishers were releasing a first run of 1 million copies for Latin America and Spain. He said the book will go on sale in Spanish in the United States ''very soon,'' although publishers hadn't set a date. It wasn't clear when the book would be released in English or how the title would be translated.

Garcia Marquez -- who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 -- is perhaps best known for his novels 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

His last work of fiction, Of Love and Other Demons, appeared in 1994. Two years ago, he released a memoir of his life through 1955, Living to Tell the Tale, in which he talks about visiting bordellos in Colombia's coastal city of Barranquilla as a young journalist.

In Colombia, Bogota police said Wednesday they arrested three street vendors selling pirated versions of the book. The book's Colombian editor, Moises Melo, said this is the first time illegal copies hit the streets before the official version came out.

Peralta said the early counterfeits differed from the legal version because Garcia Marquez made last-minute changes to the final chapter.



Garcia Marquez book creates frenzy in Latin America, Spain

Little people, big thrills

The best-selling thriller-writer Philip Kerr was nervous about promoting his first children's novel in the US. Would shiny, happy American children take to an ageing, overweight British author?

21 October 2004


As a thriller-writer, I'm quite used to visiting other countries to promote a novel. I've even become reconciled to the new publishing order - that it's no longer enough to write a book; you have to promote it, too. Having spent months in monastic, anti-social seclusion, you suddenly emerge into the light of day, blinking like some myopic mole, and are then required to behave like a cross between Martin Jarvis and Jackie Mason.

Meeting journalists, photographers and the public, shaking hands and signing books while wearing my best grin, I've even learnt a new respect for politicians who do something similar all year round. But nothing prepared me for the rigours of a three-week tour of the United States, as a first-time children's author. Three weeks without uttering a single profanity and without once getting drunk; three weeks of politeness and diplomacy that would have exhausted Kofi Annan.

The first thing I noticed about Scholastic, who specialise in publishing children's books (they publish JK Rowling in America) is how nice they all are. How nice and how enthusiastic. Such a pleasant change from the glum old world of adult publishing where booksellers moan about point of sale (or more likely the lack of it), and editors and marketing people regard you with shifty indifference - as if it must have been someone else's bright idea to have you read to several rows of empty seats and a lost dog at some dismal bookshop in St Albans. Everyone in children's books is smiling.

Beginning my American tour in New York and New Jersey, I decide that dealing with children probably encourages this; and, unaccustomed as I am to public smiling, I fix a Tony Blair sort of rictus on my face and set off for my first speaking engagement - a 50-minute talk to 300 pupils at the Elisabeth Morrow School, in Englewood. Elisabeth Morrow was, it turns out, Charles Lindbergh's sister-in-law and, frankly, I feel like I'd rather have flown single-handed across the Atlantic than what I'm about to do. Never in my life have I spoken to a large group of children - other than the time during my eldest son's birthday party when I told all his friends that the next person to punch or kick someone else would be sent home immediately! (You get the picture.)

Somehow I get through a whole hour with Elisabeth Morrow's kids. They even laugh at my jokes. Afterwards I sign about a hundred books and autographs, and have my picture taken with various kids and even a few teachers before collapsing into the back of the limo. On the way to the next school, and another 250 kids, Charisse, my publicist, informs me that JK Rowling did the same kind of promotional tour for her first and second books that I'm doing now. I can tell that she's only saying this to keep up my spirits because suddenly this feels like hard work. But after two or three more schools I start to feel a little more relaxed.

My book is about two New York twins who discover that they are djinn, and, as well as reading from the novel, which is called Children of the Lamp, I tell the children how djinn sometimes grant humans three wishes. They know all about this part already, the schoolchildren tell me. There's a Pop Tarts commercial running on TV that features a cartoon djinni. I tell the children about my own three wishes and ask them what they'd wish for if they ever met a real djinni. Mostly this goes well. One little boy tells me he wishes he had his own personal sushi chef. Another boy stands up in front of the whole school and says he wishes there could be world peace and no more wars. We laugh when swimsuited young women in the Miss World contest come out with this sort of guff. But it's a different story when a nine-year-old boy says it, and I encourage a round of applause for this particular wish. We need more wishes like that, don't we? Especially in America. A little girl wishes she was the President and everyone laughs when I say that I wish she was, too. Who knows? Maybe there's hope for John Kerry after all.

On one occasion, however - these are children, after all - the unpredictable happens. A boy in Michigan City tells me he wishes he knew where his mother was. Gulp. And a twin in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, tells me that she wishes she didn't have a twin at all; this provokes a howl of outrage and anguish from the other side of the school gymnasium where the other twin is sitting with her friends. I'm beginning to see what WC Fields was talking about when he aired his prejudices about working with children and animals.

By now I've reached the West Coast, where I speak to my biggest audience yet: 500 kids aged nine to 13. The vast school looks more like a correctional facility, and I half expect to see some scrofulous youth trotting up the endless corridor with a newly legalised automatic rifle slung over his acne-covered shoulder. Here, the principal tells me that some of his girls wept for joy when they heard I was coming; and several with whom I shake hands tell me, improbably, that they're never going to wash their sticky little paws again. All of which persuades me to double-check that the school isn't really some institute for the blind. I'm 48 years old, for Pete's sake. Clearly there exists a real shortage of celebrities in America that is almost as acute as the lack of irony. Either that or these girls were being really ironic and I just didn't get it.

My young male fans don't seem to find any of this as surprising as I do. Cooler, more laid back about meeting a writer than their female counterparts, they and I still manage to strike up an unlikely fraternity. One of them leans toward me and says, "Our librarian thinks you're hot". Thanks buddy, I tell him. "What's the PB stand for?" enquires another youth. "Peanut butter?"

Two weeks into my tour, I'm starting to find all of this rather touching, not to say encouraging. In America, bookshops, publishers and schools work together to promote child literacy. And clearly it works. It must work when an ageing, overweight British author is treated to the kind of adoration that is normally reserved for six-packed boy bands. For years I've lived a monkish, somewhat cynical existence, never really doing very much except reading and writing and watching movies. But in a strange way I'm actually starting to enjoy myself. I realise how important children are. Not just my own. But all children, everywhere.

Arriving back in the UK, I discover that my book has entered the New York Times bestselling children's author's list. This feels good. But it doesn't feel quite as good as the experience I have just enjoyed. The fact of the matter is I feel a little privileged to have been the subject of some youthful awe. I feel like I've been given something really important and worthwhile that I ought to cherish. And far from making me feel old, my contact with children had an opposite, enlivening effect. There's no doubt about it, children are the best elixir of life I've yet discovered.

'Children of the Lamp: The Akhenaten Adventure', by PB Kerr, is published by Scholastic Press (£12.99)


Enjoyment

from PW Daily for Booksellers (Tuesday, October 19, 2004)

Naked Justice? Wal-Mart Cancels America Orders

Though America: The Book has been the country's #1 hardcover nonfiction bestseller for three weeks, it has achieved those sales without the help of America's largest retailer.

Warner Books publisher Jamie Raab confirmed today that Wal-Mart had cancelled its orders for the book authored by Jon Stewart and the writers at the Daily Show because of a satirical spread that pastes the heads of Supreme Court justices onto naked bodies.

The images "really seemed to shake people up," said Raab. In addition to Wal-Mart, at least one other significant chain also initially balked at stocking the book, she said, though "they later decided it was going to be big book and they didn't want to miss out."

Wal-Mart is well-known for its refusal to stock albums with explicit lyrics. It has also modified book orders on decency grounds. Last month, Walmart.com stopped carrying The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in response to a complaint from the Anti-Defamation League. In 2003, the site also ceased stocking Varieties of Man/Boy Love by Mark Pascal. In Stewart's case, Walmart.com is carrying the book while brick-and-mortar Wal-Mart stores are not. However, the situation is unusual because the book is selling so well elsewhere, and because its images are intended as satire.

Though the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression holds the position that "offering a broad range of material is essential for democracy," president Chris Finan said that Wal-Mart is acting within its rights. "The First Amendment protects the right of retailer not to stock a book or other product. We would never criticize Wal-Mart for its particular choices."
While sales at Wal-Mart can account for anywhere from 1%-20% of sales for some books, it's unclear how much Stewart's book has been hurt by the chain. "Maybe it wouldn't have sold very well at Wal-Mart, but we'll never know," said Raab, pointing out that sales of genre fiction tend to far outweigh political books at the chain.

Co-author and Daily Show executive producer Ben Karlin said that Wal-Mart's decision came as a blow. "Wal-Mart was the place we wanted to be the most. We wanted America: The Book to reach America, and we thought the flag on the cover would do it for Wal-Mart, since they're fond of selling things with flags on them."--Charlotte Abbott

THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2004

Shortlist Announced

www.themanbookerprize.com

Achmat Dangor, Sarah Hall, Alan Hollinghurst, David Mitchell, Colm Tóibín and Gerard Woodward are the six authors shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2004, the UK’s best known literary award. The shortlist was announced by the chair of judges, Rt. Hon Chris Smith MP, at a press conference at the Man Group offices in London today (Tuesday 21 September).

The six shortlisted books were chosen from a longlist of 22 and are:

Author Title Publisher Price
Achmat Dangor Bitter Fruit Atlantic Books £10.99
Sarah Hall The Electric Michelangelo Faber & Faber £10.99
Alan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty Picador £16.99
David Mitchell Cloud Atlas Sceptre £16.99
Colm Tóibín The Master Picador £15.99
Gerard Woodward I’ll go to Bed at Noon Chatto & Windus £12.99

Rt. Hon Chris Smith MP comments:

"This is an exceptionally strong shortlist. All of these books would stand contention with the Booker winners over the years. The list contains a number of well-established authors as well as two writers for whom this is only their second novel.

"If there is one essential characteristic of all these books, it' s the quality of their writing, their use of words and deployment of imagery. In a strong field these novels have stood out as being truly remarkable."

The winner receives £50,000 with a guaranteed increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their own book.

The judging panel for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is: Rt. Hon Chris Smith MP (Chair); novelist, Tibor Fischer; writer and academic, Robert Macfarlane; journalist and writer, Rowan Pelling and literary editor of The Economist, Fiammetta Rocco.

The winner will be announced on Tuesday 19 October at an awards ceremony in the Royal Horticultural Halls in Westminster, London and will be broadcast live on BBC TWO and BBC FOUR.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor
Atlantic, £10.99

The last time Silas Ali encountered Lieutenant Du Boise, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the Lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on his wife Lydia, in revenge for her husband’s ANC activities. When Silas sees him again, by chance, twenty years later, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is due to deliver its report, crimes from the past erupt into the present, splintering the Ali’s fragile family life.

Bitter Fruit is the story of Silas, Mikey and Lydia, a brittle family in a dysfunctional society. By turns harrowing, erotic and fearlessly satirical, it is a portrait of modern South Africa that also addresses questions of universal significance.

Achmat Dangor was born in October, 1948 in Johannesburg.

He has devoted much of his life to politics, including heading up the Kagiso Trust, which, when created, was the largest black–led foundation in South Africa. He was formerly Executive Director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, and is currently Director of Advocacy and Communications at the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS).

He will soon relocate from New York to Geneva, Switzerland.

For more information please contact:
Clare Pierotti, Atlantic Publicity
T: 020 7269 1615
E: clarepierotti@groveatlantic.co.uk

The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall
Faber & Faber, £10.99

Opening in the seaside resort of Morecambe Bay during its early 1900s heyday, The Electric Michelangelo chronicles the remarkable life of Cy Parks. Spending his childhood helping his eccentric mother Reeda run her macabre guest house, he is then apprenticed to Eliot Riley, the greatest tattoo artist in the northern counties, from whom he learns his strange folk craft.

After a decade of abuse and in the wake of Riley’s violent death, Cy flees to America, where he sets up his own business on the infamous Coney Island boardwalk. In this riotous carnival environment of roller-coasters and freak shows, while the crest of the amusement industry wave is breaking, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious European immigrant and circus performer, who commissions him to cover her body entirely with tattooed eyes. Hugely atmospheric, anecdotal and historical, Sarah Hall’s second novel casts an imaginative spell of local colour and lyrical prose.

Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in January 1974, and grew up in Penrith, Cumbria.

She studied at Aberyswyth University and gained an MA at St Andrews. She has taught Creative Writing at the Arvon Foundation and is the author of Haweswater which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2002, along with a Betty Trask Award.

Sarah Hall lives in Cumbria.

For more information please contact:
Bomi Odufunade, Faber & Faber Publicity
T: 020 7465 7542
E: bomi.odufunade@faber.co.uk

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Picador, £16.99

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. As the boom-years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, with its grand parties, its holidays in the Dordogne, its parade of monsters both comic and threatening. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance; but it is a later affair, with a beautiful millionaire, that will change his life more drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.

Alan Hollinghurst was born in May 1954 in Gloucestershire.

He studied and then taught English at Oxford. His previous novels are The Swimming-Pool Library (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Folding Star (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and The Spell.

For several years he was the Deputy Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and was one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 1993.

Alan Hollinghurst lives in London.

For more information please contact:
Camilla Elworthy, Picador Publicity
T: 020 7014 6178
E: c.elworthy@macmillan.co.uk

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Sceptre, £16.99

In a bold and unconventionally structured work, David Mitchell combines the stories of six individuals to create a masterful whole, which is both thought provoking and incredibly exhilarating.

The morality and ambitions of a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified ‘dinery server’ on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation echo and impact on each others stories and point to a terrifying vision of the world’s future and challenges our ability to shape not only our destiny but those that will come after us.

David Mitchell was born in Southport in January, 1969.

His first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best book by a writer under 35 and was also shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, number9dream, was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

In 2003 he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

He also returned to Britain from Japan, where he spent several years.

David Mitchell now lives in Ireland.

For more information please contact:
Jocasta Brownlee, Sceptre Publicity
T: 020 7873 6176
E: jocasta.brownlee@hodder.co.uk

The Master by Colm Tóibín
Picador, £15.99

In The Master, Colm Tóibín tells the story of Henry James, an American-born genius of the modern novel who became a connoisseur of exile, living among artists and aristocrats in Paris, Rome, Venice and London.

In January 1895 James anticipates the opening of his first play in London. He has never been so vulnerable, nor felt so deeply unsuited to the public gaze. When the production fails, he returns, chastened, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost.

Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man whose artistic gifts made his career a triumph but whose private life was haunted by loneliness and longing, and whose sexual identity remained unresolved. Henry James circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, he was lauded and admired, yet his attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.

Colm Tóibín was born in Wexford, Ireland in May, 1955.

He is the author of four other novels, The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize.

His non-fiction includes Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona, The Sign of the Cross and Love in a Dark Time. Colm Tóibín's debut play, Beauty in a Broken Place, has recently premiered in Dublin.

Colm Tóibín lives in Dublin.

For more information please contact:
Camilla Elworthy, Picador Publicity
T: 020 7014 6178
E: c.elworthy@macmillan.co.uk

I’ll Go to Bed at Noon by Gerard Woodward
Chatto & Windus, £12.99

Colette Jones has had drink problems in the past, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to alcohol. Her oldest son has thrown away a promising musical career for a job behind the counter in builders’ merchants, and his drinking sprees with his brother-in-law Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher who seems to see alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution, have started to land him in trouble with the police.

Meanwhile Colette’s recently widowered older brother is following an equally self-destructive path, having knocked back an entire cellar of homemade wine, he’s now on the gin, a bottle a day and counting. Who will be next? Her youngest son had decided to run away to sea, but when her own husband hits the bottle Colette realises she has to act.

As the pressure builds on Colette to cope with these damaged people, her own weaknesses begin to emerge, and become crucial to the outcome of all their lives.

Gerard Woodward was born in London in December, 1961.

His first novel, August, was published in 2001 to great acclaim and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. He has also written three award-winning collections of poetry.

Both novels August and I’ll Go To Bed At Noon draw heavily from Gerard Woodward’s own personal family history. August focuses on his mother’s increasing dependency on glue and his second novel I’ll Go To Bed At Noon concentrates on his brother, a gifted musician who is taken out of school early to study at the Royal Academy of Music.

Gerard Woodward lives in Bath.



ManBooker