Two-Book Deal for Zoetrope Discovery
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 8/6/2001
Gabriel Brownstein, who is a professor at the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York, is about to achieve publication via a classic route: a story of his in Zoetrope was spotted by agent Paul Cirone at the Aaron Priest agency, who called to ask if he had more. Brownstein put together a collection called A Boy Falling Out of the Sky, and last week Cirone sold it as part of a two-book deal (with a novel to follow) to Jill Bialosky at Norton. She bought North American rights and hasn't set a pub date. Cirone said the "wonderfully written" stories are a linked set about a group of boys growing up in New York in the 1970s (like Brownstein himself), and some of them pay deliberate literary homage to such masters as Auden, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne and Kafka.
