Hoffman Tale Is Breakout for Author, House
Bob Summer -- 2/9/98
Although William Hoffman's fiction has won a National Endowment for the Arts grant, been included in the Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize annuals, and received such honors as the Fellowship of Southern Writers' Hilsdale Prize for a lifetime body of work, being regarded as "a writer's writer," Hoffman laconically noted, "usually means your books are reviewed much better than they sell."The author of two story collections from LSU Press and another from the University of Illinois Press, the 72-year-old Virginia Cultural Laureate has also produced seven novels published at pre-Bertelsmann Doubleday; two released by LSU; and one brought out by Viking. But only his best-known Godfires (Viking, 1985), according to Hoffman's longtime agent, Emilie Jacobson at Curtis Brown, reached a guardedly unspecified "satisfactory midlist range" in sales. That limited embrace by book buyers may be on the verge of change, however. In April, Algonquin will publish Tidewater Blood, Hoffman's 11th novel, with an announced 20,000 first printing. It will be the North Carolina literary house's entrée into the suspense genre.In-house excitement, together with validating outside readers' reports, have prompted editorial director Shannon Ravenel, impressed by what she described as Hoffman's "finely honed literary skills and intuition for building fast-paced suspense," to request a sequel, for a projected Tidewater series. At its reps' urging, Algonquin is designing the jacket for the inaugural novel to proclaim its introduction of ex-con Charles LeBlanc. The black sheep of a pedigreed Virginia clan blown up (in the opening scene) during a reunion at its ancestral plantation, LeBlanc is in pursuit of a smarter-than-he-seems suspect and traces the crime back to West Virginia's abandoned coal mines. "Many West Virginians think of themselves as red-headed stepchildren, looked down upon by Virginians ever since the Civil War, when West Virginia split off from the Commonwealth after choosing what some in family-proud Virginia still call the wrong side. I tried to reflect this unresolved conflict in Tidewater Blood," explained Hoffman. The author is a West Virginia native (and son of a coal-mining operative) who's called Virginia home for 40 years, and who now lives in in Charlotte Court House below Richmond as professor and writer-in-residence at Hampden-Sydney College. Back To News---> |
