First Fiction—Publishers Spring into Action

A bounty of novelists are hoping to strike bestseller gold with their debut offerings

by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 1/27/2003

Carolyn Parkhurst
The Dogs of Babel
Little, Brown (June)

Pregnancy works wonders as a deadline, says Carolyn Parkhurst, author of The Dogs of Babel. "I literally finished the manuscript the day before my son was born. I just hope I don't have to have a baby every time I want to write a book!"

Parkhurst, 32, has wanted to write since she was practically a baby herself. She wrote as a child, she says, and took creative writing classes in high school. At Wesleyan, she was an English major, then worked for three years in a bookstore before returning to graduate school (American University) for an MFA.

Though a number of her short stories have been published in such venues as the North American Review and the Crescent Review, "this is the first book-length project I've ever attempted," Parkhurst says. "I was a little nervous about undertaking a novel." Not to worry. The Dogs of Babel—the tale of a grief-stricken college professor whose dog Lorelei is the sole witness to his wife's death, and who subsequently attempts to teach his pet to communicate in order to fathom the odd circumstances—is already creating a buzz: it's been snapped up as both a BOMC main selection and Quality Paperback premier selection, and foreign rights have sold in half a dozen countries.

"I'm just so thrilled," says Parkhurst. "I just got the advance review copies in the mail today, and it looks like a real book for the first time. " As a writer, Parkhurst is "very interested in situations in which characters are willing to step out of their own lives, in which something pushes them down a path they'd never go down otherwise. Grief works well for that, and an unexpected death with loose ends left behind seemed a good way to accomplish it."

And just how did she come up with the idea of having her main character try and teach his dog to talk? "It's kind of hard to say," muses Parkhurst, who admits to being a dog lover herself. "In grad school, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek history of canine linguistics that was supposed to sound kind of academic. I came across it a couple of years later when I had some parts of this story but not the dog angle, and it started me thinking."

A fan of such authors as Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Ethan Canin, among others, Parkhurst says she's "very intrigued by writers who use fantastic elements in their writing, but I'm kind of grounded in reality. I didn't want to do anything that really breaks the rules of the world as we know it, which is why Lorelei never actually talks."

The novel took Parkhurst—who writes full-time—two and a half years to complete. She sent out query letters to a handful of agents and "mostly got form rejections." Douglas Stewart at Curtis Brown, however, asked to take a look at the manuscript. "He read it and said he wanted to sign me, and two weeks later he sold it," says Parkhurst. "I have friends who have spent a long time trying to sell their books, and I'm amazed it's happened so quickly."

As for what she has up her sleeve for the future, Parkhurst, whose son Henry will shortly be a year old, notes with a laugh, "I've just really gotten to the point where he has a more normal routine and I'm able to start writing again at all. I've started something, but I think it's a short story."

Sales Tips: In the words of editor Asya Muchnick, Dogs of Babel is "a touching story about the lengths that people are pushed to by grief and by love." And, although Little, Brown is putting "a huge push" behind the novel, Muchnick says that what they're really counting on is word of mouth. She tells PW that when she first received the manuscript, "I started reading it on the subway, not wanting to get to my stop because I didn't want to put it down. At home, I wouldn't talk to my husband, but went straight to my room with it. It moved me enormously, and when I finished it, around one in the morning, I ran to the phone and called Carolyn's agent and left a message saying that I had to have this book. I've never done that before or since."

Lauren Weisberger
The Devil Wears Prada
Doubleday (April)

If you're a 25-year-old former Vogue staffer who's written a deliciously witty and gossipy first novel that's about to be published with no small amount of fanfare, how do you celebrate? Something frilly from Miu Miu or perhaps something naughty from Manolo?

Not Lauren Weisberger: "I am totally intimidated by stores like Prada." So instead of shopping her way down Madison Avenue, this author is backpacking across Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Her fashion statement for the trip? "Dirty khakis and gross gym shirts," says Weisberger, laughing.

Like her leading lady, Andrea Sachs, the small-town girl with a degree from Brown who unexpectedly lands a job working for the editor of America's trendiest fashion magazine, Weisberger's first job out of Cornell was as an assistant to Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. An aspiring writer looking for a job in magazine publishing, Weisberger's priority had been words rather than wardrobe. When offered the job, she was sartorially unprepared for life at the center of the fashion universe. "Looking back, I can't believe how I showed up for work—Gap and Banana Republic basics. Everyone gave me a lot of leeway, but the other staffers did not look like me."

While Weisberger describes her time working with Wintour as "a great experience," Andrea finds herself working for the boss from hell—with a devilish haute couture twist. Miranda Priestly, the egomaniacal editor of Runway magazine, demands that Andrea do everything from sorting her dirty laundry to finding two embargoed copies of the newest Harry Potter so they can be sent by private jet to her daughters in Paris.

Weisberger may not have taken inspiration from Wintour, but she does admit to putting "the impossibly tall thin people and the ambiance at Vogue" to good use. So how did she get all that dishy dirt about fashion magazines? "Friends shared stories and as outrageous as it may seem, some of it actually happened to people I know. But the majority of it was 4 a.m., haven't-slept-in-72-hours, bizarre scenarios."

The Devil Wears Prada, Weisberger tells PW, began as a project for The Writer's Voice workshop. "I was at least a decade younger than anyone else. Everyone seemed to be working on something about terminal illness, marital difficulties or their sex lives and I was writing fun pieces about a young woman working at a magazine in New York. I like sarcastic and irreverent and I can't imagine writing something highly personal and intimate and sharing it with the world." When Weisberger's "fun" story had grown to 100 pages, her teacher encouraged her to start showing it around. Agent Deborah Schneider of Gelfman & Schneider sold the novel to Doubleday in May 2002.

With pre-publication publicity already underway and in-house enthusiasm running high, there is just one small hurdle to be overcome—just how does her publisher e-mail galleys to their author when she's on the road somewhere between Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok?

Sales Tips: Bought by executive editor Stacy Creamer in a "heated auction," Doubleday sees The Devil Wears Prada as The Nanny Diaries of summer 2003. The first printing of 100,000 will be supported by a confirmed Today appearance and a national tour. Film rights have been sold to Wendy Finerman, producer of Forrest Gump and Stepmom.

Monique Truong
The Book of Salt
Houghton Mifflin (April)

When Monique Truong was 20, she read The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, where Toklas recalled having placed the following ad: "Two American ladies wish to retain a cook—27 rue de Fleurus." According to Toklas, among the several cooks who sequentially entered the Stein/Toklas household, two were Indochinese. "It was such a shocker for me," Truong recalls. "To see someone who was somehow like me in their lives was an unforgettable discovery." Truong's first novel, The Book of Salt, germinated in that chance encounter.

Binh, the protagonist, is an exile from Vietnam, an outsider in Paris and in Western culture. Yet he's an acute observer of the brilliant and eccentric ladies who are lodestars to the Lost Generation and whose famous soirees for American expats carry an exotic literary aura. How Binh came into the orbit of the women he calls "my mesdames" and the revelation of his secret life, are elements in a book remarkable for its wit, elegance, insight and artistry.

Truong's own life has been a remarkable trajectory. Born in Saigon in 1968, she left Vietnam with her family when she was six. Though they first settled in North Carolina, Truong has no trace of a Southern drawl, unlike her mother and younger sister. "I guess I just watched a lot of television," she says. She chose Yale from a college guidebook, and after graduation, working briefly as a paralegal, she felt she must comply with her parents' wish that she have a profession, so she went on to Columbia Law School.

"But I always thought I'd be a writer," Truong explains, and she wrote some fiction during her years at Yale. However, "there was a period of about seven years when I must have sounded completely delusional," she says. "I told people I was a writer—without ever putting a word to paper."

Luck came her way when two friends asked her to collaborate in editing an anthology of Vietnamese poetry and prose, an experience that reactivated her own writing. She began The Book of Salt, working at it sporadically while she held down her day job. When she won a Lannon Foundation Writing Residency in 2001, the novel was in its final stages, "that incredibly difficult point in the process where you hold the entire narrative in your head."

Because Truong loves to cook, her descriptions of food in the novel are sensuously seductive. Historical cookbooks are one of her passions, making her feel like a time-traveler. "You have that taste in your mouth and you know that it tasted the same way to the person who wrote the recipe."

The book's title came rather late in the process, although to a reader it seems fated. Throughout, Truong writes about salt as condiment and metaphor—salt connotes tears and sweat, and also "the pure sea salt sadness of the outcast." A pair of antique silver salt and pepper shakers sat on Truong's desk as she was writing the book. To her, they symbolized the era she was writing about, and also Binh's sad, labor-intensive, but also secretly piquant life.

If all goes well, Truong says she hopes never to practice law again. Being a lawyer did help her in one respect in writing her novel, she says. "It taught me what servitude meant."

Sales Tips: Truong's debut, says Houghton Mifflin trade books publisher Janet Silver, is "entirely fresh and unique—it's unlike anything you've read about either Gertrude Stein or the exile experience. Anyone who loved The Remains of the Day will be drawn to Monique's gorgeous voice and compassionate vision." The book has already been chosen as a B&N Discover title for April, according to publicity director Lori Glazer; a seven-city author tour, and outreach events are planned for the Asian-American community, foodies and Francophiles.

David Amsden
Important Things That Don't Matter
William Morrow (April)

When David Amsden was two, he and his father used to eat raw oysters together. By the time he was six or seven, they were hanging out at a local dive bar. And though Amsden would later entertain friends with these stories, he certainly never thought of putting them on paper. "I was writing a ton of short stories, erudite stuff for The New Yorker about a world I didn't know—white, upper-middle class people with neurotic quirks living in a big city," says the 23-year-old Amsden, who was raised outside the Washington, D.C., area and lives in Brooklyn. "My friend said, 'These are good, you can write, but the best story I ever heard from you was going to the bar with your dad.' "

So Amsden, who was attending NYU as a journalism student and penning a gossip column for New York magazine, began writing about his childhood and his relationship with his father, who was divorced from his mother. "That first scene became the vision for the novel," he says. "Then I just kept feeding on things that maybe I remembered or maybe I heard from friends."

The result, Important Things That Don't Matter, is a sad and darkly humorous look at family and divorce and their impact on children. The 20-year-old nameless narrator, growing up surrounded by unhappiness, looks back at how his relationship with his father affected his issues of intimacy and sex. "I started to notice that there are people out there between the ages of, say, 16 and 30, who grew up when the divorce rate hit around 50%. Divorce became the norm rather than a phenomenon—that has its consequences on individuals and on society."

The novel takes place in Amsden's hometown, which he describes as "so without character, it could be anywhere." Says Amsden, "In a way, I look at it as an anti-coming-of-age story—it's really charting the young man and his father, and the young man and the women he meets, but if you read it closely enough you see the father's never around. Blank years happen in between chapters and women aren't around much. He doesn't have a good grasp on them and how to deal with his feelings toward them."

After graduating early from NYU, Amsden began writing his novel while continuing to work at New York. He contacted agent Melanie Jackson after learning that she represented Rick Moody, whose writing Amsden admired. Jackson agreed to represent him and sold the book in only a few weeks. As Amsden puts it, "Morrow really backed it. They passed it around to younger people, all of whom liked it, which was great because I never really thought it was a book for 38-year-olds. I thought it was for people my age."

The author is currently working on his second novel, which focuses on kids of the same generation and how they deal with each other, rather than with their parents. "I'm interested in how kids equate sex with death and disease before they equate it with love and intimacy—kids who know about AIDS before they have erections."

Sales Tips: Editor Sarah Durand, who took over Amsden's novel when Jennifer Hershey left Morrow, says, "What Jennifer spotted is that this was the voice of a generation that really hadn't been heard before. I'm only a bit older than David and I remember friends' parents divorcing left and right and you never heard from the kids—they were sort of in the background. David captures that in a sensitive yet dark and humorous, often heartbreaking way." Durand describes the novel by saying, "take a look at what Rick Moody said about families in the '80s, then take a look at the kids. David's humor is perfect for fans of Nick Hornby or Dave Eggers."

Deborah Schupack
The Boy on the Bus
Free Press (March)

Describing her novel as a "domestic thriller," Deborah Schupack offers this one-sentence plot synopsis: "A boy gets off the school bus at the end of the day, and his mother doesn't think he's the right kid." Alarmed, the mother, Meg, summons home to northern Vermont the boy's father, who is working in Toronto, and their 13-year-old daughter, away at boarding school, to assist in this crisis. Neither can confirm the boy's identity.

Now a freelance advertising copywriter at work on a new novel, Schupack trained as a UPI reporter before teaching writing and literature at Yale University, the New School and in Vermont. Although The Boy on the Bus is her first published novel, she remarks, "This is actually my third 'first' novel. One of my 'practice' novels had a similar family in a similar setting, but with a more conventional story." But that story lacked an essential ingredient: conflict, says Schupack. "I was terribly stuck—fatally, it turned out—in a previous novel, and I opened a blank file to write something, anything, else. I turned to an exercise I'm fond of giving my writing classes: Pit two characters in a direct conflict in which one must win and the other must lose, and write the struggle to its end. I sat down with this exercise in mind, and for some reason, the image that came to me was a mother trying to get her son off the bus. Don't ask me why. I don't have a son. I've never ridden a school bus. But I couldn't figure out why the boy would not get off the bus, why the mother couldn't get him off. Then I realized: he isn't the right child. I wrote the first chapter as a short story, but I couldn't get the mystery out of my head. So I wrote the novel."

Senior editor Amy Scheibe categorizes the book as psychological suspense. "It's compact" at 215 pages, she notes. "It pulls you right in. This is crossover fiction at its very finest: a well-crafted literary novel with commercial appeal." She comments, "I find it particularly interesting that the parents in the book are not married. It adds a whole dimension to the mother's panic."

Schupack says, "What I tried to do is render an impossible premise possible. How could it possibly be that a mother wouldn't recognize her own child? What I hope I've achieved is a novel that sustains two opposite possibilities at any one moment, like a holograph." She adds, "When writing this book, I had my eye on writers working with impossible premises—The Metamorphosis being the definitive example. Boy, is it brilliant."

Sales Tips: The novel is an alternate selection for both Doubleday Book Club and Literary Guild. Scheibe suggests this tag: "Shirley Jackson mixed with Russell Banks. Our intention is to build Deborah as a strong literary woman's author." Free Press will tour her throughout New England and plans an extensive publicity campaign. Schupack confides, "I'd love to think of booksellers putting my book into customers' hands and saying, 'She took something that seemed impossible and made it a familiar possibility, something recognizable in all our families.'"

Jennifer Vanderbes
Easter Island
The Dial Press (June)

Novels as ambitious as Jennifer Vanderbes's Easter Island come along about as often as a blue moon. Set in chapters that alternate between 1913 and 1973, with fictionalized accounts of German vice admiral Graf Von Spee's squadron's time in the South Pacific layered in, the book tells the story of Elsa Pendleton, wife of a British archeologist, and Greer Farrady, an American botanist, as their lives unfold 60 years apart on the remote tropical island famous for its colossal toppled monuments. Vanderbes first imagined the book as a novella, but nine months into the writing process she succumbed to the realization that she had "miscalculated" the number of elements she was trying to juggle: Not just a strong cast of characters, not just a remote island with a mysterious history, but also the ecology of the place, WWI military history, palenology (the study of ancient pollens), the Rapa Nui language and more. She threw out half the manuscript and continued from there.

"My overall feeling," she says, "was that I was in over my head at times. I'm not a military historian, a botanist, an Edwardian. I had to describe Edwardian fabric. It was an extra task in the midst of character motivation. I hadn't even heard of palenology when I began the book, but I figured if I could make sense of it, readers could too. It all ended up being fun." Fun, she says, is one of the most important lessons she learned from writing the book. "If you're having fun it's probably good."

A devoted reader as a child, Vanderbes, now 28, began to pursue writing as an undergraduate at Yale. A reporting stint at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after college gave her experience but sapped her creative juices for other projects, so she left the paper and embarked on a series of undemanding jobs, first in New York, then in Buford, S.C. "I wanted to write," she says. "I didn't care about a job going somewhere." She enrolled in Barry Hannah's writing class at the University of Mississippi and, at his urging, went on to graduate school at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She next went to the University of Wisconsin on a writing fellowship, and from there to Colgate University on a teaching fellowship. Agent Maxine Groffsky sold the book to Dial while she was teaching at Colgate.

Vanderbes has made two trips to Easter Island; the first when she was halfway through the book. "It was a wonderful, bizarre and fabulous trip. I was nervous at first that nothing would be as I wrote about it but strangely it was the complete opposite. There was an eerie déjà vu." This past summer, she went back again when she was two proofs away from the final manuscript—to check out some information and see a film made in the 1930s about the island's leper colony.

Vanderbes follows the dictum to write the book you can't find in the bookstore. "It's the pleasure principle again," she says. "If you're enjoying it there's something real in there."

Sales Tips: According to Dial Press editorial director Susan Kamil, the audience for Vanderbes's book is the one that appreciated A.S. Byatt's Possession, Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Ann Patchett's Bel Canto. "These are all extremely rich novels that began as literary tour de forces but whose appeal is wider. What makes Easter Island unique and remarkable is its combination of literary imagination, scientific research and emotional wisdom. It satisfies the novel-reading experience in so many ways. "Marketing plans include sponsorship announcements on public radio, print ads and free reading group guides for 12-copy prepacks. "The book is important to us," Kamil says. "The money we spend on advertising and publicity will be commensurate with that."

Meghan Daum
The Quality of Life Report
Viking (May)

The title of her New Yorker essay "My Misspent Youth" (also the title of her first book, a collection of essays from Open City Books) notwithstanding, Meghan Daum has no regrets about her debt, largely student loans to attend the graduate writing program at Columbia University. Or about leaving New York.

Speaking from her temporary abode in Los Angeles, where she's working on the screenplay for her novel, Daum recalls her decision to downshift lifestyles and move from Manhattan to Lincoln, Nebraska. "I was on the bus one day and I wondered what would happen if I moved to Nebraska. I dared myself. People were placing bets as to how long it would take until I got back—six weeks?" Instead, Daum has been in Nebraska four years and counting. "It's a great place to write," says the 32-year-old, "and I love the landscape. It's very austere and nondramatic. I tried to buy a farm a couple months ago and it didn't work out. I still want to buy a farm, not to farm it, but just to live in the farmhouse."

Before she pulled up stakes in the East, Daum went to Nebraska on assignment for a story about methamphetamine labs, an interest she and the protagonist in her novel, Lucinda Trout, share. However, Manhattanite Lucinda's destination is Prairie City, U.S.A., which Daum is careful to describe as "its own entity; it's not in Nebraska." The similarities, however, don't end there. Lucinda is a journalist on the thong underwear/lifestyle beat for TV's Up Early, while Daum writes for Self, NPR's This American Life, Vanity Fair and Vogue. Lucinda is the more impetuous of the two. Her decision to move to Prairie City was based on fantasies about Sam Shepherd and wheat fields, rather than careful reasoning like Daum: she'd been there once.

Despite the similarities, Daum stresses that the novel is, in fact, "a fictional work. I created it as a framework to talk about issues having to do with class and identity, which could have gotten thorny in nonfiction. Unlike race or gender, we have this belief we can transcend our class. The novel's really about what it is to have an authentic life. In some ways the novel is a story with my essayistic tendencies snaking around it. I found writing fiction really freeing. I was laughing a lot when I was writing the book."

Given the narrator's age, late 20s, Daum is concerned that The Quality of Life Report not be classified as Chick Lit. "Lucinda ends up with a man," says Daum, "but there's a lot going on. I'm not a big reader of 'women's fiction.' The books I like are by 'mean' male authors—Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Richard Ford—writing that doesn't pander."

Sales Tips: Says Viking editor-at-large Carole de Santi, "what attracted me to the book was the voice and the clear intelligence telling this story and making pithy observations about herself and the culture. I think readers are going to respond to more than just a love story out West. What engaged me is the idea of our quality of life and what it feels like." So that others can weigh in on the ql factor in their communities, Viking just launched an online newspaper, TheQLReport.com.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
The Dirty Girls Social Club
St. Martin's (May)

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez started young. "By the age of four, I was pretending to write," she remembers. "My dad's a professor at the University of New Mexico, and he was always writing. My mom got a master's degree in creative writing. So writing is just what you did." The payoff proved monumental. Last June, St. Martin's executive editor Elizabeth Beier prevailed in an auction for The Dirty Girls Social Club with a bid of $500,000. Valdes-Rodriguez, now 33, admits, "I'm still shocked anyone would want to buy a novel of mine."

After growing up in Albuquerque, where she now lives with her husband and son, Valdes-Rodriguez earned her undergraduate degree in music from Berklee College of Music in Boston. While living in Boston, she covered Latino issues as a staff writer at the Boston Globe for five years. She subsequently held the same post at the Los Angeles Times for two years. Through it all, fiction called. "I've written several terrible novels," she confesses, "although I thought they were good thrillers at the time." When one made the publishing rounds, word came back, "Don't quit your day job."

Then in 1994, Valdes-Rodriguez took a new tack with Merengue, named for the dance originating in the Dominican Republic. (Dominicans were among those on Valdes-Rodriguez's beat at the Globe.) Drawing on a variety of Hispanic heritages (Valdes-Rodriguez's father's background is Cuban, her mother's Irish), she metamorphosed Merengue into The Dirty Girls Social Club, in which six Latinas who met at Boston University reconnect twice a year to update one another on their lives. After news broke about the auction and the book's subject, the Associated Press dubbed Valdes-Rodriguez a "Latina Terry McMillan."

Although understanding society's penchant for easy tags, Valdes-Rodriguez sighs when reminded of the sobriquet. "I view the book as a mainstream novel about women's friendships," she says. "I chose to write about six Latinas because I wanted to explode stereotypes. I wanted to find an entertaining way to help people understand that Latinos are as diverse a group as Americans are overall."

As for that title, Valdes-Rodriguez says, "These women call themselves sucias, which means dirty girls. It started out as kind of a joke for them." Despite its ethnic flavor, Valdes-Rodriguez hopes the book isn't ghettoized. "When I started writing, I didn't set out with any demographics in mind. After all, you don't have to be a dead girl to like The Lovely Bones." And what about any political overtones? "I think maybe the book is political, but not in a heavy way. It's like a candy bar with vitamin powder inside."

Sales Tips: In Beier's words, "These are very strong characters that you hook onto instantly. There's a lot of plot with some scenes that made us cry, but there's also a lot of light flirting, a bit of a smart-ass tone." Taking a strong position, the house plans a 150,000 first printing and a 12-city tour. Recognizing the book's niche potential, SMP will also release a simultaneous Spanish-language edition in trade paper. Film rights have been signed by the producer of Spider-Man (last year's top-grossing film), in association with Jennifer Lopez's production company.

Mick Foley
Tietam Brown
Knopf (July)

Mick Foley started to write because he didn't like the way his autobiography was going. A professional wrestler (ring name: Mankind), he was charismatic enough to make ReganBooks believe his story could sell, so the publisher assigned an "autobiographer" to him. Five chapters along, Foley decided he could do better on his own, finished the book, rewrote the first chapters and turned it in. Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks, sharp and funny, became a surprise bestseller, so he wrote another, bringing his life up to date; lo and behold, Foley Is Good: And the Real World Is Faker Than Wrestling also took off. Foley wrote a couple of children's books, one pegged to Christmas, one to Halloween. They sold, too. Writing, Foley discovered, was fun: "the only thing I could imagine doing that I liked as well as wrestling." Too bad he had run out of autobiographical material.

Wrestlers don't last forever, and Foley, now 37, retired in 2000 and wanted to keep writing. He thought about trying a novel, but didn't know how to start. Then he read Stephen King's book on writing and learned that fiction is about making up characters and telling stories. "That didn't seem so hard," he says. "After all, that's what I had been doing all my professional life." He came up with an unusual father-son story: the two are strangers to each other, the 17-year-old son just out of reform school (for murder at a tender age) but now trying hard to fit into small-town high-school life in upstate New York. The father, a crude caricature of macho slobdom (beer, broads, bodybuilding), has no apparent job, no apparent past and several locked rooms into which his son is not permitted. They don't seem to have much in common, especially as the son, soon deep in idealistic first love, has to endure his father's boisterous serial fornications in the next room. But there are surprising revelations to come.

"What's great about it," says Foley's editor, Victoria Wilson, "is that Mick has found a voice, besides being a natural storyteller. He has found some serious emotional material that reaches beyond the obvious to get to something unexpectedly moving and unusual. This is a book women will respond to, not just the men who would seem to be his natural audience."

Sales Tips: This one should be a joy to sell. Knopf is treating it as a serious novel, but it would be folly to ignore Foley's huge fan base. When he visited Wilson, she recalls, "People, some with kids in tow, would line up outside my office door for autographs. That doesn't happen with our other authors." Foley is an experienced entertainer, sure to be media catnip, and Knopf is sending him on a 13-city tour, though he says that since he will drive himself he's perfectly willing to go to more places if he's wanted. Hard to believe he won't be. Canny booksellers should check out Foley's DVDs and videos under all three professional names (Cactus Jack and Dude Love).

Suzan-Lori Parks
Getting Mother's Body
Random House (May)

Suzan-Lori Parks's play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and the year before that she was awarded a MacArthur grant in recognition of her contribution to the theater. She also heads the dramatic writing program at CalArts. Now the overachieving 39-year-old is branching out to fiction: her first novel, Getting Mother's Body is being published in May by Random House. Of the shift from one genre to the other, she says, "It helps with novel writing to have a sense of pace and structure. If you can write something that holds an audience in their seats for two hours, you know how difficult that is."

Getting Mother's Body centers on an African-American family in 1960s Texas looking for a cache of jewels buried with a body. Parks completed the manuscript just before Topdog/Underdog opened. "I'd been working on it for five years, and it was ready to be born," she says. "I counted backwards from the day of the opening and knew I had to write a chapter a day to be done by the sixth of April." That kind of determination and scheduling is central to this author's work ethic. Despite her great respect for the imagination, she recognizes that creativity alone is not enough. "The imagination is like a puppy," she explains. "It needs to be told not to eat the carpet. If you give it some structure it will be a happy, free, energetic, loving companion."

Ann Godoff, former Random House president and editor-in-chief, points to the structure of Getting Mother's Body as one of its strong points. "The story line is perfectly navigated, even though it's told in multiple voices and the central character around whom the action revolves is dead. You read the first couple of pages and you know you're in the hands of somebody who knows about narrative and voice."

Parks favors imagination over autobiography, and she laughs as she recounts how, after Topdog/Underdog opened to acclaim, she was often asked if she lived in a single room like the two brothers in the play. "Shakespeare was never a king or a murderer, as far as we know, but he wrote about brilliant murderers and kings," she says. "Now more than ever we need to embrace the imagination, because the imagination teaches us how to live and how to make the leap between what is and what could be."

Parks is currently using her own formidable imagination to write Hoops, a Disney musical about the Harlem Globetrotters , and is simultaneously adapting Toni Morrison's Paradise into a miniseries for Oprah Winfrey's production company. Parks is enjoying the restrictions of the miniseries format. "Basically, it goes chug chug chug chug chug commercial, chug chug chug chug chug commercial. You have to fashion it so it works with the commercial breaks," she says cheerfully. "It's a great exercise for me."

Sales Tips: Getting Mother's Body, which will have a 100,000-copy first printing, will be promoted through advertising in the New York Times and a feature in the Random House newsletter, and the book has received an advance quote from Richard Russo. The most anticipated sales tool, however, is the author's eight-city reading tour. Says Godoff, "She's going to be a triumph both on the independent side and in the chains. When they hear her, people are going to say, 'Wow.'"

Trading in Paper

Like most publishers, Riverhead selects a handful of debut novels each season to publish as paperback originals, with its most notable success being Jennifer Belle's Going Down, a 1996 bestseller. Co-editorial director Cindy Spiegel explains, "We choose books that are younger and should be cheaper for a more student-type audience, but also in general books that are more fun than serious."

One of Riverhead's choices this season is, logically enough, the April title Paperback Original by Will Rhode. Already published (under the title Paperback Raita) in the UK in May 2002, it's the story of Joshua King, an aimless young man living in India whose father dies and leaves him a fortune—on the condition that he write a bestselling novel within five years. Spiegel re-edited the novel for a U.S. audience and worked to bring out certain themes, namely the struggle for originality. "I published The Beach by Alex Garland, and this is the book that comes after The Beach. In other words, it asks, how do you write a novel when someone's already written a novel defining your generation?"

While Riverhead has a long track record with such books, Hyperion will publish 50,000 copies of its first-ever trade paperback original, Men and Other Mammals by Jim Keeble, in May. Executive editor Leslie Wells says, "It's very much in the vein of the Shopaholic books and other trade paperback novels that have been doing so well lately. We feel it's Nick Hornby for women."

Another paperback writer whose publisher is comparing him to Nick Hornby, as well as to Roddy Doyle, is Shawn McBride, author of Green Grass Grace, a Touchstone title due in March. McBride found inspiration for the story of a 13-year-old altar boy in 1984 Philadelphia in a school photograph of himself at 13. The author recalls, "I had these huge wings, feathered hair and I had the dumbest outfit on—a navy blazer, maroon tie and white pants and shoes. I thought I was hot stuff in that outfit." McBride, who currently works as a court officer in Philadelphia ("I breathe and bleed Philly," he says), long sensed that he would write a book one day, although he admits, "It's something I always said to myself and to women in bars."

Words aimed at women can also be found in Karen Brichoux's Coffee and Kung Fu, an entry in the so-called chick-lit market due out in July from New American Library/Penguin. Brichoux's heroine, Nicci Bradford, is a 26-year-old living in Boston, who, when faced with difficult choices, poses herself the question WWJD? Those initials, however, don't stand for what one might think: Nicci, a fan of kung fu movies, bases her approach to life on the teachings of Jackie Chan rather than Jesus. "Many chick-lit novels are too episodic and cynical for my taste," explains executive editor Ellen Edwards. "This one has got plenty of heart and it's well-structured."

Also in the burgeoning chick-lit category is May's The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker, one of the first titles from the new Pocket paperback imprint Downtown Press. The protagonist, like the author herself, is a "song reader" who analyzes people based on songs that stick in their heads. In addition to an eight-city reading tour, Tucker will do a 20-city radio satellite tour, and the press plans to compile a CD of the novel's songs. Says senior editor Amy Pierpont, "We really think of her as a career writer, which is why, with economic times the way they are and price point more of an issue now than ever, we didn't want to put her in a hardcover format."

Jim Knipfel, author of The Buzzing, a Vintage paperback original coming in March, is already well-established in his writing career with two memoirs—Slackjaw (Tarcher, 1999) and Quitting the Nairobi Trio (Tarcher, 2000)—under his belt, as well as a gig as columnist for the New York Press. Of his fiction debut he says, "This is going to sound crass, but the difference I found between writing fiction and writing nonfiction is that writing fiction is much easier. I could just make crap up as I went along." The Buzzing recounts the adventures of reporter Roscoe Baragon, who begins to believe some of the crazy theories his sources spout. "To be honest, there's not really anything too profound to be said about it. It's just a funny story, is all," shrugs Knipfel, but Vintage/Anchor editor-in-chief Marty Asher says admiringly, "In the times we live in, it's really hard to still be weird. Jim manages it in this book."

More sedate surprises emerge from Jordan Ellenberg's The Grasshopper King, an April Coffee House Press title. Senior editor Chris Fischbach reports, "I was drawn to two elements of the novel which probably don't sound very exciting: a main character who barely says a word, and lots of checkers playing. This novel could start a national checkers craze." It's set in the Gravinics department (dedicated to the study of an obscure European country) of a fictitious university. Ellenberg himself teaches at Princeton and writes a column on mathematics for the on-line journal Slate—as a child math prodigy, he was featured by The National Enquirer as a math prodigy and interviewed by Charlie Rose on CBS's Nightwatch.

Albert Goldbarth's Pieces of Payne (Graywolf Press, Apr.) considers the laws of physics rather than mathematics. Executive editor Anne Czarniecki considers the work a mind-bending original. "There's not a traditional narrative or novel form in this work, and yet he makes these amazing connections. You finish the book and you're a little bit dizzy, but perhaps you're also wiser." Goldbarth is no novice—he's written more than 25 books of poetry and essays and has received the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry and the PEN West award. He didn't, however, consciously set out to craft his first novel. He recalls, "It came to me the way a 14-line sonnet or a haiku might come to me and said, 'Albert, work on me.' "

Should We Call This Kid-Lit?

Kids say the darndest things—especially, it would seem, fictional children. While the coming-of-age novel—from The Member of the Wedding to Anywhere But Here—is anything but new, what is new this season is a crop of debut adult novels with younger-than-usual protagonists.

One of the youngest is the eponymous narrator of Bruiser (Atria, Mar.), who turns 10 during the course of the novel. To create the character, author Ian Chorão consulted numerous books about young people, including Susan Minot's Monkeys and Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, but most of his inspiration derived from an unlikely source. "The book I went back to time and again was The Stranger by Camus," he says. "His voice is so concrete and he doesn't tend to talk in abstraction. It's very straightforward, yet he was able to discuss incredibly complex things, and that was the challenge of writing from a kid's point-of-view."

Another author who has met that challenge is Laura Moriarty, whose The Center of Everything will be published by Hyperion in July. Ten-year-old narrator Evelyn Bucknow tells of a mother-daughter relationship in which she is often the more mature player. Hyperion editor-at-large Leigh Haber admires Moriarty's ability "to get into the heads of young people, retaining their innocence, while at the same time understanding that their optimism may not evolve into happiness." Haber muses that perhaps a culture of therapy and our ongoing infatuation with youth are fueling this spurt of such books. "People continue to explore what took place in their childhoods longer and longer throughout their lives," she says. "It probably has to do with therapy and wanting to understand why we are who we are."

Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu by Stephanie Rosenfeld (Ballantine, May) also depicts a mother-daughter relationship, this one between a 12-year-old and her peripatetic mother. The novel was the second in a two-book deal for the author, whose short story collection, What About the Love Part?, Ballantine published in May 2002. Nancy Miller, Ballantine editor-in-chief, heard echoes of other writers in Rosenfeld's work—"She has some similarities with Pam Houston. Her writing also evokes Ordinary People."

Shaye Areheart, publisher of Harmony and Shaye Areheart Books, sees Beth Bosworth, author of the August Shaye Areheart title Tunneling, as "Italo Calvino and Lorrie Moore's godchild, since Calvino has that playfulness of narrative and magical realism, and Moore is the acute observer." The novel relates the real life and imagined heroics of 12-year-old Rachel Finch, an asthmatic girl living in New Jersey in 1968 whose fantasies have her traveling through time with a superhero named S-MAN to lend a hand to writers such as Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Keeping the novel squarely in the adult realm is the fact that it is narrated by Rachel as an adult. Areheart says of the mix of politics, history, literary references, humor and magical realism, "What makes this a distinctly adult book is the scope of its ambition."

The narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, happens to be 15, but his age is perhaps less crucial to the narrative than his particular malady: autism. Doubleday Broadway editor-in-chief Bill Thomas, who acquired the book, has a history with such characters. "I edited Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, which featured a narrator with Tourette Syndrome, and Aimee Bender's An Invisible Sign of My Own, which featured a narrator with obsessive-compulsive disorder," he says, "but I don't have a disease-of-the-week complex as far as I know." Thomas adds that it was the choice of "a narrator who is incapable of processing emotion to narrate a novel in which the subject is the human heart" that drew him in.

Tom House, author of The Beginning of Calamities, a June debut from Bridge Works, purposely made the protagonist of his novel an 11-year-old "to escape the coming-of-age label." House distinguishes between adolescents and children, and places Danny Burke squarely on the "pre-sexual" side of the dividing line. In The Beginning of Calamities, Danny writes and insists on appearing in a passion play at his Catholic elementary school in the Long Island suburbs. "It's based on this humiliating memory of something similar that happened to me in the fifth grade, and I still get hot in the face when I think about it," says House. "I figure if something creates that really shameful feeling, it's probably good fodder for fiction."

Also somewhat autobiographical is Sasha Troyan's Angels in the Morning (Permanent Press, Mar.). Even the cover has an autobiographical twist: it's a photograph of the author and her sister when they were young, wearing handmade dresses. The narrator is a 10-year-old girl being raised in the south of France, which is where Troyan herself grew up. The similarities don't stop there. "I really did have this amazing nanny who used to do belly dances and was an alcoholic," says Troyan. "I felt these characters deserved to be remembered."

Collected for the First Time

The list of debuting short story collections is particularly lengthy this season, and here are just a few.

"One of the things I love about A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies is its use of exotic locations," says HarperCollins executive editor Gail Winston. "The Third World aspects are very strong, the way Western countries deal with developing countries and the way people use science, medicine or religion to order their world." Author John Murray, an Australian doctor who has done much relief work around the world, sets the stories in Africa, Asia, even America. "They're long," says Winston. "Some span decades and are multi-generational with great female characters. The overall feel is unusual in that it's very international." Enthusiasm for the March title has spurred the house to project a first printing of 75,000.

A faraway land also positions Maura Moynihan's Yoga Hotel (ReganBooks, May). "All the stories take place in India," says associate editor Aliza Fogelson. "What I was attracted to was the clarity and simple elegance of Maura's depiction of the meeting of East and West in a very real, detailed way. There is nothing stereotypical here. Maura shows rather than tells, and she allows you to draw your own conclusions." Moynihan, daughter of former U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, went to live in India in her youth. Today she still divides her time between the U.S. and New Delhi, making her a longtime witness to a culture in which the opposites of poverty and ostentation can co-exist.

Upon discovering Mary Swan's "The Deep," the 2001 O. Henry Award first-prize winner, Random House executive editor Kate Medina reports, "I couldn't stop reading." She was so taken with Swan that "I tracked her down through The Malahat Review," which had published her short fiction. "Mary captures something inexpressible, something ineffable about life," explains Medina. "The stories are all about the connection between people and between people and places and how those connections vibrate." The settings in the April collection (The Deep and Other Stories) span time and geography from the horrors of WWI to life on an Israeli kibbutz. "She finds the emotional undertow within people and puts it on the page," Medina says. Advance quotes from Alice Munro and Mary Gordon agree.

The aura of a canal-crossed city wafts through Venetian Stories (Pantheon, May) by Jane Turner Rylands. "She has lived there since 1973, so she knows Venice extremely well," says senior editor Shelley Wanger. "It's a strangely closed society, something just a little bit sinister. In each of the 12 stories, Jane focuses on a particular individual, whether it's the Postman or the Architect or the Mason, but what is especially interesting is how the characters overlap from one story into another. They intertwine, and the stories have Saki-like twists." Ohio-born Rylands "gives you a sense of Venetian daily life," says Wanger. "You feel you get to know how people live amid the intricacies of what is essentially a small town and its hidden inner workings."

The 17 stories about Maceo, the black protagonist of The First Thing Smoking (Ballantine/One World, Aug.) by Nelson Eubanks, are indelibly interconnected, says executive editor Dan Smetanka. "Chapters alternate between the coming-of-age of a young boy in Manhattan and later glimpses of him as a young man in Brazil. This is a very ambitious collection that builds in power until the two strains converge in the final two stories." The book's ethnic strengths are evidenced by its One World imprint, but Smetanka is convinced that its components of racial tensions, politics and raging hormones will speak to a wide variety of readers.

A boy's youth in 1960s North Carolina is recalled in the title story of The Music of Your Life (Simon & Schuster, Apr.) by John Rowell. "There's a real sense of nostalgia, although the stories bridge time from the '60s to the present," says senior editor Chuck Adams. "These are gay stories dealing with escape, fantasy, the love of movies and music and trying to find yourself there. In one story a six-year-old boy is excited about going to see Mary Poppins. We meet him again at 14, when he's excited about going to see Cabaret. Years later, he tries to convince the guy he's dating to go see Cruising. Some of the stories are very funny, but all are touching and some are very moving. The book is southern, it's gay and it's literary, but the writing is so exceptional, it should reach well beyond a gay audience."

Another southern lad follows quite a different path in Trouble with Girls (Algonquin/Shannon Ravenel, Mar.) by Marshall Boswell. Director of her own imprint, Ravenel says, "This is a story cycle that starts in Memphis when the character named Parker is 12 going on 13 and ends with him going on his honeymoon. Parker is his own worst enemy. He's sort of a slacker, and while he's on the make, the girls he encounters chew him up and spit him out—until he meets Rachel." While Parker is not amused by what he goes through, the reader is. "It's very much a guy's book," says Ravenel, "but we think women will enjoy it too." She pauses and adds wryly, "When they read it, women will feel slightly superior."

The latest winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction published by the University of Georgia Press is the colorfully entitled Eyesores (Mar.) by Eric Shade, who joins such previous honorees as Ha Jin, Rita Ciresi and Antonya Nelson. "The stories in Eyesores are definitely literary," says press director Nicole Mitchell. "They also have a lot of dark humor." Shade's milieu is a fictional town in western Pennsylvania where economics and dreams have taken a nosedive. Things are so bad that in the last of these interrelated stories, two men head for Pittsburgh with a contract for a killing that they hope will give them a head start on the remunerative road to crime.