Epic New York Novel for Random
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 2/10/2003
Random House executive editor Kate Medina bought an ambitious first novel about New York City in the 1870s by Elizabeth Gaffney, who has been a longtime editor at the Paris Review. It's a picaresque tale of an immigrant whose jobs range from working at P.T. Barnum's stables to helping build the Brooklyn Bridge; he falls in with a gang of thieves and has a romance with a woman of the docks. It's called Metropolis and is said to be in the grand manner of the Parisian novels of Victor Hugo. Medina bought North American rights (with hard/soft for Random Trade Paperbacks, too) from agent Leigh Feldman at Darhansoff & Verrill (who discovered Charles Frazier).
