First Impressions

As Esquire's literary editor, Adrienne Miller navigates an ocean of fiction. "Including unsolicited manuscripts, we probably receive 1,000 submissions a month," says Miller, now a New Yorker who grew up in Akron, Ohio. "Out of those, we publish six to eight stories a year." Last year, when the magazine won the 2004 National Magazine Award for Fiction, Miller's picks included Arthur Miller, Stephen King and George Saunders. Thus, the odds for hopefuls like Miller herself are less than heartening.

And her own writing? "I wrote short stories in college, but they were unbelievably terrible," she concedes. "I'm too long-winded, actually. The Coast of Akron started as a short story five years ago, and I couldn't give it up."

Her position exerted its own influence on her debut work. "I'm a merciless critic, as anyone in my job would have to be," Miller says, "so I was able to look at my own novel dispassionately." FSG calls her work "dazzlingly ambitious and hilarious." Her novel fits her standards. "My taste in fiction has remained constant since I was in my teens," Miller says. "I particularly like comic novels written in a high style." About The Coast of Akron, Miller observes, "I'd say it was comic/sad. I started with the characters and the plot stuff just kind of happened."

The characters include Lowell Haven, a famous artist who mysteriously stopped painting; Jenny, his former wife; Merit, their alienated daughter; and Fergus, the man with whom Lowell currently lives. Akron is a primary setting, but so is mid-'70s London, when and where Jenny and Lowell met.

"For the first three years of its life, the novel was set in Portugal," Miller says with a hint of surprise, "a country to which I've never been and about which I only had foggy romantic notions. The novel wasn't moving, but I knew I also wanted to include a blimp and tires. When I figured out the plot after three years and moved it to Akron, I wrote 85% of it in a year."

Despite her geographical ties, Miller says, "It's not a thinly veiled autobiographical novel. My only goal was to write a book with living characters. The Havens are quite over the top in every way. They're difficult and complex, but everybody does end up in the same room." And what of Akron? "It's not a realistic depiction," she says. "It's Akron as a state of mind."

—Robert Dahlin

Sales Tips: "Adrienne is an incredibly sharp writer," says FSG executive editor Eric Chinsky. "The characters are not the most lovable ones you'll ever meet, but they are presented with a sly, ironic tone throughout. In fact, the book made me laugh out loud, but the laughs aren't cheap. There is no shtick. I don't want to overstate comparisons, but readers, especially younger readers who like Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith, will like this. Adrienne's book is not as experimental as theirs, but it has a real energy and exuberance, and it touches on big truths about family and desire and the need to own other people."

Wesley Stace, Misfortune
Little, Brown (Apr.)

"Wes is a real writer, not a musician who happens to have written a book," says senior editor Judy Clain about Wesley Stace, a young Brit who is known to a large community of music fans as the singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding, with 13 albums to his name. If Misfortune takes off the way Little, Brown hopes, that fan base will adjust to the change in name as word of the novel, an epic coming-of-age story, spreads. "The book is incredibly imaginative," says Clain. "It has a modern sensibility while being a Dickensian cliffhanger."

Indeed, Stace says his book was influenced not just by Dickens but also by Laurence Sterne, Anthony Trollope, William Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell. "This is my comfort reading," he says. "I wrote a novel of the type I love to read." Misfortune was sparked when Stace wrote the song "Miss Fortune," about a boy who is raised as a girl by the wealthiest man in 19th-century England. The first line, "I was born with a coat hanger in my mouth," set the stage for the unusual narrative, though Stace says it doesn't take a "postmodern turn" until after the first two verses. "The lyrics hinted at a bigger story that started with a backstreet abortion. I wrote the book as a great fan of literature, but also I wanted to finish the song."

Stace, who describes his singing self as "the bastard son of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez," describes his book as "a bodice ripper, with a guy wearing the bodice." He showed the novel's first hundred pages to author Rick Moody, who advised him to finish the book before trying to get it a contract. "That was good advice," Stace says. A chance meeting four years ago with Grove Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin at a PGW party at BEA, where Stace was performing, sparked Stace to look for a literary agent. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh at William Morris, the first agency to which he sent the finished manuscript, snatched him up immediately and negotiated a two-book contract.

Stace says he's always thought of himself as a writer. His early success as a performer led him to leave Cambridge in 1990 (he had been pursuing a Ph.D. in social and political science) and move to the U.S., first to San Francisco and eventually to New York, where he now lives. The hardest thing about novel writing, Stace says, is the immensity of the worlds that need to be juggled. "You have to keep so many things in the air at the same time. I'd never done anything like it. Hopefully, I can do it again, but I have no confidence I'll be able to."

—Suzanne Mantell

Sales Tips: Clain describes Misfortune as "a surprising debut from a singer, a Dickensian comedy in the tradition of The Crimson Petal and the White with a touch of Jeffrey Eugenides." That Stace already has an audience is a huge plus, she says. "He's very promotable. There are lots of ballads in the book. He'll go to cities he's gone to before with his music. He'll read and sing." A CD of ballads from the book will be out in July, which should feed sales. And plans are firm for editions in England, France, Holland, Israel and Italy.

As Richard McCann puts it, "It took me a long time to admit that this was at heart a difficult love story between a mother and her son." A long time indeed—McCann worked, on and off, on his elegiac first novelfor more than 17 years. In fact, Dan Frank, now Pantheon's editorial director, was a junior editor at Penguin when, in 1986, he signed up McCann for a work of fiction based on a story that had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Between then and now, McCann published a collection of poems, Ghost Stories; co-edited the anthology Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic; received several prestigious fellowships; and became codirector of the graduate program in creative writing at American University in Washington, D.C., where he now resides. "At several points, I was also stopped by what I'll call Life Itself: in May 1996, I underwent a liver transplant after waiting 13 months for a donor organ. For a while, I was busy dying, and then I was busy with the work of being resurrected."

McCann explains that his 188-page book is "primarily the story of two brothers whose father suddenly died, and of their beautiful and complicated mother, whom the younger brother worshipfully imagines as 'Our Mother of the Late Movies and the Cigarettes, Our Mother of Sudden Anger, Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches.' This is the brother who narrates the stories, looking back after 30 years in an effort to understand a past that has held him captive even as he has attempted to create a life of his own."

Like his first-person narrator, McCann grew up in a post-WWII subdivision of identical brick houses in suburban Maryland. "Many of those who have read Mother of Sorrows regard it as being unquestionably a novel," notes the author, while others term it a story collection. "For me, the livelier question—at least while I was working on it—was whether it would turn out to be a work of fiction or a memoir. Ultimately, it became a work of fiction, because I ended up inventing and omitting a fair amount of stuff. But I think it reads like a memoir in that the narrator's retrospective examination of his life often has what strikes me as a kind of confessional urgency."

Designating Mother of Sorrows literary fiction, McCann is wary booksellers may shelve it among their gay and lesbian titles. "For the most part," he says, "I find the term 'gay writer' reductive. I say this not out of shame, not that at all, but out of loyalty to our human complexity and to our vast human interconnectedness to one another."

—Charles Hix

Sales Tips: Citing enormous in-house enthusiasm, Frank says Pantheon will pull out all the stops—including a 20,000-copy first printing, extensive advertising and an author tour—to insure the novel a wide readership. Frank likens the work's scope and power to This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White and That Night by Alice McDermott. In particular, Frank praises the way McCann "recreates the atmosphere and sensibility of the 1950s perfectly while simultaneously evoking a sense of longing and regret."

Short story writer Alicia Erian, 37, finds it easier to thank her agent, Peter Steinberg, in retrospect for pushing her to write a novel than she did at the time it was happening. "I was daunted by the idea of a novel. I didn't really want to do it," she admits. Nevertheless, she's happy she tried. "With a story, you write about a group of people and then say goodbye to them. You're not so involved. With a novel it's like living in a house with them and being constantly annoyed."

It's not clear how she could be annoyed with Jasira, the Arab-American 13-year-old who dominates Towelhead as she determinedly explores her awakening sexuality while living in Houston with her strict Lebanese father. "The starting point was that in fiction there seem to be a lot of women who go out with lots of men and we don't question it," Erian explains. "I wanted the book to be a prelude to that, to provide an explanation for certain appetites. I thought it would be interesting to talk about this when one of the parents is of another culture."

Erian herself grew up with an Egyptian father and a mother of Polish descent, though she says you'd have to go over the book with a magnifying glass to see similarities to her own life. She was influenced by Mary Gaitskill's story "Secretary," which is about a woman in an unhealthy sexual relationship. "It's very dark. Gaitskill put her character in a situation that's bad for her, but the reader is titillated. That's what good writing should do."

Erian, who teaches creative writing at Wellesley College, says the hardest part of novel writing was learning to relax. "You can't work too hard. You're working hard not to work hard. I used to hate the advice that your characters will tell you what to do, but they will. You have to trust your intuition, but who knows if you can until you've had some success?" Growing up, Erian says, the only thing she thought she could do was write stories and make her friend Barbara laugh. "We used to have a contest to see who could write the funniest thing." Later, after a story appeared in the Sun, a North Carolina magazine, things started happening. "No one was batting for me. It just took persistence and agitation. There was no need for connections, just hard work and good material. It's heartening."

—Suzanne Mantell

Sales Tips: Senior editor Marysue Rucci has tracked Erian's career since she was an underbidder on The Brutal Language of Love, a story collection published by Villard in 2001. She says Towelhead became "smaller" as Erian worked on it, creating something more universal: a clear-eyed rendering of a girl's sexual awakening. "She could have fallen into caricature and stereotype, but she didn't. She has a provocative voice that is deceptively simple and Jasira is such a compelling heroine." Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball bought film rights for his feature-film directorial debut. And Barnes & Noble has chosen the book as a 2005 Discover Great New Writers Selection—Summer Season.

Even though the events of September 11 are vital to the plot of Philip Beard's debut novel, the author says he had the idea for the story—a teenage girl writing to her baby stepsister who was killed in front of the family home in a car accident—long before that fateful day in 2001. Then he found it hard to get back into his novel after the terrorist attacks.

"I was walking my dog," says Beard, "and I was thinking, 'What right did I have to write about this personal tragedy?' " That, he explains, is when he decided to explore the emotional terrain of a teen girl's handling of her family's personal tragedy on that day of national loss. "My greatest fear is losing a child," says Beard, a father of two girls (ages five and nine) and stepfather of Cali, a 19-year-old woman who has lived with her mother and Beard since she was three.

"So the family structure is very similar," he says. "I don't think of Cali as my stepdaughter, although I thought she had a dynamic in her life that was more interesting than my own." Beard finished his first draft on September 11, 2002, and his agent sent it out the following spring. There were some close calls, but the novel was rejected; Beard's reworking met with further rejections.

So he decided to self-publish.

Then John Towle, owner of Aspinwall Bookshop in Beard's Pittsburgh neighborhood, offered to pass along the manuscript to Jason Gobble, his local Penguin rep. "I didn't think anything of it," says Beard. "Then literally the day before I was going to send the book to the printers, I got a call from Clare Ferraro, the president of Viking/Penguin, saying she wanted to make an offer on it." Beard adds, "I owe a lot of the credit to Jason and his championing of the book. Getting the sales force on board is usually step three or four. For me, it was step one."

Although Dear Zoe is written from the point of view of 15-year-old Tess writing to Zoe, a toddler when she died, the novel is not epistolary in style. As a stepchild, Tess navigates through the family tragedy feeling a bit like an outsider. (She even goes to live with her biological father, abandoning another half-sister.) Through writing about everything from her grief to her guilt, she starts to open her heart again. Tess's voice, says Beard, came to him naturally: "I heard it in my sleep—even before 9/11 was a part of it."

—Bridget Kinsella

Sales Tips: Thanks largely to Gobble's personal push, the Viking sales force is definitely bullish on Zoe. (The publisher has already increased the cities on Beard's tour from six to 13.) According to executive editor Carolyn Carlson, "This is a mesmerizing first novel with an utterly compelling voice and we think it'll take off in a big way." The demand for galleys, she adds, has been "overwhelming," and bookseller buzz has already begun.

Kevin Guilfoile first garnered attention by making people laugh. The former advertising executive's humorous essays have been published in McSweeney's, the New Republic and Modern Humorist, which led to his being asked to coauthor My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook by George W. Bush (Riverhead, 2001). However, Guilfoile trades chuckles for chills in his debut novel, Cast of Shadows. "I don't think there's one joke in it," Guilfoile admits. "It's pretty dark."

In this thriller, a grief-stricken fertility doctor specializing in reproductive cloning creates the perfect genetic replica of the man who raped and murdered his daughter. "The engine driving the novel is the fate of this little boy, whom we come to care for enormously, but also fear, because his genetic makeup is the exact replica of a cold-blooded killer," says Knopf editor Jordan Pavlin. "So Kevin has taken what appears to be a straightforward page-turner and woven important questions through it about good and evil, biology and destiny, the moral and ethical implications of genetic research, and the increasingly sophisticated field of assisted reproduction."

In order to present these questions and keep the narrative rolling, Guilfoile limited the technical writing. "Honestly, I did as little research as I could get away with," he tells PW. "I didn't want the book to get bogged down in the details of cloning. But I had the manuscript read and vetted by a doctor and a Chicago cop to make sure the details were believable."

Guilfoile attempted a comic novel before Cast of Shadows ("I promise you it will never see the light of day"), but he was always drawn to thrillers and says his writing background helped. "Writing humor is a terrific practice no matter what you want to write. Humor is all about the rhythm of language and all good writing needs elements of that," he says. "Also, writing humor and writing suspense are the same in that with both you're trying to get an involuntary response out of people, whether it's to make them laugh or to scare them. So, on the face of things, it might look like they're opposites, but when you deconstruct it, they're not all that dissimilar in terms of craft."

Working with Guilfoile, Pavlin reports, was thrilling in more ways than one. "He was quite masterful in his revisions, and I had telephone conversations with him that just gave me the chills—he would invent terrifying scenarios and resolutions on the spot, and you could just hear the gears turning."

—Michael Archer

Sales Tips: "This is astonishing," says Pavlin, "to have written something so conceptually ambitious and fresh, so cutting edge in its science and so impossible to put down." Early reads from booksellers, he adds, have been "unbelievably enthusiastic, and the in-ho use reaction has been absolutely passionate from every department." Knopf has a two-book contract with Guilfoile, Pavlin reports, and rights to Shadows have sold "at major auctions around the world." An extensive ad campaign in major newspapers, Web promotions and a 10-city author tour should also draw attention.

When Arlene Fleet heads North to college, she makes three promises to God: she'll stop fornicating outside of marriage, never tell a lie and never ever go back to Possett, Ala. The only thing she asks of God: make sure no one finds the body.

Jackson explains that Arlene began life as a bit player in a 1998 short story that was published in TriQuarterly, but she almost never made it to leading lady. "Gods in Alabama is a book that almost wasn't written," says Jackson. "I had two previous novels that had been shopped around and never sold. That whole process really broke my heart, and I'd come to the point where I thought I might as well stop beating my head against the wall."

Then she got a note from her agent, Jacques de Spoelberg. "When will I see something from you?" he asked. "You're one of my favorite writers." That note, Jackson recalls, "treated me with such respect. It made me realize that yes, I do want to be a novelist. I called him up and promised that he'd have something from me in 14 months." That something was Gods in Alabama.

Jackson, who grew up in the Florida panhandle and now lives outside Atlanta, knew she wanted to be a writer from age five. "I always had a story going in my head. And I had imaginary friends much longer than I want to admit." After attending "just about every college you could go to in the South," she finally earned a degree in English from Georgia State—and became an actress. "I traveled with a slapstick dinner theater that played military bases around the South—and not the Officer's Clubs. I was the girl in the low-cut blouse who said 'Oops' a lot."

Work on Gods in Alabama coincided with the arrival of Jackson's second child. "Let me tell you, women don't get novels written without a great husband and supportive friends. My husband, Scott, always treated my career as equally important, even when I wasn't earning any money. And he'll actually take the kids for a weekend so I can work!"

Sales Tips: "It's the rare novel that hijacks the affections of every reader I've given it to," says senior editor Caryn Karmatz Rudy. " Gods in Alabama is the perfect read for lovers of Fannie Flagg and Rebecca Wells, but it's also for fans of Six Feet Under. Joshilyn's characters are so real, so wonderfully flawed, funny and human, that I kept having to stop myself from addressing editorial comments to them, rather than to Joshilyn." Tapped for the lead spot on Warner's spring/summer list, plans have Jackson heading out this month for a series of pre-pub lunches and dinners with booksellers, followed by a 10-city media tour in April.