New Capote Coming
by Raya Kuzyk, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 9/30/2005
Just one day before the September 30 Sony Pictures Classics release of Capote--what would have marked its namesake's 84th birthday--Random House announced it will publish Truman Capote's long-lost first novel, Summer Crossing, on October 25.
The existence of the four handwritten notebooks that originally comprised the novel--which Capote began in 1943, tinkered with throughout the years, and later claimed to have destroyed--came to light in 2004 when they were found among manuscripts consigned by a relative of Capote's former house sitter. Later in 2004, just before the notebooks hit the Sotheby's auction circuit, Random House editor-at-large David Ebershoff read them and took an interest.
By June 2005, after much back-and-forth between longtime Random House editor Bob Loomis, Truman Capote Literary Trust trustee Alan U. Schwartz, Capote biographer Gerald Clarke and RH president Gina Centrello, Schwartz and Ebershoff finally closed a deal. Publication was accelerated, Ebershoff said, "when it became more and more evident that we were entering a Capote moment."
The novel follows socialite Grady McNeil's adventures in New York--Sotheby's v-p for books and manuscripts, Justin Caldwell, described it as "a pre-Breakfast at Tiffany's"--and will be released as a $22.95 hardcover with a 30,000 first printing.
The real question is: How well will a book Capote didn't think was good enough for publication do since, given all his successes, he seemed to have a very good sense of what would work? Ebershoff said bookstores so far have been ordering aggressively, "with a number of accounts, especially in the South, taking front-of-store quantities."|
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