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King to FSG: Get Real

by Diane Roback -- Publishers Weekly, 4/2/2007 6:32:00 AM

For FSG, the good news is that Stephen King is touting one its debut novels in his influential Pop of King column in Entertainment Weekly. The bad news is he's blasting the publisher for letting literary pretensions get in the way of good packaging.

In EW’s April 6 issue, King praises first-timer Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork, a thriller set in Thailand, calling it a "great story" that "cooks like a mother," with a "narrative voice full of humor and sadness." But King also excoriates its "drab" cover and title. "Why, why, why would a company publish a book this good and then practically demand that people not read it?" he asks. "Why not put the heroine on the jacket… [and] "sell this baby a little?"

He suggests that the book’s visual presentation might reflect a belief that "readers who liked The Memory Keeper’s Daughter are too dumb to enjoy a killer novel like Fieldwork," reviving the topic he addressed at the 2003 National Book Awards, when he assailed publishing’s traditional divide between literature and popular fiction ("elitist twaddle," he scoffed in EW).

FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi responded to the criticism by saying, "We're delighted that Stephen King loves Fieldwork as much as we do. If The Corrections and Gilead were failures, I hope and pray that we can keep on failing with Mischa Berlinski and all our other great young authors."

The advanced reader copy for Fieldwork, by the way, had a cover much closer to what King describes,

with a close-up of a woman's face. Though arguably also literary in tone, the ARC cover is considerably more striking than the image FSG ultimately chose.

"It's funny about that first jacket design," said the book's editor Lorin Stein. "That's the heroine. In the end, though, we thought it made the book look a little bit documentary. Plus, from the beginning we loved that picture of the jungle -- its mystery and depth. Different strokes."

Knowing King's track record for spurring sales--his plugs have helped boost interest in books including Ron McLarty’s The Memory of Running, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men--should help FSG take the jab in stride.