Doubleday to Publish New Grisham Novel This Fall
-- Publishers Weekly, 5/31/2007 1:13:00 PM
After John Grisham’s foray into nonfiction with last October’s The Innocent Man, he’ll return to fiction with Playing for Pizza, which Doubleday will release on September 25. Doubleday Broadway president and publisher Stephen Rubin bought North American rights from David Gernert of the Gernert Company.
Rubin says the "short novel" is about a fallen American football star who can’t find work in the NFL, so his agent sends him to Italy to play for the Parma Panthers. The book tells of the quarterback’s misadventures in small-town Italy and was inspired by a trip Grisham took to Italy to research 2005’s The Broker, which was set in Bologna. "I was pleasantly surprised to find real American football in Italy," Grisham says, "and as I dug deeper a novel came together. The research was tough—food, wine, opera, football, Italian culture—but someone had to do it."Rubin called the book "a romp about a fish out of water that had me laughing out loud." Dell will publish Playing for Pizza in paperback in fall 2008.Grisham plans to return to the courtroom for his next novel; Doubleday said it will publish the next legal thriller by Grisham, who built his career on the genre, in spring 2008.
