Very Smart, Anita, Very Smart
by Daisy Maryles -- Publishers Weekly, 4/9/2001
This past January, while Anita Shreve was on a 15-city tour for Little, Brown's trade paperback edition of Fortune's Rocks, she gave fans at each of her bookstore events a sneak preview of her newest work, The Last Time They Met. Evidently, the technique worked, as that novel debuts in the #10 spot on our fiction chart. (Fortune's Rocks spent a total of 12 weeks on our lists in its hardcover and trade paper editions.) The Boston Herald has chosen Shreve's latest as its April book club selection, and NBC's Weekend Today will be talking with the author on May 5. Shreve, just back from a whirlwind European book tour, will be making several store appearances in the New England area this month and next. LB reports that The Last Time had a 185,000-copy first printing. But that's not all. The mass market edition of Shreve's 1997 novel, The Weight of Water, snags the #7 spot; published on March 1, it has just over 480,000 copies in print. The film version of Weight, starring Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley, is slated for fall release. All this and Oprah, too: back in March of 1999, The Pilot's Wife was selected by Ms. Winfrey for her on-air book club; that title spent 50 weeks on our trade paperback list, 19 of them in the top spot.
With reporting by Dick Donahue.
