'Prague' Gets High Six
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 6/11/2001
A first novel about a group of young Westerners seeking to make their fortunes in the turbulent world of Budapest shortly after the collapse of communism has been sold for a high six figures by former publishing exec Marly Rusoff, now agenting as an affiliate of Carlisle & Company. It's by Arthur Phillips, a young writer who 10 years ago lived just the kind of frenetic existence in the Hungarian capital that his protagonists do. The book was bought by Lee Boudreaux at Random House, North American rights only, and Carlisle is handling the rest of the world, with considerable foreign interest shown at the BEA show in Chicago. Boudreaux made a successful preempt after the author had been introduced to several interested editors, at Viking and Harper among others. Oddly, the novel's title is Prague, because that is the dream city the young strivers are imagining for themselves. According to Phillips, "I wrote this book to exorcise my obsessive love" for a city he sees as comparable in many ways to Paris in the '20s. The novel contains, incidentally, the story of a struggling Hungarian publishing house one of the young entrepreneurs tries to help.
