SIZE D SN'T MATTER
Given the infrequency with which short story anthologies garner major media attention -- let alone appearances on national bestseller lists -- Houghton Mifflin's excitement about the April 5 publication of The Best American Short Stories of the Century seems more than justified. The publisher's publicity campaign kicked off on March 29 with a tony bash at New York's American Place restaurant; the gala crowd included many of the book's contributors, and a live band played music representative of the changing decades. The contributors -- 55 in all -- to this centennial collection, edited by John Updike, have all appeared in earlier editions of Best American Short Stories, which was first published in 1915. Not surprisingly, the new volume's roster reads like a Who's Who of American Literature: Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Joyce Carol Oates, William Saroyan, Philip Roth, etc. etc. The book has been featured on Today, Charlie Rose, CBS Sunday Morning, NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday and Bloomberg Radio; press coverage has included features and/or reviews in Esquire, Vanity Fair, Mirabella, Details, Harper's, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal and many more. It continues to amass glowing notices (including a starred and boxed PW review) and has already appeared on several national charts (it debuts on our list at #15); copies in print total 81,000 after two printings. Evidently HM's efforts are paying off: last Thursday (when this column went to press), Best American Short Stories of the Century was holding the #28 sales slot at Amazon.com.

TEED OFF ONCE AGAIN
It's back to the links for author John Feinstein, whose A Good Walk Spoiled was a 1995 bestseller for Little, Brown (the 1996 trade paperback spent 12 weeks on PW's list). Just as that book explored the daily demands of a year on tour, The Majors looks at the four leading golf tournaments grouped under that name -- the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open and the PGA Championship -- and how the sport's greatest players hold up under the tremendous pressure these "Majors" exert. LB published Feinstein's latest on April 6, with a first printing of 220,000; two trips back to press brings the total to 240,000. Last week, the author launched a 12-city tour at the Masters in Augusta, Ga.; publicity continues through the summer as he travels to the other three leading tournaments. Feinstein will also do Charlie Rose, CNN Morning News and NPR's Morning Edition. Radio ads will run throughout May in New York; Chicago; L.A.; Ph nix, Ariz. ("a huge golf city," notes the publisher); and Orlando, Fla. (headquarters for cable TV's Golf Channel and home of many PGA players).

THE WINDS OF WAR
Just over five years ago -- in March 1994 -- U.S. troops left the scene of the most bloody firefight fought by American soldiers since Vietnam. The battle itself occurred in Mogadishu, Somalia, October 3-4, 1993. Now Mark Bowden, a 19-year veteran of the Philadelphia Inquirer, has told the story in a book that has generated a tremendous amount of media coverage. Black Hawk Down was published by Atlantic Monthly Press on March 22 with a first printing of 65,000; after five trips back to press, that figure has increased to 152,000. Bowden's work, called "a gripping narrative... military writing at its breathless best" in a starred PW review, will be the subject of a CNN documentary this month; it has been optioned by film producer Jerry Bruckheimer; and, in its original serialized form in the Philadelphia Inquirer, won an award for best foreign reporting from the Overseas Press Club. The book -- hovering just below our top nonfiction titles -- has become a textbook for military training at the service academies, and Bowden has been asked to speak at a number of top-level military conferences. On March 1, he began an extensive tour that's taking him from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to Ph nix to Seattle (with myriad stops in between) and back to the East Coast before winding up in late May.



With reporting by Dick Donahue.