In the house: Carrie Hagen, author of WE IS GOT HIM

We'll spare everyone pictures on this rainy, humid day, but today Carrie Hagen came into the Overlook offices to work with our new editor, Stephanie Gorton. (Welcome, Stephanie!) She has a book coming out this August called WE IS GOT HIM: ABDUCTION, MURDER, AND FEAR OF THE EVE OF AMERICA'S CENTENNIAL.

We launched this title last week, and everyone is waiting impatiently for the manuscript to be finished so we can start reading! It's true crime in the vein of Devil in the White City, and the story is absolutely fascinating. It's 1874, and a young boy named Charley Ross (learn more about him here) was snatched from his front yard in Philadelphia in what became the first kidnapping for random in America.

The title "We Is Got Him" comes from the famous random note, which we'll just preface with one [sic]:

Mr. Ross- be not uneasy you son charly bruster he al writ we as got him and no powers on earth can deliver out of our hand. You wil hav two pay us befor you git him from us. an pay us a big cent to. if you put the cops hunting for him yu is only defeeting yu own end. we is got him fitt so no living power can gits him from us a live. if any aproch is maid to his hidin place that is the signil for his instant anihilation. if yu regard his lif puts no one to search for him you money can fech him out alive an no other existin powers don't deceve yuself and think the detectives can git him from us for that is one imposebel
yu here from us in few day

Philadelphia was preparing to celebrate the American centennial after decades of civil war and recession, and Hagan weaves the story of this kidnapping--and how it threatened to unravel social confidence and plunge a city into despair--into the fight by the Philadelphia mayor to preserve the city's stature and other politicians using the Centennial as a chance to show America's endurance.

The research that went into We Is Got Him is incredibly daunting--Hagen worked on it while earning her MFA in Writing Nonfiction from Goucher College. We're absolutely thrilled to be publishing this--mark your calendars for August!

A glimpse into the life of Robert L. Forbes

Check out this fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal profiling Robert L. Forbes, author of our wonderfully whimsical children's book LET'S HAVE A BITE! A BANQUET OF BEASTLY FEASTS. It's always fun for us to read author profiles instead of traditional reviews--especially when they lead lives as interesting as this. Go here to read the full article, but here's an excerpt you might enjoy! You can also keep up-to-date on the life and times of Robert Forbes and events surrounding the publication of Let's Have a Bite! on Facebook and by following @robertlforbes on Twitter.

As happy and well adjusted an adult as Mr. Forbes seems on the surface, I can't help but believe his latest book, published this week, "Let's Have A Bite! A Banquet of Beastly Rhymes," with drawings by the New Yorker cartoonist Ronald Searle, isn't the result of night terrors.

"The Giant Panda at the zoo just sits and chomps on fresh bamboo," goes one poem. "His belly is like a cooking pot, Which happens when you eat a lot. He's content to do not much but chew. Which is all he seems to do (That and poo!)"

People often take a stab at children's books after reading "Goodnight Moon" to their own kids and becoming convinced they can do better. But Mr. Forbes hasn't read to his son Miguel in decades. Miguel is in his thirties. Miguel is Forbes's president of television and licensing.

It seems Mr. Forbes simply has crazy rhymes going through his head. He'll wake up in the middle of the night, don his special Edward Beiner reading glasses with built-in reading lights, write for a couple of hours, roll over and go back to sleep.

"I write to amuse me," he said. "I write stuff I'd like to read." Such as, apparently, "A chicken-stewing cat named Shauna slipped on her sweat in the sauna. She moaned on the floor, 'I must reach the door, Or I'll be a fricasseed goner.' "

Mr. Forbes said he contacted Mr. Searle, who lives in the south of France, and whose work he collects, out of the blue, fully prepared to be rejected, but figuring it couldn't hurt to ask. But Mr. Searle said yes. "I'll write a couple of lines about the poem," Mr. Forbes said of their collaborative process, "and a month or two later back this package comes with all these illustrations. It's like a little boy opening a Christmas present."

This is actually Mr. Forbes' second book of poems and critters. The first, "Beastly Feasts," also illustrated by Mr. Searle, was published in 2007. And Mr. Forbes shot the photography for "A Year of Dancing Dangerously," about his wife Lydia Raurell's successful quest to be crowned newcomer of the year on the pro-am ballroom dance circuit, though partnered with Brian Nelson, her professional dance partner.

Mr. Forbes divides his time between Manhattan, where he lives in Forbes Magazine worker housing, Palm Beach where his wife and Lamborghini reside, and the road, having just returned from dance competitions in Irvine, Calif., Las Vegas and Phoenix. "She's three to four hours a day practicing with a coach," he said of his wife. "She takes it very seriously."

However, she'll still condescend to dance with her husband. "Happily," he said, "she lets me lead."

And the poems keep coming. The drawings too. Last month the 90-year-old Mr. Searle delivered five more. "I've got at least two more books done by him," Mr. Forbes said. "I have no idea whether my publisher will do it—but I don't care."

Norman Foster's Masdar development featured in the New York Times

Have you picked up a copy of Deyan Sudjic's new biography of architect Norman Foster? If not, this article from Sunday's New York Times should definitely pique your interest in the book. While NORMAN FOSTER: A LIFE IN ARCHITECTURE is primarily a professional biography, it also discusses Foster's idealism, design aesthetic and the Masdar development that received so much attention from the Times. Go here to read the full article, and check out a brief excerpt below!

Back in 2007, when the government here announced its plan for “the world’s first zero-carbon city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many Westerners dismissed it as a gimmick — a faddish follow-up to neighboring Dubai’s half-mile-high tower in the desert and archipelago of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees.

Designed by Foster & Partners, a firm known for feats of technological wizardry, the city, called Masdar, would be a perfect square, nearly a mile on each side, raised on a 23-foot-high base to capture desert breezes. Beneath its labyrinth of pedestrian streets, a fleet of driverless electric cars would navigate silently through dimly lit tunnels. The project conjured both a walled medieval fortress and an upgraded version of the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.

Well, those early assessments turned out to be wrong. By this past week, as people began moving into the first section of the project to be completed — a 3 ½-acre zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented research institute — it was clear that Masdar is something more daring and more noxious.

Norman Foster, the firm’s principal partner, has blended high-tech design and ancient construction practices into an intriguing model for a sustainable community, in a country whose oil money allows it to build almost anything, even as pressure grows to prepare for the day the wells run dry. And he has worked in an alluring social vision, in which local tradition and the drive toward modernization are no longer in conflict — a vision that, at first glance, seems to brim with hope.

Continued here.

Library Journal praises THE MORNING STAR

More praise for The Morning Star by Andre Schwarz-Bart came into our inbox this morning from Library Journal--always a great way for someone in publishing to greet the day. There have been some changes to the cover art and the pub date, but it will be in stores in November, and the stunning cover you see with this post is its final version. Questions? Review copy requests? Contact us here.

Here's the full review from Library Journal.

Schwarz-Bart’s debut, The Last of the Just (1959), is regarded as one of the great works of contemporary Jewish literature. Fifty years later and four years after his death, a bookend to that novel appears, patched together from the author’s manuscripts by his widow, Simone. Like the earlier novel, this is an intensely personal tale of the Holocaust that stands apart from other works of its type in its distinctive approach. Combining fact, myth, folktale, and fantasy, the plot spans several thousand years, from a small Polish village in the late 19th century to the year 3000 in another solar system. At its heart is a simple and powerful story of a flute-playing cobbler’s son who loses his family but survives both the Warsaw ghetto and the extermination camp at Auschwitz. VERDICT: Schwarz-Bart’s harmonious prose stirs the emotions as he considers the unfathomable darkness of the human soul and the brightness of the morning that will always follow. A moving and illuminating read in its own right, his final novel serves as a fitting coda to one of the past century’s most striking literary careers.--Forest Turner, Suffolk Cty. House of Correction Lib., Boston

Peter Quinn at NYU's Glucksman Ireland House RECAP!!

As devotees of the Winged Elephant know, Peter Quinn read from THE MAN WHO NEVER RETURNED last Thursday night at NYU's Glucksman Ireland House. We were lucky enough to have some bloggers report back from the scene.

Here's some of the post from From the Balcony, A Publisher's Blog...

In a fulsome introduction, the representative of Ireland House noted that Peter Quinn's last opus, Looking for Jimmy, about Irish America, was a huge hit with students of NYU. "The one copy is always in demand and we are endlessly copying chapters for students," she said. Opening his reading, Peter Quinn spluttered in disgust: "Just one copy. And you're breaking the law by photocopying it. My attorney is present and I saw him take notes at that." He was only kidding, I think. Here he is signing copies. Fintan Dunne, the detective Peter created, rides again in the new novel. Read it.

...and here's some from Hell's Kitchen, the blog of TheWildGeese.com.

Quinn, never at a loss for words, talked colorfully and candidly about his work, his writing process, and the judge’s disappearance, more than he actually read. Quinn suggested, perhaps seriously, that readings such as his were archaic. They certainly do provide a vehicle for engaging with an auteur and his work, and the evening provided that in spades.

‘The Man Who Never Returned” took shape, Quinn said, during a conversation he had a few years back with Paul Browne, deputy commissioner of public information for the NYPD and a fellow Manhattan College alum. Quinn added later that his writing was driven by character, not plot, and his characters emerge from conversations he has and those he readily imagines. This process emerges for him, in part, because, he said, “you are always writing about yourself,” even in historical novels, which, he suggested, draw on the author’s experience and personal history. He is famously in love with the historical research his books require, but said to be averse to the writing part. Novel writing is not only autobiographical, he wryly noted, “but psychotic.”

What fun! We're glad you both enjoyed the event.

Susan Hill is "once again at the top of her game"

We've been thrilled about the great buzz around Susan Hill's new thriller, THE SHADOWS IN THE STREET. In fact, we've already done a roundup post of some of the great praise for this latest Simon Serrallier mystery (click here to read it all, including a great review from Marilyn Stasio in the New York Times!).

But we had to share this starred review from Booklist. Our favorite part--"This is a hugely satisfying, highly entertaining, masterfully written book in which Hill is once again at the top of her game." Wonderful to hear! And don't forget that Deb's Book Blog is giving away all FIVE of Susan's Simon Serrallier mysteries--go here to enter!

Hill once again shines with a book that’s part taut suspense thriller, part classic British procedural, and part modern morality tale with an overlay that is at once heartwarming and terrible. DCS Simon Serrailler has taken some much-needed time off after solving a high-profile, high-pressure case. But he’s called back to work when two local prostitutes are brutally murdered, and his team of detectives is struggling to find a single useful clue to the killer’s identity. But the murders aren’t the only issue Simon has to worry about—his sister, Cat, is still trying to deal with her husband’s tragic death, his father is thinking of heading off to America, and his nephew is showing signs of preteen rebellion. Still, it’s the murders that must be Simon’s top priority, but he continues to hit brick walls at every turn. Fearing he may never solve the case, Simon is nearly ready to give up when the killer reveals himself in a near-tragic event that hits all too close to home. This is a hugely satisfying, highly entertaining, masterfully written book in which Hill is once again at the top of her game. — Emily Melton

Booklist praises Andre Schwarz-Bart's THE MORNING STAR

Booklist's Oct. 1 issue has this review of the posthumous novel THE MORNING STAR, by Andre Schwarz-Bart, No. 1 bestselling author of the classic THE LAST OF THE JUST.

Check out their issue for more fantastic reviews, but the fantastic review of The Morning Star is below.

Acclaimed French novelist and Holocaust survivor Schwarz-Bart’s last novel, discovered after his death, begins in the year 3000, after the earth has been obliterated by a nuclear war. One survivor uncovers chests filled with manuscripts that document a human massacre occurring one thousand years earlier. The central narrative shifts to the Polish village of Podhoretz, and chronicles the life of Haim Shuster, descendent of the town’s fabled rabbi who is rumored to have hosted the prophet Elijah. Sensitive and inquisitive Haim possesses a gift that links him, in music and religion, to his lineage. When Nazi troops enter 1939 Poland, Haim’s family is cruelly separated, leaving him to care for his three young brothers. While Haim becomes increasingly disillusioned with God and humanity, he struggles to survive in the Warsaw Ghetto and, subsequently, Auschwitz. Years later, Haim, much older and expecting a child of his own, struggles to reconcile the horrors of the Holocaust with the weight of his oscillating spirit. Schwarz-Bart’s tale is a delicate, necessary portrait, wavering between faith and disbelief, reconciliation and doubt.

Peter Quinn at NYU's Glucksman Ireland House TONIGHT!

A rainy fall Thursday in New York City--sounds like the perfect time to head over to NYU's beautiful Glucksman Ireland House to hear Peter Quinn read from and discuss his acclaimed new book, THE MAN WHO NEVER RETURNED.

This event is made possible by the New York Council for the humanities and is free for all with an NYU ID (all others are asked to make a $10 donation at the door).

Thanks for supporting Glucksman Ireland House along with Peter and we hope you enjoy hearing about The Man Who Never Returned as much as the rest of his standing-room-only audiences have this summer and fall!

Running (or cheering at) a marathon this year?

Then know your history. Runner's World takes a break from advising on training plans, shoes, hydration techniques and general running-cheerleading to look at why people run the specific 26.2 mile distance. Below, their article, which draws on MARATHON: HOW ONE BATTLED CHANGED WESTERN CIVILIZATION, by Professor Richard Billows.

Read the article in its entirety here!

When Was the Battle of Marathon?

On or around August 11th, 490 B.C.E., 2,500 years ago. Experts have chosen the 11th after consulting historical lunar calendars. Fellow Greek city state Sparta would have contributed troops to the fight, but for religious reasons couldn’t march until the next full moon, which would have been several days later in mid-August. Previous estimates put the battle in early September.

Did Pheidippides Exist? Did He Run Anywhere?

Most likely yes, on both counts. Ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote the definitive account of the battle some 40 or 50 years after it took place, says that a messenger named Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta, asked for help, then ran back with the bad news. That’s a round trip of close to 280 miles over mountainous terrain, and it took him four or five days. Greek messengers routinely ran similar distances for similar reasons. That’s how information generally traveled among Greek city states, says Richard Billows, a professor of Greek and Roman history at Columbia University in New York and author of Marathon: The Battle That Changed Western Civilization.

Did Pheidippides Die?

Well, sure—all of us do eventually—but there’s nothing in the historical record to suggest that Pheidippides died upon completing his Athens/Sparta run, or any other run.

Did Anybody Run from Marathon to Athens?

Yes, but a messenger would have taken a horse. The road between the cities was smooth, and a horse would have been faster and more efficient. The trip from Athens to Sparta, by contrast, was too treacherous for horses, which is why Pheidippides most likely went by foot. That means that the famous scene, whereby a messenger announces victory and collapses, is almost certainly fictional.

Billows, however, believes that thousands of Athenian soldiers were forced to march double time to Athens from Marathon after vanquishing the Persian invaders. During the battle, Athens was left largely undefended, and Billows suspects that Persian war ships were en route to the city and looking for trouble. If true, that means that the first marathon—thousands of people hustling for 25 miles—may have taken place following the Battle of Marathon after all. Just not the way we imagined it.

While this might not motivate you to go run 26.2 miles (which we don't recommend without months of training anyways!) it's interesting to see how events 2,500 years ago still affect both our culture and our traditions today.

Thanks, Runner's World!

Thanks for braving the rain to visit us at the Brooklyn Book Fair!

Thanks to everyone who braved the rain to come support the Brooklyn Book Festival yesterday! We had a wonderful time manning the Overlook booth (which gave us a front-row seat to some outstanding readings!) and seeing the rest of the festival.

If you missed the festival, NY1 ran this piece highlighting the festival. Notice the books they pan over--those are ours! You can see someone paging through Let's Have a Bite! less than 10 seconds in. Hooray!

Here are a few of the photos we took of our time at the BKBF. Sadly, Kate's point-and-shoot didn't hold up very well in the rain, but if you were there, hopefully these photos bring back some great memories of wonderful books!

Can't wait to see you there next year!

Interviews and more with P.F. Kluge for A CALL FROM JERSEY!

Recently, it seems that New Jersey's place in popular culture has been solidified by the TV popularity of shoes like Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

But for New Jersey native P.F. Kluge, now a professor and writer-in-residence at Kenyon College in Ohio, it's the place where he grew up, and a perfect setting for a novel about how the American dream has changed through generations.

The Newark Star-Ledger and Cleveland Plain Dealer both reviewed Kluge's new novel, A CALL FROM JERSEY, this week.

The Star-Ledger's interview offers more insight into the creation of this literary novel and the thought processes Kluge had while writing. Read the full article here, but our favorite excerpt is below.

"The book is really about conversations with my father I never got to have," Kluge said. “I have tried to imagine his experience as an American, and as a German in America, especially between the two world wars."

The son, too, is culturally adrift. He is a second-generation American, suddenly trying to understand his parents’ life and re-connect with their lost old-world ways.

“As I grow older, and the number of years since my parents have died grows larger, I grow closer to them,” Kluge said. “As I get older, I miss the sound of their voices, the sound of German being spoken around me, and the stories they told. I miss the beer parties and German songs sung into the night. I miss mother’s potato pancakes.”

The book’s sense of place is authentic. Kluge writes about “13 Bumps,” (Johnston Road in Watchung), which climbs the mountain above Route 22 and has been a teenage makeout place for generations, from Model As to Mitsubishis. And Snuffy’s in Scotch Plains, gone from “roadhouse to Parthenon.” Old Hans even recalls Madame Bey’s, the old Passaic-side boxing training camp on River Road in Summit, where Schmeling once trained.

Only one of Kluge’s previous seven novels was a Jersey story, and it was his most famous.
“I set ‘Eddie and the Cruisers,’ in South Jersey. I spent the summer of 1962 working as a college intern at the Vineland Times Journals, and I found South Jersey so fascinating, and so different from here I was from. You could smell whatever they were canning that day in the air.”

The Plain Dealer's article, which you can read in full here, calls A CALL FROM JERSEY an "engaging road novel" and also comments on Kluge's ability to vividly describe a particular location.

In P.F. Kluge's "A Call From Jersey," characters travel to the highest point of the Watchung Mountains at night, park the car, turn out the lights and strain to glimpse Staten Island in the distance. New Jersey is the place from which Kluge's characters flee, Manhattan being "in the direction of my dreams," says George Griffin, co-narrator, with his father, Hans, of this engaging intergenerational story.

Kluge, a wry and underappreciated novelist who teaches at Kenyon College, wrote 2008's beguiling "Gone Tomorrow" and "Eddie and the Cruisers."

Here, he illustrates how difficult George finds it to get entirely away from New Jersey. Even if you are away your entire adult life, the roads of the Watchung Mountains, George says, still "become part of you so you feel you could find your way along them in the dark forever."

...

Then, like all great road trips, Hans and George's ends in an epiphany. Kluge handles these passages deftly, allowing for the bonds of siblings, and Hans' lingering questions: Was my brother a monster? Or was my brother me?

Stay tuned for more news and reviews for P.F. Kluge and A CALL FROM JERSEY.

Did you miss Richard Billows discussing MARATHON on NPR?

Never fear! Here's a handy link to both his interview (with a transcript!) and an excerpt of the professor's wonderful book MARATHON: HOW ONE BATTLE CHANGED WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

Our favorite part of the interview with Guy Raz actually occurs right at the beginning, and is a great summary of why the Battle of Marathon is so crucially important to our civilization, besides giving us 26.2 mile runs.

RAZ: Aeschylus was a veteran of the legendary battle at Marathon. It happened exactly 2,500 years ago, and it pitted a heavily outnumbered band of mainly Athenians against the far mightier Persian army. It also lent its name to the famous race, which we'll hear about in a moment.

Historian Richard Billows writes about the battle in a new book called "Marathon." And he says that that one day in 490 BC actually changed the course of Western civilization.

Mr. BILLOWS: What we can tell from the way the Persians treated other cities -Greek cities that they attacked in this same period is that if the Athenians had lost the battle, the city of Athens would have been destroyed. The Athenian citizen population rounded up, put on ships and transported to Persia to be interviewed by the Persian king, Darius, at that time and then probably resettled somewhere near the Persian Gulf where they would've been lost to history.

And as a result, all those great Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries -the likes of Thucydides and Socrates and Plato, one could go on - simply would never either have been born or their works would never have been written and would not have been able therefore to shape subsequent classical Greek civilization and Western culture as we know it.

RAZ: I mean, you say that had the Persians defeated the Athenians at Marathon, democracy would never have flourished.

Mr. BILLOWS: The first democracy that we know of in world history was created by the Athenians just 15 years before the battle of Marathon. It was established as a result of a kind of coup d'etat against a tyrant who had been ruling Athens. And that democracy was a very young and new experiment when the Athenians faced the Persians.

We also love how Mr. Raz chose to end the interview.

RAZ: I'm curious. You emphasize the importance of democracy in the Athenian victory. Why?

Mr. BILLOWS: The way that the Greeks fought was very egalitarian. Every individual soldier fought at his own expense. He paid for his own equipment and for his own upkeep. And essentially voluntarily, they were participating members of the social and political community. They felt that this community, because the democratic system, was theirs, they governed themselves very directly.

We tend to make a distinction between the government and the people. There was no such distinction in Athenian democracy because the people were the government. It was that sense of this is ours - this community, this political state that we've created is our thing.

So, the Greek victories over the Persians were intimately tied up with the political system of participatory democracy that the Greeks had created.

Fascinated yet? Make sure to listen to (or read!) the entire interview. And stay tuned for more reviews, events and interviews with Professor Billows as the marathon race season gears up!

A wonderful reception for Susan Hill's SHADOWS IN THE STREET

Susan Hill's latest Simon Serralier mystery, SHADOWS IN THE STREET, went on sale in the U.S. last Thursday, and we're thrilled to see that others are loving her wonderful work as much as we are. Did you miss her review in the New York Times? See below for the full review and some other praise that has been rolling in for SHADOWS IN THE STREET.

"As every Trollope reader knows, English cathedral towns can be hotbeds of viciousness and vice. And so it is in Lafferton, where Susan Hill sets her thoughtful mysteries. As if it weren’t bad enough that flesh traffickers from Eastern Europe have been deploying a small army of underage prostitutes on the edge of town in THE SHADOWS IN THE STREET (Overlook, $24.95), the unpopular new dean of the cathedral, a “happy-clappy” Anglican evangelical, and his overbearing wife (“the Mrs. Proudie of St. Michael’s”) are hell-bent on saving the souls of these “Magdalenes,” whether they like it or not. Simon Serrailler, the brooding detective hero, doesn’t appear on the scene until a serial killer begins picking off some of the local working girls who’ve been displaced by the foreign competition. But his absence allows Hill to direct her elegant prose to other characters, especially Serrailler’s widowed sister, observed in depth as she struggles to live with her grief." -- The New York Times

“This is the fifth of Hill's exceptional series (after The Various Haunts of Men, The Pure in Heart, The Risk of Darkness, and The Vows of Silence). Her characters continue to be intelligent and engaging, and the perfect balance of drama, atmosphere, and suspense holds the reader to the very last page. Highly recommended for fans of thoughtful British mysteries, especially those written by P.D. James, Martha Grimes, and Tana French.” -- Library Journal (starred review)

“It is really the characters that are so strong in these novels and even the minor characters are brought to life... As usual, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.” -- Canadian Bookworm Blog

“Hill continues to engage us with fresh characters and intriguing story lines.” -- MostlyFiction.com

"Right from its rain drenched opening lines, Shadows draws the reader into its bleak landscape. Hill is a master at creating atmosphere – the autumn chill hovering over the town seeps right into the story, and tightens its hold on the reader as the plot hurtles towards its climax… strong writing, taut pace and finely etched characters” -- BookPleasures.com

Notes from a Publicist: Yes, I Really Do Like Penny Vincenzi This Much

A Love Story, by Kate in Publicity



This is a picture of my bookshelf, taken last night. I don't really have an organizational system and promise I didn't re-organize it to look more impressive (or I definitely would have replaced that Adriana Trigiani book with David Foster Wallace or something equally highbrow).

Those of you familiar with Overlook's highest-selling titles might realize the books in the middle--the Penny Vincenzi "Spoils of Time" trilogy. I actually applied for this job having read most of Penny's books, and am ridiculously excited to be working on her new one, Forbidden Places, that comes out in October.

But as I pitch these books, I find myself trying to prove that I'm not just being a publicist--these are historical romances that I actually think are fantastic. Sure, they're not the most literary thing we publish here, but they're pretty high-end commercial romance and I love the historical aspects as well.


I kind of want to attach this picture of my much-loved copy of No Angel to the pitches I'm sending out to reviewers, producers, and bloggers. "I'm one of you!" it seems to say. "Once upon a time, I wasn't a publicist. I was just a reader. And look how many times I read this book!"

In my cover letter that I submitted when applying for this job, I mentioned how I recommended these books to all of my girlfriends (after my grandmother recommended them to me. Generations coming together!). The upside? They loved the books too, and are badgering me for advance copies of Forbidden Places. The downside? I have to explain to them that my job is just slightly less glamorous than that of Lady Celia Lytton.

Anyways, I just wanted to share that it's incredibly fun to be a fan of an author and also get to work with her titles--and that this isn't me fluffing Forbidden Places, I actually AM that big of a fan of Penny Vincenzi.

Do you love her, too? Leave a comment, and be sure to pre-order Forbidden Places (or the paperback of Windfall, out this month!)--I think it's the best non-Celia Lytton book yet. And Penny fans know that that is high praise, indeed.

Happy reading!

Dave Zeltserman on Ebooks and the Future of Publishing

Kevin Tipple graciously invited Dave Zeltserman, author of the new Overlook release The Caretaker of Lorne Field, to guest blog over on his terrific site "Kevin's Corner." The subject? The future of the publishing industry, specifically related to ebooks and other digital developments.

Intriguingly, Zeltserman's post distills his thoughts on what ebooks mean and how publishing will change into six key predictions. Read the full post here, but scroll down for the quick hits of his predictions. Interested? We certainly were.

(Prediction 1) Dedicated eBook readers, like Kindle and Nook, will try to lower their prices to gain marketshare, but they will go the way of the 8-track as consumers gravitate towards multifunction devices like iPads, which will not be lowering their prices substantially.

(Prediction 2) You think ATD is bad now, just wait until we have a generation of readers constantly interrupting their reading to check Facebook and email.

...

(Prediction 3) Large publishing is starting to diverge where they’ll be publishing in print only books for the large box stores, everything else will be digital only.

(Prediction 4) Small independent bookstores that can integrate themselves into the their neighborhoods will survive and flourish, and will sell mostly books from small independent presses.

...

(Prediction 5) The large publishers who continue to follow their current blockbuster only mentality will die.

(Prediction 6) The smaller, independent publishes who keep publishing the books they love instead of chasing after blockbusters like the big six, will flourish as they form a symbiotic relationship with like-minded small independent bookstores.

Head over to his post on Kevin's site to read more about his thoughts, predictions and possibilities for the future of the world of publishing, and leave a comment there to get involved in the conversation!