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!

Publishers Weekly raves about "On The Many Deaths of Amanda Palmer"!

Reminder: you can still upload your own palmeresque on the Amanda Palmer Trust site. You can win an advance readers' copy of the book--and it's time to start really getting excited for that!

Publishers Weekly is certainly excited to have read the On the Many Deaths of Amanda Palmer, giving it a starred review and calling it "coy, engaging, and delightfully imagined." See below for the full review!

Web Exclusive On the Many Deaths of Amanda Palmer (And the Many Crimes of Tobias James)
Rohan Kriwaczek, Overlook, $24.95 (240p) ISBN 9781590203811

Inspired by the imagined death of the real-life (and living) Amanda Palmer, the front woman for the self-described "Brechtian punk cabaret" band, The Dresden Dolls, Kriwaczek (An Incomplete History of the Art of the Funerary Violin) puts his mischievous faux-scholasticism to work. Presented as an anthology of "Palmeresques," an artistic form of fan response to Palmer's mysterious death, each text offers its own darkly fanciful version of the songstress's demise. Also imagined are a jumble of issues concerning the shady dealings of the Amanda Palmer Trust (APT) selection committee, the possible influence of a murder suspect on their proceedings, and the intervention of the Boston police. A postmodern Russian nesting doll of realities, complete with poems, charts, and censored text, this book is successful on many levels: creepy and fun when accepted at face value; tantalizing when looked at as evidence in a murder mystery; insightful in its commentary on modern celebrity and culture--in all coy, engaging, and delightfully imagined. Illustrations. (Jul.)