Lawrence Ellsworth, Ushering in a New Heyday for Classic Adventure Fiction

Readers of this blog may recall that one of the authors I represent on the literary agency side of my business is Lawrence Schick, who under the pen name Lawrence Ellsworth has served as anthologist and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, and translator of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Red Sphinx, an all but forgotten sequel to The Three Musketeers.

The two books were published by Pegasus Books in 2014 and 2017, respectively. The long-lost novel—which was praised by Washington Post critic Michael Dirda as an “Excellent, compulsively readable translation”—has been so successful that Pegasus later acquired from us the rights to Ellsworth’s new translation of The Three Musketeers, a sparkling, modern translation of Dumas’s classic adventure novel, which they will publish on January 2, 2018. 

With all the praise and interest that Ellsworth’s enterprise of reviving adventure fiction has attracted, Literary Hub assigned journalist Dwyer Murphy to do a profile of him for its readers. The result is a fascinating profile that touches on swords, fencing (author and interviewer visited a fencing academy in Harlem), knights errant, role-playing games (Schick was an original team member of the outfit that created Dungeons & Dragons), and other matters. Linked to here, you can also read the first few paragraphs in the screenshot below. I am delighted to be representing such a talented client as Lawrence. If you or someone you know enjoys adventure fiction, I recommend you check out his outstanding work.

Vicki Huddleston, former top US diplomat on Cuba, on the Letters Page of the NY Times

Very proud of my author client Vicki Huddleston—former head of the United States Interests Section in Havana, Cuba, 1999-2002—who has this letter to the editor running in the NY Times today on the Trump administration’s reversal of President Obama’s Cuba policy. Her book, Our Woman in Havana: A US Diplomat’s Inside Account of America’s Long Struggle With Fidel Castro’s Cuba, will be published by Overlook Press in 2018. Here’s the letter, and you can also find it via this link

Some Social Sharing I Did on Canada Day

In May 2014, soon after I began to publish and write my second website/blog, Honourary Canadian: Seeing Canada From Away, I wrote and assembled a personal essay titled “Why I Started this Blog and Call it Honourary Canadian.” It chronicles more than forty years of trips to Canada, first as a 12-year old traveling from Cleveland to Expo ’67 in Montreal, to many solo vacations when I was single and first working in NYC, to many trips with my wife and son, and since 2011, annual visits to Toronto for the NXNE music festival and for publishing activities, especially with author Elaine Dewar. The essay is longish, with almost 8,000 words of narrative text and more than 200 captioned photos, many taken on film back in the day, and scanned for the web.I’ll some day hope to fashion it as part of a book about Canada, seen from away. Having the chance to publish the essay is, in a sense, probably why I started the second site—to conjure up the experiences and landscapes I encountered in the nation to the north.

Canada Day 2017 was observed this past Saturday, on July 1 (sometime, I have to find out why US Independence Day, and Canada’s day, happen to be so close on the calendar). It was sort of a special one, as the 150th since Canada’s confederation. Many Indigenous groups weren’t keen to celebrate it, but it engendered widespread coverage, and debate about Canada’s colonialist past, a good thing. With the special anniversary in mind, I re-shared the link to the 2014 post on my  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn page, the first time I’ve done that on a Canada Day. There’s been a gratifying response, so I’m posting it here, too. Before I started the second site—no surprise—I published a lot of Canadian reflections here on The Great Gray Bridge.