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Sold—”The Barrens: A Novel of Love & Death in the Canadian Arctic”

Delighted to announce that in our New Stories initiative Ewan and I have sold a superb debut novel, The Barrens: A Novel of Love & Death in the Canadian Arctic, to Arcade Publishing, who will bring it out in Spring 2022. Here’s a condensed version of the pitch letter I sent to publishers:

The Barrens: A Novel of Love and Death in the Canadian Arctic by Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson is a unique adventure novel that will captivate readers across a wide range of tastes. Written in spare, flowing prose, it tells the story of Holly and Lee, two female wilderness paddlers who face hardship and tragedy along the Thelon River in sub-Arctic Canada, canoeing through the uninhabited tundra of the Barren Lands during their summer break from college. Holly had made this canoe trip in an earlier summer, and wanted to share the experience with her friend and lover Lee.

In their relationship, Holly and Lee have always told each other stories; Holly had even called Lee a “storyist,” an animating idea for them both. Storytelling helps Lee endure, and in turn the reader is brought along on their epic journey. These personal narratives form the backbone of the novel, with Lee chronicling her coming-of-age life off-the-grid in Nebraska with an eco-anarchist father who ends up in prison. The reader also encounters their coming-out stories, peaking when Lee meets Holly’s parents at the end of the trip.

The Barrens explores themes of nature versus humanity, the elements versus civilization, weaving them together in a way that is compelling and engrossing. The word “unique” is applicable when considering this novel, as this is the first wilderness adventure tale I know of that explores themes of gender identity and sexual orientation, juxtaposed with gritty survival and tragedy.

Kurt Johnson wrote the novel with insight and guidance from Ellie, who made the 450-mile-long paddle down the Thelon River and for forty-five days didn’t see a soul apart from her paddling companions. The story is the product of the two working to understand an arduous journey through the Barren Lands, and Ellie’s journey as a young gay woman coming of age.

Kurt completed a year-long novel writing course at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis taught by Peter Geye (a Minnesota Book Award winner) who’s said of The Barrens, “I’ve rarely come across a novel that’s simultaneously so economical and fulsome,   that’s as restrained as it is brimming with unspoken wisdom, and that manages all this while also being propulsive in its storytelling. It’s bravura work that demands a wide audience.”

Kurt Johnson lives in St. Paul with his wife Stephanie Hansen, who is writing a cookbook with Minnesota Historical Society Press called True North Cabin Cookbook. Ellie Johnson is a senior at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities, and a former canoe counselor at Camp Widjiwagan in Ely, Minnesota.
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I’ve never worked on a novel that’s received so many sincere and heartfelt endorsements this far out from publication. Here are all of them, in addition to the one above from Peter Geye.

The Barrens grabbed me from the opening pages and never let go, a riveting adventure story written by a father-daughter team who clearly have wilderness chops.”—Michael Punke, author of The Revenant and Ridgeline

“A deeply compelling tale, told in vivid, elegant but concise prose, The Barrens carried me along, swiftly as the river at the heart of the story. The central character, Lee, will break your heart, although she’ll have none of it. Love, loss, life and death, against a landscape as raw and ancient as the human heart. Most highly recommended.”—Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall

“As harrowing as the whitewater adventure it chronicles, The Barrens is an epic tale of wilderness survival and death in the techno age. The writing throbs with presence: the life-force embedded in Canada’s northern frontier landscape and in the life-scape of its queer young heroine as she journeys toward selfhood. Co-authors Kurt and Ellie Johnson reveal the pulse of identity, born of the stories we weave. A mesmerizing, devastating read.”—Carol Bruneau, Canadian author of Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis

The Barrens is the raw and moving story of two young women paddling by canoe down one of North America’s the most remote rivers—of their coming of age, their love, and terrible loss. I’ve rarely come across a text that is so visual, and so tangible. The Barrens is a vivid portrayal of the Canadian subarctic, and of the human drive to persevere.”—Alex Messenger, author of The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra

 

Celebrating Maurice Sendak at the Society of Illustrators

A Thurber drawing in the permanent collection at the Society of Illustrators.

Ewan and I had fun yesterday with children’s book scholar Michael Patrick Hearn at the Society of Illustrators on E. 63rd St in Manhattan for an exhibit and sale of paintings, drawings, etchings, and posters by Maurice Sendak. Lovely work by a true master artist. The Society was founded in 1901, and their narrow townhouse building is beautifully kept up, with a handsome cafe bar and patio on the third floor. It’ll be fun to go back for a drink later this summer. The permanent collection at the Society is also excellent, including works by Norman Rockwell, James Thurber (see picture here, two figures and a dog, in his signature style). In 2012, as a tribute to Sendak, I wrote about a censorious customer in my bookstore, Undercover Books, who vehemently demanded we stop selling his book In the Night Kitchen, which you can read about here. Michael Patrick Hearn wrote an even more personal eulogy to Sendak in 2012. It was a treat to spend the afternoon appreciating the art of Maurice Sendak in this exhibit put on by Battledore Ltd. #childrensbooks #art #NYC #MauriceSendak #SocietyofIllustrators

For more images from the exhibit, click here.
 

Q&A with Paulette Myers Rich—Photographer, Printer, and Curator of No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works

I’m handing over the blog today to my wife, artist Kyle Gallup, for a guest post in the first of what will be a series of interviews by her with artists and writers. Kyle last wrote for The Great Gray Bridge with a post on the painter J.M.W. Turner. I am really excited to publish this post, because it draws on the rich literary tradition of Minnesota, such a vital place in America for book arts and fine printing. —PT
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Paulette Myers Rich. Photo credit: Donna Turner

Paulette Myers Rich is a photographer, artist, fine art printer, maker and collector of artists’ books. She is also the curator of the exhibition space, No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works in Beacon, New York. With Covid restrictions she has reoriented her space to show art in the front windows of her gallery. It seemed to me like a good time to check in with her and see how her own work’s going and what she sees for the future of her gallery space.

You moved from Minnesota to New York City and now upstate, to Beacon, New York. Can you tell me a little bit about what led you from the Midwest to the East Coast, and how this has influenced your work as a photographer and artist?

I was teaching and working in Minneapolis/St. Paul for many years, but major life changes prompted us to take time off to decide what would come next. My husband David Rich is a painter and educator who has deep roots in NYC and in 2012 we decided to spend a year there to immerse ourselves in our work and consider our next steps. The year turned into five before we completely relocated from Minnesota.

We had a live/work loft in lower Manhattan that gave us each a small studio space, but I was going back and forth from NYC to my letterpress studio in St. Paul for months at a time. Finding the right kind of space for my equipment in NYC was tough because so many larger studios have been chopped up into tiny spaces with high rent. I began looking north for a place on the train line and in 2015, finally found a derelict commercial building for sale on Beacon’s Main Street where we could live and work, although I wasn’t looking forward to yet another gut renovation. This became our fourth such project. We sold our St. Paul building, moved everything into storage until the renovation was done a year later, then moved from our loft in the city up to Beacon. I got very good at logistics.

The move to Beacon allowed me to open No.3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works in the storefront adjoining my letterpress studio. It’s an extension of my studio practice, designed for viewing artists’ books, photobooks and small press poetry from my collection along with work on paper and photography by guest artists. Exhibitions of artists’ books tend to show the work in a vitrine out of reach with only a page spread on view, which was frustrating for me as an artist as my work is intended to be interactive. I decided to make a space where readers’ copies of my artists’ books are accessible to viewers. Books are meant to be handled and read and the experience is incomplete without this. No.3 offers visitors access to experience the entire book at their own pace in a context with related work. I also make myself available for conversation or questions as viewing books tends to generate a response and many times, looking at one book leads to another. It’s a form of engagement that’s rare in viewing art.

I also invite exhibiting artists to include personal copies of books that informed their practice, or alternatively, a reading list. The artists I show are readers and they’re generous in their sharing. Some of these books have traveled with them or were gifts from loved ones, many have marginalia and tabs that reveal what’s important to them. But if the artist needs to hold onto their books, I’ll acquire a reader’s copy to share. This hybrid approach to showing artwork opens up conversations in a meaningful way that doesn’t often happen in a commercial gallery.

I read that your photographs are about landscape, place, and time. How does your locale influence what you photograph?

My current locale in Beacon and the Hudson Valley is new to me and I’m still exploring it. I’m surrounded by wilderness and mountains, which is very different from the urban post-industrial landscapes I’ve been living in and photographing for the past forty years. However, it’s the remove from familiarity that’s been most influential in my current practice. I returned to the studio about ten years ago, spending more time in what I see as a necessary and compelling phase of my landscape work, which means delving into my photo archives, revisiting these sites and reconfiguring them through collage and new juxtapositions. I’m also photographing constructed spaces that explore the metaphysical, mathematical and spiritual dimensions of place once again. There’s a quietude here that I’ve never had elsewhere that I find I need in this time.

Are there particular subjects and themes that you most gravitate or return to?

Most sites I photographed were once active industries on acres of land that were abandoned and left vacant in the midst of working class neighborhoods or along the Mississippi River, and there were many of them. It was hard for me to fathom how a company could just shut down, throw so many people out of work and walk away from such a massive property, usually very polluted, that we as residents had to deal with in the aftermath before gentrification. However, aside from the social indifference and environmental impacts that I contended with as a citizen at City Hall, as an artist, it was the mysteries of the site that I sought out; the lingering energies, the aftereffects of abandonment, evidence of the former life of the place, the encroachment of nature, and the momentary landscapes that emerged from the demolition process that combined to make strange, poetic juxtapositions and layers. I’m striving for that kind of mystery and energy in my current work in the studio through combinations of ephemeral installations and constructions set up for the camera, as well as in the reworking and reconfiguring of my Work Sites series photographs.

Your artistic practice is wide ranging, from photography, to fine art printing, to handmade book-making, to being a collector of artists’ books, and director of No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works. How have these different aspects come about and how have they evolved?

I came to my photo-based artist book practice through experimental films I was making in the early 1970’s as a youth, at a media arts center called Film in the Cities, where I was immersed in contemporary alternative and experimental media projects. I was especially interested in film-as-film, where the material qualities of light, emulsion, grain and surface are a part of the content. But to continue making this work as a working-class mother of two required resources I didn’t have, so I scaled back to still photography, working experimentally, abstractly and sequentially to simulate the pacing of film. I exhibited this work as sequential stills but wasn’t satisfied with this form of presentation. It felt static to me.

When the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) opened in Minneapolis in 1985, I became an intern in the papermaking studio to study sculptural techniques using handmade paper for still-life constructions, my primary photography subject at the time. Initially, I had no notion of making books, but when I was exposed to contemporary book art practice in MCBA’s studios and gallery, I realized I could reintroduce a sequential and temporal element back into my work, along with the tactility of materials and forms designed to activate the narrative. Eventually though, my industrial landscapes became my primary subject as it came to dominate my life in many ways.

I’ve always been a reader and novice writer and wanted to integrate poetry and text into my work, so I enrolled in the College of St. Catherine’s weekend program to study creative writing and library science, then returned to MCBA in 1990 to intern with Gaylord Schanilec in letterpress printing, entering the world of fine press books. I continued on as a studio assistant on various projects, mentored by master practitioners while taking workshops to acquire the skills I needed, learning a trade in the working-class tradition as an apprentice, which felt comfortable to me. I did this all as a working mother; I wish I still had that kind of stamina.

Eventually I became a master printer-in-residence with assistants of my own, overseeing projects and teaching at MCBA and local art colleges. I acquired my own letterpress equipment and set up Traffic Street Press, named for the street adjoining my studio in the North Warehouse District of Minneapolis. Along with my personal work, I collaborated with poets I admired publishing fine press books in my Trafficking in Poetry series, and also produced a series of contemporary Irish poetry books and broadsides with the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul.

In 1990, I also became a news librarian at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where I did research for reporters, helped manage the photography collection and cataloged books. It was my dream day job, but soon after, newspaper publishing was hit hard as a business and in time, most of the library staff was eliminated. I then picked up extra teaching in book arts, mentored grad students, and produced and sold my books.

Even before my time at MCBA, I had collected small press poetry chapbooks from a used bookstore in my neighborhood near Macalester College that carried a range of them. St. Paul is a city with a cluster of liberal arts colleges and the used bookstores were goldmines for me. When Allan Kornblum became the first printer-in-residence at MCBA and moved Toothpaste Press from Iowa City to Minneapolis to start Coffee House Press, you could buy his chaps at the Hungry Mind bookstore, so I have a box full of them. There were a variety of small presses, writers, editors and book distributors in the neighborhood. I was in a rich literary environment and took advantage of this.

With Covid-19 restrictions affecting artists around the world, how have you dealt with the quarantine and in what ways has this affected your work, artistic process, and thinking?

I’m trying to remain disciplined, reminding myself that I’ve endured deadly and frightening times in other periods of my life. I looked to women artists who went through difficult times, reading biographies and journals as a guide. As a former Minnesotan, I’m accustomed to hunkering down for long, extreme winters so my home and studio have always been set up for that. I’ve been revisiting photographs from my archives, experimenting with new forms and spending time in No.3 doing research, writing and cataloging new books. I value the quietude and concentrated thought that books provide, but I miss my engagement with artists and the community, so in warmer months I use the display windows of No.3 to install exhibits which works well, and I’ll continue to do that.

But I must say there were times I couldn’t concentrate enough to read or work and instead watched a lot of news keeping up with what was happening back home in Minneapolis/St. Paul after George Floyd was murdered in a neighborhood dear to me, because this could happen to any number of people there that I love. And of course, the 2020 election was stressful. I avoided social media and instead, called friends to talk, which made each of us feel much less isolated. One night during the riots in Minneapolis, while talking to a friend who lives a few blocks from Lake Street, smoke from the fires came into her windows. I had friends on neighborhood watch with their guns and dogs because white extremists had infiltrated the cities, instigating a lot of the destruction. Friends documented cars with Boogaloo Boys logos and out-of-state plates, and they found incendiary devices hidden in their alleys and backyards. People had their garden hoses pulled to the front door and turned on in case they needed to put out a fire. It was traumatizing to see all this unfold on national media and hear even worse news from our friends and family living through it. I’m hoping that Chauvin’s guilty verdict will secure much needed, long overdue police reform and that justice will be served in the ongoing violent episodes that have happened since.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to emerging from this strange, isolating time. Initially, No.3 Reading Room will reopen by appointment or invitation, so I can keep it safe for those who visit. I’m going to stay hopeful about reopening more fully as a walk-in space. I really miss that part of my life and I know people need a place to go have some peace and spend time sorting out the last year as well as to plan for the future. Books and the reading room offer that space.

On your blog, you have a new exhibit, Walking the Watershed, Photographs by Ronnie Farley, that is part of a larger project and exhibition, Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss. Can you talk about this project and how it relates to your own work and interests?

Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, was initiated by Peter Koch, a fine press book artist, writer, educator and co-founder of the CODEX Foundation, a non-profit devoted to fine press and artist book practice. Peter is from Montana and experienced the impact mining has made on the environment and people there. In 2015 he produced a book called Liber Ignis; “…a collaborative project of appropriations, inventions, and constructs documenting the ongoing war against nature in the American West…”

When Peter encountered the book Black Diamond Dust in the Dia Beacon museum bookstore about a year later, he was inspired by this multi-site arts action about the impact of the extractive industries in Vancouver Island, B.C., and decided to initiate something similar in Montana about the mining industry there, but it expanded to a much larger scale and became what he calls a “global Art Ruckus.” I was supportive of this project early on, having photographed, lived near and worked in industrial landscapes set in big nature for many years, so I’m well aware of the impact these industries have on our environment. I’m honored that No.3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works is included as a site for exhibiting artists who focus on these environmental issues in their work as a part of the Extraction project.

Ronnie Farley is a photographer and writer I admire very much. Her work is deeply concerned with the environment and the Indigenous women who have been fighting polluters for decades. Her recent Walking the Watershed project features photographs from her 150-mile trek from the Schoharie Reservoir, following the path of the aqueduct that delivers water to NYC. She made it in stages, carrying a bucket of water from the reservoir and giving talks in each community she passed through. When she arrived in NYC at the end of her journey, she poured the water into the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, “returning the water to itself.” Ronnie lived in NYC for many years but is from upstate and wants New Yorkers to know what a long distance their drinking water travels and how fragile and precious it is. She has a companion book and film that will be completed soon that I’ll also feature.

Throughout 2021, I’ll be showing the work of painters, sculptors, printmakers and filmmakers, alongside books relating to their specific topics, including Black Diamond Dust. The Extraction project has produced a comprehensive catalog called the Megazine (pictured above), featuring writing and images by participants. I’ll be giving away 100 copies throughout the summer to visitors.

 What have you been reading over the last year?

I’ve been reading across disciplines, but the books that stand out for me are the biography and poems of Paul Celan, essays by Audre Lourde, and the new anthology Women in Concrete Poetry, 1959-1979. I’m also reading Ninth Street Women, by Mary Gabriel; Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade, and Frantumaglia: A Writers’ Journey by Elena Ferrante. I’m always looking at new photography books, but Alessandra Sanguinetti’s The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer is a favorite, but there are too many more to mention; my research covers everything from industrial handbooks of the late 19th century to theory. One thing leads to another when you read.

No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works, Beacon, NY

Ghost Poems for the Living, Traffic St Press, Paulette Myers Rich

Ghost Poems, interior, Paulette Myers Rich

Ghost Poems, interior, Paulette Myers Rich

Work Site Series, Paulette Myers Rich

No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works

No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works

Recommending “The Most Precious Gift: Memories of the Holocaust, a Legacy of Lisette Lamon”

Readers of this blog may recall that I worked with photojournalist Ruth Gruber, editing her work and helping her publish six of her eighteen books during her career as a trailblazing woman photojournalist and chronicler of displaced persons (DPs) after the Holocaust. Books we worked on together include Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America (Carroll & Graf Publishes, 2000) and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (Union Square Press, 2008).

In the same vein, in 1999 while Executive Editor at Crown Publishing, I acquired rights to IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black. And in the early 1990s, I edited Solly Ganor’s affecting wartime memoir, Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem, which recounted his survival in the Kaunas (Kovno) ghetto and as a teenaged forced to labor underground in a dangerous mine. Let it suffice to say that Holocaust-themed titles are very much a part of my publishing persona.

That is why I was excited recently when I had the opportunity to edit a remarkable first-person primary source narrative of the Holocaust titled The Most Precious Gift: Memories of the Holocaust, A Legacy of Lisette Lamon.

Lisette Lamon was nineteen and engaged to Benno, the young man she loved, when with her parents she fled from Amsterdam to New York City prior to the Nazi invasion of Holland. Unable to bear the separation from her fiancé, she returned to Amsterdam so they could marry. Soon after their wedding, the Nazi occupiers of the Netherlands came to their home, to arrest a young man who had been rooming with them. In his absence, Benno was arrested instead and deported to the Mathausen concentration camp in Austria, where he would die  under Nazi captivity. Lisette became a motivated member of the Dutch Resistance, a courier for the movement. However, her work was discovered by the occupiers. She was arrested and sent to the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, then to Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

These shattering developments are established in the first few chapters of this emotive book, followed by a clear-eyed report on daily life in the camps, chronicled in thirty-five vignette-length chapters. In one chapter, “Euphemisms,” Lamon writes about the vocabulary inmates coined to express what they endured—a “Slipper Parade: the shuffling of inmates in the morning on the way to the washroom”; “Transport Noir: a trip to a death camp”; and “Vitamin R: a right connection that might help an inmate gain an extra ration of food.”  She writes about achingly beautiful children and stalwart adults who struggled to survive amid deprivation, overwork, malnourishment, and cruel treatment; the decline of the German fighting machine; and the survivors’ hope that if they could only stay alive long enough, they might be liberated by the Allies.

As Allied armies closed in on Bergen-Belsen, Lisette was placed with hundreds of other prisoners on a train car that was driven to the middle of a high bridge. The Germans intended to blow up the span, sending the inmates crashing into the river below and preempting the Allies’ push across the vital link into Nazi-held territory. But liberation came an hour before the explosives could detonate. When an American soldier asked the English-speaking Lisette if she would serve as an interpreter, she seized the opportunity to ask if a note could be sent to her parents in New York City informing them that their daughter was still alive. The officer gasped in astonishment when he looked at the address and saw it was the same Upper West Side apartment building where his own parents lived in Manhattan!

Lisette Lamon (1920-1982) remarried in the United States, and had a family with her new husband. She became a psychologist who pioneered in providing trauma counseling to survivors of the Holocaust, at a time when the category of survivors of the Holocaust was still a relatively new phenomenon, around the time that journalist Helen Epstein published her seminal book, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (G.P. Putnam, 1979). The manuscript of The Most Precious Gift came to me from David Mendels, the adult son of the author. David and I were friends and classmates at Franconia College in the 1970s, when I often heard from him about his remarkable mother and her Holocaust stories. After I edited the manuscript in consultation with David, the book was recently published in a handsome edition (French Hill Publications, hardcover with jacket, book design by Neuwirth & Associates, 195 pages, 11 photos, $19.45) and I am gratified to help him get the word out about his mother’s written legacy. I consider the title an ideal expression of what makes this book so special—it is indeed a most precious gift, an ideal Mother’s Day present, for instance. It is available as an ebook, as well as the handsomely printed and bound hardcover, which you may order it via this link.

Sold: “PICTURE SHOW PLAYLIST: Pop Music in Film from the Crystals to Rihanna” by Nate Patrin

Delighted to announce our sale of the second book by my agency client, music writer Nate Patrin. As a follow-up to his stellar debut, BRING THAT BEAT BACK: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, a Rolling Stone best music book of 2020, published by the University of Minnesota Press, Nate will be writing about music in film in a series of linked essays on eighteen movies for the PICTURE SHOW PLAYLIST: Pop Music in Film from the Crystals to Rihanna. In addition to the music and movie pairings noted in the adjacent Deal Report that’s running today in PublishersMarketplace, he’ll also be  covering these examples of pop music in movies:

  • John Coltrane, “A Love Supreme” — Mo’ Better Blues
  • The Delfonics, “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time” — Jackie Brown
  • Talking Heads, “The Big Country” — 20th Century Women
  • Simon & Garfunkel, “The Sounds of Silence” — The Graduate
  • The Doors, “The End” — Apocalypse Now
  • Steppenwolf, “The Pusher”—Easy Rider
  • Jimmy Cliff, “Many Rivers to Cross” — The Harder They Come

    I’m excited for Nate, whose first book received splendid reviews like this one: “A deeply informed, eminently readable account of a facet of pop music as complex as it is commonly underestimated.”—Music Books of 2020, on the Rough Trade music store blog.

The cover of Nate Patrin’s first book Bring that Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)

Sold: “The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World” by Ray E. Boomhower

One of the pleasures of having been an active literary agent for several years now is the satisfaction I get from selling a subsequent book by an author whose earlier book that I sold is already on the way to being published. This is the case with Ray E. Boomhower, whose biography of combat reporter, Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire From Guadalcanal to Vietnam will be published this November under the High Road Books imprint of the University of New Mexico Press. Yesterday we announced that Boomhower’s next book, The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World, has also been acquired by University of New Mexico Press. The book will detail how Browne—a most unlikely war correspondent who switched from life as a chemist to a journalist, and became the Associated Press’s bureau chief in Saigon at age 32—was the only Western reporter on June 11, 1963, to capture, with a cheap Japanese Petri brand camera, the image of Thich Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the Catholic-dominated administration of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem.

Boomhower, who began publishing books long before we began working together (in fact, The Ultimate Protest will be his nineteenth title), has made a speciality of tracking the work of journalists at war, with earlier books on Ernie Pyle and Robert Sherrod, and the forthcoming book on Tregaskis, best known for publishing Guadalcanal Diary, the 1943 bestseller that was the first book in the US to emerge from the Pacific theater.

Chronicling the impact of the gruesome photo inside the Kennedy administration, from the draft manuscript:

“Jesus Christ!”

The sharp expletive uttered by President John F. Kennedy interrupted the telephone conversation he had begun early on the morning of Tuesday, June 11, 1963. The president was talking with his brother, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States, who had called to discuss what to do if Alabama governor George Wallace made good on his promise to deny the entry of two African American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, into the University of Alabama.

The impetus for the president’s exclamation had not been Wallace’s intransigence, but a photograph he saw splashed on the front pages of newspapers delivered to him that morning. Since May 8, 1963, when a company of Civil Guards had killed Vietnamese civilians protesting a new governmental decree outlawing the flying of the Buddhist flag on Buddah’s birthday in Hue, South Vietnam had been wracked by demonstrations. The awful image that had so startled the president showed a man—a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk named Thich Quảng Đức—engulfed in flames while calmly, it seemed, sitting in the lotus posture on a street in Saigon, South Vietnam.

Browne, who had been tipped off about the demonstration the evening before, was the only Western reporter on the scene to photograph the horrific event. Although the monk, as he burned, uttered no sound nor changed his position, Browne could see that his “features were contorted with agony” and could hear moans from the crowd that had gathered, as well as the ragged chanting from the approximately 300 yellow-robed monks and gray-robed Buddhist nuns who had joined the protest.

“Numb with shock I shot roll after roll of [35mm] film, focusing and adjusting exposures mechanically and unconsciously,” Browne recalled. “Trying hard not to perceive what I was witnessing I found myself thinking: ‘The sun is bright and the subject is self-illuminated, so f16 at 125th of a second should be right.’ But I couldn’t close out the smell.” The AP correspondent was almost overwhelmed by the smells of joss sticks—incense burned for religious rituals—mixed with burning gasoline and diesel fuel and the odor of burning flesh.

 

 

Sold: “Cinema of Swords: A Popular Guide to Movies & TV Shows About Knights, Pirates, and Vikings (Plus Samurai and Musketeers)”

Proud to announce the latest book by our agency client Lawrence Ellsworth, Cinema of Swords: A Popular Guide to Movies & TV Shows About Knights, Pirates, and Vikings (Plus Samurai and Musketeers), a popular reference tome containing hundreds of reviews of action movies and programs. It will be published in 2023 by Applause Theater and Cinema Books*.

Ellsworth is the pen name of Lawrence Schick (seen below), who is also translator of Alexandre Dumas’s  Musketeers Cycle from Pegasus Books. Early in his career, Schick was a writer on the team at TSR Hobbies that developed Dungeons & Dragons. He’s something of a role-playing game legend. An impetus for the new book is his popular web feature, Cinema of Swords, on his site, and on Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature.

Shots from videos below: 1) Toshiro Mifune as a crafty ronin in Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” (released in 1961); 2) Basil Rathbone ready to skewer Errol Flynn in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), and 3) “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), with stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen’s ingeniously conceived skeletons clashing with Todd Armstrong as the seeker of the Golden Fleece.

 

 

 

 

 

*We earlier sold Applause Books Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater by Alexis Greene to be published in October 2021.

Sold to Penguin Random House Audio: Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War, 1930-1949   by Janet Somerville

I’m excited to announce a deal I’ve made for a major new audiobook to be published on May 18 2021 by Penguin Random House Audio for Toronto writer Janet Somerville’s widely praised book Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War, 1930-1949 (Firefly Books, hardcover 2019). Tony Award-winning actress Ellen Barkin*, a Gellhorn enthusiast and admirer of Somerville’s book, will be the voice of the audio edition. You can pre-order the audiobook via this link.

As with photojournalist Ruth Gruber** (1911-2016), Gellhorn (1908-1998, b. St Louis), was a trailblazer in her field. From the pitch letter I sent to acquiring editor Megan Mills at Penguin Random House Audio:

Journalist. Pioneer. Feminist. Human rights advocate. 

Martha Gellhorn was all of these and more, leaving her role as wife of Ernest Hemingway a lesser light among many noteworthy milestones. Rendered sensitively here by Janet Somerville in a curated collection of letters braided together with a biographical narrative threaded through the correspondence, Yours, for Probably Always brings readers into Gellhorn’s life and career shaped by her combat reporting, all spanning the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, WWII, the refugee crisis following the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Somerville also highlights Gellhorn’s friendships, her lovers, and a life lived intentionally. 

Gellhorn’s work speaks to our times; she was a champion of the poor and dispossessed, a vocal critic of war and brutality, and a warrior against oppression. Her weapons were her pen and her words. Her circle included Gary Cooper, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Beach, Colette, John Dos Passos, Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Adlai Stevenson, and Robert Capa, a dear friend. Among her regular correspondents reflected in this collection were Leonard Bernstein; Eleanor Roosevelt; H.G. Wells; Maxwell Perkins; Charles Scribner; US General James Gavin, a high-profile critic of America’s War in Vietnam, and a romantic partner to Gellhorn; French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel; and of course, Hemingway.

Along with the letters, the book includes examples of Gellhorn’s journalism, fiction, and excerpts from her journals. An ardent anti-fascist, Gellhorn was a life-long advocate of social justice and a strong-willed, self-made modern woman. Yours, for Probably Always shines a light on this intrepid reporter and fearless figure.

The reception for Yours, for Probably Always

When the hardcover edition was published it carried glowing endorsements from Ward Just and Azar Nafisi, seen on the book jacket above, receiving wide coverage and superb reviews, including a starred Kirkus; coverage in the Guardian, where it was their Book of the Day; the NY Review of Books; and some Twitter love from actor Alec Baldwin:

  • “Somerville makes an impressive book debut with a life of novelist, journalist, and intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, told through a captivating selection of her letters to friends, family, husbands, and lovers. The volume is enriched by Somerville’s biographical narrative and her decision to include responses of many recipients and, in some cases, letters between individuals who were especially significant in Gellhorn’s life… An engrossing collection that burnishes Gellhorn’s reputation as an astute observer, insightful writer, and uniquely brave woman.”—Kirkus Reviews, a starred review
  • “It’s history as it was lived, and shared in intimate emotional detail… Curated with valuable context by Janet Somerville… her own love letter of sorts to a woman she calls ‘a wonder.’”—Lyse Doucet, Guardian Books,
  • “Martha Gellhorn was many things, including a novelist and short story writer, but a ‘relator of Wars”’ is the most important of them. . . . As early as 1935, her regular correspondent Allen Grover wrote to Gellhorn that ‘I should one day publish your collected letters. They’re magnificent prose.’ They are—and they are also precious traces of the turbulent, passionate, relentless, self-examined inner life of a woman of honor whose indomitable character is beautifully summed up by her mother in Somerville’s invigorating collection: ‘She lacks everything that makes living easy, she possesses most things that make it worthwhile.’”—Fintan O’Toole, New York Review of Books
  • The CBC radio program Day 6 aired a feature on Somerville’s book which explained,
    “Though [Gellhorn’s] dispatches from Normandy and Spain, which documented a mother’s grief after her child was killed by a bomb, brought humanity to tragedy for years, it was a report on Dachau…that made her famous. ‘My personal war aim was to get into Dachau,’ Gellhorn [said] in a 1983 TV interview. ‘I did get there and I was there the day the war ended. I didn’t have to be objective, in the sense that what was there to be objective about? It was a total and absolute horror and all I did was report it as it was.'”

Janet Somerville and Ellen Barkin

Somerville learned of Barkin’s interest in Gellhorn in 2019 when she offered to send the actor a copy of the hardcover book. They continued exchanging correspondence, by letter, text, and Twitter. Barkin told Somerville that she loved reading a few pages every night before bed, with Gellhorn’s powerful words, and Somerville’s narrative about her, in her mind’s ear.

In summer 2020, the pair spoke voice-to-voice for the first time, and Janet planted a seed about Ellen becoming her book’s voice, should there be an audiobook. Ellen responded with [almost] unprintable alacrity: “It would be my fucking honor.”

Around this time, I became Janet’s agent and my pitch to Penguin Random House Audio came soon after.

We cannot imagine anyone more suited to give Martha Gellhorn’s words vibrant life than Ellen Barkin. Like Gellhorn, she is intelligent, funny, indefatigable, an outspoken champion of the most disenfranchised among us, and a true supporter of social justice, willing to give voice to important issues when a less brave person would turn away. We are delighted she is adding her singular luster to Yours, for Probably Always.

Hemingway on PBS

We’re excited to announce the audiobook this week featuring the voice of Ellen Barkin, ahead of Ken Burns’s new documentary “Hemingway,” which will air on PBS, April 5-7.

*  Ellen Barkin was awarded the Tony in 2011 for her role in “The Normal Heart,” her Broadway debut. She broke out as a film actress in 1982 with her performance in “Diner.” She’s also known for her performances in “Tender Mercies” (1983), “Big Easy” (1986), “Sea of Love” (1989), “This Boy’s Life” (1993), “Ocean’s Thirteen” (2007), and “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (2017).

** Like Gellhorn, Ruth Gruber was a foreign correspondent. I’ve often wondered if Gellhorn and Gruber crossed paths, as their careers tracked closely. Along with reporting from abroad, both women served in the FDR administration—Gellhorn in the Federal Relief Emergency Administration (FERA), and Gruber as Interior Secretary Harold Ickes’ Special Representative to Alaska. I worked with Gruber for twenty years, publishing six of her eighteen books, including Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America (Three Rivers Press, 2000, and a CBS mini-series with Natasha Richardson as Ruth Gruber) and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (Union Square Press, 2008).