Powerful Endorsements for “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life” by Todd Goddard

As announced previously on this website, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by our agency client Todd Goddard, the first biography of the American author, will be published on November 4, 2025, in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook by Blackstone Publishing. The book has garnered powerful endorsements so far, from writers Rebecca Solnit, Colum McCann, Carl Hiassen, and John Matteson, as seen below.

If you’re interested in pre-ordering the book, here are links for doing so:

Bookshop.org (Bookshop is an online bookseller whose sales support  independent bookstores), 2) Barnes & Noble, 3) Books-A-Million, and 4) Amazon.

 

Advance Praise for Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard

“Jim Harrison was a mustang that never got corralled, or at least broke out of all the paddocks he found himself in, and Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight. I was more than glad to go on the journey that was Harrison’s life in Devouring Time’s narrative, and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and all.”—Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

“Jim Harrison is and always will be one of my great heroes. He emerges from Todd Goddard’s splendid Devouring Time in vivid technicolor, and indeed shadow, as if he could walk off the page at any moment, sounding out his American yawp. Gracefully rendered and impeccably researched, Goddard intimately charts the free-flowing river that was Harrison’s life, its headwaters and tributaries, the glistening shallows and eddies, and the dark charging currents that carved channels through the literary landscape. His timeless poetry and fiction, singular joie de vivre, boundless appetites and intellect, as well as his unerring commitment to wisdom and wildness, resound on every page. One of our most cherished writers, Jim Harrison has landed in the hands of a worthy biographer. An absolute pleasure to read, Devouring Time resonates with me still.”—Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon

“My friend Jim Harrison always seemed a fiercely untameable subject for a biographer, but I think Devouring Time will stand as a complete and moving portrait. Jim was one of those rare writers whose private life was as adventurous as their works, but only a dogged journalist could have tracked down all the tales. Todd Goddard tells the whole story in a way that Jim would have admired – raw and revealing, yet with a sensitive eye for both the pain and the talent that made Jim one of modern America’s most intriguing poets and novelists.”—Carl Hiaasen, author of Bad Monkey and Fever Beach

Jim Harrison, Paris, 1971. Credit: Dan Gerber

“Jim Harrison lived a big life, and he has long deserved a gargantuan biography, both in size and spirit. And this is what Todd Goddard has given us. All by itself, the meticulously rendered story of how Harrison’s prose masterpiece Legends of the Fall came into being would be ample reward for the curious reader. But Goddard has given us immeasurably more. Impeccably researched, sensitively written, Devouring Time gives us a man — one who experienced the very depths of pain but found there the building blocks of enduring art. Cruelly battered by adversity, Harrison nevertheless infused his world with transcendent song. Read in conjunction with his own work, Devouring Time completes his testament.”—John Matteson, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father

Excitedly Anticipating Publication of “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life” by Todd Goddard

May 27 2025 update:

For fans of Jim Harrison eager to have their copy of Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life as soon as possible upon publication November 4, 2025, please click through to the websites of major book retailers below, using the pre-order/buy buttons provided:

1) Bookshop.org/for pre-ordering Devouring Time (Bookshop is an online bookseller whose sales support many independent bookstores)  2) Barnes & Noble/for pre-ordering Devouring Time   3) Books-A-Million/for pre-ordering Devouring Time  4) Amazon

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May 22, 2025
As reported on this website in April 2020, for our author client Todd Goddard, Philip Turner Book Productions sold Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life to Blackstone Publishing. Due to the pandemic, a number of key archives were inaccessible for 2-3 years but the author persevered and his book, the first biography of the protean American writer—beloved to readers for his poetry, many novellas, full-length novels, and essays that covered the gamut from food to fishing to foreign locales—will be published in hardcover, ebook, and as an audiobook on November 4, 2025. You can see the cover image from the advanced reading copy (ARC) that is being distributed to bookstores, book critics, and literary journalists, and the back cover copy.

Things are setting up very well for the book, with this enthusiastic blurb already received from the author and activist Rebecca Solnit, who writes that,

“Jim Harrison was a mustang that never got corralled, or at least broke out of all the paddocks he found himself in, and Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight. I was more than glad to go on the journey that was Harrison’s life in Devouring Time’s narrative, and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and all”— Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

The biography of Jim Harrison (1937-2016) unfolds across a number of key places, from the lakes and forests of Michigan, his home state, to the Florida Keys, to Greenwich Village, to Durango, Mexico, as well as Montana, Hollywood, Arizona, and Provence, France. In the archives, Todd Goddard found a rich record of correspondence, including many letters with Raymond Carver, Francis Ford Coppola, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Allen Ginsberg, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Mailer, Gary Snyder, David Foster Wallace, Terry Tempest Williams, and Tom McGuane. Goddard is an associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University, has taught Harrison’s fiction and poetry, and presented research on Harrison’s works for the Jim Harrison Society at the American Literature Association’s annual conference.

We have some ARCs available, so let me know, if you or someone you know—a bookseller say, or a reviewer—wants one because of the sort of books they read, carry, and write about, including Harrison’s own poetry, essays, and novellas, the latter being a form he excelled at beyond any fiction writer of his era. 

This week, Harrison’s classic 1989 poetry collection, The Theory and Practice of Rivers, has been reissued in a new edition from his longtime poetry publisher, Copper Canyon Press. In advance of that, Todd Goddard, Rebecca Solnit, and Jamie Harrison, one of Jim’s daughters, took part in an online discussion of the book with Copper Canyon publisher Joseph Bednarik. In addition, Copper Canyon printed a sweet little broadside for The Theory and Practice of Rivers, which I was delighted to receive in the mail, as shown in the photo gallery below. The republication of The Theory and Practice of Rivers is timely in that it happens to coincide with the publication this week of Is a River Alive?  by another of my favorite writers on nature and landscape, Robert Macfarlane. Taken together the two books are sure to bring renewed attention to our riverine world.

And if you’re looking to join an online community of folks who treasure Jim Harrison’s work, I suggest you can join the Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook, where I appreciate that this post is being widely shared.

All in all, it’s shaping up to be a banner year for the indomitable Jim Harrison!

Stellar Reviews of “Dreams of the Romantics,” a Story Cycle by M. G. Turner

May 15, 2025, an update regarding Dreams of the Romantics:

The prominent editor of weird fiction, and critic, S. T. Joshi (known for American Supernatural Tales, Penguin Classics, and The Theory of the Weird Tale, Sarnath Press) reviewed the book and recommended it to his audience, writing:

“The occasion for this story cycle is the most famous literary contest in the history of weird fiction….Turner engages in the fantasy of being himself a member of the literary circle at the Villa Diodati, recounting his own Gothic tale….The final story in the book, “The Last Voyage,” is a gripping modern recreation of the fateful boat trip that led to Shelley’s drowning in the Bay of Spezia in 1822….Dreams of the Romantics is a vivid and engrossing little book….well worth reading by those many devotees of the weird who find themselves drawn back to that day, more than two centuries ago, when several towering literary figures sought to enshrine the weird into the corpus of English literature.”—S. T. Joshi, Spectral Realms No. 23 (Summer 2025)

Post originally published April 8, 2025

Among the fortunate discoveries I made during COVID was that of a book reviewer in New Brunswick, Canada, James Fisher, who edits a book review journal called The Seaboard Review of Books, which can be found on Substack. Having long been interested in Canadian literature, and the curator of a blog I call Honourary Canadian, I appreciated that he and his team of critics focus on Canadian authors and small presses, and noticed that they also cover “international” titles. With that in mind, I contacted James and asked if he’d be interested in receiving a copy of Dreams of the Romantics, the chapbook inspired by the Romantic poets that Ewan Turner, my adult son and business partner, recently published under his pen name M. G. Turner. James was intrigued, so we shipped him a copy.

Yesterday, he published a lovely, thoughtful review of the book which I’m pleased to share here. Below are the closing paragraphs:

Dreams of the Romantics  was a beautiful read. Turner’s use of language reflects the period, and I read through the book several times, picking up on different metaphors from the lives of all those in attendance at Lord Byron’s dinner party. I also found it educational, as I had only a passing knowledge of the Shelleys, little of Byron and none of Doctor John Polidori. Invariably, I was sent scrambling to the Internet for answers to my questions, as well as the biographies of the participants.

I certainly anticipate hearing more from the pen of M. G. Turner, as Dreams of the Romantics certainly demonstrated his potential as a writer.”

I invite you to read it in full by clicking on this link, or by opening the screenshots below.

Dreams of the Romantics is now available on Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.


Chuffed to Hear “Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure” Praised Four Decades Later

This hour-long youtube video offers a brilliant book conversation between Chicago writers Alex Kotlowitz, author of the 1992 classic social welfare book There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America, and Donna Seaman, longtime editor of Booklist magazine, and author of the recent memoir River of Books: A Life in Reading, published by Ode Books, a cool imprint of Seminary Co-Op Bookshop and 57th Street Books devoted to books about books, bookselling, publishing, etc. Now that’s my kind of imprint!

At about the 25th minute of the video I was surprised and chuffed to hear Kotlowitz extol the nonfiction wilderness narrative Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge, an engrossing wilderness narrative about an epic canoeing expedition in the Canadian north that the late esteemed editor Dan Frank acquired and published for Viking in 1986, which I then was honored to republish in 1997 as a Kodansha Globe title with a new Introduction by the late great Vermont novelist Howard Frank Mosher.

Alex Kotlowitz is right—Great Heart is a great book, and it was gratifying to learn it’s still being read and enjoyed nearly four decades years after it was first published, and nearly three decades after I brought it out again. #Canoeing #SurvivalStories

Here is the video of their conversation.

On Sale Now: “Dreams of the Romantics,” a Story Cycle about the British Romantic Poets, by M. G. Turner

As mentioned in the annual letter for Philip Turner Book Productions that we sent out a few weeks ago, we are starting a book imprint, Riverside Press, to publish chapbooks and belles-lettres titles. To begin, the first book, by Ewan under his pen name M. G. Turner, is Dreams of the Romantics, a gothic story cycle about Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Dr. John William Polidori, who served as Byron’s physician.

The poetic circle gathered at Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland; it was June-July 1816, during the fateful Year Without a Summer, following the eruption of Mt Tambora near Bali which cast a pall over the earth. Mary Shelley, eighteen that year, later described “incessant rain” and “wet, ungenial” weather. Over one three-day stretch stuck indoors during inclement weather, Byron—who that same month would write his lacerating, apocalyptic poem “Darkness”—dared each of his friends to devise a gothic tale. His challenge resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Prometheus Reborn, and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the first popular vampire story. Dreams of the Romantics will appeal to readers who have a yen for spooky stories, and an interest in or curiosity about the lives of these immortal writers.

We’ll use Riverside Press to bring out the work of other suitable books as opportunities present themselves. If you’d like to have a copy of Dreams of the Romantics, details are below.

  • The 96-page trade paperback, with seven stories imagining the lives of the British Romantic poets, sells for $15 + $5 (maybe more for international destinations). If you want to buy a copy, please contact us at ptbookproductions[@]gmail[.]com and we will give you electronic payment information or our address
  • The painting on the front cover is “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” Caspar David Friedrich, 1818
  • The painting on the back cover is “The Funeral of Shelley,” Louis Edouard Fournier, 1889
  • The Jenman symbol, seen on the back cover, traditionally symbolizes good fortune and wards off evil, as adopted by W. Somerset Maugham on his books.
  • In descending order the figures in the frontispiece shown here—opposite the titles of the stories—are Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Lord Byron, Dr. John William Polidori, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The Tragedy of Bruno Schulz, A Mysterious and Captivating Writer by M. G. Turner

Reading the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz is an experience like no other: scholars have compared him favorably to both Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust. However, each of these authors provides only a partial analogy, despite Schulz’s work exhibiting the absurdity of the former and the nostalgia of the latter. But even with these similarities to existing storytellers, he is his own man, a wild, surreal magician of the written word who could conjure whole worlds right in his hometown of Drohobycz—then Poland, today Ukraine. In addition to being a linguistic marvel, he was also an accomplished illustrator of his own work, drawing bizarre phantasmagorical images which often featured a distorted version of himself.

Schulz is one of the few deceased writers I have ever felt creatively jealous of, for he achieved something on the page which is extremely elusive and usually relegated only to the medium of cinema: the ability to transmit surrealism into fiction. There are some technical reasons why fiction does not lend itself well to this style; in film, directors can move from image to image at will, while with words we must always be building and rounding out our world, as well as shoring up our grammar, and at the same time constantly keeping in mind the reader who may at any moment put the book down. However inexplicably, Schulz does both of these things—that is to say, building a world and transmitting surrealism—to powerful effect. He crafts confounding fables of a family in turmoil, of a son bewildered by his father, of a city where the rules of reality are supplanted by a magical dream logic that sweeps the characters and the reader into rollicking journeys of remarkable and sublime poignancy. And despite the inherent darkness of this world, in which it always seems to be night, it is truly a delight to go with him. Another literary feat he manages to accomplish is making the harsh realities of Jewish life in pre-war, and then war-torn Poland seem beautiful and in, its own way, holy. For there are no laments or complaints in his prose, or even dirges on suffering; rather, his work, in its own roundabout way, appears to be a celebration of the human imagination and its ability to influence and effect our lives in a palpable and entertaining fashion. Not to mention the fact that, like Kafka, his characters are not recognizably Jewish.

Still, the fact Schulz was Jewish—and later murdered by a jealous S.S. officer who resented his artistic endeavors, while walking home with a loaf of bread—does lend the work a feeling of impending doom. Like Kakfa, he is perpetually aware of his own perceived inadequacy and manages to fight this psychological oppression by saying in effect, “Okay, you’re right, I am hideous and inferior. But so are you, and more so—you are agents of darkness while I am only an agent of the strange.” This is my own rendering of what I take to be Schulz’s overarching idea and modus operandi. The world he permeates with strangers and drifters and birds and hats with a will of their own has no hue or whiff of evil to it; instead, confusion seems to be its main characteristic and echoes what he and his family must have been feeling at the height of the war when they’d been forced into the Drohobycz ghetto by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators.

The confusion present in his two story collections—the only ones that survive, as the rest of his literary output, including a novel called The Messiah, is lost to history—has a logical conclusion, and that is madness. A sense of madness was what Schulz must have been feeling as his family members were taken away, a sense of the vicious absurdity of trying to be an artist in a world that was crumbling around him. If it was driving the author mad, it made sense that the characters themselves are occupying a mad world where the laws of physics are suspended, or else don’t even apply. But in fiction, unlike in life, this kind of societal collapse can be rendered beautiful and even, to the reader, pleasurable to read—and all for its dream-like qualities which are born of the author’s escapist fancy and aesthetic brilliance. We enter a trance when reading Schulz, a healing type of meditative state, that even in the English translation by Celina Wieniewska (Schulz wrote in Polish) is distinct from the kind acquired from reading Kafka or Proust. This is due to the writer’s fusion of linguistic excellence with unbridled imagination that reveled in knowing no bounds—especially as his external world became increasingly cramped, closed-in, and imprisoning.

Schulz’s best story, I believe, is “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” a must-read for anyone interested in dream logic pushed to its most extreme. In this story the narrator’s father has died; yet he remains alive in only one location, a mysterious sanatorium where the rules of life and death go unenforced. Time is the key element here: in the sanatorium his father’s death simply has yet to occur, and it is here the narrator finds himself visiting the man whose antics have plagued him for many consecutive stories. Some scholars have pointed out the similarity of this theme to those of Franz Kafka whose issues with his own father were often on display in pieces like The Judgment, and of course The Metamorphosis. But instead of making us feel, as Kafka does, that the author is finding comparable metaphors in fiction for the most intense emotions in his own life, Schulz takes a more nebulous and, in many ways, more nuanced approach. There is simply no resolution in “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” or really in any of his work. This mirrors the writer’s own death. As stated earlier, Schulz was shot down in the street at the age of fifty by an S.S. officer who did not appreciate Schulz’s artistic efforts—efforts he was lending to a rival Nazi commander who’d contracted his services to paint a mural of fairy tales on his children’s bedroom wall, in exchange for money and some degree of protection, which in the end did not save him. (This mural is now restored and on display in Israel’s Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center.)

Perhaps Isaac Bashevis Singer said it best, when he lent a blurb to the publication of Schulz’s work, that had he “…been allowed to live out his life, he might have given us untold treasures, but what he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” I could not agree more. I highly recommend delving into this mysterious and tragic author if dream logic, surrealism, and magical realism appeal to you—though he is so much more than any label, name, or genre, can stick to him. In life he defied convention, and in death he did the same; thus, his immortality as a mid-century European literary master, albeit one who died before their time, is unquestionably assured.

M. G. Turner

January 2025

Looking Back on 2024, Another Productive and Creative Year in Editing, Consulting, and Agenting

This week I began totaling up the volume of business for Philip Turner Book Productions in 2024, to prepare to send agency clients a full accounting of monies we received from publishers for them in the past year, and to write this annual year-end blog post. I’m pleased to note the figures confirm how it felt while we were working all year—2024 was another very productive year for the company that I founded in 2009, which I began operating with my adult son Ewan five years ago.

It’s fun and rewarding to work with Ewan, a knowledgeable colleague and partner whose instincts and judgment I trust completely. He began as Managing Editor, and then in 2022 was promoted to Executive Editor and Co-Literary Agent. The dual role is emblematic of our makeup as a joint editorial services consultancy and literary agency.

Ewan is also a very talented creative writer who publishes his own fiction under the pen name M. G. Turner. His personal essay, “Ray Harryhausen: A Remembrance,” on the movie special effects pioneer, along with his review of Harryhausen’s classic movie “Jason and the Argonauts,” will be published in the Winter 2025 issue of Videoscope Magazine. All his writings on this website—personal essays and short stories—can be viewed via this link.

In January, Ewan will also be publishing a book of his own, Dreams of the Romantics, a story cycle about Lord Byron, Mary and Percey Bysshe Shelley, and their poetic circle. It’s an interconnected series of tales written in a gothic vein. It will come out under the rubric of Riverside Press, a new book imprint devoted to publishing belles-lettres titles of Ewan’s work and other writers. If you’d like to have a copy of ordering info for Dreams of the Romantics, we’ll be sharing ordering information in a few weeks.

A creative highlight of the past year for me was the opportunity I had to interview Canadian historian  Ken McGoogan at the Explorer’s Club in Manhattan for his latest polar book Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery. I posted an essay about the event for this blog, “In Conversation w/Canadian Author Ken McGoogan at The Explorer’s Club in NYC.” Our conversation can also be viewed on youtube. My writings on this website can be viewed via this link.

Looking back on the year that ends next week, Ewan and I note that,

  • On the editorial side, we worked with a total of nineteen authors, editing manuscripts and book proposals, and consulting with writers on a number of different book ideas;
  • On the agency side, we made ten new deals with book publishers and audiobook publishers for titles that will be published in 2025 and beyond; in addition, we are currently submitting a number of the above book proposals to publishers—such as a narrative nonfiction about domestic violence, a biography of one of Major League Baseball’s greatest player-managers, a memoir about Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and a novel in stories set in a surreal New York City by Ewan, writing as M. G. Turner;
  •  With a backlist of author clients whose books we began licensing over a decade and a half ago, we also paid out advances and ongoing royalties from various publishers to seventeen different authors and rights holders.

The books we licensed in 2024, to be published in 2025 unless otherwise noted:

  • Black Witness: Journalist Wallace Terry, the Civil Rights Crusade, Vietnam, and Bloods by Ray E. Boomhower. The first-ever biography of  Terry (1938-2003), who spent his life smashing barriers as a Black journalist, first in his hometown of Indianapolis, all the way to the nation’s capital at the Washington Post and Time magazine (becoming the first Black correspondent working for a major U.S. news magazine) and then overseas during the Vietnam War, where he chronicled Black service members as no one ever had before him. To High Road Books, University of New Mexico Press (UNMP) for publication in 2026; for more on Boomhower’s books with UNMP please see below under the rubric of books published in 2023-24.
  • Who’s To Blame for Putin? Reassessing Russia’s Lost Chance for Democracy by Amy Knight. Thirty-five years ago many in the West hoped that Russia was embarking on a future of unprecedented political freedom. Today the countries of Eastern European that were under the Soviet yoke are democracies and members of NATO and the EU, while Russia has retreated to a form of governance that echoes the Stalin era. Knight’s new book will examine how this occurred. To Reaktion Books in London, for publication in 2026; for more on Knight’s books see below under the rubric of books published in 2023-24.
  • The Ice On The Lake, a debut novel by Alex Messenger, about a late middle-age man haunted by past tragedies, mistakes, and the children he’s pushed away. After a medical diagnosis prompts him to begin making amends with his estranged daughter, he goes missing while ice fishing on Lake Superior; a story of redemption and survival set in the wild environs of the frozen north, to Blackstone Publishing, by the author of the Wall St Journal bestseller, The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack on the Canadian Tundra (Blackstone, 2019).
  • “I’ve Got the Shakes”: Performing Richard Foreman by Shauna Kelly. A sparkling curation of interviews and writings from cast and crew discussing their experiences working with Richard Foreman, who wrote and directed award-winning plays for forty-five years at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (OHT) in SoHo, the East Village, at the Public Theater, and around the world, exploring Foreman’s philosophy, legacy, creative methods, and artistic values, and providing insight about the careers of theater artists such as Willem Dafoe with roots in off-off Broadway. A new play by Foreman, now eighty-seven, was recently reviewed by Ben Brantley, NY Times Theater Critic. To Applause Theater and Cinema Books.
  • Shakespeare Theatre Company:  An Illustrated Biography of a Classical Theatre by Alexis Greene. A history of one of America’s great classical theaters, the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D..C., whose roots stretch back to the Folger Shakespeare Library and colonial America. Greene is also author of Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater (Applause Books, 2019). To Peter Randall Publishing.
  • Man in the Iron Mask, a new translation by Lawrence Ellsworth. The culmination of Dumas’s swashbuckling saga, set at the glittering court of King Louis XIV, with adventures ranging from the grim fortress of the Bastille to battles on the wild coast of Brittany, in which the Musketeers intrigue, romance, and fight alongside each other. To Pegasus Books; for more on Ellsworth’s books see below under the rubric of books published in 2023-24
  • Versions and Subversions: The Cover Songs That Changed Music by Nate Patrin. A wide-ranging examination of the place the cover version holds in popular music. Starting from the premise that the rise of the singer-songwriter in 1960s pop music put a renewed emphasis on the potentially transformative relationships between a song’s author and its performer(s), this book takes a kaleidoscopic and unpredictable view of the way musicians both renowned and obscure have found new means of expression through the works of others. Examples include Aretha Franklin’s cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect”; Run-D.M.C.’s genre-bending revival of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way”; and Johnny Cash world-weary cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” To University of Minnesota Press (UMP) for publication in 2026. Patrin is previously author of Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop and The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock’n’Roll to Synthwave, published by UMP in 2019 and 2022, so the new book should be seen as the third in a trilogy of books by Patrin about the surprising ways in which songs are given additional life through new contexts.
  • Scared by the Bible: A New Hermeneutics of Horror by Brandon Grafius. A practical and spiritual guide to reading the horror stories in the Bible which builds on the author’s illuminating readings of challenging texts from scripture, to Church Publishing, Grafius is also the author of Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions that Haunt Us (Broadleaf Books, 2019)
  • Feeling Our Way Through the Bible: Interpreting Scripture with Emotions by Brandon Grafius. This book for students and scholars will demonstrate how our emotional responses to a biblical text can help us to understand difficult passages in the Bible, to Baker Academic, for publication in 2026
  • The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption by Barbara Bisantz Raymond. Audio rights licensed to Tantor Media. Working from her mis-named Tennessee Children’s Home Society, Tann stole, bartered, and brokered more than 5,000 children from unwed mothers and poor Appalachian families from the 1920s through the 1950s, selling them to wealthy clients around the country including in Hollywood, where actors Dick Powell, Lana Turner, and Joan Crawford were among her clients, prominent names she would cite in marketing to future customers. I edited the manuscript while an editor with Carroll & Graf Publishers in the mid-2000s. It was a Publishers Weekly Best Book in 2007, and changed the face of adoption, leading many states to open their adoption records. The book was awarded an “Angels in Adoption” citation from the US Congress. After Lynn Franklin, the author’s longtime agent, died a few years ago, Barbara Raymond asked Philip Turner Book Productions to be her new agent. We’re also aiming to license a new trade paperback edition in 2025.
  • Our Woman in Havana: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of America’s Long Struggle with Castro’s Cuba, by Vicki Huddleston, which we licensed to Overlook Press in 2018, will also be an audiobook in 2025 from Tantor Media.
  • In the popular Pot Thief mystery series—whose author J. Michael Orenduff we’ve been representing since 2010—we placed his tenth title, The Pot Thief Who Studied Calvin, to be published by Open Road Media in January 2025. With Open Road, in March 2025 Orenduff will also be publishing The Ten Commandments: Updated, Condensed, and Improved, providing readers with a fresh look at a familiar text and offering readers a new understanding of what they can mean in our time.
  • Also coming in 2025, is Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard (Blackstone Publishing), the first biography of the great American poet, fiction writer, outdoorsman, and gourmand, Jim Harrison. We’re getting a great response to Blackstone’s cover.   

In our book development role—in which we begin working with authors even before they’ve begun writing their book—we are editing proposals and consulting with authors for books on:

  • The history of surgery going back to the Greco-Roman world;
  • How people can assemble adequate wealth to assure a prosperous retirement;
  • The latest techniques to bring equity and inclusion to organizations and institutions;
  • The island of Cyprus, and its long history from antiquity to the present;
  • A knowledgeable commentator on Russia with a popular youtube channel;
  • An anthology with essays by trans athletes about their lives and sports careers.

For the record, projects we currently have on submission to publishers include

  • a memoir by the frontwoman of a popular Canadian grunge rock duo;
  • a business book by America’s foremost designer of themed and historical attractions, the manuscript for which we also edited;
  • an epistolary novel about Elvis;
  • a memoir by the first Arab jurist to serve on the Israeli Supreme Court;
    and the aforementioned:
  • narrative nonfiction about domestic violence;
  • biography of Major League Baseball’s greatest player-manager;
  • memoir about Senator Robert F. Kennedy;
  • and novel in stories set in a surreal New York City by Ewan, writing under his pen name, M. G. Turner.

For the Mayo Clinic Press, I also edited the manuscript of Face in the Mirror: A Surgeon, a Patient, and the Remarkable Story of the First Face Transplant at Mayo Clinic by Jack El-Hai, which will be published in 2025.

In 2024, I also served as a judge in the Public Scholars program of the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), for which I served on a four-person panel reviewing applications from authors seeking grant support for their projects in American history. Prior to that, I was a juror for the Works-in-Progress Award from the Lukas Prize, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism Graduate School. In these two roles, I reviewed more than 125 nonfiction works-in-progress, many stellar projects, giving me the widest view of quality nonfiction publishing I’ve ever had.

In addition, please see books published by our clients in 2023-2024:

  • Cinema of Swords: A History and Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Barbarians, and Vikings [And Samurai and Musketeers and Gladiators and Outlaw Heroes] by Lawrence Ellsworth, acclaimed translator of classic works of Alexandre Dumas including The Three Musketeers and The Red Sphinx.
  • The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock’n’Roll to Synthwave by Nate Patrin, Book II in Patrin’s nonfiction trilogy on the creative repurposing of popular songs, University of Minnesota Press;
  • Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis by John Webb, Potomac Books, University of Nebraska Press;
  • Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater by Gaill Merrifield Papp, Applause Theater and CinemaBooks;
  • The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quang Duc, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World by Ray E. Boomhower, High Road Books, UNMP, which also brought out his Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam in trade paperback, first published in hardcover in 2022;
  • How Midsummer Night: A Memoir of Friendship and Loss by Janet Somerville, Open Road Media, lauded by Stephen King as “A wonderful memoir.” Somerville was previously author of Yours, for Probably Always:
Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War 1930–1949 (Firefly Books, 2019), which we licensed to Penguin Random House audio in 2021.
  • The Kremlin’s Noose: Vladimir Putin’s Blood Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia by Amy Knight; in addition, for Knight, with independent subsidiary rights representative Linda Biagi, we licensed The Kremlin’s Noose to publishers in Brazil and the UK, and the audiobook rights were sold to Tantor Media. In addition, Knight’s 2017 book Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (St Martin’s Press, 2017) came out in trade paperback.

 

First Reviews of “The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia”

“The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia”, Northern Illinois/Cornell Univ. Press, May 15, 2024 —

Update: On the publication date of The Kremlin’s Noose, May 15, we received this outstanding starred review in Kirkus. The key lines are

“An in-depth examination of the rise and fall of a Russian oligarch….Knight’s thorough research and broad comprehension of Russian politics since the Soviet era allows her to deftly draw linkages between the events that led to Berezovsky’s downfall as she also notes aspects of Berezovsky’s personality that contributed to his demise….A chilling, compellingly written exploration of Russian politics.”—Starred review, Kirkus

Here’s a screenshot of the review:

 

I’m excited with the upcoming publication of our agency client Amy Knight’s latest book, The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia, as we’ve seen the first full review of the book. In Foreign Affairs, critic Maria Lipman writes, “Knight tells the riveting story of the Russian tycoon and political operator Boris Berezovsky and his role in the rise of Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000.” (Full review screenshot below)

And in Theater Mania—in a review of the new play “Patriots” by Peter Morgan (“The Crown” and “Frost/Nixon”), which also chronicles the testy relationship between oligarch Boris Berzovsky and Putin—critic Ian Stewart writes, “In a book, like Amy Knight’s excellent forthcoming history, The Kremlin’s Noose [the story of the two men is] a thriller.”

Along with the North American print edition of The Kremlin’s Noose (May 15, Northern Illinois/Cornell University Press), we’ve also licensed an audiobook edition to Tantor Media, also due out in May; and foreign editions of the book are coming out from a publisher in Britain (Icon Books, June 2024), and Brazil (2025).

Amy Knight has been called “the West’s foremost scholar” of the KGB by The New York Times. She is also the author of How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt of Soviet Spies (Carroll & Graf, 2006, for which I was the editor back in the day), and Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (St Martin’s Press, 2017), the first book for which I was her agent. Orders to Kill is now available in paperback.

Foreign Affairs review

How the Cold War Began

Orders to Kill