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
http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/1-Great-Heart.jpg640480Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2025-03-17 19:03:072025-03-26 11:16:28Chuffed to Hear “Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure” Praised Four Decades Later
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.
http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Dreams-front-scaled.jpg19202560Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2025-01-27 15:50:282025-03-09 13:55:57On Sale Now: “Dreams of the Romantics,” a Story Cycle about the British Romantic Poets, 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.
http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Bruno-picture-2.jpg480600M. G. Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngM. G. Turner2025-01-05 13:06:242025-01-17 23:43:05The Tragedy of Bruno Schulz, A Mysterious and Captivating Writer by M. G. Turner
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 Nooseto 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.
Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis, John Webb; Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater, Gail Merrifield Papp
Cinema of Swords: A History and Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Barbarians, and Vikings; The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock’n’Roll to Synthwave, Nate Patrin
The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quang Duc, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World, Ray E. Boomhower; How Midsummer Night: A Memoir of Friendship and Loss, Janet Somerville; The Kremlin’s Noose: Vladimir Putin’s Blood Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia, Amy Knight
http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Philip-Ewan.jpg10591356Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2024-12-26 15:37:102025-01-27 14:17:06Looking Back on 2024, Another Productive and Creative Year in Editing, Consulting, and Agenting
“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).
http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Kirkus-review.png19803290Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2024-04-29 14:22:442024-05-19 15:56:33First Reviews of “The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia”
In the early 2000s, when I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers, I had the good fortune to acquire the US publishing rights to a book first published in Canada, Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Who Time Forgot and Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean, what would prove to be only the first two books on polar exploration by Ken McGoogan, who has continued to immerse himself in the subject over the past twenty years, now having published a total of six Arctic books. A key development in that immersion has been his role as a resource historian for many sailings with Adventure Canada, a travel company that takes visitors on voyages to Canada’s northern reaches and in to the Arctic itself.
Fatal Passage chronicled the mystery of the ships HMS Terror and Erebus, which under the command of Royal Navy captain John Franklin, set off with more than 125 officers and crew on board in search of the Northwest Passage, but then disappeared never to be heard from again, at least not among Euro-centric people. Many search parties sought to learn the fate of Franklin and his men, including one helmed by John Rae, from Orkney in northern Scotland. He was the first European-based explorer to value highly the local knowledge of Inuit guides, hunters, and interpreters, who led him to eyewitnesses who’d seen hungry white seamen trekking across their lands in dire straits. They reported to Rae their understanding that to them these desperate men had engaged in cannibalism, feeding on the dead to try and save themselves. Rae’s discovery, though vetted by him with careful cross-questioning of the native witnesses, earned him a vituperative rebuke once back in England from Franklin’s wife, Jane Lady Franklin, who even enlisted Charles Dickens to editorialize against Rae. Fatal Passage effectively rehabilitated the reputation of John Rae, more than a century after it had been trashed by poobahs in Victorian England.
When it was published in the US, in 2002, the book won a Christopher Award, given to authors who produce works that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” McGoogan traveled from his home in Toronto to New York for the ceremony, and we began to get better acquainted as author and publisher, and as friends. Later, I made a road trip with my wife and son to Toronto and we enjoyed a dinner at Ken’s home with him and his artist wife Sheena. Another guest that night was Ken’s literary agent Beverley Slopen, from whom I’d acquired the rights to Ken’s books, and from whom I would later acquire rights to books by other Canadian authors, such as the mystery master Howard Engel, creator of the Benny Cooperman detective series.
Last December, Ken got in touch with me to extend an invitation. His latest book, Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery, was published in Canada last fall, and he explained to me it would be coming out in the US in the Spring of 2024. He would be coming down to New York to make a presentation on March 22 at the NY Public Library, in connection with a new exhibit, “The Awe of the Arctic” in the historic main library from March 15-July 13. A day prior to that, Ken said, he would be giving a talk at another public venue. He asked, in so many words, “Would you be interested in reading the new book, preparing some questions, and interviewing me at the first event?” After learning a few more details, including the fact there would be an honorarium to cover my preparation and for serving as his interlocutor, I readily accepted the exciting invitation.
In January, I was even more excited to learn from Ken that the venue for our joint event would be The Explorer’s Club, a venerable institution on the east side of Manhattan established in 1904. On Honourary Canadian, the sister website to this one, I put up a post promoting our talk, chronicling my longtime association with Canada and Canadian authors, and drafted what I dubbed my Canadian-adjacent bio, touching on my longtime immersion in #CANLit and in reading and publishing tales of polar exploration.
From Ken’s publisher—Douglas & McIntyre of Madeira Park, British Columbia, Canada—I received a copy of Searching for Franklin, and dove right into it. Rather than immediately noting possible questions for Ken while reading the book, I instead read it with a pencil in hand, scratching out asterisks in the margins next to passages that intrigued me, which I anticipated going back to once I’d finished the whole book, to mine them for the most resonant themes and to form the most stimulating questions I could think of for our discussion.
I found the book quite engrossing, and appreciated that it was written in multiple, contrasting styles of narrative nonfiction, though it’s all done without becoming jarring or off-putting. While most of is written in past tense, the norm for this sort of book prose, there are occasional passages in present tense, as when Ken and his fellow adventurers were actually touring the Arctic on an Adventure Canada cruise, and when they disembarked from the ship to traverse the ground where Franklin, his officers and crew, and their Inuit hunters, interpreters, and guides had trekked almost two centuries ago. Ken also presents some fascinating counter-factual possibilities that contrast with the known historical record, as he offers his best theory about what led to the tragic demise of Franklin and his two ships and the entire crew. Note with no spoiler: this new theory of his, appearing for the first time in Searching for Franklin is supported by medical reporting and highly informed speculation.
Last Thursday, the night of our discussion finally arrived. I was glad to be joined by my wife, artist Kyle Gallup, and my adult son Ewan Turner, who operates Philip Turner Book Productions with me; he is a creative writer publishing under the pen name M.G. Turner. After a friendly reception in the historic rooms of The Explorer’s Club, Ken McGoogan pulled on the rope that sounds the Club’s bell, calling the meeting to order, and an audience of what looked to be about seventy-five people took seats in the main hall. Following an introduction by Cedar Swan, the CEO of Adventure Canada, Ken gave a talk outlining his long association with the Franklin saga, going all the way back to the writing of Fatal Passage. Using slides, he described how Margaret Atwood had introduced him to Swan’s father Matthew, the founder of Adventure Canada; the many voyages he’s made with them over the past twenty years; how Franklin’s candidacy to lead the search for the Northwest Passage had been championed to the Royal Navy by Lady Franklin, even though his earlier expeditions had produced less than stellar results; John Rae’s discovery of Franklin’s fate; and the medical and dietary travails that he now believes led to the demise of so many of Franklin’s men. When he finished his presentation, it was time for our discussion.
I began, asking such questions as these (with appendices from my research in parentheses):
Why did the idea of the Northwest Passage become so central to British myth-making about itself, and later to Canada’s own self-image? (In a discussion a day earlier when we met for a convivial dinner and to discuss the following night’s program, I referred Ken to such evidence of the rousing example from pop culture of Stan Rogers’ song “Northwest Passage,” a veritable Canadian national anthem, sung lustily by the barrel-chested musician (1949-83) on his debut album in 1981. So as to not lengthen the duration of our discussion unduly, I refrained from mentioning it then, but do so now for the sake of sharing more of my research.)
How was it that young boys went to sea so young, including Franklin himself, at age twelve? (In another example from cultural history cited in camera to Ken, but not at the Club is the haunting folk song “The Captain’s Apprentice,” collected in 1905 by my favorite English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose lyrics tell the sad tale of a boy treated roughly.)
Can you contrast the leadership styles of John Rae and Franklin, with Rae seeming to show special regard for the well-being of his fellow expeditioneers, more so than Franklin?
It’s amazing to me, as you write, that ships had libraries—1700 volumes on Franklin’s ship, which would have taken up a lot of room on board. Aboard ship, where living and sleeping quarters were notoriously tight, how did they accommodate so many books? (And, was there such a thing as a ship librarian? That would be the job for me.)
You write that Charles Dickens at least allowed John Rae to publish a rebuttal to Lady Franklin’s accusations about him, but I wonder: Why did Dickens believe Lady Franklin’s slanders about Rae, at all?
Can you explain why when Erebus and Terror were found in 2014 and 2016, they were forty miles apart in the Arctic Ocean?
The caloric demand for portagers and voyageurs while doing all the enormously strenuous work on the trail must have been very high for them—while they carried 80-pound packs, in contrast to the sailors who carried a fourth of that weight—yet they often didn’t get the food they needed. How did they manage?
The discussion between the two of us transitioned into questions from members of the audience, with me calling on seven or eight people to stand and ask their questions, which were good ones. I enjoyed this part of the program very much, taking me back to my days when I moderated the community meeting of my college, Franconia College. After about an hour and twenty minutes, we concluded what had been a very enjoyable and stimulating program. The Explorer’s Club has posted it on their youtube page, so if of interest, you may view it via the link below.
I will conclude this post by making one more observation that I didn’t take the time to say last Thursday night. As my author Ruth Gruber (1911-2016)—about whom I’ve written often on this website—who I’ve observed with her spot reporting during and after WWII, and in such books as Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation, became, in my opinion, the most prominent chronicler of DPs (displaced persons) following the war, Ken McGoogan has over the course of his six books on the Arctic become our foremost chronicler of the explorers who sailed across the Atlantic seeking navigable waterways spanning northern seas that would take them all the way to “Cathay”—a Pierre Berton for the twenty-first century. I’m glad I’ve been in a position to carry on a dialogue with Ken these past many years.
And here is a gallery of photos from the whole night, from the reception through Ken’s talk, and then from our discussion. All photos taken by Kyle Gallup.
Reception at The Explorer’s Club
From l.-r. Philip Turner; Bill Getz, Ingram Book Company; Cedar Swan, Adventure Canada;
From l.-r., Ken McGoogan, Philip Turner, Bill Getz, Ingram Book Company
From l.-r., Ken McGoogan, Philip Turner, Elizabeth Cronin, NY Public Library
Ken McGoogan signing a book for a reader from Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
Philip Turner w/Cedar Swan, Adventure Canada
Books on John Franklin in The Explorer’s Club library
Ken McGoogan, shadowed by a mounted polar bear, pulling on the bell rope
Cedar Swan, introducing Ken McGoogan
Ken McGoogan, w/the Explorer’s Club flag and medallion.
Ken McGoogan is a voluble public speaker.
We began our discussion by talking about the Northwest Passage
We had a vigorous discussion.
Ken and I, in a mirthful moment. enjoyed
Ken, signing a copy of “Searching for Franklin.”
Ken McGoogan, with the bookseller from Shakespeare & Co., Jesse.
http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/12-KM-PT-2.jpg493640Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2024-03-25 15:35:372024-03-25 21:53:35In Conversation w/Canadian Author Ken McGoogan at The Explorer’s Club in NYC
May 1, 2024—I received this message from administrators of the Lukas Prize at Columbia Journalism Graduate School regarding the ceremony scheduled for May 7 to honor the recipients of the awards:
“Out of an abundance of caution and with deep regret, we have decided to cancel this year’s Lukas Award Ceremony. With the volatile circumstances on campus, we feel it is in everyone’s best interest to delay this celebration until a later date when we can properly honor the winners, and thank you for your stellar work in judging these prizes.”
— Since early fall last year, I’ve been serving as one of three judges for the Works-in-Progress Awards of the J. Anthony Lukas Prizes, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Collectively, we read nearly 100 nonfiction book proposals and mission statements submitted for consideration, with each of us reading approximately one-third of the entries, then arriving at a shortlist of fifteen titles, which was announced last month.
Following more discussion among the three of us, we chose two works-in-progress—whose authors will each receive $25,000—which have been announced today. The works-in-progress awardees are Body Weather: Notes on Illness in the Anthropocene by Lorraine Boissoneault (Beacon Press), which was in my original tranche of proposals, and The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company by Alice Driver (One Signal, Atria).
Here are the citations we wrote for the books:
Body Weather is a visceral work of reported essays, masterfully braided with narrative research. Lorraine Boissoneault tells the story of living with chronic illness at a time when the planet is in a state of dire suffering. Climate change is bringing more hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, fires and landslides. How will a distressed planet affect stressed, ill or disabled bodies? In poetic and haunting prose, Boissoneault unearths intersections between her unique experience living with illness, while also illuminating universal questions lodged within all of us: How do we learn to live with discomfort? “How do we seek refuge from our own bodies, from weather that wraps itself around the world?” The Lukas Prize will enable the author to travel from her home base in Chicago to the Saguenay fjord in northern Quebec, to Death Valley in California and to Australia’s outback to complete reporting for the book. Body Weather is a singular work of literary reportage, a firsthand, intimate account drawing profound connections between the body and the planet.
The Life and Death of the American Worker is a rigorously researched work of narrative nonfiction that exemplifies the spirit of holding powerful institutions accountable, while humanizing the individuals who have been systematically dehumanized by immigration law and unregulated labor practices. Powerful forces have tried to silence the project and the people who are part of it. Yet with deep access and empathy, Alice Driver tells the multifaceted stories of families who have filed a class-action lawsuit to hold Tyson responsible for the working conditions that caused the deaths of their loved ones. She conducted interviews in the various native languages of subjects, and the Lukas Award will go toward some of those translations. Although many journalists have held temporary jobs within meatpacking plants to write about the industry, Driver (who is from Arkansas and grew up around Tyson employees) is solely focused on the longterm experiences of immigrant workers who have been at Tyson for decades. Driver has performed a remarkable feat of investigative and narrative reporting in telling the stories of these essential yet often overlooked and exploited workers.
It was a pleasure to serve with my fellow judges, Chris Jackson, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, One World Publishing, Penguin Random House, and Erika Hayasaki, Professor at the University of California, Irvine, in the Literary Journalism Program, and author of Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity and the Meaning of Family (Algonquin Books, 2022). I also want to thank publishing friend Peter Ginna, who had been a Lukas juror in previous years, who recommended me for this assignment. I’m also grateful to Program Manager of Professional Prizes at Columbia Journalism School Susie Marples for her deft and genial handling of many matters.
I want to add that a great majority of the projects submitted to us were worthy of support and consideration. In the course of our deliberations, on many occasions one of us said to the others, “I wish we could recognize and support all these books!” As an affirmation of that reality, the graphic with this post shows the fifteen books shortlisted for all Lukas Prizes this year, including the five works-in-progress.
The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards are given annually to aid in the completion of significant works of nonfiction on American topics of political or social concern. These awards assist in closing the gap between the time and money an author has and the time and money that finishing a book requires. J. Anthony Lukas (1933-1997) was the author of many books, including Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Knopf, 1985), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Two other Lukas Prizes were announced today:
Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed by Dashka Slater (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, August 2023), the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000).
A finalist for this prize was also recognized: Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by Kerry Howley (Knopf, May 2023)
and
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (Yale University Press, April 2023),
the Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000)
A finalist for this prize was also recognized: Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary Bass (Knopf, October 2023)
Congratulations to all the authors, as well as their editors and their literary agents! There will be a public ceremony on May 7 at the Columbia Journalism School, honoring all the authors and their work.
From the prize website: “Established in 1998, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project honors the best in American nonfiction writing. Co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and sponsored by the family of the late Mark Lynton, a historian and senior executive at the firm Hunter Douglas in the Netherlands, the Lukas Prize Project annually presents four awards in three categories.”
http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Lukas-shortlists.png7141424Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2024-03-19 12:59:302024-05-01 11:17:56Proud to Have Been a Judge for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Works-in-Progress Awards, Announced Today
At Philip Turner Book Productions, we’re excited to announce three new deals for two of our authors.
This week with my business partner Ewan Turner we sold Ray E. Boomhower’s latest biography of a journalist, Black Witness: Wallace Terry, The Civil Rights Crusade, Vietnam, and His Book ‘BLOODS‘ to the High Road Books imprint at University of New Mexico Press. This is the third book we’ve sold to UNMP for Ray Boomhower. The earlier books were biographies of Richard Tregaskis, who during WWII wrote the bestselling book of firsthand reportage, Guadalcanal Diary, and Malcolm Browne, AP Bureau Chief in Saigon in the early years of the Vietnam War—he took the shocking photograph of the Buddhist monk who self-immolated in protest against the South Vietnamese government. #CivilRights #VietnamWar #OralHistory #Journalism #biography
We’re also excited with two deals we’ve made for biblical scholar Brandon Grafius, Feeling Our Way Through Violent Texts: Interpreting Scripture With Emotions to Baker Academic Publishing and Scared by the Bible: A Hermeneutics of Horror to the Morehouse imprint at Church Publishing. These are the second and third books we’ve sold for Brandon Grafius. The first book of his we sold was Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions that Haunt Us (Broadleaf Books, 2022). #Horror #Bible #Hermeneutics #Text
http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/PM-Deals-March-8.png12621988Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2024-03-11 10:14:212024-03-11 10:26:05Recent Sales By Philip Turner Book Productions
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!
