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

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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.

A 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.” It can also be viewed on youtube.

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

  • On the editorial side, we worked with a total of eighteen authors, editing manuscripts and book proposals, and consulting with them 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—such as narrative nonfiction about domestic violence, a biography of one of Major League Baseball’s greatest player-managers, and a novel in stories set in a surreal New York City;
  •  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 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, though officially still part of the Soviet Union, 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, 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, previously translator of The Three Musketeers, The Red Sphinx, and other novels by Alexandre Dumas. 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 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”; 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, both 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-200s. 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 hoping 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 coming months. With Open Road, 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. 

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;
  • 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.”
  • The Kremlin’s Noose: Vladimir Putin’s Blood Feud with the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia by Amy Knight; in addition, for Amy 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.

 

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

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“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

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In Conversation w/Canadian Author Ken McGoogan at The Explorer’s Club in NYC

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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.

 

 

 

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Proud to Have Been a Judge for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Works-in-Progress Awards, Announced Today

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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.”

 

 

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Recent Sales By Philip Turner Book Productions

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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

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“Sitting in a Grove Reading Shelley” by M. G. Turner

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I sat this afternoon in a grove reading Shelley. The sky was bright and the heat of the early spring a portent of things to come. The pages turned, the poetry passed, the phrases came to me with ease. I saw ancient lands that dissolved and rearranged as quickly as clouds. I saw fleeting glimpses of storied citadels and fiery furnaces. I saw riders on horseback pushing themselves toward an infinity of grandeur. My breath halted; I had finished the book.

Sighing to myself, it was lucky I had brought something else to read on this happy warm day. Another work sat beside me on a bench, of related and equal importance.

This new thing was the novel of his wife Mary, an immense book in some respects, a little book in others. I thought of them together, I thought of the dinner party with Lord Byron in Geneva when they’d each agreed to write a frightening tale—in her case, a classic to be. Had it come to her easily? Was it in some respects a presentiment of her approaching grief, Percy’s death at the age of twenty-nine, in a dreadful sailing accident? How do we remake the ones we’ve lost? Can they only be demonic when we’ve cobbled them back together by fragments, and by memories? The sky was turning a brighter shade of blue as I thought of Percy and Mary and their antique love; then I thought of my own lost loves, some that had drifted away, others that had collapsed in on themselves like ailing stars. Being alone was now a balm and not a travesty—at least not when Riverside Park was green and the sun shone down on me so freely.

Oh grief, which makes its home in human hearts, art thou not a monstrosity? Cursed be Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and raised us from our lowly origins. Cursed be the phantoms and phantasms that haunt our quiet moments, when all we would like to have is the peace which I, for a brief moment, experienced in that golden grove at the start of the spring, as I began to stitch together the many severed pieces of myself.

Soon enough I left the grove and went home, both Shelleys tucked snuggly under my arm. Reunited at last.

“The Funeral of Shelley,” Louis Edouard Fournier, 1889. Edward John Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, l-r. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

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“The Shakespeare Authorship Conundrum Society” by M. G. Turner

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The Shakespeare Authorship Conundrum Society met Thursdays at the public mansion on Riverside Drive and 107th street. It was there that Theodore Gurney, Teddy for short, had found his confidantes—a ragtag gang of young and old aesthetes united over the dubious though benign conspiracy theory that the Bard of Avon was not the author of the greatest plays ever written. And in a culture plagued by misinformation of a more destructive sort, their little club wasn’t doing much harm. In fact, it was a delight to meet each week especially on those often rainy April afternoons and discuss, argue, and interpret. Everyone there was well-educated and a lover of the Bard’s work—that is, whoever the Bard actually was.

For some it was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Several of his close family members had, according to Bennet Leach, a forty-three-year-old professional fact checker, been the supposed Shakespeare’s patrons. He, as well as several others in the group, adhered to the idea that Old Will was indeed a real person, but more of a steward, a frontman for the work of someone else who for reasons of political impropriety could not go public with their quill. How, this particular faction argued, could an uneducated man of humble background, whose father was a mere tanner, have written so penetratingly about kings, queens, and other members of the royal elite? How could he have always had the inside scoop on court intrigue? He couldn’t, they claimed—hence the existence of a secret that, if confirmed, threatened to unseat nearly five hundred years of orthodoxy surrounding the Bard’s majestic output.

But Teddy didn’t fall into this category. Nor did he fall in with the others, some of whom claimed Shakespeare was a Sicilian by the name of Collolanza who’d supposedly been puttering around England at this time, or that he was in fact Christopher Marlowe himself, who’d inexplicably succeeded at faking his infamous barroom death. Nor did Teddy believe he was one of the kings and queens who graced the English, French, or Spanish thrones, whose names over the course of centuries had been tossed into the hat for consideration by amateur critics and armchair scholars.

It is important to note that Teddy’s own belief about the veracity of Shakespeare’s genius lay in a more considered, accurate, though certainly less exciting realm. His own postulation which had come to him after several weeks of attending the Thursday meetings and taking in all the diverse opinions—as well as doing frenzied research of his own—was that Shakespeare was indeed Shakespeare, but that, seeing as he was part of the consummate Elizabethan repertory company at the renowned Globe Theater, many of the plays, including some of the most famous might have been written, or edited, or looked over by actors, namely Richard Burbage, who some scholars had even gone so far as to posit as the unacknowledged co-author of Hamlet.

But amid all the wild theories that dove inside his ears each week Teddy felt reluctant to lay bare this, by comparison, banal theory. To him the very fact of its subdued suggestiveness made it more stirring than say, the unsubstantiated idea that Shakespeare was really Sir Francis Drake, composing plays and sonnets while circling “the whole globe.” Thusly, it wasn’t until the sixth week of his involvement with the Society as he was now thinking of it, that his courage became plucked up enough to share his hypothesis. He decided to begin by validating all the other theories he had heard that day and in subsequent weeks before pouring the proverbial cold water on the wildest of them. “Never in my life,” he began, “have I had occasion to enjoy such compelling and consequential talk. But there is another theory which has gone neglected that I would like to share with you today.”

The faces of his co-conspirators glimmered under the resplendent lights of the Library Room. Several of them smiled, while some looked demonically expectant, as if daring him to outdo their spirited reveries.

“Go ahead, please,” said Margaret Crawley—a sixty-four-year-old librarian who was on the verge of retirement and was herself planning a “truth-seeking trip” to Stratford-upon-Avon, aka “The Birthplace” in the fall. “You have not spoken much in our meetings and we’d all be glad to hear from you.”

“Well,” Teddy cleared his throat. “As I see it, none of us will soon get the validation from academia required for a public acceptance of our theories, but there is one suggestion made by some scholars whose names I can share that seems to me almost indisputable.”

After a shared gasp there was a round of excited voices—some angry and some mortally pleased. Teddy went on:

“It is that, seeing as the Globe was a place of collaboration and collective creativity, portions of the plays—maybe even large portions of them—could have been contributed by the actors. It has even been suggested that the renowned thespian Richard Burbage—and in some ways the Bard’s right hand man—took a leading role in not only the production but in the writing of Hamlet. Who knows how many times an actor would flub a line, but in the process of this divine accident make it sound even better than it had been written on the page and Old Will watching from the back of the theater might have called out: ‘Forsooth, that is better than what I had quilled! Leave as is.’

“And though this line of thinking cannot be expressly proved it cannot be expressly refuted either, which I think lends it a great deal of credence and intellectual power. I would love to know your thoughts.”

As Teddy stopped speaking a great silence filled the Library Room, which was only broken several seconds later by Lloyd Hanger, a fifty-seven-year-old linguistics professor who was the unofficial “heavy” of the group, “THAT IS TREASON!”

“Yes! How absurd!” came another voice, which was met by a second chorus, some in defense, some in derision:

“I think Teddy has a point!”

“What does he know, he hasn’t even spoken until today!”

“But of all the theories his makes the most sense!”

“Don’t forget about Edward de Vere—you can’t explain him away!”

“I think this young man just did.”

“Oh, poppycock.”

“Care to take it outside?”

“I’d like to.”

“SILENCE!” This one word, from the instigator of the unexpected skirmish, quieted the rabble. Especially as Lloyd added: “Do we want to get kicked out of here?”

“He’s right.” Margaret let out a deep, feeling sigh. “This idea you have presented to us, Teddy, has certainly raised the temperature. How curious too, considering it is one of the most moderate we have heard. However, so as not jeopardize our position here, I suggest we move on to other business.”

With that mild word the war had been put down and Teddy sat in silence, unsure if another contribution of his was apt to be considered. But truthfully he didn’t have one and when he walked out that April day, after saying goodbye to his co-conspirators he made a silent vow to not return. For as the rain pattered down upon the earth and misted the Westside in its dew he felt as if he could, like Schrodinger, see all the possible identities of Shakespeare both having existed and not. He was simultaneously a great naval-man, a great earl, a great king, and a great scholar. He was a Sicilian wanderer and Miguel de Cervantes. But something all these theories seemed to reject, and something all the theorists seemed allergic to was that someone of so humble a background could be imbued with genius. Like most conspiracy theories, it neglected to consider a bare, and perhaps humdrum truth—in this case, that the embers of creativity can spark anywhere resulting in a blaze so tall and great we remain in awe for hundreds of literarily blessed years after.

And some five hundred years prior, in a green corner of jolly old England a bard was brought into the world—though in the minds of the most benignly credulous, who he truly was we’ll never know.

M. G. Turner
New York City
December 2023

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Celebrating “Public/Private” with Gail Papp and Friends at the Public Theater

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Happy publication date today to my treasured author client Gail Merrifield Papp whose PUBLIC/PRIVATE: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater is out today from Applause Theater and Cinema Books, and from Audible as an audiobook narrated by actress Kathryn Grody. There was a launch event at the Public Theater last night for the book where about 150 people, including Kevin Kline, Mandy Patinkin, and Grody all feted Gail and the book. Kathryn, in particular, spoke movingly about narrating it.

It was also fun meeting Gail’s editors from Applause, book industry colleagues Chris Chappell and John Cerullo. There was an independent bookseller on hand all night selling the book who told me as the evening wrapped up that she’d sold all the inventory she brought, a cool 90 copies!

Links to online booksellers and info at the author’s website. Below is some of the early press for the book. The first review was in Library Journal:

Papp, Gail Merrifield. Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater. Applause. Oct. 2023. 346p. ISBN 9781493074860. $32.95. THEATER—Joe Papp (1921–91) is a legend in the annals of American theater history. He founded the New York Shakespeare Festival, which has offered free performances in New York City since 1956. He also conceived, nearly 60 years ago, New York’s Public Theater, where some of the most iconic American productions have originated, including Hair, A Chorus Line, The Normal Heart, and Hamilton. The distinguished cast of players who have taken the Public’s stage includes Morgan Freeman, Colleen Dewhurst, Meryl Streep, Patti Lupone, and Denzel Washington. But that is only half of this story. Papp and the award-winning play developer who authored this book met as colleagues at the Public Theater. Then their work relationship developed into a personal one; they married in 1976 and remained together until his death. Their story is deftly woven into the fabric of this compelling account. Since it is also a history, there are appendixes that list the actors, choreographers, composers, directors, and playwrights who worked on the Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, and there’s a helpful bibliography too.
VERDICT A terrific twofer that’s both a fascinating history and an affecting personal memoir. Will likely appeal to theater fans everywhere.—Carolyn M. Mulac
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The second write-up on the book was on Graydon Carter’s website Air Mail, where the book is an Editor’s Pick:

 

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