Gotta love a story like this: Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues was mired at bankrupt publisher Key Porter, then rescued by Patrick Crean at Thomas Allen Publishers, and now has vaulted to win Canada’s Giller Prize. Picador will be bringing it out in the U.S. A foundling to a prize-winner! This is what I’ve always loved […]
Cool b&w photo of Lady Liberty’s torch in Madison Square Park, before its placement atop the full statue in New York Harbor. This very period, the 1880s, is chronicled in Jack Finney’s great NY time travel novel, Time and Again. The 125th anniversary of the Statue’s dedication in New York City is upon us now.
In 2008 I edited and published NBA referee Bob Delaney’s first book, Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob. Co-written with Dave Scheiber, it was named a USA TODAY Best Book of the Year. While relating the dangerous undercover assignment that led to multiple indictments and convictions of organized crime figures, the book also chronicled how the assignment led to undiagnosed post-traumatic stress for Bob. This was in the 1970s, before PTSD was a familiar term in our lexicon. Bob’s path through treatment to healing has now led to his second book, Surviving the Shadows: A Journey of Hope into Post-Traumatic Stress, which I represented with Bob’s longtime agent, Uwe Stender, placing it with Sourcebooks. In a new op-ed Bob writes that vet-to-vet, first responder-to-first responder, peer-to-peer therapy is an effective bulwark against post-traumatic stress and full-blown PTSD. This is just one of many promising treatments described in the new book. I’m so proud of Bob, now retired from the NBA, for working with medical professionals, veterans’ groups, and law enforcement and first responder associations to promulgate these treatments for survivors of stress and trauma.
Better late than not all: a last-minute #fridayreads, ‘The Abramsky Variations,’ Morley Torgov, an acerbic comic novel about a Toronto Jewish family.
I’ve known my friend George Gibson since 1979 when he paid a call as a sales rep on Undercover Books, the bookstore I then ran in Cleveland with my sibling and our parents. George, now publishing director of Bloomsbury USA, hosted an event Nov. 1 at the Grolier Club, one of NY’s most distinguished book […]
Richard Nash is a very smart publishing person, and plenty smart enough to know when an experimental direction he’s taken isn’t working out. As a result, he gave a talk this week at the Books into Browsers conference in San Francisco conceding that Cursor, the enterprise he announced with great anticipation in 2010, hasn’t really […]
In recent months there have been a number of terrific graphic novels released, including Kate Beaton’s Hark, Vagrant, Michael Kupperman’s rendition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography 1910-2010, Ludovic Debeurme’s Lucille, and Nick Bertozzi’s Lewis & Clark. Last April, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival I had the privilege of covering a special comics reading […]
The personal essay pasted in below chronicles a formative episode in my publishing career, when I had the privilege of working with William Styron on an Introduction to a nonfiction book that told the story of an innocent man on Death Row in Virginia. It was called Dead Run and Styron helped me champion it to […]