Superb profile of Lawrence Ellsworth, Translator of Classic Dumas Novels

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Readers of this blog may recall that in years past I’ve written about Lawrence Ellsworth, a client of my literary agency, who is translating all six* novels in Alexandre Dumas’s classic Musketeers Cycle. Three volumes have already published by Pegasus Books—The Red Sphinx, The Three Musketeers, and Twenty Years After—with a fourth volume, Blood Royal, due out later this year.

Amazing as Ellsworth’s enterprise is, I should point out that it is actually a pen name, and that under his real name, Lawrence Schick, he has an equally impressive résumé. Both of his names are featured in a superb profile and interview that journalist and novelist Andrew Ervin has recently published in the Brooklyn Rail. The profile portion begins like this:

As far as I can tell, Lawrence Ellsworth is responsible for one of the biggest literary projects happening right now in the English language. Like William T. Vollmann’s “Seven Dreams” series of novels about the European occupation of the New World and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts, an interlocking and cross-referencing “poem of a life,” Ellsworth is working on a massive and daunting scale. He’s translating the entirety of Alexandre Dumas’s stories of The Three Musketeers (1844), all 1.5 million words of it. The third volume, Twenty Years After, appeared late last year.

Twenty Years After restores a chapter that Dumas once serialized in his native French but which has never before appeared in English. It also, as with the previous and future volumes, moves past the Victorian-era translations that were, per Ellsworth’s introduction, for an “audience that was uncomfortable with frank depictions of violence and sexuality.” Those old translations, he reminds us, “employed a style of elevated diction that was deemed appropriate for historical novels of the 19th century, but seems stiff, long-winded, and passive to today’s readers.” In Ellsworth’s hands, these stories of swashbuckling and all-for-one-and-one-for-all friendship feel new again. The Three Musketeers is an enormously entertaining tale for the ages.

A few paragraphs later, Ervin brings up the Schick side of his persona:

It so happens that Lawrence Ellsworth is the pen name of Lawrence Schick, who was an early employee of TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons [the role-playing game]. There, he wrote White Plume Mountain (1979), which I personally regard as the greatest D&D adventure module of all time. He’s also the co-creator of the earliest version of the D&D setting Mystara, in which my own long-running campaign is set even now. Since then, among other pursuits, Ellsworth served as Loremaster for the Elder Scrolls Online games and now lives in Dublin, where he is hard at work writing a new mobile game.

Ellsworth was generous enough to correspond with me via email in January and February, during which time we discussed world-building, how to write an epic role-playing game (RPG) adventure, and the challenges of adapting Dumas for current audiences. There’s a unique and profound joy in getting to pick the brain of a multi-talented writer whose work I’ve known since I was a kid and who’s had such a huge impact on my own creative life.

When the piece moves in to the interview portion, Ervin asks how Lawrence undertook the mammoth task of translating Dumas:

We were looking for a subject for our next game when I remembered Dumas and his musketeers. It turned out to be a great choice, and in the process of doing the research for [what became] The King’s Musketeers I got hooked on the characters and the period all over again, so much so that I started doing independent study into Early Modern Europe and France in the 17th century. I decided that I wanted to write historical fiction in that setting and began collecting materials. 

I was teaching myself French and rereading Dumas, and began to realize that his writing wasn’t creaky and old-fashioned, but his Victorian English translations were. Reading Dumas in the original French was a revelation: dynamic prose, crackling dialogue, vivid scenes, plus he was funny as hell. Most of the English translations of his work paled in comparison. 

By this time I was reading beyond Dumas’s famous novels and into his more obscure works, and I kept coming across references to a musketeers-period swashbuckler from late in his career called The Comte de Moret, but there was no extant English translation and it was impossible to find. Finally I came across French reprint copies of its two volumes in the bouquiniste stalls in Paris, and though the novel was unfinished, it was grand stuff, genuine Dumas bursting with all his color, humor, and joie de vivre. I’d done my own translation of The Three Musketeers as part of my learning-French project, and as I was flying back from Paris, it suddenly occurred to me that I could translate Moret and from that idea was born the literary reconstruction that became The Red Sphinx.

Ervin’s last question is a good one:

Rail: Why is it that Dumas’s stories still feel so vital, especially right now?

Ellsworth: Dumas’s work remains vital and relevant over 150 years later because his best novels speak to the problem of courage, of how an individual can find the strength and means to do what’s right despite the constraints of society, family, and convention. This is a problem that never goes away, a matter that every generation has to face for itself. Unlike many of the heroes of historical fiction, Dumas’s characters are complex, three-dimensional humans of depth and contradiction, people for whom wrestling with these problems is no easy matter. Look at Cardinal Richelieu, an antagonist and seeming villain in The Three Musketeers, yet a protagonist in The Red Sphinx. Because his novels are exciting and plot-heavy, and because his early translators cut out the sex, softened the language, and dialed back the violence, in the early 20th century Dumas’s work was miscategorized as “Boys’ Adventures,” a label that has stuck for far too long. His best work is long overdue for a re-assessment, at least in the Anglophone world.

I recommend you read the whole profile and interview which combined are quite a bit longer than the excerpts I’ve provided here. I’m going to check out Andrew Ervin’s work, whose bio states:

Andrew Ervin is the author of the novel Burning Down George Orwell’s House and the novella collection Extraordinary Renditions. His most recent book is Bit by Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World.

And if you’d like to know how a prominent critic assesses the new Dumas translations by Lawrence Ellsworth, please consider this in a review from the estimable Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda:

“En garde! In Lawrence Ellsworth’s excellent, compulsively readable translation, The Red Sphinx is just the book to see you through the January doldrums. And maybe those of February, too.

If your interest extends to other classic tales of adventure, I suggest you also check out the anthology Ellsworth edited for Pegasus The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, with tales by Rafael Sabatini, Conan Doyle, Baroness Orczy, and others.

*In the end, there will be eight novels in Ellsworth’s rendering of the Dumas canon in to English, because he is splitting some of the longer French versions in to two volumes.

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First review of Nate Patrin’s “Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop” is a Winner

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Due to the pandemic, University of Minnesota Press pushed the publication date of my agency client Nate Patrin’s new book, Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, from April 28 to May 26. Evidently, not everyone got the message, but that’s just fine because the book’s first review in a consumer publication has already appeared, and critic Adam Ellsworth, writing for the Boston-area outlet The Arts Fuse, enjoyed the book very much. The headline is “Bring That Beat Back”—A Stellar History Of The Art Of Sampling, and the first line below that tells readers, “Nate Patrin’s magnificently written and wildly informative new book argues for the artistry of sampling, its potential for beauty.”  I invite you to read the whole review, but for a quick hit, please see the screenshots below with two key sections of the piece. I’m optimistic there will be much more coverage of the book in weeks to come, but until that I’m very excited for my author, and offer him hearty congratulations! To have the first review of one’s debut book be such a positive and thoughtful essay is very heartening indeed!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a postscript for this good news blog post, you’ll also find here a lengthy Spotify playlist of all the music associated with the book.

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Sold: “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Life” by Todd Goddard

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I’m very excited to announce that under the banner of my literary agency Philip Turner Book Productions I’ve sold Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Life to Blackstone Publishing in print, ebook, and audiobook, on behalf of my author client Todd Goddard, associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University.  This will be the first biography to chronicle the fascinating, large life of the acclaimed poet and fiction writer (1937-2016). Goddard will examine all aspects of Harrison’s creative life, and how he incorporated major life milestones in to his work. Among those momentous events:

  •  The fatal car wreck that killed Jim’s father and sister when he was twenty-four; he blamed himself as they were heading to a weekend stay at a family cabin for which Jim had intended to join them until his last-minute cancellation delayed their departure. The tragedy spiraled Jim in to a deep depression, while also spurring his dedication to writing, as he soon after published his earliest poems and met Denise Levertov who shepherded his first book to publication, a poetry collection from Norton.
  • Jim received an introduction to Jack Nicholson who became a patron, supporting him financially through the completion of the three novellas that would become the collection,  Legends of the Fall; this relationship led to work on film projects and relief from the money woes that had long burdened him. Through this he also formed associations with many Hollywood figures including Anjelica Huston, John Huston, John Belushi, director Bob Rafelson and his wife Toby, who had made the match with Nicholson, and Stanley Kubrick, with whom Jim played chess.
  • Working with publisher Seymour Lawrence, who embraced the idea of publishing a collection of novellas, an unorthodox experiment that other publishers of the day were not eager to take on. Interviews by the biographer with Harrison’s longtime agent Bob Datilla explore the relationship between the writer and publisher.

Harrison’s sense of place will also be key to the narrative, as Goddard explores the importance of landscape in Jim’s poetry and fiction, mapping his life and situating him topographically. This process will unfold throughout the book in a number of important locales, from the lakes and forests of Michigan, to the crashing surf of the Florida Keys, to Greenwich Village where he drank with Jack Kerouac at the Five Spot bar, to hardscrabble Durango, Mexico, as well as Montana, Hollywood, Arizona, and Provence, France.

Todd Goddard regularly teaches Harrison’s fiction and poetry, and has presented research on Harrison’s works for the Jim Harrison Society at the American Literature Association’s annual conference. His research is well underway, already taking him in to the Harrison archive courtesy of the late author’s estate, thanks to an introduction by generous executives at Grove Atlantic. The archive includes correspondence with Raymond Carver, Francis Ford Coppola, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Allen Ginsberg, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Mailer, Gary Snyder, David Foster Wallace, Terry Tempest Williams, and Tom McGuane.

Goddard is also in touch with the The Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook, where more than 10,000 fans celebrate the writer’s life, from preparing a special cassoulet to arranging bookstore discussions of Harrison’s work.

In Harrison’s later years, he was twice a featured guest on Anthony Bourdain’s TV shows, gaining a status as an elder statesman of American letters and enlightened living. With such biographies as Madison Smartt Bell’s work on Robert Stone (Doubleday, published this month), and Blake Bailey’s life of Philip Roth (Norton, 2021), it’s a propitious time for this biography of Jim Harrison.

 

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Sold: “WAR DIARIST: The Many Battles of Richard Tregaskis” by Ray E. Boomhower

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January 2021 update: The book on Richard Tregaskis will be published in Fall 2021. The author and University of New Mexico Press have settled on a final title: Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam.
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Delighted that I’ve sold Ray E. Boomhower’s WAR DIARIST: The Many Battles of Richard Tregaskis by independent scholar Ray E. Boomhower to University of New Mexico Press (UNMP) for publication in fall 2021. In 1943, combat reporter Tregaskis published GUADALCANAL DIARY, acquired by Bennett Cerf at Random House, which became an instant bestseller and the first book to emerge from the Pacific theater, when Americans had had little chance to read about the fighting there. Here are some grafs from the pitch letter I sent to the editor at UNMP, and photos that will be in the book, including one of the lanky reporter.

In 1942-43, Tregaskis (1916-73) was one of just two reporters “embedded” with US forces in the Pacific, before the specialized use of that term existed. He observed the fierce fighting between the Americans and Japanese, sending daily dispatches that had to be cleared by military censors before they could go to his editors at the International News Service. Some things he did not share with any editors or readers, as Boomhower writes:

“During his time on Guadalcanal, Tregaskis and United Press International reporter Bob Miller armed themselves with Colt 1911A1 pistols in direct contravention of U.S. War Department regulations prohibiting correspondents from using weapons. “We knew and the Marines knew that if we ran up against Jap[anese] snipers, they weren’t going to ask for our credentials.” Upon leaving Guadalcanal on a B-17 bomber, Tregaskis also helped man one of the plane’s .50-caliber machine guns and fired on an attacking Japanese Zero fighter.”

While breaking the mold for a war reporter, Boomhower notes that Tregaskis also harbored a distressing medical secret:

“Neither his colleagues in the field or his superiors at the International News Service knew that when he began his work in the Pacific Tregaskis had to contend with a recently diagnosed condition—diabetes, a debilitating disease that plagued his family.”

At one point, while briefly laid over in Pearl Harbor, he sent an expanded collection of his combat dispatches to a wire service editor who shopped the manuscript to more than a half dozen book publishers in NY. Bennett Cerf read it overnight and acquired the rights the next day. This became Guadalcanal Diary, an early example of “an instant book”; it was an immediate bestseller for Random House, and before WWII had ended, a Hollywood movie with Anthony Quinn, William Bendix, and Richard Conte.

At another point during Tregaskis’s reporting career, while covering combat action in Italy, the 6-foot, 5-inch tall reporter was struck by an artillery shell that punctured his helmet and nearly killed him. Following brain surgery—when a metal plate was inserted into his skull—and a difficult five-month recuperation back in the States, he learned to speak again by reciting poetry, and in June 1944 resumed work, reporting from the Normandy beachhead established on D-Day.

Boomhower’s book will chronicle Tregaskis’s whole story from before the war, and beyond. He was a Harvard grad, Class of ’38, whose classmates included Kermit Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., and the historian Theodore White. Tregaskis knew Ernie Pyle and the photographer Robert Capa.

I’ve found Boomhower’s writing in the sample chapters as alive and vivid about reporting under extreme and dangerous challenges as Tregaskis’s own indelible war reporting. By the late 1960s, more than three million copies of Guadalcanal Diary had been sold and it had been translated into twelve languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Danish. The book is in print as a Modern Library edition with an Introduction by Mark Bowden, while many of Tregaskis’s wartime dispatches are included in volume 1 of the Library of America’s book Reporting World War II. Ray E. Boomhower is senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press. He is the author of more than ten books including Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Democratic Primary (2008, Indiana University Press), which won the Indiana Center for the Book’s 2009 award in nonfiction.

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Sold: Audio book rights for “Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop” by Nate Patrin

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Excited to announce that I’ve sold audio rights to editor Madeleine Collins at Tantor Media for BRING THAT BEAT BACK: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop by my agency client, and contributor to Stereogum, Nate Patrin. The book is a close analysis of four creators—pioneering DJ Grandmaster Flash; sampling innovator Prince Paul; superstar mogul Dr. Dre and left-field curator Madlib—who’ve helped shape the sounds of what’s become one of the world’s most popular art forms, one beat at a time. I earlier sold print rights to Erik Anderson, editor at University of Minnesota Press, who will publish their edition in April 2020. #books #hiphop #sampling #audiobooks #publishing #criticism

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Visiting Britain, Feb 19-April 1—Books, Brexit, and Beyond

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As I recently posted on Facebook, I’m excited that my wife, Kyle Gallup, a painter, has been invited to do an artist’s residency in London for the month of March. The sponsor is the long-established British paint company Winsor & Newton. They’ve selected a British painter, and an American, Kyle, and are providing them with art materials and studios in the same building as where their paint chemists work. They want the two sides, chemists and artists, to interact with each other, and thus improve the formulation of their new line of cadmium-free watercolors. A lovely idea, really.

I am taking the opportunity to travel with Kyle, which will also allow me to attend the London Book Fair March 12-14, for which I’ve made appointments to meet with British publishers and literary agents. We are flying to Scotland tomorrow where we’ll visit friends for a few days, then begin journeying through the North of England till we reach London on March 1. I plan to write for this blog and in my social networks about being in Britain as Brexit looms. My reading material will include Underland: A Deep Time Journey by a favorite British author Robert Macfarlane, being published in the US in June by W.W. Norton. I’ve loved earlier books by Macfarlane, including The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot and Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination. I’m confident that reading Underland while touring Britain and staying a month in London will be a tonic regardless of the news in the UK and from the US.


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“Shattered Minds: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets,” Publishing March 1

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I’m excited that Shattered Minds: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets will be published by Potomac Books on March 1, 2019. In 2016, I wrote about research in to new materials that could improve the safety features of military helmets. And as I explained in a 2018 blog post, I originally commissioned the book in 2008 when I was acquiring new titles for Union Square Press. After I left that job, the contract was canceled, and almost a decade later I ended up as the agent for the book, placing it with Potomac Books last year. A circuitous path, indeed. Below are the superb pre-publication blurbs the book by Robert H. Baumann and Dina Rasor has received. I’m delighted to see this early reception for the book.

Advance Praise for SHATTERED MINDS:
How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets

“No one is better than Dina Rasor and Bob Bauman in connecting the intricacies of the Pentagon’s politics of budget-and-bureaucracy with real world consequences for the men and women who wear United States uniforms and fight the nation’s wars. Their latest project gives the startling details of how the bureaucracy has failed in providing that most basic part of a soldier’s protective gear, the helmet. Dina’s and Bob’s previous work has been highly influential, and this should be too.”—James Fallows, National Correspondent, Atlantic Magazine

“Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman are some of the most experienced and tenacious advocates in America. Year after year, Dina and Bob have been sounding the alarm and demanding accountability on behalf of our troops and veterans. They have changed policies and helped save lives. And they always have our back. Dina’s and Bob’s critical voices must be heard—now more than ever.”—Paul Rieckhoff, CEO and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and author of Chasing Ghosts

“Robert Bauman’s and Dina Rasor’s richly detailed account of how military bureaucrats and greedy contractors have callously risked the lives and health of soldiers and marines for the sake of their own selfish interests is both riveting and horrifying.  We are used to learning about multi-billion dollar defense procurement scandals, but that our military leadership could not, or would not, provide troops on the front lines with something as basic as an effective helmet is truly shocking.  Shattered Minds should be required reading for congress, press, and concerned citizens everywhere.”—Andrew Cockburn, Washington Editor, Harpers Magazine

“Rasor and Bauman weave together the gripping stories of individuals who were all determined to provide a helmet that would better protect our troops from traumatic brain injury. If you really want to ‘Support the troops,’ read this book.”—Danielle Brian, Executive Director, Project on Government Oversight (POGO)

“You go to war with the helmet you have, not the one you wish you had. With apologies to Don Rumsfeld, that is the sad tale Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor tell in Shattered Minds. It’s the infuriating story of how a sclerotic U.S. military bureaucracy has failed to protect young troops from traumatic brain injury after they answered their nation’s call in the wake of 9/11. For anyone who has ever worn a U.S. military helmet, or loved someone who has, this book will hurt your head. For the rest of us, it’s a traumatic heart injury.”—Mark Thompson, former Time Magazine reporter

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Sold: “SHATTERED MINDS: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets” by Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor

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I first blogged about SHATTERED MINDS: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets in 2016, linking it to a Washington Post story by Ben Guarino about an amazingly hard material found in nature:

“UC-Riverside scientists and engineers say they have detected a heretofore unknown natural structure in the outer layer [of the mantis shrimp claw]—the critical ‘impact area’— of the club. Were helmets or body armor to be created following this mantis shrimp template, they say, soldiers and football players could be protected from immense blows. When viewed under a microscope, the outer layer of the club has what the scientists describe as a herringbone structure. There, fibers of chitin and calcium compounds are arranged in a series of sinusoidal waves. When the shrimp strikes a prey’s shell, the researchers think this herringbone wave buckles, dispersing the impact throughout the club without causing catastrophic damage to the predator.”

Authors Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor were still working on their manuscript in 2016, and I was preparing to begin submitting the project to publishers. There’s an unusual backstory to the book, which I’ll outline below.

In 2008, when I was acquiring books as Editorial Director at Union Square Press, I read a stunning NY Times story about two whistleblowers at a defense contractor in North Dakota who at great personal risk revealed that their employer was knowingly shorting the amount of the protective material Kevlar in the combat helmets they were fabricating for the Pentagon, to increase their profits at the expense of troop safety. At the suggestion of Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. I commissioned a book on this grotesque boondoggle to be written by two ace reporters on military procurement and the Pentagon, Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman. In 2009, while they were working on the manuscript, and discovering yet another brave whistleblower to include in the narrative, I left that job and parent company Sterling Publishing canceled the contract, handing the rights back to the authors. Fast forward several years and Bob and Dina approached me to see if in my new role as an agent I would be game to try to help them re-sell the book to a new publisher, which I agreed to, with generous approval from their original agent Bonnie Nadell. This is exactly the type of “imperative nonfiction” I have long cultivated as a publishing professional, and I was very excited to accept the challenge of reselling it to a new publisher. This was part of my pitch letter to publishers:

This revelatory book, written by two authors who’ve covered the Pentagon for many years, reports that in the twenty-first century, while traumatic brain injury (TBI) has become the signature injury suffered by our troops, the defense establishment has failed US fighting men and women by continuing to issue them an antiquated military helmet that fails to mitigate the worst of this tragic harm, even though superior design and technology are increasingly available. This investigation by Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman, the first book to examine this most basic item of military equipment, features the stories of two sets of whistleblowers determined to expose the truth about the failures of the military helmet bureaucracy. Their book braids together the two stories of two sets of whistleblowers to chronicle the helmet scandal and its human impact.

Indeed, in 2017 I sold the book to Potomac Books, a military and public affairs imprint at the University of Nebraska Press, as documented in the deal report below posted at the book industry site publishersmarketplace[dot]com.

 

Potomac has scheduled the book for publication in March 2019. I’ll post a cover when they have it ready. Meantime, the authors have already received these superb endorsements:

SHATTERED MINDS will set a challenge for technologists, designers, people who use 3D printers, materials scientists, and high level defense thinkers to finally design the most protective military helmet possible. Despite the Pentagon’s failures to this point, we hope to gain their attention to bring new talent and focus to the goal of producing a superior helmet. In the same regard, we are excited about the effort being undertaken by the Head Health Challenge, which also relates to football helmets, an effort that has been covered by Liz Stinson in Wired magazine. I’m hopeful we’ll be able to forge a constructive link between the Defense Dept and the NFL, in as much as the league often cites its cooperation with the US military. I recommend you read the fascinating article by Ben Guarino, which also has video from UC Riverside scientist David Kisailus.

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