Looking Back on 2024, Another Productive and Creative Year in Editing, Consulting, 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. All his writings on this website—personal essays and short stories—can be viewed via this link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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From 2007, “The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption”

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When I was an editorial executive for Carroll & Graf Publishers from 2000-2007, among the most consequential narrative nonfiction books I edited and published was journalist Barbara Bisantz Raymond’s revelatory investigation The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption.” Publishers Weekly named it a Notable Book of the Year, in 2007.

The basic story—first chronicled by Raymond in an exposé for Good Housekeeping magazine, which inspired a “60 Minutes” segment and then a 1993 TV movie, “Stolen Babies,” with Mary Tyler Moore in an Emmy-winning performance as the titular figure Georgia Tann—was shocking. Tann (1891-1950), nationally lauded for supposedly arranging legal adoptions out of her Tennessee Children’s Home Society, was in reality a baby thief who stole, bartered, and brokered more than 5,000 children from unwed mothers and poor families throughout Appalachia and the South, 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 use with future customers. Protected by Memphis political boss Ed Crump, it is estimated that Tann sold more than 5,000 children, making about $5 million in mid-twentieth century dollars (equivalent to more than $100 million today).

Beginning in 1924, and ending only with Tann’s death in 1950, she virtually invented modern American adoption, popularizing it, commercializing it, and corrupting it with secrecy. To cover her crimes, Tann falsified adoptees’ birth certificates, sealing their original documents and issuing new ones that falsely claimed adoptive parents were birth parents. This secrecy was enshrined in law by legislators in the entire United States who claimed it was necessary to spare adoptees what they believed was the stain of illegitimacy.

As the years passed following the original explosion of interest in the story, Barbara Raymond continued to hear from Georgia Tann’s adult adoptees. She kept gathering string, and in 2006, Barbara’s then-agent Lynn Franklin submitted the manuscript of what would become The Baby Thief  to me. I quickly made an offer to acquire the rights.

Reading the manuscript for the first time—in those days still a printout on paper—conjured up a cascade of emotions as Raymond’s reporting included many accounts of anguished parents and adult adoptees who’d been separated against their will. She revealed dozens of instances where Tann schemed to separate newly born babies from poor parents, with fictions customized for each situation; a common one was to imply that the babies would be taken from destitute parents only while they got themselves on their feet. Editing the manuscript with Barbara, I also encountered the rich trove of documentation and sources on which she based her narrative. Reading it today, as I have been this week, I see its themes continue to reverberate, with many states still denying adult adoptees their original birth certificates, though other states are now operating under reformed practices. Arguably, the book has done a lot to create more open information-sharing with families by the states.

In a contemporary sense, it strikes me now, more than fifteen years after I edited the manuscript, that the baby trafficking Georgia Tann undertook, and the national baby sales network she developed, could be said to have been a sort of proto-version of QAnon—the mythology of this decade which purports that members of the Democrat party are engaged in stealing children from their parents—only Georgia Tann really did it.

When published in hardcover, the reviews were exceptional:

“An episode in American adoption history little remembered by the public at large, the crimes of nationally-lauded Memphis orphanage director Georgia Tann are skillfully and passionately recounted by freelance writer Raymond, herself an adoptive mom. The portrait of Tann that emerges is a domineering, indefatigable figure with an insane commitment to ends-justify-the-means logic, who oversaw three decades of baby-stealing, baby-selling and unprecedented neglect. Meanwhile, she did more to popularize, commercialize and influence adoption in America than anyone before her. Tann operated carte blanche under corrupt Mayor Edward Hull Crump from the 1920s to the ’50s, employing a nefarious network of judges, attorneys, social workers and politicos, whom she sometimes bribed with “free” babies; her clients included the rich, the famous and the entirely unfit (who more than occasionally returned their disappointing children for a refund). “Spotters” located babies and young children ripe for abduction-from women too uneducated or exhausted to fight back—and Tann made standard practice of altering birth certificates and secreting away adoption records to attract buyers and cover her tracks—self-serving moves that have become standard practice in modern adoption. A riveting array of interviews with Tann’s former charges reveals adults still struggling with their adoption ordeal, childhood memories stacked with sexual abuse, torture and confusion. Raymond’s dogged investigation makes a strong case for “ridding adoptions of lies and secrets,” warning that “until we do, Tann and her imitators will continue to corrupt adoption.” A rigorous, fascinating, page-turning tale, this important book is not for the timorous.—Publishers Weekly, a starred review

“A fascinating dark tale of Ms. Tann’s influence [that] gives voice to the brokenhearted children and their birth parents damaged by her actions. [R]iveting.’”—Dallas Morning News
 
“Raymond recounts this astonishing and horrifying true story with tremendous self-awareness and intrepid research into Tann’s ongoing legacy.”—The Tampa Tribune

“Fascinating, insightful, chilling and compelling. A very important book and a terrific read.”—Adam Pertman, Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and author of Adoption Nation

I thought so highly of the book that when I moved to a new editorial position early in 2008—to run Sterling Publishing’s Union Square Press imprint—I quickly acquired the reprint rights to the book, and published it in trade paperback later that year. In the years that followed the book attained elevated status among adult adoptees and their families. As one measure of its impact, web pages for the book on Amazon and Goodreads total more than 2000 comments from grateful readers, with remarks like this one:

“Thank you for lending your voice to those still seeking their families lost. I recommend this book. In memory of my precious father in law, Fred Crumley, who was an amazing dad, paw, I am still seeking truth for our family. His birth mother was Carrie Cates. He was adopted from The Tennessee Children’s Home Society, along with a sister.”

Sadly, agent Lynn Franklin, who’d represented many important authors along with Barbara Bisantz Raymond, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, died in 2021 at age 74. Barbara, who lives in my old hometown of Cleveland, and I have stayed in touch over the years. Recently, she contacted me when a documentary producer got in touch with her about the book and my company Philip Turner Book Productions is now her literary agent. In addition to possible adaptations for a documentary or a feature, and possibly a new paperback edition, I also hope to make a deal on the author’s behalf for an audiobook, as there has never been one.

In the meantime, if you have an interest in adoption, and want to know how our practices surrounding it developed in the last century, or if you just want to read a superbly paced narrative nonfiction book, a true crime thriller with a powerful social message, I suggest you pick up a copy of The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption.

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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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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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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
—-

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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Book Cover for “Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater”

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Thrilled to see that Applause Theater and Cinema Books now has the cover and the book catalog page up for Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater live on their website. The cover—and a full listing with price, pub date, and ordering info—is also now posted on major book retailing websites—Bookshop.org, BN.com, and Amazon—with many more booksellers to come. Gail Merrifield Papp’s memoir, with many photographs, will be published October 17, 2023.

I first wrote about the project when we sold it to Applause last summer and it was announced in Publishers Weekly. To offer readers of this blog a sense of the book, I’ll quote here from the pitch letter we sent to publishers.

 

Gail Papp has written an engrossing and highly entertaining book that blends an affecting memoir of her life alongside the founder of the Public Theater Joe Papp with a behind-the-scenes portrait of the influential theater’s dazzling history. She opens with the Public Theater’s beginnings more than a half-century ago in a narrative that spans the decades-long association the couple enjoyed until Joe’s death in 1991. During that span, the Public mounted hundreds of productions, from Shakespeare in the Park to such plays as for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Sticks and Bones, to the musicals Hair and A Chorus Line—with many actors whose careers were launched at the Public, including James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Colleen Dewhurst, Martin Sheen, Gloria Foster, George C. Scott, Diane Venora, Morgan Freeman, and dozens of others.*

In a witty conversational style, the author paints a comprehensive portrait of the creative process of one of America’s most acclaimed theater artists, highlighting the innovative ways the Public operated, driven by Joe’s ambition to create a year-round producing home focused on original plays and musicals from new voices, while employing non-traditional casting which made it a home for scores of the most creative people in American pop culture. In Public/Private she traces the founding of the Shakespeare Festival, when its role was for a time limited to small venues around New York City, later moving into Central Park where its Shakespeare renditions became an indelible feature of summer in the city, and the Public’s evolution toward cultural renown and national significance, a beacon for social change.

New aspects of Joe Papp’s many battles with the establishment are also highlighted, from tilts with Robert Moses to theater critics to conservative poohbahs in the US Congress. The scourge of AIDs is also documented, in the form of people close to Joe and Gail, Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart, and in the toll it exacted on Joe’s son, Tony.

Her touching remembrances lend the narrative a keen, emotional edge, which will captivate readers and bring a human side to the legendary figure whose theater continues to thrive today, operating at both the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, in the theaters on Astor Place and at Joe’s Pub, a live music venue dedicated in his honor.

At a time when America remains divided over issues of race, identity, and sexual orientation, Public/Private reminds us that theater is a powerful force for social change and community-building, a place for people to gather.

*A marvel of the book will be its impressive appendices of more than thirty pages appearing under the headings: Featured Actors, Choreographers, Composers, Directors, and Playwrights.

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“On Browsing in Bookstores, a Pastime” by M. G. Turner

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There is something uniquely magical about walking inside a bookstore, preparing to browse: you cross the threshold and suddenly you have been transported, quite literally, to a world of books. As the atmosphere settles, you notice there is a quiet here that reigns supreme, a quiet comparable perhaps only to that of a library; a pregnant hush fills the air and instills a state of calm that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere. Especially in New York City where the aggressive frenzy of life never ceases, the bookstore—and its ill-treated cousin, the library—can be an oasis, a place of refuge, a second home that can be utilized when other options of play or fun or drink have been depleted or appear uninviting.

When times are tough the world of books calls to us, and if we’re lucky we heed that call—the call of what we must do and not what we ought to. There is no greater pleasure than going to a bookstore with an objective in mind, say to purchase some work or other by Balzac and leaving inexplicably with a Faulkner. Bookstores divert our expectations. The shelves in many of New York’s finest are crammed high to the ceiling with both old and new tomes that at first speak to us in voices we may only hear subliminally. Thus visuals are our calling card, our way in. Often it is the seductive glint of a spine or the flicker of a cover that catches our eye, and as we pull the book off the shelf, and stare at it, a love affair begins. The eye tries to comprehend what the soul sees clearer. We know there is some future here for us, our paths will diverge together, we will save that spark and let it grow—that is, if we are lucky and decide not to put whatever work we have found back on the shelf where it will be consigned to wait a while longer for the coming of its true owner.

But if we hold in our hands the book we are meant to read, then we are giving ourselves over to something unconscious and in some ways very powerful. What we are giving ourselves over to is Fate. For reading books, and at the outset, buying books, is very much like making friends. The object itself transcends the lucid boundaries of paper and ink; it is so much more, and because of that the weight of a decision rests heavily on our shoulders. Do you buy another Nabokov? No, you’ve already read four of him. Another Tolstoy? You haven’t even finished Anna Karenina. A new edition of Ulysses? You have two already, dog-eared and disgruntled and waiting to be finished. You walk on aimlessly, through the aisles, dodging people taking on a similar pursuit: beautiful girls in faded jean jackets and sunglasses on their foreheads, old men stooping over dangerously to get a look at some old and beaten Melville, and the others like yourself trying to work themselves up into a state of rapt determination, studying the walls, trying to discern the titles of famous works, squinting as if at the hieroglyphics of Luxor.

The weight of a book in hand is equivalent to the weight of gold. You measure it, test it, consider whether you can withstand the flurry of its pages, the emotional impact of its premise. Stories are contained within stories, characters within characters, subtlety gives way to novelty, novelty to extremity, enjoyment to a cessation of pain. For that is what all the browsers, including yourself are looking for: a place to stop and sit awhile, to direct thought consciously toward a more righteous purpose, feeding the imagination a meal it cannot make on its own.

The shelves are calling to you. You know not to make a mistake. Occasionally you do make one and you are back at the register the next day making the same hurried, nervous claim: “I bought this for my friend but it turns out he already had it.” Several Hemingways have found their way back to this bardo. Tolstoy’s What is Art? was too polemical for your taste. A copy of the Master and Margherita whose translation you utterly hated was happily parted with. Silently, the cashier, gives you store credit and with this slip, handed over with a subdued frown—half-judgement, half-dismay—you are now able to go back to the walls, back to the drawing board as it were, to feast your eyes over the multitude of possibilities, the bold, broad scope of world literature staring you so determinedly in the face.

And finally you find what you’re looking for. And that pain does cease. Until of course you finish the book at a remarkable clip and opt to do it all again. The energy to read recycles, reincarnates, reinvigorates, and you hope never to give up the journey; even after you have lined up your finished books like the proud trophies they are, there is always a little more room, another book case to fill, another story to sink into. Finished Mann’s Buddenbrooks, well there’s always The Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus. You’ve read those two Flauberts but there’s more Proust to dig into, a seemingly endless supply of it. Turgenev always wins over the other, more popular Russians, but there is not much of him along the walls, save the obvious in Fathers and Sons. You’d read more Dostoyevsky if you didn’t hate his guts and think he was an anti-semite and in many ways a difficult and stifling writer. You need to read more women, it’s a fault of the whole system, the whole structure, but for your part you do love Woolf, Chopin, Cather, Stein; Wharton is an undeniable great but her meanness never ceases and it’s not clear she even likes her characters.

But no matter who you choose—or rather who chooses you—the point is never to give up on books or decline what they have to offer. The point is to never cease searching for some little taste of paradise that we had previously lacked, to find the good in the bad, the large in the small, the mediocre in the great. You can see in three dimension and you can read in four. To live other lives is to live your own more fully. You can’t believe it sometimes, the depth, the brevity, the longevity, the incalculable gifts given to us by people who worked sitting down. It is connection that we are looking for when we pace like ghosts up the hallways of some magnificent temple of literature, filled to bursting with every voice; male, female, Black, white, and all varieties of humanity. Nothing can touch us, and by the same token, everything can. For we want it to. We will it to. For if Fate has deemed it, we go home happy—and if we’re lucky, stay that way.

M. G. Turner

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The Joys of Synchronous Reading, Part II

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I’m a big fan of what I’ve come to call synchronous reading, a phenomena I first wrote about in 2014, after I read Emily St. John Mandel’s engrossing pre-Covid post-apocalyptic plague novel Station Eleven and Nevil Shute’s scalding post-nuclear event novel On the Beach, published in 1957.

More recently, I loved Jim Steinmeyer’s 2013 book Who is Dracula? which explores the many sources that fed the creative imagination of Bram Stoker (1847-1912), and the late 19th century London milieu that led to him publishing Dracula in 1891. Players on stage here include Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Walt Whitman, Francis Tumblety, who may well have been Jack the Ripper, and actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.

Before picking up Who Was Dracula? I’d just finished Joseph O’Connor’s novel Shadowplay featuring many of the same characters as in Steinmeyer’s book, especially the thespians Henry Irving, an irresistible force and the winsome Ellen Terry who had a deep friendship with Stoker. He worked as the manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theater in London. The novel has some great parts, like the writing lair that O’Connor imagines Stoker resorted to in the rafters of the Lyceum when the pressures of the theater, and Irving’s frequent hectoring, became too much for him.

I’m very glad I followed Shadowplay with Steinmeyer’s nonfiction account. Reading them back-to-back, gave me a really rich perspective on Victorian London, and the personalities of all these fascinating real-life characters, all of whom were capable of conjuring from their imaginations a rich tapestry of make-believe and human drama.

In 2002, I published Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, which was reviewed by Teller in the NY Times Book Review in 2003.  Steinmeyer is without question, one of most interesting writers on magic and the theater, and I published several more of his books, pictured below. For the record, The Conjuring Anthology, was published by Hahne, while the others were published by Carroll & Graf where I worked from 2000-2007. At Carroll & Graf, I also published The Illustrated History of Magic by Milbourne and Maurine Christoper.

I remain fascinated by all books associated with magic and theater, reflected in the authors  I represent nowadays as a book developer and literary agent, Alexis Greene, author of Emily Mann, Rebel Artist of the American Theater (Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2021) and Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater by Gail Merrifield Papp (forthcoming in October 2023 from Applause Books). I’ve written about both of those books on this blog, here and here.

 

 

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