For Halloween, “Reader Faustus: A Novella in Verse” by M. G. Turner

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My dad and I share an affinity for the legendary literary character Faust, who in various retellings over the centuries has been depicted as selling his soul to the devil in exchange for a number of enticing rewards, including immortal life, admiration from the public, endless amounts of money, and much more. For Philip, this interest goes back to his student days, when with a professor named Donald Sheehan he took a course at Franconia College called “Faust,” and wrote a paper on the topic. Then a few years ago, I undertook the writing of what I call a “novella in verse” which retells the Faust legend for our modern times. With these materials in hand we decided to publish another in the series of chapbooks I’ve brought out this year under our Riverside Press imprint (preceded by Dreams of the Romantics and Roman Visions), using my pen name M. G. Turner. Collected with the narrative poem are two other devilish tales I’ve written, “The Tale of Hanns Drumpf” and “Johann Fust: Patron of Gutenberg,” plus Philip’s essay from 1974, “Faust: Man and Myth.” We believe all this writing goes well together and are now happy to announce publication of Reader Faustus: A Novella in Verse for Halloween. For those who would like to buy a copy from us directly before we begin distributing it online, we are selling them for 13 dollars plus 5 dollars shipping.

To learn a little more about our new title, here is the back cover copy:

The “Faust” legend is as old as time, as is the proverbial “deal with the devil.” In M. G. Turner’s Reader Faustus this idea is brought into a modern context, as a young poet chooses to sell his soul in exchange for the power to read every book ever written. While Turner’s “novella in verse” hearkens back to Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1601), Goethe’s Faust (1808), and Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947)—Reader Faustus zeroes in on today’s zeitgeist, in which people feel burdened to consume endless content, and who see Faustian bargains all around them, in politics, technology, science, and the arts. Readers of the macabre will surely enjoy this new offering, a veritable museum of Faust, from the author of Dreams of the Romantics.

I’m honored to have received two endorsements in advance of publication:

“The Faust legend is ever regenerative and ever redefined, as seen in M. G. Turner’s beguiling new verse tale Reader Faustus. In elegant, Augustan rhyming couplets, Turner tells the story of the devil’s bargain anew, but with a focus on the wages of modernity, when those who create are cursed by having to consume ever more content. Clever, thoughtful, and fun, Reader Faustus uses classical language to speak to very contemporary problems.”—Ed Simon, author of Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, and Editor of Belt Magazine

“M. G. Turner’s richly imaginative Reader Faustus offers a new twist on the devil’s bargain. In verse both erudite and playful, Turner asks us to reflect on what we might offer in exchange for our pursuit of both knowledge and enjoyment. While Turner takes glee in the use of antique language and form, the poem is also uncannily modern, as it proposes a complex relationship between the ability to consume content and the ability to create content—a relationship that is always under negotiation, and which has become particularly fraught in our digital age. As Turner’s work recognizes, the stakes for this bargain have never been higher.”—Brandon Grafius, author of Scared by the Bible: The Roots of Horror in Scripture 

We hope you find the Faust legend as compelling as we do, and will be interested in visiting, and reading, our “veritable museum of Faust.” Please let us know!

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Powerful Endorsements for “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life” by Todd Goddard

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September 15, 2025 update:

Along with all the terrific endorsements the author and publisher have received for Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by our agency client Todd Goddard (shown below), we now also have an enthusiastic Publishers Weekly review (“A perceptive account of a prolific and celebrated artist.”), which was quickly shared by the proprietor of the popular Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook**, where it’s generating more enthusiasm and pre-orders ahead of the book’s launch on November 4.
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As announced previously on this website, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by our agency client Todd Goddard, the first biography of the notable American author, will be published on November 4, 2025, in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook by Blackstone Publishing. The book has garnered powerful endorsements so far, from writers Gretel Ehrlich, Rebecca Solnit, Colum McCann, Carl Hiassen, John Matteson, William Souder, and Jim Fergus, as shown below.

If you’re interested in pre-ordering the book, here are links for doing so:

Bookshop.org (Bookshop is an online bookseller whose sales support  independent bookstores), 2) Barnes & Noble, 3) Books-A-Million, and 4) Amazon.
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Advance Praise for Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard

“Devouring Time is a massive achievement, a deep plunge into the life of Jim Harrison whose 40 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry line our shelves. Atavistic, inspired, despairing, gluttonous, turbo-charged, and broken-hearted, the gut strings of what drove Harrison are plucked, page by page until his high-wire obsessions, his “beggar’s banquets” of eating, drinking, traveling, and writing finally recede. What lasts are the words.”—Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces and Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Jim Harrison was a mustang that never got corralled, or at least broke out of all the paddocks he found himself in, and Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight. I was more than glad to go on the journey that was Harrison’s life in Devouring Time’s narrative, and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and all.”—Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

“Jim Harrison is and always will be one of my great heroes. He emerges from Todd Goddard’s splendid Devouring Time in vivid technicolor, and indeed shadow, as if he could walk off the page at any moment, sounding out his American yawp. Gracefully rendered and impeccably researched, Goddard intimately charts the free-flowing river that was Harrison’s life, its headwaters and tributaries, the glistening shallows and eddies, and the dark charging currents that carved channels through the literary landscape. His timeless poetry and fiction, singular joie de vivre, boundless appetites and intellect, as well as his unerring commitment to wisdom and wildness, resound on every page. One of our most cherished writers, Jim Harrison has landed in the hands of a worthy biographer. An absolute pleasure to read, Devouring Time resonates with me still.”—Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon

“My friend Jim Harrison always seemed a fiercely untameable subject for a biographer, but I think Devouring Time will stand as a complete and moving portrait. Jim was one of those rare writers whose private life was as adventurous as their works, but only a dogged journalist could have tracked down all the tales. Todd Goddard tells the whole story in a way that Jim would have admired – raw and revealing, yet with a sensitive eye for both the pain and the talent that made Jim one of modern America’s most intriguing poets and novelists.”—Carl Hiaasen, author of Bad Monkey and Fever Beach

[caption id="attachment_18927" align="alignright" width="202"] Jim Harrison, Paris, 1971. Credit: Dan Gerber[/caption]

“Jim Harrison lived a big life, and he has long deserved a gargantuan biography, both in size and spirit. And this is what Todd Goddard has given us. All by itself, the meticulously rendered story of how Harrison’s prose masterpiece Legends of the Fall came into being would be ample reward for the curious reader. But Goddard has given us immeasurably more. Impeccably researched, sensitively written, Devouring Time gives us a man — one who experienced the very depths of pain but found there the building blocks of enduring art. Cruelly battered by adversity, Harrison nevertheless infused his world with transcendent song. Read in conjunction with his own work, Devouring Time completes his testament.”—John Matteson, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father

“A feast of a biography that does full justice to a writer whose vast appetites…for books, food, sex, success, and a life in the wild…fueled a prodigious and prolific talent. Sweeping yet judicious, written with grace and restraint, Devouring Time deftly captures a life that veered between exhilaration and despair, impoverishment and acclaim. A keen-eyed and sensitive interpreter of Harrison’s writing, especially his poetry, Todd Goddard also grapples with his subject’s manifold excesses and insecurities. Harrison’s long marriage to his wife Linda, to whom he was serially unfaithful but never faithless, anchored his tempestuous personality. Their often-challenged devotion to each other is the beating heart of this moving portrayal of an artist who craved domesticity but could never live entirely within its boundaries. An exquisite, indelible book.”—William Souder, author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“Let me just say upfront that any other writers who are working on, and/or planning to write a biography about the life and times of poet/novelist Jim Harrison, I would suggest that you hang up your pens and pencils, fold up your laptops, and turn your literary attentions elsewhere. Todd Goddard here delivers the most definitive possible such work, a book brilliantly constructed, comprehensive and artfully written.

I was a close friend of Jim Harrison’s for thirty-seven years (among, of course, many others) right up until the evening of his death. I thought in that time (as many of us did) that I had heard virtually all of Jim’s stories, some more than once, for he was a consummate storyteller, frequently with alternate versions of his tales, and never too shy to talk about himself.

Herein are the rich details of the life and career of one of America’s sometimes overlooked literary geniuses, a man devoted to his art, who pushed his talents, and body, to the limit, from the rarefied world of poetry, to fiction and novels, to screenplays on the other end of the spectrum. Along the way, the reader will learn a great deal about the complicated and sometimes cutthroat literary and film businesses, as well as meet a vast array of friends, family members and colleagues who peopled Jim’s world.

There are no punches pulled here; like so many creative geniuses, Jim Harrison had his dark side, fueled by alcoholism of which he himself was more than well aware. This is a big book, and not just in size, that tells the story of an extraordinary character unlike any other, a man so totally out of the ordinary, that those of us who knew him personally, forgive him all his excesses, remember his humor and generosity, and will miss his presence on earth until the day we die.”—Jim Fergus, author of One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

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Excitedly Anticipating Publication of “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life” by Todd Goddard

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May 27 2025 update:

For fans of Jim Harrison eager to have their copy of Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life as soon as possible upon publication November 4, 2025, please click through to the websites of major book retailers below, using the pre-order/buy buttons provided:

1) Bookshop.org/for pre-ordering Devouring Time (Bookshop is an online bookseller whose sales support many independent bookstores)  2) Barnes & Noble/for pre-ordering Devouring Time   3) Books-A-Million/for pre-ordering Devouring Time  4) Amazon

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May 22, 2025
As reported on this website in April 2020, for our author client Todd Goddard, Philip Turner Book Productions sold Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life to Blackstone Publishing. Due to the pandemic, a number of key archives were inaccessible for 2-3 years but the author persevered and his book, the first biography of the protean American writer—beloved to readers for his poetry, many novellas, full-length novels, and essays that covered the gamut from food to fishing to foreign locales—will be published in hardcover, ebook, and as an audiobook on November 4, 2025. You can see the cover image from the advanced reading copy (ARC) that is being distributed to bookstores, book critics, and literary journalists, and the back cover copy.

Things are setting up very well for the book, with this enthusiastic blurb already received from the author and activist Rebecca Solnit, who writes that,

“Jim Harrison was a mustang that never got corralled, or at least broke out of all the paddocks he found himself in, and Todd Goddard tells the story of this bon vivant, outdoorsman, hellion, and great poet from his ancestors to his end with grace, momentum, generosity, and insight. I was more than glad to go on the journey that was Harrison’s life in Devouring Time’s narrative, and what a great American life it was, wreckage, glory, gifts, and all”— Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

The biography of Jim Harrison (1937-2016) unfolds across a number of key places, from the lakes and forests of Michigan, his home state, to the Florida Keys, to Greenwich Village, to Durango, Mexico, as well as Montana, Hollywood, Arizona, and Provence, France. In the archives, Todd Goddard found a rich record of correspondence, including many letters 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 an associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University, has taught Harrison’s fiction and poetry, and presented research on Harrison’s works for the Jim Harrison Society at the American Literature Association’s annual conference.

We have some ARCs available, so let me know, if you or someone you know—a bookseller say, or a reviewer—wants one because of the sort of books they read, carry, and write about, including Harrison’s own poetry, essays, and novellas, the latter being a form he excelled at beyond any fiction writer of his era. 

This week, Harrison’s classic 1989 poetry collection, The Theory and Practice of Rivers, has been reissued in a new edition from his longtime poetry publisher, Copper Canyon Press. In advance of that, Todd Goddard, Rebecca Solnit, and Jamie Harrison, one of Jim’s daughters, took part in an online discussion of the book with Copper Canyon publisher Joseph Bednarik. In addition, Copper Canyon printed a sweet little broadside for The Theory and Practice of Rivers, which I was delighted to receive in the mail, as shown in the photo gallery below. The republication of The Theory and Practice of Rivers is timely in that it happens to coincide with the publication this week of Is a River Alive?  by another of my favorite writers on nature and landscape, Robert Macfarlane. Taken together the two books are sure to bring renewed attention to our riverine world.

And if you’re looking to join an online community of folks who treasure Jim Harrison’s work, I suggest you can join the Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook, where I appreciate that this post is being widely shared.

All in all, it’s shaping up to be a banner year for the indomitable Jim Harrison!

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Sold: “First Great Sorrow: My Years with Senator Robert Kennedy,” a memoir by Donna Chaffee

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As literary agent, I’m very pleased to have sold First Great Sorrow: My Years with Senator Robert Kennedy, a memoir by Donna Chaffee, to Usher Morgan of Library Tales, a new publisher for me.

One of the reasons I’m optimistic for Ms Chaffee’s book, and the publicity it’s likely to attract, is that I sense a backlash brewing to RFK Jr.’s controversial tenure in the Trump administration. The same day we announced Donna’s book in Publishersmarketplace, it was also announced that Kerry Kennedy, sister of RFK Jr., is going to publish Ethel: Faith, Hope, Family, and an Extraordinary American Life, a biography of her mother Ethel Skakel Kennedy, written with Maryanne Vollers, with the Harper One imprint; by coincidence, as editor I earlier published a book with Kerry Kennedy, Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders  Who Are Changing the World (Crown Publishing, 2000) which shows her commitment to social justice and human rights. I think there will be a good synergy between the new books by the two women, Donna and Kerry.

I am reminded that during the 2024 campaign for the presidency, many Kennedy family members expressed opposition to, and unease with RFK Jr holding high office. With him now installed in the federal government, I believe the Kennedys will continue providing counterweights to the shameful example being set by their dangerous sibling and close relative, especially in contrast to his father.

As to Donna Chaffee’s book itself, it is a rare personal account of the charismatic Senator whose life was abbreviated so tragically.. The memoir covers the years Chaffee knew and worked with RFK, from the time he became a member of the Senate in January 1965, through his run for the Democratic nomination in 1968, and his murder that June. Over the decades she retained a lot of material from that time, including photographs, and has remained a member of the close-knit community of Kennedy family friends and associates. Her book will be published on June 6, 2026, 58th anniversary of the assassination.

Following the Senator’s death, Chaffee received a degree in Political Science from UC Berkeley and embarked upon a career in public service, working for more than 20 years as a financial manager for the County of Los Angeles. Since her retirement, she has become actively involved in cheetah conservation in Africa and traveled the world, visiting more than seventy countries.

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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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