Editors were advised to keep it interested at Tuesday’s Editor's Buzz panel and they did not disappoint. One of the six buzz books flogged has a three-page sex scene between a talking monkey and a woman. “It’s not bestiality,” said Cary Goldstein, the book’s editor at Twelve, “It’s love.”
The book is The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, Benjamin Hale’s debut, and Goldstein said he loves the story, that of a chimpanzee who learns to talk, falls in love with a primatologist and eventually becomes a murderer. Why not? “It’s big, loud, abrasive, witty, earnest, and accomplished,” Goldstein said.
Little, Brown’s Judy Clain talked up veteran novelist Emma Donoghue’s Room, told from the perspective of a young boy who has grown up held captive in a room with his mother, who was kidnapped years before. “When you have real buzz in publishing,” Clain said, “you don’t have to leave your chair. People come to you.”
Two nonfiction books dealing with science and medicine got the buzz treatment. First Bad Science, which FSG’s Mitzi Angel first published in the U.K., where it went on to become a bestseller and the cause of a lawsuit. (The good guys won.) In it, author-physician Ben Goldacre takes on quick science and medicine—the lawsuit originated from a South African vitamin entrepreneur who was selling vitamins to treat AIDS—and dispels the junk medical practices while making the real science accessible. Also on the science and health beat is the buzz book Scribner’s Nan Graham promoted, The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer. As author Siddhartha Mukherjee was researching the book, Graham said, he began to see cancer as more its own entity (hence the “Biography” subtitle), and the wide-ranging story runs from ancient Persia to a contemporary case study of one of Mukherjee’s patients, with a look to the future of treatment.
A few years ago, Ballantine’s Susanna Porter pitched Loving Frank at the editor buzz panel and is hoping for another bestseller with Anne Fortier’s debut, Juliet, about a contemporary American woman who travels to Siena, Italy, in search of her family roots, only to discover she’s descended from the family who inspired the Capulets of Romeo and Juliet. The other big, fat, generations-spanning novel to get the buzz treatment was West of Here, Jonathan Evison’s second novel, and his first with Algonquin, where it was acquired by publishing veteran Chuck Adams, who called it the “best book I’ve ever had the pleasure to work on.” The story is divided between 1890 and 2006 in a small Washington town, and traces the fallout of things the town’s founders did more than a century later, as their descendants are left to clean up the messes.
Granta’s American editor, Jonathan Freeman, moderated briskly, warning the panelists before they began that “the stuff about missing a subway stop or staying up all night to read a manuscript—leave that out.”
