LISA ZEIDNER is a professor of English and creative writing at Rutgers University's Camden, N.J., campus. She regularly writes book reviews for the New York Times Book Review and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She's an award-winning published poet. She's written three previous and well-received novels, Customs (Knopf, 1981), Alexander Freed (Knopf, 1983) and Limited Partnerships (North Point Press, 1989.)

All decent literary credentials, but given the modest four-figure sales of her previous novels, Zeidner took quite a layover -- about five years -- to work on her fourth novel, Layover, just released by Random House.

"I was aware I wasn't going to have many more shots in today's publishing climate," she said.

Well, it looks like this shot has worked. At press time, the house is going back for a second, 5000-copy printing to supplement the book's initial 12,000-copy printing. Last week Ingram's weekly demand for the book jumped to 1963 copies, compared to 236 copies the week before. And a major trade house -- outside of RH's Bertelsmann family -- just set a mid-five-figure paperback floor, making a healthy auction likely. (Random House holds U.S. hard/soft rights to the book.)

"She's really being relaunched with this book," said agent Georges Borchardt.

What's made the difference? An alluring cover helps, but it merely reflects the book's equally titillating topic, the first-person emotional -- and strongly sexual -- journey of traveling saleswoman Claire Newbold, who, grieving over the death of her young son as well as her husband's infidelity, refuses to check out of her hotel room -- and thus checks out of her regular life. After previously penning a mystical tale about a utopian community and ahead-of-their-times analyses of date rape and downwardly mobile yuppie angst, Zeidner alighted on writing about "a smart, middle-aged woman, a grownup," said Zeidner, 44. "And isn't this the typical age demographic of book readers?"

The book also has particularly benefited from what editor Daniel Menaker calls "pennies from heaven," in the form of favorable, at -- publication reviews from the New York Times Book Review and Newsweek.

"There are few aspects of a novel more compelling than watching the writer go on a limb, wondering how dare she," said Karen Karbo in a June 13 review in the New York Times Book Review. "Claire's odyssey of lust, seduction, desire, control... never veers from what we think of as classic male acting out, which forces us to examine why we would more easily accept such behavior in a bereaved father." Better yet, Karbo noted that with Layover, Zeidner "joins the ranks of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon, all of whom have written in the women-spiraling-into-madness genre."

In its June 14 issue, Newsweek also made similarly stellar comparisons, likening Layover to Lorrie Moore's short story "People Like That Are the Only People Here," as well as to the uvre of Updike.

Amazon.com featured the book on its home page (a free staff pick, not a co-op deal) the same day the Times review ran. That placement helped get the book in Amazon.com's top 10, just under Thomas Harris's Hannibal -- at least for a few hours.

It's all made Zeidner a bit less of a publishing cynic -- although she still feels that being a "Z" makes for unfortunately store placement, "probably at the bottom, lower right," of most bookstore shelves. With that in mind, she's helping raise her book's profile by working her own media contacts and adding a California leg to her bookstore tour (Random House also has her booked for New York, D.C. and Philadelphia events).

But Zeidner has also been buoyed by the support of Menaker and his assistant Jeanne Tift, who actually spotted the book first and is the official acquirer of the book. While Zeidner consciously crafted a more accessible novel, "it turns out all the reviews still say it's literary, after all." While she worries she may never publish more poetry because of its limited audience, "I actually imagined Layover almost like an epic poem, very spare, no excess flab," she said.

And it was this "stealth lyricism," as Menaker calls it, that first attracted him to the book. "This is becoming a great example of being able to still `make' a book the old-fashioned way, through good reviews and word of mouth," he said.