Carolyn Parkhurst The Dogs of Babel Little, Brown (June)
Pregnancy works wonders as a deadline, says Carolyn Parkhurst, author of The Dogs of Babel. "I literally finished the manuscript the day before my son was born. I just hope I don't have to have a baby every time I want to write a book!"
Parkhurst, 32, has wanted to write since she was practically a baby herself. She wrote as a child, she says, and took creative writing classes in high school. At Wesleyan, she was an English major, then worked for three years in a bookstore before returning to graduate school (American University) for an MFA.
Though a number of her short stories have been published in such venues as the North American Review and the Crescent Review, "this is the first book-length project I've ever attempted," Parkhurst says. "I was a little nervous about undertaking a novel." Not to worry. The Dogs of Babel—the tale of a grief-stricken college professor whose dog Lorelei is the sole witness to his wife's death, and who subsequently attempts to teach his pet to communicate in order to fathom the odd circumstances—is already creating a buzz: it's been snapped up as both a BOMC main selection and Quality Paperback premier selection, and foreign rights have sold in half a dozen countries.
"I'm just so thrilled," says Parkhurst. "I just got the advance review copies in the mail today, and it looks like a real book for the first time. " As a writer, Parkhurst is "very interested in situations in which characters are willing to step out of their own lives, in which something pushes them down a path they'd never go down otherwise. Grief works well for that, and an unexpected death with loose ends left behind seemed a good way to accomplish it."
And just how did she come up with the idea of having her main character try and teach his dog to talk? "It's kind of hard to say," muses Parkhurst, who admits to being a dog lover herself. "In grad school, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek history of canine linguistics that was supposed to sound kind of academic. I came across it a couple of years later when I had some parts of this story but not the dog angle, and it started me thinking."
A fan of such authors as Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Ethan Canin, among others, Parkhurst says she's "very intrigued by writers who use fantastic elements in their writing, but I'm kind of grounded in reality. I didn't want to do anything that really breaks the rules of the world as we know it, which is why Lorelei never actually talks."
The novel took Parkhurst—who writes full-time—two and a half years to complete. She sent out query letters to a handful of agents and "mostly got form rejections." Douglas Stewart at Curtis Brown, however, asked to take a look at the manuscript. "He read it and said he wanted to sign me, and two weeks later he sold it," says Parkhurst. "I have friends who have spent a long time trying to sell their books, and I'm amazed it's happened so quickly."
As for what she has up her sleeve for the future, Parkhurst, whose son Henry will shortly be a year old, notes with a laugh, "I've just really gotten to the point where he has a more normal routine and I'm able to start writing again at all. I've started something, but I think it's a short story."
Sales Tips:In the words of editor Asya Muchnick, Dogs of Babel is "a touching story about the lengths that people are pushed to by grief and by love." And, although Little, Brown is putting "a huge push" behind the novel, Muchnick says that what they're really counting on is word of mouth. She tells PW that when she first received the manuscript, "I started reading it on the subway, not wanting to get to my stop because I didn't want to put it down. At home, I wouldn't talk to my husband, but went straight to my room with it. It moved me enormously, and when I finished it, around one in the morning, I ran to the phone and called Carolyn's agent and left a message saying that I had to have this book. I've never done that before or since."
Lauren Weisberger The Devil Wears Prada Doubleday (April)
If you're a 25-year-old former Vogue staffer who's written a deliciously witty and gossipy first novel that's about to be published with no small amount of fanfare, how do you celebrate? Something frilly from Miu Miu or perhaps something naughty from Manolo?
Not Lauren Weisberger: "I am totally intimidated by stores like Prada." So instead of shopping her way down Madison Avenue, this author is backpacking across Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Her fashion statement for the trip? "Dirty khakis and gross gym shirts," says Weisberger, laughing.
Like her leading lady, Andrea Sachs, the small-town girl with a degree from Brown who unexpectedly lands a job working for the editor of America's trendiest fashion magazine, Weisberger's first job out of Cornell was as an assistant to Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. An aspiring writer looking for a job in magazine publishing, Weisberger's priority had been words rather than wardrobe. When offered the job, she was sartorially unprepared for life at the center of the fashion universe. "Looking back, I can't believe how I showed up for work—Gap and Banana Republic basics. Everyone gave me a lot of leeway, but the other staffers did not look like me."
While Weisberger describes her time working with Wintour as "a great experience," Andrea finds herself working for the boss from hell—with a devilish haute couture twist. Miranda Priestly, the egomaniacal editor of Runway magazine, demands that Andrea do everything from sorting her dirty laundry to finding two embargoed copies of the newest Harry Potter so they can be sent by private jet to her daughters in Paris.
Weisberger may not have taken inspiration from Wintour, but she does admit to putting "the impossibly tall thin people and the ambiance at Vogue" to good use. So how did she get all that dishy dirt about fashion magazines? "Friends shared stories and as outrageous as it may seem, some of it actually happened to people I know. But the majority of it was 4 a.m., haven't-slept-in-72-hours, bizarre scenarios."
The Devil Wears Prada, Weisberger tells PW, began as a project for The Writer's Voice workshop. "I was at least a decade younger than anyone else. Everyone seemed to be working on something about terminal illness, marital difficulties or their sex lives and I was writing fun pieces about a young woman working at a magazine in New York. I like sarcastic and irreverent and I can't imagine writing something highly personal and intimate and sharing it with the world." When Weisberger's "fun" story had grown to 100 pages, her teacher encouraged her to start showing it around. Agent Deborah Schneider of Gelfman & Schneider sold the novel to Doubleday in May 2002.
With pre-publication publicity already underway and in-house enthusiasm running high, there is just one small hurdle to be overcome—just how does her publisher e-mail galleys to their author when she's on the road somewhere between Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok?
Sales Tips:Bought by executive editor Stacy Creamer in a "heated auction," Doubleday sees The Devil Wears Prada as The Nanny Diaries of summer 2003. The first printing of 100,000 will be supported by a confirmed Today appearance and a national tour. Film rights have been sold to Wendy Finerman, producer of Forrest Gump and Stepmom.
Monique Truong The Book of Salt Houghton Mifflin (April)
When Monique Truong was 20, she read The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, where Toklas recalled having placed the following ad: "Two American ladies wish to retain a cook—27 rue de Fleurus." According to Toklas, among the several cooks who sequentially entered the Stein/Toklas household, two were Indochinese. "It was such a shocker for me," Truong recalls. "To see someone who was somehow like me in their lives was an unforgettable discovery." Truong's first novel, The Book of Salt, germinated in that chance encounter.
Binh, the protagonist, is an exile from Vietnam, an outsider in Paris and in Western culture. Yet he's an acute observer of the brilliant and eccentric ladies who are lodestars to the Lost Generation and whose famous soirees for American expats carry an exotic literary aura. How Binh came into the orbit of the women he calls "my mesdames" and the revelation of his secret life, are elements in a book remarkable for its wit, elegance, insight and artistry.
Truong's own life has been a remarkable trajectory. Born in Saigon in 1968, she left Vietnam with her family when she was six. Though they first settled in North Carolina, Truong has no trace of a Southern drawl, unlike her mother and younger sister. "I guess I just watched a lot of television," she says. She chose Yale from a college guidebook, and after graduation, working briefly as a paralegal, she felt she must comply with her parents' wish that she have a profession, so she went on to Columbia Law School.
"But I always thought I'd be a writer," Truong explains, and she wrote some fiction during her years at Yale. However, "there was a period of about seven years when I must have sounded completely delusional," she says. "I told people I was a writer—without ever putting a word to paper."
Luck came her way when two friends asked her to collaborate in editing an anthology of Vietnamese poetry and prose, an experience that reactivated her own writing. She began The Book of Salt, working at it sporadically while she held down her day job. When she won a Lannon Foundation Writing Residency in 2001, the novel was in its final stages, "that incredibly difficult point in the process where you hold the entire narrative in your head."
Because Truong loves to cook, her descriptions of food in the novel are sensuously seductive. Historical cookbooks are one of her passions, making her feel like a time-traveler. "You have that taste in your mouth and you know that it tasted the same way to the person who wrote the recipe."
The book's title came rather late in the process, although to a reader it seems fated. Throughout, Truong writes about salt as condiment and metaphor—salt connotes tears and sweat, and also "the pure sea salt sadness of the outcast." A pair of antique silver salt and pepper shakers sat on Truong's desk as she was writing the book. To her, they symbolized the era she was writing about, and also Binh's sad, labor-intensive, but also secretly piquant life.
If all goes well, Truong says she hopes never to practice law again. Being a lawyer did help her in one respect in writing her novel, she says. "It taught me what servitude meant."
Sales Tips:Truong's debut, says Houghton Mifflin trade books publisher Janet Silver, is "entirely fresh and unique—it's unlike anything you've read about either Gertrude Stein or the exile experience. Anyone who loved The Remains of the Day will be drawn to Monique's gorgeous voice and compassionate vision." The book has already been chosen as a B&N Discover title for April, according to publicity director Lori Glazer; a seven-city author tour, and outreach events are planned for the Asian-American community, foodies and Francophiles.
David Amsden Important Things That Don't Matter William Morrow (April)
When David Amsden was two, he and his father used to eat raw oysters together. By the time he was six or seven, they were hanging out at a local dive bar. And though Amsden would later entertain friends with these stories, he certainly never thought of putting them on paper. "I was writing a ton of short stories, erudite stuff for The New Yorker about a world I didn't know—white, upper-middle class people with neurotic quirks living in a big city," says the 23-year-old Amsden, who was raised outside the Washington, D.C., area and lives in Brooklyn. "My friend said, 'These are good, you can write, but the best story I ever heard from you was going to the bar with your dad.' "
So Amsden, who was attending NYU as a journalism student and penning a gossip column for New York magazine, began writing about his childhood and his relationship with his father, who was divorced from his mother. "That first scene became the vision for the novel," he says. "Then I just kept feeding on things that maybe I remembered or maybe I heard from friends."
The result, Important Things That Don't Matter, is a sad and darkly humorous look at family and divorce and their impact on children. The 20-year-old nameless narrator, growing up surrounded by unhappiness, looks back at how his relationship with his father affected his issues of intimacy and sex. "I started to notice that there are people out there between the ages of, say, 16 and 30, who grew up when the divorce rate hit around 50%. Divorce became the norm rather than a phenomenon—that has its consequences on individuals and on society."
The novel takes place in Amsden's hometown, which he describes as "so without character, it could be anywhere." Says Amsden, "In a way, I look at it as an anti-coming-of-age story—it's really charting the young man and his father, and the young man and the women he meets, but if you read it closely enough you see the father's never around. Blank years happen in between chapters and women aren't around much. He doesn't have a good grasp on them and how to deal with his feelings toward them."
After graduating early from NYU, Amsden began writing his novel while continuing to work at New York. He contacted agent Melanie Jackson after learning that she represented Rick Moody, whose writing Amsden admired. Jackson agreed to represent him and sold the book in only a few weeks. As Amsden puts it, "Morrow really backed it. They passed it around to younger people, all of whom liked it, which was great because I never really thought it was a book for 38-year-olds. I thought it was for people my age."
The author is currently working on his second novel, which focuses on kids of the same generation and how they deal with each other, rather than with their parents. "I'm interested in how kids equate sex with death and disease before they equate it with love and intimacy—kids who know about AIDS before they have erections."
Sales Tips: Editor Sarah Durand, who took over Amsden's novel when Jennifer Hershey left Morrow, says, "What Jennifer spotted is that this was the voice of a generation that really hadn't been heard before. I'm only a bit older than David and I remember friends' parents divorcing left and right and you never heard from the kids—they were sort of in the background. David captures that in a sensitive yet dark and humorous, often heartbreaking way." Durand describes the novel by saying, "take a look at what Rick Moody said about families in the '80s, then take a look at the kids. David's humor is perfect for fans of Nick Hornby or Dave Eggers."
Deborah Schupack The Boy on the Bus Free Press (March)
Describing her novel as a "domestic thriller," Deborah Schupack offers this one-sentence plot synopsis: "A boy gets off the school bus at the end of the day, and his mother doesn't think he's the right kid." Alarmed, the mother, Meg, summons home to northern Vermont the boy's father, who is working in Toronto, and their 13-year-old daughter, away at boarding school, to assist in this crisis. Neither can confirm the boy's identity.
Now a freelance advertising copywriter at work on a new novel, Schupack trained as a UPI reporter before teaching writing and literature at Yale University, the New School and in Vermont. Although The Boy on the Bus is her first published novel, she remarks, "This is actually my third 'first' novel. One of my 'practice' novels had a similar family in a similar setting, but with a more conventional story." But that story lacked an essential ingredient: conflict, says Schupack. "I was terribly stuck—fatally, it turned out—in a previous novel, and I opened a blank file to write something, anything, else. I turned to an exercise I'm fond of giving my writing classes: Pit two characters in a direct conflict in which one must win and the other must lose, and write the struggle to its end. I sat down with this exercise in mind, and for some reason, the image that came to me was a mother trying to get her son off the bus. Don't ask me why. I don't have a son. I've never ridden a school bus. But I couldn't figure out why the boy would not get off the bus, why the mother couldn't get him off. Then I realized: he isn't the right child. I wrote the first chapter as a short story, but I couldn't get the mystery out of my head. So I wrote the novel."
Senior editor Amy Scheibe categorizes the book as psychological suspense. "It's compact" at 215 pages, she notes. "It pulls you right in. This is crossover fiction at its very finest: a well-crafted literary novel with commercial appeal." She comments, "I find it particularly interesting that the parents in the book are not married. It adds a whole dimension to the mother's panic."
Schupack says, "What I tried to do is render an impossible premise possible. How could it possibly be that a mother wouldn't recognize her own child? What I hope I've achieved is a novel that sustains two opposite possibilities at any one moment, like a holograph." She adds, "When writing this book, I had my eye on writers working with impossible premises—The Metamorphosis being the definitive example. Boy, is it brilliant."
Sales Tips: The novel is an alternate selection for both Doubleday Book Club and Literary Guild. Scheibe suggests this tag: "Shirley Jackson mixed with Russell Banks. Our intention is to build Deborah as a strong literary woman's author." Free Press will tour her throughout New England and plans an extensive publicity campaign. Schupack confides, "I'd love to think of booksellers putting my book into customers' hands and saying, 'She took something that seemed impossible and made it a familiar possibility, something recognizable in all our families.'"
Jennifer Vanderbes Easter Island The Dial Press (June)
Novels as ambitious as Jennifer Vanderbes's Easter Island come along about as often as a blue moon. Set in chapters that alternate between 1913 and 1973, with fictionalized accounts of German vice admiral Graf Von Spee's squadron's time in the South Pacific layered in, the book tells the story of Elsa Pendleton, wife of a British archeologist, and Greer Farrady, an American botanist, as their lives unfold 60 years apart on the remote tropical island famous for its colossal toppled monuments. Vanderbes first imagined the book as a novella, but nine months into the writing process she succumbed to the realization that she had "miscalculated" the number of elements she was trying to juggle: Not just a strong cast of characters, not just a remote island with a mysterious history, but also the ecology of the place, WWI military history, palenology (the study of ancient pollens), the Rapa Nui language and more. She threw out half the manuscript and continued from there.
"My overall feeling," she says, "was that I was in over my head at times. I'm not a military historian, a botanist, an Edwardian. I had to describe Edwardian fabric. It was an extra task in the midst of character motivation. I hadn't even heard of palenology when I began the book, but I figured if I could make sense of it, readers could too. It all ended up being fun." Fun, she says, is one of the most important lessons she learned from writing the book. "If you're having fun it's probably good."
A devoted reader as a child, Vanderbes, now 28, began to pursue writing as an undergraduate at Yale. A reporting stint at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after college gave her experience but sapped her creative juices for other projects, so she left the paper and embarked on a series of undemanding jobs, first in New York, then in Buford, S.C. "I wanted to write," she says. "I didn't care about a job going somewhere." She enrolled in Barry Hannah's writing class at the University of Mississippi and, at his urging, went on to graduate school at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She next went to the University of Wisconsin on a writing fellowship, and from there to Colgate University on a teaching fellowship. Agent Maxine Groffsky sold the book to Dial while she was teaching at Colgate.
Vanderbes has made two trips to Easter Island; the first when she was halfway through the book. "It was a wonderful, bizarre and fabulous trip. I was nervous at first that nothing would be as I wrote about it but strangely it was the complete opposite. There was an eerie déjà vu." This past summer, she went back again when she was two proofs away from the final manuscript—to check out some information and see a film made in the 1930s about the island's leper colony.
Vanderbes follows the dictum to write the book you can't find in the bookstore. "It's the pleasure principle again," she says. "If you're enjoying it there's something real in there."
Sales Tips:According to Dial Press editorial director Susan Kamil, the audience for Vanderbes's book is the one that appreciated A.S. Byatt's Possession, Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Ann Patchett's Bel Canto. "These are all extremely rich novels that began as literary tour de forces but whose appeal is wider. What makes Easter Island unique and remarkable is its combination of literary imagination, scientific research and emotional wisdom. It satisfies the novel-reading experience in so many ways. "Marketing plans include sponsorship announcements on public radio, print ads and free reading group guides for 12-copy prepacks. "The book is important to us," Kamil says. "The money we spend on advertising and publicity will be commensurate with that."
Meghan Daum The Quality of Life Report Viking (May)
The title of her New Yorker essay "My Misspent Youth" (also the title of her first book, a collection of essays from Open City Books) notwithstanding, Meghan Daum has no regrets about her debt, largely student loans to attend the graduate writing program at Columbia University. Or about leaving New York.
Speaking from her temporary abode in Los Angeles, where she's working on the screenplay for her novel, Daum recalls her decision to downshift lifestyles and move from Manhattan to Lincoln, Nebraska. "I was on the bus one day and I wondered what would happen if I moved to Nebraska. I dared myself. People were placing bets as to how long it would take until I got back—six weeks?" Instead, Daum has been in Nebraska four years and counting. "It's a great place to write," says the 32-year-old, "and I love the landscape. It's very austere and nondramatic. I tried to buy a farm a couple months ago and it didn't work out. I still want to buy a farm, not to farm it, but just to live in the farmhouse."
Before she pulled up stakes in the East, Daum went to Nebraska on assignment for a story about methamphetamine labs, an interest she and the protagonist in her novel, Lucinda Trout, share. However, Manhattanite Lucinda's destination is Prairie City, U.S.A., which Daum is careful to describe as "its own entity; it's not in Nebraska." The similarities, however, don't end there. Lucinda is a journalist on the thong underwear/lifestyle beat for TV's Up Early, while Daum writes for Self, NPR's This American Life, Vanity Fair and Vogue. Lucinda is the more impetuous of the two. Her decision to move to Prairie City was based on fantasies about Sam Shepherd and wheat fields, rather than careful reasoning like Daum: she'd been there once.
Despite the similarities, Daum stresses that the novel is, in fact, "a fictional work. I created it as a framework to talk about issues having to do with class and identity, which could have gotten thorny in nonfiction. Unlike race or gender, we have this belief we can transcend our class. The novel's really about what it is to have an authentic life. In some ways the novel is a story with my essayistic tendencies snaking around it. I found writing fiction really freeing. I was laughing a lot when I was writing the book."
Given the narrator's age, late 20s, Daum is concerned that The Quality of Life Report not be classified as Chick Lit. "Lucinda ends up with a man," says Daum, "but there's a lot going on. I'm not a big reader of 'women's fiction.' The books I like are by 'mean' male authors—Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Richard Ford—writing that doesn't pander."
Sales Tips: Says Viking editor-at-large Carole de Santi, "what attracted me to the book was the voice and the clear intelligence telling this story and making pithy observations about herself and the culture. I think readers are going to respond to more than just a love story out West. What engaged me is the idea of our quality of life and what it feels like." So that others can weigh in on the ql factor in their communities, Viking just launched an online newspaper, TheQLReport.com.
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez The Dirty Girls Social Club St. Martin's (May)
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez started young. "By the age of four, I was pretending to write," she remembers. "My dad's a professor at the University of New Mexico, and he was always writing. My mom got a master's degree in creative writing. So writing is just what you did." The payoff proved monumental. Last June, St. Martin's executive editor Elizabeth Beier prevailed in an auction for The Dirty Girls Social Club with a bid of $500,000. Valdes-Rodriguez, now 33, admits, "I'm still shocked anyone would want to buy a novel of mine."
After growing up in Albuquerque, where she now lives with her husband and son, Valdes-Rodriguez earned her undergraduate degree in music from Berklee College of Music in Boston. While living in Boston, she covered Latino issues as a staff writer at the Boston Globe for five years. She subsequently held the same post at the Los Angeles Times for two years. Through it all, fiction called. "I've written several terrible novels," she confesses, "although I thought they were good thrillers at the time." When one made the publishing rounds, word came back, "Don't quit your day job."
Then in 1994, Valdes-Rodriguez took a new tack with Merengue, named for the dance originating in the Dominican Republic. (Dominicans were among those on Valdes-Rodriguez's beat at the Globe.) Drawing on a variety of Hispanic heritages (Valdes-Rodriguez's father's background is Cuban, her mother's Irish), she metamorphosed Merengue into The Dirty Girls Social Club, in which six Latinas who met at Boston University reconnect twice a year to update one another on their lives. After news broke about the auction and the book's subject, the Associated Press dubbed Valdes-Rodriguez a "Latina Terry McMillan."
Although understanding society's penchant for easy tags, Valdes-Rodriguez sighs when reminded of the sobriquet. "I view the book as a mainstream novel about women's friendships," she says. "I chose to write about six Latinas because I wanted to explode stereotypes. I wanted to find an entertaining way to help people understand that Latinos are as diverse a group as Americans are overall."
As for that title, Valdes-Rodriguez says, "These women call themselves sucias, which means dirty girls. It started out as kind of a joke for them." Despite its ethnic flavor, Valdes-Rodriguez hopes the book isn't ghettoized. "When I started writing, I didn't set out with any demographics in mind. After all, you don't have to be a dead girl to like The Lovely Bones." And what about any political overtones? "I think maybe the book is political, but not in a heavy way. It's like a candy bar with vitamin powder inside."
Sales Tips:In Beier's words, "These are very strong characters that you hook onto instantly. There's a lot of plot with some scenes that made us cry, but there's also a lot of light flirting, a bit of a smart-ass tone." Taking a strong position, the house plans a 150,000 first printing and a 12-city tour. Recognizing the book's niche potential, SMP will also release a simultaneous Spanish-language edition in trade paper. Film rights have been signed by the producer of Spider-Man (last year's top-grossing film), in association with Jennifer Lopez's production company.
Mick Foley Tietam Brown Knopf (July)
Mick Foley started to write because he didn't like the way his autobiography was going. A professional wrestler (ring name: Mankind), he was charismatic enough to make ReganBooks believe his story could sell, so the publisher assigned an "autobiographer" to him. Five chapters along, Foley decided he could do better on his own, finished the book, rewrote the first chapters and turned it in. Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks, sharp and funny, became a surprise bestseller, so he wrote another, bringing his life up to date; lo and behold, Foley Is Good: And the Real World Is Faker Than Wrestling also took off. Foley wrote a couple of children's books, one pegged to Christmas, one to Halloween. They sold, too. Writing, Foley discovered, was fun: "the only thing I could imagine doing that I liked as well as wrestling." Too bad he had run out of autobiographical material.
Wrestlers don't last forever, and Foley, now 37, retired in 2000 and wanted to keep writing. He thought about trying a novel, but didn't know how to start. Then he read Stephen King's book on writing and learned that fiction is about making up characters and telling stories. "That didn't seem so hard," he says. "After all, that's what I had been doing all my professional life." He came up with an unusual father-son story: the two are strangers to each other, the 17-year-old son just out of reform school (for murder at a tender age) but now trying hard to fit into small-town high-school life in upstate New York. The father, a crude caricature of macho slobdom (beer, broads, bodybuilding), has no apparent job, no apparent past and several locked rooms into which his son is not permitted. They don't seem to have much in common, especially as the son, soon deep in idealistic first love, has to endure his father's boisterous serial fornications in the next room. But there are surprising revelations to come.
"What's great about it," says Foley's editor, Victoria Wilson, "is that Mick has found a voice, besides being a natural storyteller. He has found some serious emotional material that reaches beyond the obvious to get to something unexpectedly moving and unusual. This is a book women will respond to, not just the men who would seem to be his natural audience."
Sales Tips: This one should be a joy to sell. Knopf is treating it as a serious novel, but it would be folly to ignore Foley's huge fan base. When he visited Wilson, she recalls, "People, some with kids in tow, would line up outside my office door for autographs. That doesn't happen with our other authors." Foley is an experienced entertainer, sure to be media catnip, and Knopf is sending him on a 13-city tour, though he says that since he will drive himself he's perfectly willing to go to more places if he's wanted. Hard to believe he won't be. Canny booksellers should check out Foley's DVDs and videos under all three professional names (Cactus Jack and Dude Love).
Suzan-Lori Parks Getting Mother's Body Random House (May)
Suzan-Lori Parks's play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and the year before that she was awarded a MacArthur grant in recognition of her contribution to the theater. She also heads the dramatic writing program at CalArts. Now the overachieving 39-year-old is branching out to fiction: her first novel, Getting Mother's Body is being published in May by Random House. Of the shift from one genre to the other, she says, "It helps with novel writing to have a sense of pace and structure. If you can write something that holds an audience in their seats for two hours, you know how difficult that is."
Getting Mother's Body centers on an African-American family in 1960s Texas looking for a cache of jewels buried with a body. Parks completed the manuscript just before Topdog/Underdog opened. "I'd been working on it for five years, and it was ready to be born," she says. "I counted backwards from the day of the opening and knew I had to write a chapter a day to be done by the sixth of April." That kind of determination and scheduling is central to this author's work ethic. Despite her great respect for the imagination, she recognizes that creativity alone is not enough. "The imagination is like a puppy," she explains. "It needs to be told not to eat the carpet. If you give it some structure it will be a happy, free, energetic, loving companion."
Ann Godoff, former Random House president and editor-in-chief, points to the structure of Getting Mother's Body as one of its strong points. "The story line is perfectly navigated, even though it's told in multiple voices and the central character around whom the action revolves is dead. You read the first couple of pages and you know you're in the hands of somebody who knows about narrative and voice."
Parks favors imagination over autobiography, and she laughs as she recounts how, after Topdog/Underdog opened to acclaim, she was often asked if she lived in a single room like the two brothers in the play. "Shakespeare was never a king or a murderer, as far as we know, but he wrote about brilliant murderers and kings," she says. "Now more than ever we need to embrace the imagination, because the imagination teaches us how to live and how to make the leap between what is and what could be."
Parks is currently using her own formidable imagination to write Hoops, a Disney musical about the Harlem Globetrotters , and is simultaneously adapting Toni Morrison's Paradise into a miniseries for Oprah Winfrey's production company. Parks is enjoying the restrictions of the miniseries format. "Basically, it goes chug chug chug chug chug commercial, chug chug chug chug chug commercial. You have to fashion it so it works with the commercial breaks," she says cheerfully. "It's a great exercise for me."
Sales Tips: Getting Mother's Body, which will have a 100,000-copy first printing, will be promoted through advertising in the New York Times and a feature in the Random House newsletter, and the book has received an advance quote from Richard Russo. The most anticipated sales tool, however, is the author's eight-city reading tour. Says Godoff, "She's going to be a triumph both on the independent side and in the chains. When they hear her, people are going to say, 'Wow.'"
