All Roads Lead To... First Fiction

Jack Kerley

The Hundredth Man Dutton (June)

"It was always in the back of my head to write a novel, and the more I was in advertising, the closer the idea came to the front," says Jack Kerley, a Kentuckian who toiled in the ad game as writer and creative director for better than two decades. "About seven years ago, after a couple of rugged weeks, I was lying on the couch studying cracks in the ceiling, when my wife said, 'Why don't you get up off your ass and write the book you've always wanted to write?' "

That was all the motivation Kerley needed. He quit his nine-to-five and settled into the practice of rising at 4 a.m. to work on fiction before turning to his freelance ad copy assignments. Despite his dedication, matters did not evolve as hoped. "After three years, I'd finished a novel. I figured I'd send it out, and people would send me checks," he says. "Instead, they sent me rejection slips."

Deciding that that was his "training novel," Kerley set to work again. The result, which gained the attention of agent Aaron Priest, is The Hundredth Man, a distinctive thriller that starts out with a most unusual bang and leads leading junior police detective Carson Ryder and his veteran partner to investigate what's behind the sudden surge of corpses on their Mobile, Ala., beat.

"Everything I'd learned in writing the first book came to the fore," Kerley says. "I knew what I was doing and, best of all, I knew when I started to go wrong. The book actually came from an old joke I must have heard a hundred times, the one about the man looking under the street light looking for an object he'd lost blocks away in the woods, but the light was better where he was."

While Kerley had long coveted the novelist's life, he had even longer enjoyed reading mysteries. "I started with Leslie Charteris," he recalls. "I received a copy of his novels from my father when I was about 12, and then my father later introduced me to the more contemporary work of John D. MacDonald." Kerley's journey from Charteris's Simon Templar (aka The Saint) to Travis McGee to Carson Ryder has fed his appreciation of active protagonists.

"I write character-driven books," he says, "so I let the characters take the reins, which means that the most difficult part of writing is making sure they run parallel to the plot. Sometimes you have to nudge them a little." Kerley intends to keep on nudging Carson Ryder. The Hundredth Man is the first in a two-book deal with Dutton, and Kerley envisions a long career for his cop. "I think the characters are malleable enough to go for a good distance," he says.
—Robert Dahlin

Sales Tips: Dutton editorial director Brian Tart says, "We'd been looking for a book that could be a breakout thriller for a couple of years. We think this is it. The main character is complex and interesting, someone who can grow from book to book." Because of the novel's particularly stylish writing, Tart expects positive word-of-mouth even from readers who don't usually turn to thrillers. Its sophisticated cover, he adds, should be another strong selling point.

Lolly Winston

Good Grief Warner Books (Apr.)

One balmy Hawaiian afternoon, Lolly Winston found herself Windexing the hubcaps on her supervisor's car. Working as a Kelly Girl, she decided, was perhaps not the ideal career track for someone dreaming of becoming a novelist. "I'd fallen in love with Flannery O'Connor when I was in college," says Winston. "She made me want to be a writer. But I also discovered that you can't write good Southern gothic when you're from Hartford, Connecticut, the insurance capital of the world."

Winston applied to the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence and traded in boogie boarding at the beach for subway boarding in New York. One teacher who made a lasting impression was noted author Allan Gurganus—"He told us that adverbs are the artificial crab meat of the English language. Whenever I'm revising I think of that: use verbs and nouns, use verbs and nouns."

In 1987, MFA in hand, Winston returned to Hawaii, where she worked as a corporate copywriter and did public relations for a hospital trauma center. "I was the person," Winston recalls, "who told the media that a 22-year-old surfer was in good condition after being attacked by a shark." In 1993, she decided it was "time to grow up" and moved to San Jose. She eventually landed a high-powered job as PR manager at a Silicon Valley pharmaceutical company—a position very similar to one held by Sophie Stanton, the narrator of her debut novel, Good Grief.

And like Sophie, Winston experienced "a corporate meltdown." While Sophie loses her husband to cancer when she's 36, Winston lost both her parents in the early 90s. "The corporate world is so unforgiving of grief—I got three days off. I'd lock myself in a stall in the ladies room and cry. Usually, I'd be able to take a deep breath and go back to work, but one day I couldn't." When Winston finally came out of that stall, she quit her job and started freelancing as a writer.

Despite success as a magazine writer, something continued to hold Winston back from taking the leap to novelist—until a writing teaching told her "if something is troubling you and keeping you from writing, that's what you must write about."

In 2001, she decided to take a year off and concentrate on writing a novel. It would be about grief and loss, the "something" that was holding her back. Sophie, says Winston, "is a woman who cycles through not just the five stages of grief, but 15—losing her husband, her job and her waistline along the way."

When Winston began her novel, it was high times in Silicon Valley. Then came the high-tech bust. "My husband's company went bankrupt. He came home carrying the company espresso machine—it was his severance pay." Selling her book (in November 2002), says Winston, "was like wining the lottery."

Winston is now hard at work on a second novel for Warner. "Escaping the corporate world and getting to work at home as a writer is wonderful, but on some days it's a long psychological commute."
—Lucinda Dyer

Sales Tips:"The response to Good Grief has been amazing both in-house and out," reports Amy Einhorn, editorial director, trade paperbacks. "Several of our top sales and marketing people are championing this book the same way they did The Lovely Bones." Einhorn sees Winston's opus appealing to readers who love Laurie Colwin, early Susan Isaacs, Nick Hornby and Melissa Banks. "The main character," she says, "has a dry sense of humor that just reels you in. She's so smart and funny, you want to be her friend."

George Hagen

The Laments Random House (June)

Born in 1958 in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), George Hagen saw his young years spread across three continents. His family left Africa for England when he was five and landed in New Jersey when Hagen was 11. A similar restlessness is echoed in The Laments, in which young Will Lament and kin follow roughly the same itinerary.

"Until quite recently, I felt that no one would be interested in such an odd growing-up," Hagen says. "It's the dilemma of any child who wants to be like everyone else, who wants to stop somewhere and know everybody in the neighborhood."

"I had no desire to write before college," Hagen recalls. But at NYU he majored in film and started on scripts with an eye to becoming a director. Married, he lived in L.A., where he delivered a succession of unproduced screenplays, but five years in a single-industry city was all he could bear. "The novel started later, after we'd been back in New York for eight years," he says. "I'd written about fatherhood for Parents magazine, and then our third child was born, which meant going back to burping and changing diapers. I decided that I'd begin a novel as the other thing I would do. Parenthood lets you reassess your own childhood."

Hagen didn't plan the novel's course. "I'm not of the index-card cult," he admits, "so I'd reach dead ends and have to work my way back, sort of the Pacman style of writing. I wrote in dribs and drabs every day, and you finally get to the point in a book, after you've been writing every day, when you have to continue."

It was the subject of family that drew Hagen onward. "Family is a fascinating subject," he says. "A family cannot escape itself. If you're the eldest son, nothing you do can change that. One of the main aspects of the book is that when the family leaves Africa, their sense of identity changes. They become foreigners. Racism is also part of the story. The main character is assumed to be racist because he's white and from Africa. Much of what happens is funny, and some is quite tragic. I played against all that with the family's name, which I wanted to strike an emotional chord. However, they are by no means a lamentable family. All the authors I've loved have been amusing as well as serious." Dickens and John Irving, he tells PW, are among them.

How did his real-life family respond to the book's autobiographical elements? "I cautiously let my mother look at the manuscript after it was sold," Hagen says. "I definitely took dramatic license with things that happened to us, and the characters are not true to any of my family—to their immense relief."
—Robert Dahlin

Sales Tips:"A surprising number of readers have recalled their pleasure in reading Garp as a way of describing their response to The Laments," says senior editor Ileene Smith, "though this is, of course, a very different book." She adds that the novel will delight readers of E.L. Doctorow, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith and, of course, John Irving. "What is remarkable about Hagen's first novel is his ability to make the Laments as universal as they are particular." Random plans major support, including a 10-city tour.

Robert Rosenberg

This Is Not Civilization Houghton Mifflin (June)

According to Houghton Mifflin editor Heidi Pitlor, "I actually bought This Is Not Civilization the day after I received it. I'd read it in one night and loved it." Among the book's attractions, Pitlor explains, were "the charming and often funny characters, the fascinating similarities shown between diverse cultures and peoples. I'd never read anything quite as insightful about indigenous cultures, and had no idea how similar life on an Apache reservation and in a Central Asian village could be."

So was this episodic novel ready to roll? Not quite, says author Robert Rosenberg. "Heidi and I worked on it for over a year, over five drafts." That fine-tuning, he adds, was in addition to the three years he had already spent in the novel's creation. "Writers have a tendency to avoid doing harm to their characters," he observes. "The worst things that happen to them happened in the later drafts. It took a four-year period for me to understand the characters and the story."

Containing a quartet of major figures, the novel opens in newly independent Kyrgystan shortly after the collapse of the Soviet empire, then shifts to an Apache reservation in Arizona before returning to Kyrgystan, then leaps forward a few years to Turkey on the eve of the August 1999 earthquake that killed 40,000 people. One protagonist, Jeff Hartig, is a well-meaning Peace Corps volunteer whose efforts bring ruination while he attempts to do good.

Rosenberg shares a c.v. similar to Jeff's but claims Civilization is by no means autobiographical. "There is not a single character," he says, "who hasn't come completely from my imagination." Nonetheless, like the character of Hartig, Rosenberg swallowed the Kyrgyz delicacy of sheep's eyeballs at communal feasts. "It was a pretty common thing you had to do. It wasn't so bad, once you got over the idea of it," he maintains. "I was the first American the people in the village had ever seen. Often they'd slaughter a sheep for you. You go there to help those people, and they end up taking care of you." After a stint at an Apache reservation in Arizona, he arrived in Istanbul on a teaching assignment five days before the 1999 disaster. "The novel sort of sprung on me one day a few months after the earthquake," he says. "I wondered what would happen if these people came together in Istanbul."

Although there are correspondences between characters whom Jeff encounters on opposite sides of the globe, Rosenberg says, "The parallels weren't conscious. But having lived in both places, I can't tell you how often I said to myself in Arizona, 'This is exactly what happened in Kyrgystan.' I am convinced of the truth of the land-bridge theory that our Native Americans came out of Central Asia."
—Charles Hix

Sales Tips:Touting Rosenberg's work as ambitious literary fiction, Pitlor says, "It's for fans of White Teeth and Prague, of Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer." She believes the novel has special appeal to the Peace Corps community and to individuals who enjoy travel writing about the novel's primary settings.

Janis Hallowell

The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn Morrow (Mar.)

Sometimes a book writes itself out of the author's need to answer existential questions. And sometimes the "answer" turns out to be ambiguous, but imbued with the validity of deep and honest thought.

Such was the case for Janis Hallowell, who spent close to seven years "almost enraptured" as her novel, The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn, "emerged like a dream from my unconscious mind.'' In her story, a schizophrenic homeless man has a vision in which Francesca, a 14-year-old girl in his Colorado town, appears to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary. The narrative explores the mysteries of faith and redemption and the boundaries between mysticism and madness.

For Hallowell, the novel was a natural outgrowth of a lifelong preoccupation with the existential question: what's it all about? She was already embarked on a story about the need for salvation when she saw a movie by the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray that concerned a girl who was believed to be an incarnation of the goddess Kali. "It clarified my focus," she says. To create a similar story set in present-day America, Hallowell decided that she would use the major Christian doctrine of the annunciation. She herself is not a strictly observant person, she says. Her curiosity was piqued by the question of what people are willing to do to achieve belief, rather than an adherence to one particular religious doctrine.

Her daughter, Zoe, was then seven years old (she is now 14) and Hallowell fit in her writing time around her schedule as wife, mother and homemaker. In the meantime, David Guterson's novel Our Lady of the Forest appeared, dealing with much the same themes as Hallowell's still unfinished manuscript. She read the Guterson book, of course, but found that his story of a young girl who sees an apparition of the Virgin is quite different from her own, conveying a more jaundiced view of human nature.

Yet she's not surprised at the coincidence, since she thinks that similar ideas arise from a collective unconscious. She's convinced that many of those who believe in divinity walk a razor's edge between redemption and disaster. "I didn't set out with the message that belief is a panacea. Terrible things also happen in the name of religion. I ended up with more questions than answers."

In many ways, the homeless man, Chester, is the most important character in her book. A former teacher reduced to living on the streets because he is in the grip of a powerful psychosis, Chester teeters in the edge of emotional breakdown. Yet Hallowell implies that madness and mysticism are often sides of the same coin. "I discovered in Chester that there is always madness in us, and there is always mysticism in madness."

Hallowell's main concern at this point is that "everybody seems to bring their own belief system to the way they read the book. I worry that people are going to think that the way they interpret the story is what I meant. Cynical people may assume that mental illness inspires religious visions. Religious people may think that it's a celebration of the Virgin. I'm hoping that people will people will see it from a wider viewpoint, as the human need for belief in the divine."
—Sybil Steinberg

Sales Tips: Editor Jennifer Brehl says that she was "utterly charmed" by Hallowell's novel and intrigued by the dramatic events called into play through the issue of faith in modern life. She feels that this is not solely a "woman's novel," and that it will appeal to teenage readers and to male readers as well. According to assistant publicity director Dee Dee de Bartlo, a deep distribution of advance reader's copies alerted booksellers and the media to the novel, for which a 50,000-copy first printing is planned.

Jonathan Raymond

The Half-Life Bloomsbury (May)

Jonathan Raymond sees himself as a regional writer, and he sees his region as greater Portland, Ore., which he defines as stretching "from Seattle down to San Francisco." His debut novel, The Half-Life, recounts two stories that take place in two different eras, but are both set in Oregon. It's natural, then, that the 32-year-old lives in Brooklyn. "A lot of people go from New York to a place like Portland so they have time to do their thing, but for me it worked out the opposite way," he recalls of his eastward move in the year 2000.

Raymond spent about three years writing and editing the novel, with a few months off to work as director Todd Haynes's assistant on the 2002 movie Far from Heaven. Not coincidentally, film is a key element in Raymond's work: The Half-Life depicts an attempt to make a low-budget movie.

Raymond himself has co-authored a script titled Sprung with friend Steve Doughton and is currently working on another for what he describes as "a really weird interactive video project called Bad Blood," scheduled to premiere at the Basel Art Fair in June. He considers himself a novelist first and foremost, however: "Fiction is my real 'work.' It's what I would do regardless. Screenwriting is a great gig when I can get it, especially in the circumstances I've found myself in thus far."

Artist Marlene McCarty commissioned Bad Blood, and it was the work of another visual artist—the late David Wojnarowicz—that inspired The Half Life. "He did a piece of art that was a photograph of two skeletons holding hands with text over the top of it that had always stuck with me," says Raymond.

Not only do two skeletons figure into the plot of The Half Life, but the duality of that image is reflected in the structure: two stories, one involving fur trappers in the 1820s and the other teenage girls in the 1980s, that play off of each other. "I had just read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, which is a double narrative between WWII and Silicon Valley in the '90s, and I thought what a solid narrative engine flashing between stories was. It creates a sort of momentum," Raymond reports.

But it's "regional modernists"—Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis—whose style Raymond emulated in The Half-Life, and the mature character he achieved appealed to Bloomsbury deputy editorial director Colin Dickerman: "I was drawn to The Half-Life because it's a hugely ambitious novel that takes a lot of risks and succeeds brilliantly. A lot of first fiction feels like thinly veiled autobiography, but this is big in scope, and yet the writing itself is intimate and emotional and engaging. Reading it, I was immediately struck with the sense that this author could do anything."
—Natalie Danford

Sales Tips:Dickerman sees the regional sensibility of The Half-Life not only as a literary strength, but as a selling point as well. He says, "The book has an amazing sense of place, and we are building Jonathan regionally and then working from there." Raymond will tour both his East and West Coast stomping grounds—New York, Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. Sales and marketing director Sabrina Farber says, "We've seeded the Northwest early with bound manuscripts for key booksellers. We're also printing long on beautiful four-color ARCs with all the bells and whistles and doing a Book Sense white box mailing."

Robin Lynn Williams

The Assistants Regan Books (May)

"My life has been a nightmare ever since Mork & Mindy came out," says Robin Lynn Williams, who insisted on using her middle name on the jacket of her gossipy, first-person novel to avoid any confusion. The fact that both Robin Williamses worked in Hollywood, however, is about as close as their connection gets. In fact, Robin Lynn Williams has spent far more time with a different set of well-known comedians, Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold, for whom she worked as a personal assistant, an experience she draws on in her novel about five unhappy Hollywood helpers who once a week drink and commiserate.

"I started working for Roseanne and Tom when I was in college," Williams explains. "They basically wanted someone in their home from 9-to-5 on Saturday and Sunday to get them things. I would order them food for lunch and pick it up. Part of my job was to collect faxes; there were no faxes on the weekend." The work became so consuming that Williams took a year off from UCLA to become Barr's full-time PA. "Everything you hear about being an assistant in Hollywood is true," she says.

But the job turned out to be a creative turning point, providing material for an article that appeared in Biography magazine and was picked up by the New York Times syndicate. Although she was offered more magazine work, Williams says, "I quickly realized I didn't like journalism." Instead, she turned back to the original essay, which she expanded into the first draft of The Assistants in the mid-'90s. "I thought it wasn't going to be funny," says Williams, who regards the job of a writer first and foremost to entertain. "I put it away until The Nanny Diaries came out. Then I thought maybe there is a market for a story about a chaotic, thankless job."

In the interval between completing the book's first and second drafts, Williams wrote another novel, which was ultimately turned down. When she moved East, she took a job with Simon & Schuster, the house that sent her the nicest rejection letter for her other novel. Rather than work in editorial, though, Williams prefers sales—she is senior associate for distribution clients and works with Readers Digest Children's Books. "It's been such a great learning experience for me to be a writer and to be on the sales side and see how important the different channels are," says Williams.

Despite the stresses of full-time work, Williams maintains an active writing schedule. "I usually write on weekends, in evenings, and at lunchtime I close my door," says Williams, who wants to complete her next novel, working title D-Girls, in the spring. The new book, which is also about a group that's low on the social totem pole—divorced women—is loosely based on her own experiences in a post—Bridget Jones world. "I like the underdogs," says Williams. "I'm a Mets fan."
—Judith Rosen

Sales Tips:"We already have a lot of in-house enthusiasm for The Assistants," says publisher Judith Regan. "When you have that kind of energy, it becomes contagious and the snowball goes from there." She adds, "Every assistant in the world can relate to the book," acknowledging that there a few of her own who will no doubt identify with Williams's humor about bosses. Regan, who's been looking to do more television work, tells PW that she plans to develop Williams's novel into a TV series.

John Harwood

The Ghost Writer Harcourt (July)

By escorting readers through a leave-the-nightlight-on excursion into the scary side of the supernatural with The Ghost Writer, John Harwood invites comparisons to Anne Rice and Stephen King. But this debut author belongs in different company, according to his editor at Harcourt, Andrea Schulz.

More apt comparisons, she says, would be Michel Farber's The Crimson Petal and the White and Emma Donahue's Slammerkin. Like those other Harcourt novels, The Ghost Writer takes readers to Victorian England. And like those earlier commercial and critical successes, Harwood's debut combines the kind of suspense that keeps readers up at night with a literary voice that allows them to respect themselves in the morning.

There is one important difference (beyond the focus on ghosts instead of prostitutes): Harwood's book puts a contemporary frame on its portrait of Victorian society. The modern-day protagonist, a librarian named Gerard, is settling matters for his recently deceased mother when he uncovers ghost stories written by his grandmother, Viola. Harwood uses those tales to take the book into the 1800s and then returns the narrative back to a present that is itself loaded with conventions of the Victorian ghost story.

The novel grew out of Harwood's long-time fascination with ghost stories and the Victorian era. For him, ghosts represent all that is "strange and supernatural." But it's not just about making readers cower under the covers. "The supernatural is such a powerful metaphor for so many things that happen in emotional life that are not easily captured in realism," says the 57-year-old Australian, who retired seven years ago from a career as an English professor at Flinders University of South Australia.

As an academic, Harwood wrote a book about two famous Victorian-era writers, who were also lovers, titled Olivia Shakespear and W.B. Yeats: After Long Silence (Macmillan, 1989). Fast-forward to six years ago, when Harwood was doing research for an anthology of ghost stories. That project didn't work out, but it led to another idea. "Olivia was someone I was fascinated with, and I had thought earlier about writing a novel of the relationship (between Shakespear and Yeats). Then I thought, 'why not make her a writer of ghost stories.' "

Harwood is now working on a novel that takes place entirely in England in the late 1800s. As for what comes after that, Schulz hopes he won't stray far from where he started. "I would love to see him stay in the Victorian world because I think he has a visceral feel for Victorian England, in a way that not many writers do, that makes him a transporting writer." Harwood adds, "This feels like what I was meant to do. On a good day, when I'm writing, I feel like this is why I'm here. On a bad day I try to remember the good days."
—Karen Holt

Sales Tips: The Ghost Writer will appeal to readers who want to immerse themselves in a different world, says Schulz, as well as to those who enjoy goose bumps. "It's for people who like scary stories and entertain the possibility that something eerie lurks in the bottom drawer of the dresser," says Schulz. "John makes that very tangible. The novel works on a lot of different levels, on just the straightforward spooky level and also as a really witty commentary on the tropes of the Victorian story."

David Maine

The Preservationist St. Martin's (July)

Pakistan may seem like an unlikely place for an American novelist to pen a story based on the story of Noah's Ark, but that's exactly what David Maine has done with The Preservationist. The Connecticut native now lives in Lahore with his wife, the novelist Uzma Aslam Khan, whom he met while the two were graduate students at the University of Arizona. The pair taught English together in Morocco before settling in Pakistan.

Inspired in part by Jim Crace's Quarantine, The Preservationist focuses not only on Noe (Noah) but also on his wife, children and their spouses. But anyone who's reluctant to pick up the book because of its biblical roots needs to know that this isn't the Noah you'll remember from the Bible—he's very human and his family treats him as if he were a little crazy for building the Ark.

Maine attributes the appeal of the story itself, with or without the religious implications, to a basic tenet of writing: "Much of the power of Biblical texts comes from the fact that they are narratives—they have beginnings, middles and ends. The story of the flood is a great story. Plus I like animals. I do remember that, even as a little kid, Noah made a real impression on me. I used to wonder how they got all those animals on one boat."

The writing process, Maine believes, is "a certain kind of trance state. There are mystic singers here in Pakistan called qawwals, who sing and chant until they work themselves into a kind of trance. They say that they manage to enter a realm of pure spirit, through the rhythm and music of their singing and playing."

Despite coming on the heels of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Maine says that he did not set out to write a book about religious fundamentalism or fanaticism, though he admits that the attacks were in the air. "During this time the news was depressing; in Pakistan, some people were nervous that the States would move its demolition from Afghanistan to here," he says. "It seems possible that the general gloomy world view affected my thinking and writing, but it was nothing conscious. Noah's story is about environmental, ecological disaster rather than human folly. In that way, sure, there are echoes of what's happening in the world, vanishing species and ruined habitat and so on."

It was living in Pakistan that enabled Maine to tackle the religious theme head on. "Religious devotion is more of a public commodity in Pakistan than in the U.S., and this has allowed me to loosen up and write about people who express that devotion publicly. Sure, there are publicly devout figures in the States; but in general it's considered good etiquette to keep your religious ideas to yourself—at least in New England, where I'm from. In Pakistan there is no such compulsion."
—Edward Nawotka

Sales Tips: St. Martin's executive editor Jennifer Enderlin calls Maine's novel "the most unique novel I've read in my 15 years. I was immediately intrigued by the concept—the story of Noah told from the point of view of his family. There was something so modern, spare and wryly funny. What David has accomplished is to take characters that were previously known and make them human. As an editor, you know you have to have the book when you pick it up and start reading it again. I can count on one hand the number of times that's happened to me." St. Martin's, hoping the book rises on this tide of enthusiasm, is going out with a 100,000-copy first printing.

Cydney Rax

My Daughter's Boyfriend Crown, June

Cydney Rax created the Web site Book-remarks.com four years ago to serve the African-American reading community, tracking books of interest far in advance of publication; welcoming debut novelists, self-published authors and print-on-demand books; and making note of awards, nominations, "anything to do with the literary world." As an unexpected perk, the site (which she still manages) gave her connections that she credits with getting her a book deal for her first novel, My Daughter's Boyfriend, the racy story of a love triangle involving a mother, a teenage daughter and the daughter's college-age boyfriend.

Rax, who describes herself as looking younger than she is ("a teenager would think I'm ancient but an 80-year-old would consider me pretty young") was originally inspired to write by Terry McMillan's Disappearing Acts. "Her characters existed and made me want to try my hand," she says. "I wasn't very good. But the more I wrote the better I got." The more she read the more she learned, too. From Omar Tyree and Sheneska Jackson she began to get a knack for plot twists, character development and dialogue. From Walter Mosley she learned characterization. Jennifer Belle taught her the importance of details. Richard Wright laid out exposition and the trick of "getting inside people's heads." Margaret Johnson Hodge helped her find her style, which Rax describes as a combination of humor, sensitivity, sensuality, spirituality, sarcasm and some simple, profound statements.

"I began to pick up on it," Rax says. She found the hardest part of novel writing to be confronting writer's block. "You have to think about who is in the scene, where they are, and what's about to happen," she says. "If I can visualize those things, I can get past it." The best part was not actually being the mother of a 17-year-old but having the fun of creating appropriate dialogue and situations. "I worked totally from my imagination," she tells PW. "I didn't interview any teenage girls." Dealing with Aaron, the boyfriend, was more of a challenge. As for Tracey, the mother, "I can identify with her character but I didn't base her on me. I would use my emotions for her but they would derive from different circumstances."

Her next novel, in progress, is about a husband and wife who agree to adultery in order to save their marriage. "My characters are not sympathetic," Rax says. "They are victims of their own poor decisions and lust, people with flaws. The idea of guys who are attracted to their girl's moms came from a Teen People article. It happens. It's not talked about. That's what attracts me. Things in society that we don't always want to talk about."
—Suzanne Mantell

Sales Tips:Editor Rachel Kahn calls Rax "the next emerging trend in black fiction," a commercial writer at the forefront of what's working in the genre. The spicy love triangle at the core of the book could have been a tawdry soap opera but for Rax's ability to endow her characters with humanity, Kahn says. "The book is thought-provoking and entertaining. That's where the market is going. This is the next genre shift for African-American commercial fiction. It's no longer Waiting to Exhale. The books will be bolder and hotter and more provocative, like Cydney's."

Paul Jaskunas

Hidden Free Press, July

Free Press publisher Martha Levin's enthusiasm for Hidden, Paul Jaskunas's brooding, suspenseful first-person novel set in New Harmony, Ind., about a woman who has seemingly accused the wrong man of a brutal crime against her person, mirrors his own enthusiasm but with a major difference: whereas Levin admires "the pitch perfect nature" of his writing in a female voice, Jaskunas recalls the struggles he went through to forge that voice and the doubts he initially felt about his narrative choice. "It was scary," he says. "When I was writing it made sense to me. When I was away from the page I'd think, What am I doing?"

Hidden tells the story of Maggie Wilson, whose ex-husband has been jailed after a brutal attack on her. When another man confesses to the crime, Maggie is sent into a tailspin, trying to remember exactly what happened. "Maggie and I have a lot in common," Jaskunas says, "but not the trauma. I tried not to think about that while I was writing."

He adds, "I never wholeheartedly believed you had to write what you know. I enjoy the challenge and space that writing about something different from yourself gives you." Jaskunas, 32, grew up thinking of himself as a writer. Among the writers he most admires are James Salter, Tim O'Brien, Don DeLillo, Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore; although, he says, "I don't know how their works feeds into my mine."

After college at Oberlin, where he did some journalism, and subsequent jobs with daily newspapers, Jaskunas went to the American Lawyer in New York, starting as a fact checker and progressing to reporter. He left to attend the MFA writing program at Cornell, where he turned out the first several drafts of Hidden, finishing it up in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he spent a year on a Fulbright scholarship for creative writing. The book's plot was triggered by a newspaper article about a man released from prison after many years after DNA testing exonerated him. "The newspaper story was about him," Jaskunas explains, "but there was a quote at the end from the woman expressing her confusion. Her predicament was what interested me."
—Suzanne Mantell

Sales Tips:Levin expects major off-the-book-page attention for Jaskunas, and not only because he's a man writing in a woman's voice. According to Levin, the parallels between the Central Park jogger case and the one in Hidden are very strong. "I think this book could actually break out. Not Lovely Bones or Da Vinci Code breakout, but a book that will sell more than expected. We are sending Paul on tour. We are pushing in ways we've never pushed." The jacket is a source of controversy, Levin says. "Some people are bothered by it, the woman's semi-nakedness and dissimilarity to the woman in the book. I think it's a grabber. I couldn't not pick it up." Also, she says, after three readings she's still convinced the husband did it. "I like moral ambiguity and a moral quandary and that's what this novel offers."

Adam Langer

Crossing California Riverhead, June

Adam Langer remembers exactly when he started writing his debut novel, Crossing California. It was New Year's Eve, 2001; Langer had a cold and no big plans, so he started reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. He admits that he never really "got" Woolf before, but this encounter inspired him to start writing a short story the next day. "It was about three characters meeting on a street corner in Chicago," he tells PW. The "California" in the title refers to the street that served as a line of demarcation between middle class and upper middle class families in the Windy City neighborhood where Langer grew up. "Crossing California seemed like a really big deal," he explains. "There was a sense that once you cross California everything was okay."

Langer says the book is "very unautobiographical," except for the fact that he was a Jewish boy who had a Bar Mitzvah in the West Rogers Park neighborhood at about the same time the book is set. Dates figure prominently in Crossing California, which opens on November 4, 1979, the day the American hostages were taken in Tehran and ends on January 21, 1981, when they were released. In those 444 days, says Langer, everything changed in America. The Carter presidency gave way to the Reagan era. John Lennon went from recording his Double Fantasy album to being killed. The country became obsessed with who shot J.R. on Dallas, and the three characters who meet up at California and North in Langer's book are obsessed with all the changes happening to them, their small worlds and the nation.

The mostly comic action revolves around the three classmates and their families. Jill Wasserstrom, from east of California, takes the Iranian perspective in a school debate and plans a mischievous Bat Mitzvah speech as her widowed father goes on his first date since his wife's death. Muley Scott Wills, of mixed black and Jewish heritage, becomes host of a children's program on National Public Radio and takes a stand with his single mom that forces her to deal with his estranged father, an L.A. record label mogul. Lana Rovner, from the better side of the street, does not become host of the same program and lives with her older brother who is trying everything to launch a music career and score with Jill's big sister as their parents' marriage unravels.

"So much of the '60s ended in 1980," says Langer, a former NPR child host and a filmmaker, playwright and editor of the now defunct Book magazine. "A lot of this is hindsight. It wasn't until I got it written down that gradually I realized what was going on in the country. I was lucky the street was named California because it serves as a metaphor for America."
—Bridget Kinsella

Sales Tips:According to editor Cindy Spiegel, "We're having a lot of fun with this one. She points out that Crossing California is the lead title in Riverhead's catalogue and the sales reps' favorite book of the this season. Comparisons to Philip Roth (Jewish and funny) and The Corrections are already being made, but Spiegel calls Langer's work "an American Graffiti for a new generation." For Langer's BEA appearance the publisher is producing a CD-ROM with period photos of places in the book, music of the time and Top Ten lists from the period. Riverhead is backing Crossing California with a 50,000 printing and a six-city author tour.