Getting Past the Gatekeepers

At Touchstone Fireside, we began to question the gatekeeping lineup of agent to editor to editorial consensus.That's a limited number of eyeballs standing between anonymity and publication for aspiring authors. We couldn't help but notice that, with the advent of print-on-demand and desktop design, some authors were doing it themselves—scaling the gate, as it were, and selling their own books over the Web. Our editors even acquired a few of these self-published novels and had some success, most notably with Kathleen McGowan's The Expected One, which—credit where credit is due—was found and represented by Larry Kirshbaum. Was there a way for us to find more new talent in the vibrant online community short of simply re-opening the transom to a digital onslaught?

Along came the social networking Web site Gather.com, and together we established the First Chapters writing contest. More than 2,500 entrants posted the first chapters of their unpublished novels on the Web site. Thousands of voters then narrowed the field to 25 entrants, who sent second chapters; then to 10, who sent a third; then to five finished manuscripts. Five judges (myself included) read the finalists. Our job was to pick only one, but we settled on two: Terry Shaw's The Way Life Should Be, and as runner up, Geoffrey Edwards's Fire Bell in the Night. We decided to publish both.

Had we mounted “the American Idol of publishing?” some detractors asked. Were we trying to make an end-run around agents? No, and no. By allowing interested book consumers to vote on the quality of submissions, we were doing what many industries do—engaging in market research, trying to answer the question, What do people want? And far from trying to skirt agents, we encourage winning authors to get representation.

What we are doing is what editors and publishers have always done—look for talent. The difference is that First Chapters acknowledges that the Internet is first and foremost a place where people read—an underutilized resource that even a big New York house can find helpful.

So, the next time your cousin's wife's best friend has a first novel that they would like you to read, just send them to the Internet, where there is a huge community of eyeballs waiting to read and blog about it. And anything might happen—just ask Terry Shaw, who I'm delighted to say is among the season's first novelists picked out by another set of gatekeepers at PW.

It seems like ages since a group of editorial assistants sat around a conference table eating pizza and going through the slush pile in search of the Holy Grail, a publishable first novel—actually, it was six years ago, when the anthrax scare put an end to the practice here at S&S and at many other houses as well. Today, editorial assistants are more likely to be found at their desks eating salads and poring over title information tip sheets. With slush-pile sensations—Judith Guest's Ordinary People, found by Viking three decades ago, is a famous example—very likely a thing of the past, how can today's fresh but unagented talent have a chance? And how can we have a chance to find them?

BeaufortRon Leshem, 31(Delacorte, Jan.)Born: Tel Aviv, Israel; now lives on the outskirts.Favorite authors: García Márquez, Paul Auster, Shmuel Agnon, Romain Gary, Elsa Morante, Zeruya Shalev, Naguib Mahfouz, David Grossman.Career Arc: Journalist, news editor at Israel's leading daily, Yediot Ahronot; deputy editor of the country's second largest newspaper, Ma'ariv; programming v-p for the Keshet Broadcasting Company.Plot: As seen through the eyes of Liraz Liberti, the 21-year-old leader of an Israeil commando squad stationed in southern Lebanon, readers follow frustrated, frightened young soldiers fighting vague missions and living under near-constant fire by Hezbollah.Author's toughest challenge: “Since I have never been in battle, the toughest challenge was breaking through the isolated, sweet bubble I live in.”Publisher's pitch: Says senior editor Philip Rappaport, “Beaufort is raw and urgent, sexy and darkly comic, and impossible to forget. Ron's talents—like those of Tim O'Brien and Anthony Swofford—transcend region and category. The big political and social issues are pushed aside and the characters forget about everything except trying to stay alive.”Opening lines: “What? Are you totally out of it? How could you not know this game? No way you don't know it. It's called “What He Can't Do Anymore” and it's what everyone plays when a friend is killed. You toss his name into the air and whoever's there at the time has to say something about what he can't do anymore.”—George SpelvinThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz, 38
(Riverhead Books, Sept.)
Born: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; now lives in New York City and Boston.
Favorite authors: Samuel R. Delany, Patrick Chamoiseau, Toni Morrison, Natsuo Kirino, Edwidge Danticat.
Career Arc: “From MFA-er to activist to photocopier for pharmaceutical devil to writer to really, really tormented writer to novelist.”
Author's toughest challenge: “Trying to get the women's characters right—to make them real, strong women, even though they were being filtered through a somewhat distorted male point of view. That, and trying to write equal parts horrible and hilarious without one snuffing out the other.”
Plot: Oscar is a New Jersey ghetto nerd who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and of finding love. But he is doomed by the fukú, a curse that the novel traces back across generations and through the family's epic journey out of the Dominican Republic.
Publisher's pitch: “People have been waiting for this novel since Junot's first short story appeared over 10 years ago,” says editor Sean McDonald. “He has a singular, brilliant literary voice—he gets energy on the page like no one else can. In short: more than worth the wait.”
Opening lines: “They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles.” —Julie Stevenson
The Farther Shore
Matthew Eck, 33
(Milkweed Editions, Oct.)
Born: Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota; now lives in Kansas City, Mo.
Favorite authors: Hemingway, Tim O'Brien, Kurt Vonnegut. Also the classics—Homer, Shakespeare, Chaucer et al.
Career Arc: From high school to the army to college to grad school to teacher.
Plot: Several U.S. army soldiers in an unnamed war are separated from their command and left to fight their way out of a hostile city. They experience a series of frightening encounters. Those who survive are scarred immeasurably.
Author's toughest challenge: “This novel was inspired by my time in Somalia. It was hard to stay inside the head of my main character. You work so hard to get away from the war and to survive it. It was hard to take a character you love and visit hardships upon him.”
Publisher's pitch: Says editor-in-chief Daniel Slager, “When I first read the manuscript, I thought, this guy is a natural. The writing is spare and evocative, and intensely lyrical in places. It's a very strong work of literature, and to have that combined with the representation of an experience that is, sadly, increasingly common for young people, makes the novel very powerful.”
Opening lines: “It was full dark, midnight, and heat like that should have disappeared. Then the bombing started. Those poor souls, the poor fucks of the city, had no idea we were watching from the rooftop of the tallest building in town, six sets of eyes in the night, calling in rounds from the circling AC-130 Spectres.”—Judith Rosen
The Eye of Jade
Diane Wei Liang, 41
(Simon & Schuster, Feb.)
Born: Beijing; now lives in London.
Favorite authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald (“my absolute favorite”), Annie Proulx, Edith Wharton, E.M. Forster, Haruki Murakami.
Career Arc: Trained as a psychologist; university professor of management for 11 years; memoirist.
Plot: Mei Wang is the first female private investigator in modern Beijing. When Mei's “Uncle” Chen hires her to find a Han dynasty jade, the case forces her to delve not only into China's brutal history, but also into her family's dark secrets.
Author's toughest challenge: “The fact that I write in English, but my characters are Chinese. The Chinese had to have a more poetic writing style. So I'm not exactly translating into English, but bringing that Chinese-ness, reconciling that with English and still staying true to my characters and to their settings.”
Publisher's pitch: Says executive editor Marysue Rucci, “Diane's novel gives readers a looking glass into a little-known world. Its exotic location, intrepid protagonist and intriguing mystery offer a riveting exploration of Chinese culture, history and politics. She's China's answer to Alexander McCall Smith!”
Opening lines: “In the corner of an office in an old-fashioned building in Beijing's Chongyang district the fan was humming loudly, like an elderly man angry at his own impotence. Mei and Mr. Shao sat across the desk from each other. Both were perspiring heavily. Outside, the sun shone, baking the air into a solid block of heat.”—Dick Donahue
A Fraction of the Whole
Steve Toltz, 35
(Spiegel & Grau, Feb.)
Born: Sydney, Australia; now lives in New York City.
Favorite authors: Knut Hamsun, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Bernhard, Raymond Chandler.
Career Arc: From the bottom rung of one ladder to the bottom rung of another ladder—cameraman, extra, data entry clerk, English teacher, private eye—to full-time writer.
Plot: This comic adventure takes place in the Australian bush, the cafes of Paris, the Thai jungle, labyrinths, mental hospitals and criminal lairs. At its heart is the relationship between a father and a son who are against each other and against the world.
Author's toughest challenge: “I wrote part of the book in Barcelona. I was teaching English and living in a room above an apartment with some acrobats. I didn't have any electricity or water. There was one light bulb and it was controlled from their apartment. The obstacle was recharging the battery for my laptop.”
Publisher's pitch: “Within reading the first few pages of Steven's book, I knew I had something extraordinary on my hands—that rare debut so adventurous, so smart, so effortlessly hilarious and fearlessly original that it defies classification,” says editor Michael Mezzo.
Opening lines: “You'll never hear about an Olympic cyclist who lost his sense of smell in a tragic accident—no, for the universe to teach cruel lessons we are unable to apply later in life, the cyclist must lose his legs, the painter his eyes, the musician his ears, the chef his tongue. I have lost my freedom. Who's to blame?”—J.R.
A Golden Age
Tahmima Anam, 31
(HarperCollins, Jan.)
Born: Dhaka, Bangladesh; now lives in London.
Favorite authors: William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy.
Career Arc: Anthropologist to film production assistant to writer.
Plot: In a story of fierce maternal love and unexpected heroism, Rehana Haque, a young widow, finds herself caught up in the chaos of the Bangladesh war. She manages to protect her children and survive the war with her family intact.
Author's toughest challenge: “It was difficult to create a narrator who could tell the story authentically and also had an outsider's point of view. Rehana is loosely based on my grandmother, a widow, who harbored a lot of revolutionaries from the war in 1971. The challenge was making sure that the characters and stories were fictionalized enough.”
Publisher's pitch: “Tahmima has this gift of writing about a place which is totally foreign and yet makes the reader feel at home,” says executive editor Terry Karten. “It's rare to find a writer who can balance the story of a nation and its tumultuous birth against that of a woman who struggles and survives.”
Opening lines: “Dear Husband, I lost our children today. Outside the courthouse Rehana bought two kites, one red and one blue, from Khan Brothers Variety Store and Confectioners. The man behind the counter wrapped them up in brown paper and jute ribbon. Rehana tucked the packets under her arm and hailed a rickshaw. As she was climbing in, she saw the lawyer running towards her.”—Hilary S. Kayle
Interred with Their Bones
Jennifer Lee Carrell, 45
(Dutton, Sept.)
Born: Washington, D.C.; now lives in Tucson, Ariz.
Favorite authors: Shakespeare (“of course”), Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dinesen, Allende, Pérez-Reverte.
Career Arc: Earned English Lit degrees hoping to become a Shakespeare professor; jumped ship to become a freelance writer.
Plot: The book concerns a long-lost work of Shakespeare's; a killer who stages the Bard's extravagant murders as flesh-and-blood realities; and a desperate race to find literary gold at the end of a high-stakes treasure hunt.
Author's toughest challenge: “The beginning and the ending had been very clear. Getting from alpha to omega, though, was occasionally excruciating. I had to weave as many as possible mysteries into a coherent treasure hunt that would send my characters racing from the opening scenes to what has always seemed the necessary ending.”
Publisher's pitch: “The book is a smart literary adventure,” says publisher Brian Tart. “It's filled with enough Shakespeare arcana to satisfy English majors everywhere—and it's a page-turning thriller, a cross between Shakespeare in Love and The Thirteenth Tale. The protagonist is an expert in occult Shakespeare, which makes for a fun and illuminating read.”
Opening lines: “From the river, it looked as if two suns were setting over London. One was sinking in the west, streaming ribbons of glory in pink and melon and gold. It was the second sun, though, that had conjured an unruly flotilla of boats and barges, skiffs and wherries onto the dark surface of the Thames.” —Suzanne Mantell
Maynard & Jennica
Rudolph Delson, 32
(Houghton Mifflin, Sept.)
Born: San Jose, Calif.; now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Favorite authors: Stephen King, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Woody Allen
Career Arc: From adolescent horror fan to Berlin-based seller of personal letters to lawyer to Brooklyn novelist.
Plot: California-raised Jennica meets misanthropic pianist and native New Yorker Maynard on an uptown #6 train. A cast of 35 characters—the couple's families, exes, lawyers, building super, a hip-hop artist and others—narrates a comic love story.
Author's toughest challenge: “To try and feel like I wasn't fooling myself. I'd left my job and had this chunk of money to keep me alive for 18 months. The only way to get a return on my investment was to write something I could sell—and I really didn't want to go back to being a lawyer.”
Publisher's pitch: “It's incredibly funny,” says senior editor Anjali Singh. “What won me over was what an original way to tell a story it is, and at the same time what a great love story. It really captures New York... but in its own way it's a very California book as well.”
Opening lines: “Joan Tate, tipsy after another revelatory lunch with her son, illustrates her point (early August 2000): Here's a famous story. And remember that I am his mother, so the fact that I am the one telling you this—that tells you something. It's a famous story, and it shows you what kind of person Manny is. The year was—well, Scott and I had just sold the place on 72nd Street, so it was 1973.”—Michelle Wildgen
The Way Life Should Be
Terry Shaw, 44
(Touchstone, Sept.)
Born: Clearfield, Pa.; now lives in Knoxville, Tenn.
Favorite authors: James Lee Burke, Elmore Leonard, Tim O'Brien, Harper Lee, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac.
Career Arc: Newspaper reporter and editor; publisher of a small daily; lived off his severance while writing the bulk of his first novel; winner of First Chapters competition.
Plot: When newspaper editor John Quinn's best friend—a married man with children—is killed at a local gay pickup spot in coastal Maine and no one seems willing to look into the murder, Quinn takes matters into his own hands.
Author's toughest challenge: “Learning the difference between writing nonfiction and writing a novel. Obviously, the length and pacing is very different. But it's also a very different way of telling a story. This sounds very obvious, but it took me a while to get it.”
Publisher's pitch: “Terry has a very clear and clean style,” says editor Sulay Hernandez. “He doesn't waste words and the pace is blindingly fast. He knows how to assemble the right elements, weaving plot and back story together seamlessly.” Hernandez places Shaw in the company of Harlan Coben, Ridley Pearson and Michael Connelly.
Opening lines: “It was three a.m. and anything was possible—all he needed was a little luck. At least that's what Paul Stanwood tried to tell himself as he turned his Range Rover onto the wet, sandy road and its headlights bounced through the shadows and fir. He knew he shouldn't be there. He just couldn't help himself.”—S.M.