copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.
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Clout between the covers | BACK |
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Nos. 11 - 20 | LIT 50 HOME |
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11 CHRISTIE HEFNER | Book Bunny |
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Let us all take a moment to thank the heavens that while the likes of Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut and Nadine Gordimer appear in the pages of Playboy, the editors let other people pose for the nudie shots. Want horror? How 'bout Stephen King in lingerie? But Playboy has been publishing great fiction and interviews for forty-plus years, and when the Bunny appears on a book, such as "The Playboy Years: A Forty Year Chronicle," count on major sales. That title sold 300,000-plus copies, huge for a coffee-table book; expect the current paperback edition to fly out of stores quicker than a Playmate's name fades from memory. The Playboy empire has been producing books like, uh, bunnies lately, what with 1998's Playboy's "Guide to Jazz," a "Book of Science Fiction" anthology, the inside story of the women under the ears ("The Bunny Years"), and a look behind the scenes of the Playboy pleasure palaces in Chicago and L.A. - through Big Daddy Hef's own eyes.
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12 CHARLIE TROTTER | Chef d'oeuvre |
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A cameo in last year's romantic hit "My Best Friend's Wedding" finally put a face on a name synonymous with hoity-toity cuisine. Trotter cranks out cookbooks faster than homemade gnocchi, but "Charlie Trotter's Seafood" (Ten Speed Press), with its hefty $50 list price, isn't going to reach a mass audience. And for cost-conscious Trotter fans (if such a thing exists), there's "Gourmet Cooking for Dummies" (1997), in which Charlie reveals the secrets of French cuisine. And he's soon to release "Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter."
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13 SARA PARETSKY | Ms. Mysterious |
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Paretsky made one of the gutsiest moves in publishing this spring. Setting aside the sure-fire formula of her New York Times bestselling V.I. Warshawski mystery novels, the founding member of Sisters in Crime wrote about spirituality and belief in "Ghost Country" (Delacorte). Praised highly in Kirkus Reviews, the novel defies easy classification: It's part Anne Tyler, part Walter Mosley, with Paretsky's trademark gifts for description and dialogue and concern about social injustice. In the fall, Paretsky heads up to Evanston to teach creative writing at Northwestern University. Fans of her V.I. mysteries, never fear. A new Warshawski book is underway.
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14 JAMES FINN GARNER | Comic reliever |
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These days, the measure of how smart you are just might be how many people steal your ideas. There's a bookshelf worth of knockoffs (right-wing bedtime stories, P.C. bible stories, P.C. U.S. history tales) of James Finn Garner's million-selling "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories," even though Garner only worked on two follow-ups. While contributing to mags such as Playboy and a hilarious essay on house repair to the Vintage paperback anthology "Home," Garner penned "Apocalypse Wow!" (Simon & Schuster), lampooning the millennium two years early; and he's got another, top-secret book in the works. He's also developing an animated short, a kind of Tarzan cliffhanger story called "Smitty, Wolf-Boy of the Yukon." Security on the project is tighter than on the Seinfeld finale set, but sources did learn that although Smitty looks like a pink dog at first, when he opens his mouth you realize he's human. And naked.
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15 E. LYNN HARRIS | Unbounded success |
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Stories of love, romance, friendship and betrayal have notched black gay novelist E. Lynn Harris a warm spot in his readers' hearts - some reportedly break into tears during his public appearances. And he's got a lot of readers, too. During the height of the "Waiting to Exhale" craze, Harris' "Just as I Am" quietly became the first hardcover novel by a man to top the Blackboard bestseller chart. His novel "And This Too Shall Pass," about a football player struggling with his sexual identity, hung out in The New York Times Bestseller lockerroom for nine weeks in 1996. The sequel, "If This World Were Mine" (Doubleday), spent ten weeks on the NYT charts in 1997 and won the James Baldwin Prize for Literary excellence. Not bad, considering that avid sports fan - now at work on novel No.5 - began his publishing career giving away his self-printed first novel at beauty salons.
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16 JUDITH MICHAEL | Romantic empire |
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Judith Michael sells books pretty well for a person who doesn't exist. The pseudonymous writing team of Judith Barnard and Michael Fain saw the mass-market paperback edition of "Acts of Love" (Ivy Books) hit the stands last December, after a hardcover scaled The New York Times bestseller chart in 1997. At last count, there were more than 800,000 copies of "Acts of Love" in print.
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17 BILL ZEHME | Star gazer |
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The way he wields his pen has earned celeb chronicler and Esquire writer Bill Zehme some ring-a-ding deals. Last year's "The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Living" (Harper Collins) won critics' hearts and made the regular Fox TV personality a sort of unofficial spokesman for Old Blue Eyes, especially after the singer passed away. Delacorte Press dangled a cool half-mil in front of the smooth celebrity profiler (who's also co-written bios for Leno and Reege Philbin) to record the life story of late funnyman Andy Kaufman. Look for it later this year.
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18 ROBERT MCHENRY | Encyclopaedia titanica |
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When the growth of the Internet has allowed disinformation to spread throughout the world with the touch of a button, it's up to Encyclopaedia Britannica to collate some data you can trust. You can now access the Nobel Prize-studded pool of EB writers for the facts from A-Z in multiple media. If you don't want to fork out $1,250 for the thirty-two volumes, use the CD-ROM version or subscribe to Britannica On Line (of course, it'll cost about $1,250 for a computer to run those programs). The Chicago-based company, now headed by president Robert McHenry, has been hard at it since 1768, trying to give you the straight dope. Look elsewhere, especially on the web, and chances are you'll be relying on the rantings of a dope.
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19 BETSY BROOKS | Borders keeper |
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When the new Borders broke ground out in Beverly, Borders real-estate mogul Mary Quarles and Mayor Daley donned hardhats and grabbed shovels along with Borders president Richard Flanagan, in from Ann Arbor. But the regional power lies with Brooks, who oversees eleven Chicagoland stores, twelve when the $5.6 million, 25,000-square-foot Beverly location opens in October. They also just counterattacked against the online competition with a Borders cyberbookstore.
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20 TENNY AHN | Noble oblige |
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Burger King to Borders' McDonald's, B&N's district manager Tenny Ahn can claim to be the more literary of the two, if not the more successful. Of course, the huge online push for B&N changed the playing field somewhat, since now bookish types don't even have to leave home to shop for a new tome telling them what the world outside might be like. One suggestion: brighter lights! Blind customers are bad for bookstores.
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copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc. |