Topic: Writers in the News
Okay, Philip Roth is 73 years old and writes 10 hours a day!
Got this article from the Toronto Star...
Roth gets local publisher
One of America's greatest living writers has had no publisher here
January 26, 2007
Judy Stoffman
entertainment reporter
The Penguin Group (Canada) has announced that it will bring out Exit Ghost, the next novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. author Philip Roth, in September. Penguin's move ends a bizarre situation in which the man considered America's greatest living writer has been without a Canadian publisher.
In May 2006, when the New York Times Book Review asked several hundred prominent critics, writers and editors to name the single best work of American fiction of the past 25 years, they came up with 22 titles, of which six were by Roth. More prolific than ever, the 73-year-old author reportedly writes 10 hours each day and brings out a new book every two years.
"It seemed very odd that Roth had not been published in Canada because Canadian publishers are pretty good at picking up important international writers," said David Davidar, Penguin's publisher, in a phone interview. "We approached Andrew Wylie (Roth's New York agent) and expressed an interest in Roth. This was then the first book up for grabs and we got in on it right away. Most writers benefit from being published separately. At this point we have no idea what will happen to his backlist."
Roth's hardcover books, published in the U.S. by Houghton Mifflin, have been distributed here for the past decade by Thomas Allen and Son Ltd., while paperbacks under the Vintage imprint of his 24 novels and two non-fiction works are imported by Random House Canada. But this is not the same as having a Canadian publisher committed to creating a local market for his books.
Penguin Canada is not the first Canadian publisher to go around the dance floor with Roth. In 1995, McClelland & Stewart brought out Sabbath's Theatre, possibly Roth's most obscene book, which went on to win a National Book Award that year. Mickey Sabbath, its title character, is an aging puppeteer who rages against the death of his mistress and life in general by engaging in transgressive sexual behaviours.
"It was a great book, but risky," recalls fiction editor Ellen Seligman, who bought the book for M&S. "It's hard to sell U.S. writers unless they are Danielle Steel. A major hurdle was that Roth would not do any publicity. It did not do very well at all. When it came time for (signing up) his next book, we felt it was not going to work."
How well does the best American writer sell? A profile of Roth by David Remnick in the New Yorker in 2000 called his U.S. sales "modest," between 30,000 and 45,000 in hardcover. Since then Roth has published The Plot Against America, which turned into a surprise bestseller. However, Seligman recalls that Sabbath's Theatre sold only about 1,000 copies in Canada.
Michael Tamblyn, who heads BookNet Canada, a sales tracking service for books in Canada, says he cannot give out an actual number, but Roth's last book, Everyman, was among the top 100 on the fiction list in the weeks after its release.
Says Davidar, "Whatever he sold in Canada in the past, I'm confident that we can do better."
The acquiring editor was Nicole Winstanley; she would not disclose the amount paid for rights to Exit Ghost.
It will be the last of Roth's Nathan Zuckerman stories, Zuckerman being Roth's alter ego whom he first introduced in 1979 in his novel The Ghost Writer. Zuckerman was then a young writer with only a few short stories to his credit.
The new book is a portrait of Zuckerman as an old man, his powers waning, his desires still ungratified. Zuckerman leaves his home in rural Massachusetts, where he lives alone, to return to New York to visit a dying friend whose revelations unsettle him. "It's an astonishingly insightful study of loss, grief (and) aging," Davidar said.
In between The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost, Zuckerman has appeared in seven other novels, including the trilogy of critical novels about postwar America that may be Roth's greatest achievement: American Pastoral (1997), about the cataclysm of the '60s; I Married a Communist (1998), about the 1950s McCarthy period; and The Human Stain (2000), set in the Clinton era.
