Happy 2021! To our delight, the editing and book businesses have survived this grim period in decent shape. Stuck inside, a goodly portion of the reading public bought books, and writers were prolific. Here is a brief rundown on what the members of 5E have been up to. Our colleague and dear friend Joan Hilty is away at the moment, caring for a loved one. We’re thinking of her—and of you, too, in this time of loss and uncertainty.
Best wishes from all of us for a fruitful and above all, healthy, New Year!
Judy Sternlight
When the pandemic hit, some of us in 5E worried that our workloads would shrink. In fact, the opposite happened. Forced to stay home, some of our writers kept their butts-in-their-chairs, tackling major revisions and turning in excellent work. In addition to editing several promising literary novels, I’m drawing on my theatrical background to do story consultations on a TV pilot and an audio script.
I was an early reader on two books I’d like to mention: Gioia Diliberto’s Coco at the Ritz, a captivating novel inspired by the arrest and interrogation of Coco Chanel at the end of World War II, will be published by Pegasus in late 2021; and Simon Chesterman’s YA thriller, I, Huckleberry, was recently published by Marshall Cavendish. Set in Oxford, England, it’s the story of an American teen whose new friends pull him into a deadly mystery involving the theft of the Magna Carta.
Patricia Mulcahy
2021 got off to a great start with the publication of Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour (Houghton Mifflin), a first novel I reviewed back in 2019. This workplace satire in the format of a sales manual follows the path of a young Starbucks barista who transforms himself into a super salesman at a tech start-up. It attracted attention from the get-go, with a rave endorsement from Colson Whitehead, who called it “full of verve and dark, comic energy.” Soon it was a selection of Jenna Bush Hager’s TodayShow book club. And on 1/17 it hit the New York Times bestseller list! Mateo made the ultimate sale….
This April, Vertel Publishing will release a business memoir, Authentic, by the founder of the Vans shoe company, Paul Van Doren. I worked with ace editor Amanda Murray to integrate Paul’s business lessons with his personal narrative in this very American story of a high-school dropout from a blue-collar Boston family who worked his way up the ladder in the sneaker trade, wound up in cahoots with a crew of renegade skater kids in Southern California, and never looked back. A fascinating look at the making of an iconic American brand.
In the fall, Mango Publishing will release Alex Amouyel’s The Answer is You: Creating a Life Full of Impact. Alex is the Executive Director of MIT’s Solve, an accelerator platform that supports innovators, inventors, and social impact entrepreneurs. Her guide is aimed primarily at millennials and GenZers who want to craft a life of purpose above all. I am her collaborator on this timely and vividly detailed book.
Leslie Wells
This past year, I was thrilled to work with Michael J. Fox on his powerful, beautifully written memoir, No Time Like the Future, which was published by Flatiron Books in November and was a New York Times bestseller. I also enjoyed editing The Russian Pink by Matthew Hart, a debut thriller published in November by Pegasus/Simon & Schuster, which Booklist said, “will enthrall fans of Jack Reacher and Jason Bourne.” A compelling debut novel of historical fiction that I edited, Rebel Daughter by Lori Kauffman, is coming out from Delacorte this February. I also worked with other memoirs, as well as mysteries and commercial women's fiction.
Liz Van Hoose
The myriad challenges of 2020 were given a reprieve by the success of two novels I worked with: The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis (Dutton) was the Good Morning America August pick and a New York Times bestseller. And Black Bottom Saints by Alice Randall (Amistad) was published to resounding acclaim and featured in several Best of the Year lists, including the New York Times’ “Best Historical Fiction of 2020.” Looking ahead in 2021, I’m over the moon about the ABA/PubLunch Buzz Book selection of another novel I had the honor of reading in early stages: The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper). It’s not an exaggeration to say, as I have many times, that this novel taught me how to read.
I’m also delighted to be returning to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference this summer—whether online or on the Mountain, as the universe permits. The conference application period is 2/15 to 3/15. I hope to see you this summer, one way or another!
Jane Rosenman
It was a singular pleasure to work closely with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams on two early drafts of his memoir, Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska, published in the fall of 2020 by Farrar Straus and Giroux. In a starred review, Booklist hailed it as a "joyous paean to friendship and Alaska."
And continuing in the genre of memoir, I am pleased that Blackstone Publishing is releasing Rachael Cerrotti's We Share the Same Sky in the fall of 2021. Based on Rachael's podcast (hailed by Huffington Post as one of the best podcasts of 2019), it retraces her grandmother's war story. I loved working with Rachael on how to translate a podcast into a book-length narrative.
And in the category of narrative nonfiction, Roy Richard Grinker's Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created The Stigma of Mental Illness has been published by Norton in January 2021. Working with Richard, who is a Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University, was a fascinating intellectual experience.