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THE LAST DAYS OF PUBLISHING

Name: THE LAST DAYS OF PUBLISHING
Author: Tom Engelhardt
ISBN: 1-55849-402-2

by Tom Engelhardt ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2003

A brilliantly realized cri de coeur, pulsing throughout with life, sorrow, and thought.

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An ex-editor laments the death of the book—by writing a wonderfully observant novel about an editor whose career and way of life are both coming to an end.

Having been a senior editor at Pantheon for 15 years, unsurprisingly, has given Engelhardt an easy command of the tone and texture of the publishing world, but the graceful abilities he also demonstrates in bringing character, place, and mood achingly to life must be the gifts of the man alone. Engelhardt’s narrator, Rick Koppes, has also been a New York editor for many years, at Byzantium Press—which has just been “swallowed up” by a huge media giant, the Desmond & Dickinson Publishing Group. For Koppes—aged 56, cultivated, sensitive, thoughtful—this beginning of the end of life as he’s known it contains also an unusual personal element: namely, that his own ex-wife of 20 years, Connie Burian, is one of the new firm’s top people and sees the future of the book in far, far different ways than does Rick. Only at story’s end will the true sorrow of Rick’s life—and his love—be revealed fully, but along the way there will be forbodings galore, some so simple as lunch with another editor, a decades-old friend, who’s been “remaindered”; a call from a hustler agent that, wonderfully, brings about a trip to the American Natural History museum and an unflinching consideration, among other things, of extinction; and, in the tiny hours after one odyssey-like day, a visit to the shabby West Side walkup of the conscience-ravaged daughter of one of the airmen who bombed Nagasaki—and who wants Rick to publish her book. Conscience, indeed, may also be Rick’s most notable trait, helping determine what he sees and what he thinks about what he sees—from the look of the new Times Square to the loathsomely smug boy-emperor and boss of Desmond & Dickinson.

A brilliantly realized cri de coeur, pulsing throughout with life, sorrow, and thought.

Pub Date: June 1, 2003

ISBN: 1-55849-402-2

Page Count: 200

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
HISTORY WARS
edited by Edward T. Linenthal & Tom Engelhardt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE END OF VICTORY CULTURE
by Tom Engelhardt

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
PRECIPICE
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
ACT OF OBLIVION
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
V2
by Robert Harris

- BOOK TO SCREEN
20 Adaptations Nominated for Golden Globes

- BOOK TO SCREEN
How Adaptations Fared at the 82nd Golden Globes

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Literary Adaptations Score Multiple Oscar Nods

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.