Word: bantams
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Linderman; Bantam; 356 pages...
...defunct La Rotisserie restaurant in Manhattan, but guesses run to more than 5,000. Statistical services catering to the voracious needs of Rotisserians, for whom the stats are the life, have flourished. There are even books: Okrent and Waggoner's original Rotisserie League Baseball, published by Bantam in 1984, and How to Win at Rotisserie Baseball by American Dreamer Peter Golenbock, just out from Vintage. "If I were to discover a cure for cancer, my obit in the Times would still read, 'Dan Okrent, invented Rotisserie League Baseball,' " notes Okrent, editor of the regional magazine New England Monthly...
...Bantam Books bought the privilege of publishing Destiny for $1,015,000, "a sum," its publicity release announces, "greater than the combined advances earned by Stephen King, James Michener, Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steel for their first novel." Aside from the tantalizing but possibly erroneous suggestion of a King-Michener-Sheldon-St eel collaboration, there is not much to celebrate. For one thing, a cool million no longer induces the slack-jawed awe it once did; everyone knows that insider traders on Wall Street can steal that much before lunch. And British Author Sally Beauman is not really a first...
Destiny offers a hero, Edouard, who has more vowels in his name than seem strictly necessary, and a heroine, Helene, who suffers from a superfluity of accent marks in hers. A lot of ink is wasted just getting these characters on the page. Given its initial investment, Bantam might have urged Beauman to save money by calling her romantic leads Ed and Helen. Anyhow, Edouard is impossibly rich and handsome; Helene is impossibly beautiful; together they are . . . a word comes to mind but then vanishes in the general miasma of implausibilities and sex, which is regularly rapturous and accompanied...
...Updike turned to Bantam Books, which agreed to publish his novel, unedited, in paperback. Knopf was forced to change its hardcover versions to include the original text in order to compete, Updike said...