Word: first-novel
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...behalf of writers, charging Turow with monopolistic practices over the pool of money available for new books. Presumed Innocent racked up several records. Farrar, Straus & Giroux paid Turow $200,000, the most the publisher had ever advanced for a first novel. A paperback sale of $3 million followed, another first-novel first. Then came a million dollars more from Hollywood, and royalties from the 18 foreign-language editions of the novel are still rolling in. Neither Turow nor FS&G will disclose the financial arrangements surrounding The Burden of Proof; what is known is that the author wanted to stay...
...Such first-novel flaws slow Smith's pace. But they cannot obscure his paradoxical, poignant message: the man who is constantly asked to rescue his fellows cannot leave his post without breaking a social contract. In the final analysis, as in The Final Fire, the fireman can help everyone but himself. Paul Gray
Publishers, who periodically convene to contemplate the plight of the first novel with a melancholy akin to that so often displayed in the theater world over the perennial decline of Broadway, have considered various cures. Among them: better bookstores; special sales packages of three or four first novels together: a first-novel book club; mailorder contact with some constituency of youthful readers who are thought to care enough about serious, unheralded fiction...
...this first-novel winner of the Houghton Mifflin award, Author Burdick gives a reverse twist to the cozy U.S. sociological convention that coarse, conservative fathers produce sensitive, nonconformist sons. It is a study of Mike Freesmith, whose father was a radical so militant he once smashed the family Christmas tree into bourgeois smithereens. To contrast his old man, Mike determines to become a "big wheeler and dealer." He starts rolling as a clean-limbed, sexually limber nihilist on a surfboard off the coast of South ern California. He is supposed to be getting an education; instead he is educating...
...quaint as a minuet, but it dealt with a 20th century subject, "the contrast between the rat-race values of the radio-advertising world and the stable values of an Old Testament hillbilly prophet who gets mixed up with it." Wouk thinks of it as "a compendium of first-novel errors," but the Book-of-the-Month Club grabbed it. From that day to this, Wouk has pursued "the hard, borderline trade" of writing with monastic dedication...