Alan Pell Crawford (Photo by Jay Paul)
The Twain We Shall Meet
Alan Pell Crawford chronicles Mark Twain’s fascination with money-making gadgets and schemes
“The last few books I wrote were tragedies,” says Alan Pell Crawford. “There’s a satirist in me struggling to get out — and I finally released it.”
And how.
“How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain,” which arrives in stores in October, is a strange and funny account of how, in part, the once-flush titan of letters took to the lecture circuit in the latter half of his career to recoup his losses from the many disastrous financial decisions that made him a different sort of comic figure from the one most people today know him to be.
Crawford, whose previous books include a sordid account of incest and murder among the Randolphs (“Unwise Passions”) and a profile of Jefferson, moody and brooding in his post-presidency (“Twilight at Monticello”), writes at a swift clip, and the stories of Twain’s attempt to amass sudden wealth — like sending a friend to South Africa to mine gold so that Twain could write about it, or his investment in a Hartford, Connecticut, baseball team — read at times like fiction. Once, while attending a game, the writer lost his umbrella. He put an ad in the paper asking for $205 — $5 for the umbrella and “$200 for the remains of the kid that stole it from him.”
Like his subject, who wrote reams and often on deadline, Crawford is accustomed to working quickly. “This entire book was a first draft,” he says. “I started in May 2016 and turned it in eight months later. The narrative just poured out of me.”
His first book, a prescient look at the GOP, “Thunder on the Right: The ‘New Right’ and the Politics of Resentment,” appeared in 1981. Over the past four decades, Crawford has learned just how strange and comical the self-serious publishing industry can be. “Sometimes the agent will call and say, ‘We’ve got three bids today, but this one’s only good until 4 o’clock because [the editor] is getting on a plane.’ It sounds insane, but that’s the way the business works. I like the art, but I like the commerce.”
No Harsh Feelings
Waldorf Manor Book 6, "Stay," was released Sept. 8.
Bella Bryce’s fictions take hold in an Amazon-driven niche market
When she finished her first romance novel, “The Solicitation,” Bella Bryce didn’t think that it would be racy enough to make it in a publishing culture shaped by “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Fortunately for her, Blushing Books, a small press out of Charlottesville that began as a mail-order service in 1991, saw possibilities.
Thus was launched the career of Bella Bryce, author of “clean adult fiction.”
Even after signing on, Bryce, a native of Britain who moved to Richmond in 2013, says she was clueless about the process and what to expect. She had no idea how well “The Solicitation” was doing until she received an email from her editor one day informing her that in its first week it had sold a thousand copies — a remarkable number for a book, no matter the genre. Blushing immediately asked for another.
“I live with these characters,” Bryce says, explaining the difference between her books and conventional romance novels. “[The characters] are flawed, they are overcoming challenges. I’m writing escapism that encourages readers to improve their reality.”
Tango Tales
Cheryl Pallant is multi-hyphenate, mid-career, and has stories to tell
Cheryl Pallant’s writing career was nearly derailed when an editor at a large New York publisher who liked her work suffered a brain tumor and, along with it, a loss of memory. She took her work to another editor who responded, “Not interested in women’s narratives.”
Today Pallant, a poet, dancer, performance artist and University of Richmond professor, is the author of a dozen books. But that’s not to say that the publishing game is any easier. For years, she struggled to find a home for “Ginseng Tango,” a memoir about a trip she took to South Korea. But fortune favors the persistent: Big Table Publishing in Boston will publish the book in September.
The Big House
Dale Brumfield chronicles the Virginia State Penitentiary
Dale Brumfield spent two years researching the state penitentiary for his eighth book, “Virginia State Penitentiary: A Notorious History,” out in October. His findings are blistering, and ought to shake up a justice system that unfortunately isn’t blind — except to its many faults. The author says that his meticulous vetting of the record shows that only about 10 percent of the men sent there committed heinous crimes and deserved their sentences. The rest were casualties of race, class and the bias of Virginia courts.
“The prison and the executions carried out there,” says Brumfield, “left us a legacy of death and hatred.”
