The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel

Pompeii never had it so bad. Rick Koppes knows a world is ending. The only question is, will he end with it? An editor at Byzantium Press for the last quarter century, he has watched his small, classy publishing house get gobbled up, first by an American publishing giant and then by Multimedia Entertainment, the Hollywood wing of Bruno Hindemann's German media empire. His editing colleagues are being downsized, his authors axed, and in a world where the cultural wallpaper is screaming, he himself hangs on by a fingernail-the latest work of his sole best-selling author, pop psychologist Walter Groth, is racing off bookstore shelves. And that's just where his problems begin-after all, Multimedia is about to make his ex-wife, a publishing executive at another house, his boss, his assistant wants his authors, and a woman who claims her father dropped the bomb on Nagasaki insists he publish her woeful memoir.

Koppes, who came of age in the sixties, is an editor slowly running off the rails. In the six episodes of The Last Days of Publishing, he refights the Vietnam War in a Chinese restaurant, discovers that the paleontological is political in a natural history museum, mixes it up with a flamboyant literary agent who went underground decades earlier, and encounters a hippie cultural oligarch on the forty-fifth floor of Multimedia's transnational entertainment headquarters.

Tom Engelhardt, himself a publishing veteran, has produced a tumultuous vision of the new world in which the word finds itself hustling for a living. By turns hilarious, sardonic, and poignant, his novel deftly captures the ways in which publishing, which has long put our world between covers but has seldom been memorialized in fiction, is being transformed.

To read two excerpts from this irreverent novel about the business of culture, click here and here

Praise for The Last Days of Publishing:

Herbert Gold, The Los Angeles Times (Read a full review by clicking here.)

". . .A satisfyingly virulent, comical, absurd, deeply grieving true portrait of how things work today in the sleek factories of conglomerate book producers...a skillful novel of manners-of very bad manners...[A] tone of amused, wistful Manhattan romance, like that of an F. Scott Fitzgerald brought up to contemporary speed...

"Though this novel can be read as an anatomy of the publishing business, year 2003, and a lament for. . .somewhat better times the characters depicted are not mere stick figures or roman à clef gossips. The scenes are vividly set, and this writer, made of stern stuff, was laughing through his tears. . .The episodes in Engelhardt's account emit a sense of autobiographical anguish, seasoned with an ironic notch at one corner of his mouth."

Kirkus Reviews (starred review): "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 forebodings 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."

Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle: "The first thing to notice about The Last Days of Publishing, this interesting new novel about a gifted editor during the death throes of publishing as we've known it, is that it comes to us from a university press rather than a commercial house. . . . If you have any curiosity about the state of affairs in the publishing world, and, beyond that, the world of ideas, you should read this book."

Business Week: "An engaging, at times bitterly funny lament for what [Engelhardt] sees as an endangered industry."

The Village Voice: "Maintains a detached, bemused tone throughout, ultimately making the loss at its center all the more bitter. Engelhardt's unflashy observational style and rueful lit-geek koans ('To be a good editor has . . . nothing more to do with being a good person than saying "Polly wants a cracker" does with being a good parrot') are a treat for bookish types, and his Armageddon fixation is sure to strike a chord with middle-aged readers."

Mark Crispin Miller: "A mordant gem, at once elegiac and deeply witty. I can't think of another novel that so powerfully conveys the sense of what it means to be an editor who does such a labor out of love, and not out of ambition for an office higher in the corporate tower."

Todd Gitlin: "A fiction that, uniquely, brings us into the mind of an editor-a master editor at that-and wittily shows us how much more is at stake in publishing than money and glamour. I found it moving and revelatory."

Ariel Dorfman: "Engelhardt has written the rarest of books: a truly intellectual novel. This faux memoir uses the decline of quality book publishing both as landscape and metaphor to explore in ways that are often heartbreaking the failure of the sixties to drastically change the world and the devastating moral and cultural consequences of that failure."

Beverley Golgorsky: "Original, authentic, and compelling. Engelhardt is a smart, clear, and bold storyteller. He takes us on a multifaceted journey through a world in flux and renders it with vivid immediacy. Drawn with truthfulness and tenderness, his characters reveal the persistence of humanity."

Blood of the Earth

The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources

By Dilip Hiro

This vivid history of oil--and the way it revolutionized civilian life, war, and world politics--sets the stage for the coming oil wars of the 21st Century.

In a recent edition of Yale Global Online, Dilip Hiro explains why playing the oil card only goes so far in international diplomacy. Read it here.

Nation Books