UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

A Novel

Book Jacket: "The Last Days of Publishing" by T. Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt

An irreverent novel about the business of culture

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.

Advance praise for The Last Days of Publishing:

"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."

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"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."

Mark Crispin Miller
". . .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."

Herbert Gold, Los Angeles Times

"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."

Todd Gitlin
"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."

Ariel Dorfman
"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."

Beverly Gologorsky

Copyright 2003 Laura Dwight
Tom Engelhardt, for fifteen years a senior editor at Pantheon, is now consulting editor at Metropolitan Books, a Fellow of the Nation Institute, and a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. He has helped bring a long list of prize-winning books into print. He is a regular book reviewer and essayist for numerous periodicals and newspapers, and author of The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. He is also creator and editor of the weblog TomDispatch.com.

© 2003 Laura Dwight

Read an interview with Tom Engelhardt

Read an excerpt (pdf format)

Fiction
200 pp.
$30.00s cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-402-2
June 2003
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