Muse

March 16, 2015
In poet Galassi’s first novel, a book editor navigates the world of 21st-century publishing while unraveling the secrets of his lifelong hero, an octogenarian poet named Ida Perkins. The novel opens during the postwar literary boom, when nemeses Homer Stern and Sterling Wainwright launch competing houses—P&S and Impetus, respectively. The protagonist, Paul Dukach, begins working at P&S in the ’90s, when Union Square is still “the city’s major needle park.” The bulk of the story, though, transpires in the aughts, when Paul, driven by his obsession with Ida, befriends Homer’s foe, Sterling, a cousin of the poet. When Sterling gives Paul the cryptic notebooks of Ida’s late love to decode, the project becomes an occasion for a meeting with Ida. This meeting reveals her final, secret collection—the contents of which, Paul realizes, have the potential to turn publishing upside-down. The fun of this book is watching Galassi, who serves as president and publisher of FSG, weave his fictional characters into real literary history and put his considerable gifts as a poet to good use. Indeed, Perkins’ verses (“she smells the ozone” / “after love the fear”) surpass Galassi’s expositions on publishing and its ongoing war against Big Tech. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency.

April 1, 2015
An insider's look at New York book publishing spins a fable of egos, literature, and commerce in which an editor's obsession with a poet leads to the revelation of a crucial secret. Galassi (Left-Handed, 2012, etc.) is a poet and translator and, for his day job, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In this fiction debut, he imagines the gifted and beautiful poet Ida Perkins, cynosure of men literary and otherwise. A critics' darling from her first collection at 18, she soon captivates enough readers to make her that rarest of phenomena, a profitable poet. Her fortunate publisher is Sterling Wainwright of Impetus Editions, a WASP from old New England money, and his chief rival is Homer Stern of Purcell & Stern, a savvy, foulmouthed Austrian Jew who racks up more Nobels than any other house-except Farrar. The obsessive is Paul Dukach, whose early years working in a bookstore led him to a passion for and near-omniscience about Ida and a job at P&S. A first-time meeting with Ida brings him and the story to the ultimate collision of private person and published writing that has percolated through the novel, as it has through the history of literary criticism. With the Paul and Ida characters, Galassi conveys the thrill of being dazzled by literature. (The sample Ida poems suggest that he favors feeling and clarity over obscurantism.) He also has fun with the language of reviewing while delivering a casual seminar on American poetry. A sense of historical fiction permeates in references to Ida's many triumphs and contemporary events and in thumbnail sketches of several characters. Janis Joplin sings one of Ida's poems at Woodstock. Marianne Moore tells her "We are pierced by the intricate needlework of your asperitic formulations." An extended riff on the Frankfurt Book Fair bespeaks years of painful firsthand experience. May be more fun for cognoscenti than for common readers, yet it offers a worthy psalm on the pre-Amazon, pre-digital days of publishing that anyone might appreciate. Galassi rates praise especially for choosing to have some knowing fun with his years in the business and sparing the world another memoir.

May 15, 2015
Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, translator, and poet (Left-Handed, 2012), debuts as a novelist with a serenade to books that is at once heartfelt and wryly satirical. His selectively autobiographical protagonist, Paul Dukach, was a lonely, small-town bookworm rescued by a bookstore owner and the seductively subversive work of Ida Perkins, that rarest of creatures, a celebrity poet. Galvanized and emboldened, Paul becomes a recognized Perkins expert, moves to New York City, slowly, painfully accepts that he is gay, and gratefully secures a job at a prestigious publishing house, working for the flamboyantly competitive Homer Stern, a dead ringer for Roger Straus and one of an entire cast of characters impishly and affectionately based on publishing luminaries and writers (for clues, see Boris Kachka's Hothouse (2013), a history of FSG). So yes, Galassi's tantalizing novel is a roman a clef spiked with mordantly funny commentary on the precarious state of publishing. But it is also, via Paul's convictions, quandaries, and discoveries, a stealthily affecting and profound homage to the wonders and life-sustaining power of literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2015

President and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and author of three collections of poetry, Galassi offers a debut novel that, not surprisingly, concerns publishing itself. Paul Dukach is heir apparent at Purcell & Stern, hanging on in seen-better-days offices near Manhattan's Union Square as that rare independent. He wants to add dazzling poet Ida Perkins to his list, but her longtime publisher (also her cousin and sometime lover) is a major rival of Paul's boss.

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