After reading Jane Smiley's swipe at Jennifer Weiner yesterday, Maryann McFadden says she's willing to send Smiley an ARC of her debut novel, The Richest Season, so she can "decide for herself if pink can't be both feminine and serious." McFadden reports that it took four tries for Hyperion—who scooped up the hardcover rights to the novel after an auction spurred by the success of a self-published trade paperback edition—to come up with a cover that was "evocative, and symbolic, and actually, quite beautiful." Why not use McFadden's original cover, you ask? Well, apart from wanting to make the new edition stand out, it was in some ways really more of a movie poster than a book cover (which may well have been an advantage in connecting with the first audience, now that I think of it). Also, it didn't have any pink in it.

Speaking of that Jane Smiley review, though, I wonder how many authors in the '60s opined in newspaper reviews about whether Philip Roth had "the intelligence and the ambition to address larger questions than the psychological ups and downs of [his] nice Jewish characters," whether they really liked Our Gang and The Great American Novel better than Portnoy's Complaint, and whether anybody remembers them or their books forty years later.