New & Upcoming

Earlier this year, we told you about Notes Left Behind, a family's self-published account of their daughter's struggle with brain cancer, and the inspiration she continued to give them after her death, that achieved great success after an appearance on Good Morning America, which led to a significant deal with William Morrow just days later. The new edition of the book—which includes photographs of Elena Desserich and her family, along with some of the notes that she'd carefully hidden around the house for them to discover once she was gone, and the family did an interview Wednesday morning with the Today show...

Wednesday was like "a one-day Cinderella story," HarperCollins creative director Lisa Sharkey told us during a phone call yesterday afternoon; that eight-minute segment on Today led to an appearance on the AOL home page and "most searched" status at Yahoo! later in the day. "We've always been very big cheerleaders for the book, the family, and the cause," she added, noting that proceeds from the book's sale go to a foundation the Desserich family established to fund research into a cure for the pediatric brain cancer that took Elena's life. "We really hope that it takes off as a book for parents the way that The Last Lecture did for adult readers." And, she predicts, that desired uptick is likely to be spurred by the book's arrival in actual bookstores this week, once browsers are able to see for themselves the care with which Morrow designed their edition.

Earlier this month, GalleyCat editor Jason Boog did a Morning Media Menu segment with Brandon Sanderson, the fantasy author tapped to complete Robert Jordan's The Wheel of TIme series after the latter's death two years ago. We're just a week away from the publication of The Gathering Storm (the twelfth book in the series, and the first of the final three) now, and Tor Books is doing everything it can to rally the fan base—they've even gone so far as to handpick a crew of "Storm Leaders" who will lead "community outreach" in each of the cities on Sanderson's tour, including online promotion and coverage of the events. (According to the webmaster at the Dragonmount fansite, applicants outnumbered the available team positions by 5 to 1.)

Among those selected, clockwise from the top: Virginia O'Connor, posing with Sanderson at a signing last year; Jim Burnell, showing off his collection of Jordan's Wheel of Time volumes; and Mary Morse, at an event with Jordan himself.

The 26-city tour begins next Tuesday with a midnight release party at Brigham Young University, where Sanderson graduated with a bachelor's in English and a master's in creative writing (and currently teaches a class in fantasy and science fiction writing). In the meantime, here's a video clip with Jordan's widow, Harriet McDougal, and Sanderson explaining how he got tapped to complete the Wheel's final turns...

It was nearly two years ago that we first spotted the website Daily Coyote and said to ourselves, "There's a book in this somewhere." At the time, though, we almost wondered if Shreve Stockton even needed a book deal, seeing as how she'd already set up a business model where subscribers could get pictures of her coyote, Charlie, five months ahead of the public website. Maybe we shouldn't have second-guessed ourselves: We just got a copy of The Daily Coyote: A Story of Love, Survival, and Trust in the Wilds of Wyoming in the mail the other day—and from what we can see, while it does have a few pictures in it, it's no picture-blog-turned-book deal—this is a real memoir about Stockton's relationship with her boyfriend, with the landscape of her new home, and of course with Charlie... and it's really, really good.

Last week, we were invited to the Rubin Museum of Art for an early morning press conference announcing the launch of "The Red Book of C.G. Jung," a new exhibit that marks the first time the leather-bound manuscript into which psychoanalytic pioneer (or spiritual guru, depending on who you ask, or maybe even both) Carl Jung poured refined versions of the daily products of his imagination has been made available for public view. (It's a big production for the Rubin, which is also conducting a series of celebrity interviews spurred by images from the book.)

In addition to letting the Red Book out of the vault where it's been hidden away for decades, Jung's descendants also gave W.W. Norton permission to reproduce the book in a deluxe oversized edition that combines reproductions of Jung's calligraphy and paintings with an English-language translation. The task of preparing the manuscript for publication was handled by a company called DigitalFusion.

We met DigitalFusion co-principal John Supra at the press conference, and afterwards we emailed him about his personal (as opposed to technical) interest in the project. "I had been 'exposed' to the work of C.G. Jung in a minimal way," Supra wrote back. "I had read Memories, Dreams, Reflections on a recommendation from a friend and found it interesting and had a general awareness of Jung's work. However by no means am I a scholar or that well/broadly read in Jung."

"The excitement and interest in a project of this nature starts when you are asked to prepare a quote that involves reproducing a secret book that is locked in a vault in Switzerland and the family that owns it requires you to do the work at the vault," he continued, alluding to the intense aura of secrecy the family has kept around the Red Book since Jung's death (in large part due to concerns about how its contents would be received by the public). Ultimately, the bank vault proved inadequate to DigitalFusion's needs, and a workspace was set up at a photo studio in Zurich. "As we opened the book for the first time," he recalle, "everyone in the room was stunned by the vibrant color, intricate detail and amazing beauty that the page hold. I honestly didn't expect the quality of the images and the condition of the book to be so significant."

"As we worked with the book for the week, each time we came to one of the larger images I found myself drawn into it," he said of the digitizing process. "Looking for the details and the team would often talk about what they saw in the image. There was a lot of 'do you see that...' Each image has such detail and complexity that you can look at it for hours and still discover symbols you didn't notice before." Supra doesn't read German (and even if he did, Jung's calligraphy is highly stylized), so it's the artwork that predominantly shaped his experience with the Red Book, although he does say he's looking forward to reading the translation.

"I have been fortunate to be a part of the publishing of this important work," Supra concluded, "and the entire team that has worked on it has made every effort to faithfully reproduce the work so that everyone has an opportunity to be share in the experience we had opening the volume for the first time and reflecting on the powerful images it contains." We've only had an opportunity to browse casually through the book so far, but between those glances and the reproductions that were on display at the Rubin, so far we're mightily impressed—and looking forward to coming to terms with the actual contents, which, we were told repeatedly that morning, would completely overhaul modern understanding of Jung and his theories.

As you've probably heard by now, Random House reports that it sold more than one million copies of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol in North America and the United Kingdom during its first day of commercial availability—so it's understandable that the crew at Random House Audiobooks would get together to celebrate their success with cake and champagne. We're just wondering what secret message they embedded in the cake frosting sigils and why they covered it up with the CD sleeve...

We were delighted to see last week's Gawker item about a book deal for Melissa Broder, who was last seen in our pages when she was out promoting Sloane Crosley's essays. Hamilton Nolan had some swell lines about what it takes to get a book deal these days—the only problem was we didn't learn much more about Broder's book other than its title: When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother. Luckily, she got in touch and let us know that it's a collection of poems that will be published by a new offshoot of The Ampersand Review called Ampersand Books next February.

"I've been writing poems pretty continuously since 1989, save for a hiatus in my early 20s," Broder told us in her email. "It's always been my dream to have a collection published, but it wasn't until the past four years that I started taking the action of submitting my work. I am beyond excited that my poems have found a home at Ampersand." One of the poems that will be appearing in When You Say One Thing... is "Unhitchery," which was first published in the online literary magazine Opium.

How, we wondered, did Broder find time to write her poetry around her book publicity duties (which we know can be more than a little time-consuming)? "I've realized that I have to set up my life a certain way if I am going to keep the creative fawcet on," she replied. "I put parameters in place that inspire me to do the work; otherwise, the days can just pass you by. This includes reading the poetry journals and contemporary collections out there, curating a monthly series and, most importantly, never staying out of writer's workshops for very long." (The next Polestar reading, by the way, is Sunday, October 4, and will feature Sarah Gambito, Daniel Nester, and Victoria McCoy.)

Has it really been four years since, inspired by a Publishers Weekly trend piece on "New Age" publishing, we took a look at early attempts to cash in on Dan Brown's fascination with Freemasons? Well, The Lost Symbol is finally coming out, and publishers are standing by with books to which they hope readers will turn for answers regarding all that symbology the novel's going to toss around.

Some of the biggest names in pop mysticism want in on the action. HarperOne and Jay Kinney, the former publisher of Gnosis, have The Masonic Myth: Unlocking the Truth about the Symbols, Secret Rites, and History of Freemasonry ready for release just a few days before Brown's novel, while Bantam tapped Tarcher/Penguin editor-in-chief Mitch Horowitz for Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation. But will books like these be able to establish a new stronghold in territory already staked out by heavy hitters like David Ovason's The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital? We shall see.

Here's a book tip from Stephanie Murg, the co-editor of mediabistro.com's design blog, UnBeige: The Council of Fashion Designers of America has compiled an American Fashion Cookbook with 100 recipes from the likes of Donna Karan (green juice) and Zac Posen (butterscotch wafers), and a foreword from Martha Stewart. "We're determined to try out Catherine Malandrino's crudités," Murg comments, "which she recommends serving 'on a white tablecloth along with a Rosé de Provence, the song of the cicadas as music and a field of lavender as a landscape.' Lacking a proximal lavender field, we'll substitute her purple jersey dress and hope for the best."

Tuesday morning, we told you about the publication of Colin Tudge's The Link, the super-secret Little, Brown book about the discovery of a 47-million-year-old fossil in Germany. So we thought it might be fun to show you how Google marked the occasion—by recasting its homepage logo into a reproduction of the Darwinus masillae fossil. Clicking on the image would then give you the search results for "missing link found," most of which pertain to the discovery.

Earlier this month, there was a flurry of activity on senior editor Ron Hogan's Twitter stream about a mysterious book known to booksellers (who received it in unmarked boxes with strict instructions not to open until today) only as "Project X":

A brief guessing game followed: "Book Promotion 101" expert Bella Stander quickly determined that "Lucy Highfield" was code for "Lucy, found in a high field," a reference to the fossilized hominid discovered in 1974. A source at a national bookstore chain informed us that the actual author of the book might be Colin Tudge, a specialist in natural history and genetics, which further solidified that hypothesis concerning the book's contents.

And now it can be told: Little, Brown is set to unveil Tudge's The Link, a book revealing the backstory of the discovery (in the Messel Pit of Germany) of a 47-million-year-old primate fossil that is being heralded as evidence of a "transitional species" that shares characteristics of both the nonhuman and human evolutionary lines. The book's publication coincides with a History Channel documentary airing on Memorial Day.