02 April 2010

Chad Harbach will be buying a lot of drinks this weekend...

...now that GalleyCat let out that the n+1 editor and fellow Wisconsinite scored a $650,000 advance for his first novel. You may or may not believe that large advances are Ruining Publishing As We Know It, but that is a really big sum -- and the winning company (Little, Brown) wasn't even the highest bidder!

I was unable to root out the advances given to his fellow n+1 novelists, Benjamin Kunkel and Keith Gessen for INDECISION and ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN respectively. (I would guess the latter's was larger, but that is an uninformed guess.) I didn't like ...LITERARY MEN but I saw Gessen speak on a panel last year and he was very articulate. His next book, found by accident while searching on Amazon, is a collection of interviews with a hedge fund manager called DIARY OF A VERY BAD YEAR. I liked INDECISION a lot and hope Kunkel has another novel in the pipeline soon.

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