Bestseller
From the inimitable Olivia Goldsmith, an outrageous comedy of manners and morals, set in the cut-throat world of international publishing.It's autumn in New York, and in the anything but gentlemanly world of books, the knives are out as the new season's list is launched. Stars and wannabes, hustlers and has-beens all scramble for the prizes, the profits and the prestige – not least at big-time publishing house Davis & Dash where success depends on a handful of authors:Behind the books and the writers, and the people who make and break them, is a world of passion, politics and intrigue. Who will survive in the race to the top?
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Olivia Goldsmith
Bestseller
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This edition 1997
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1996
First published in the USA by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1996
Copyright © Olivia Goldsmith 1996
Olivia Goldsmith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006496731
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2015 ISBN: 9780008154066
Version: 2015-10-28
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Acclaim for Bestseller:
‘A highly entertaining tale.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Olivia Goldsmith’s forte has always been the writing of revenge novels with great, good humour … There’s lots of romance and revenge here … Plenty of awful people get their comeuppance and there’s more satisfactory coupling at the end than in a Shakespeare comedy.’
Washington Post
‘The achievement of Bestseller is that Olivia Goldsmith takes the sometimes arcane publishing industry and makes it interesting as well as completely credible. Her descriptions of the pressures on authors, the often arbitrary editorial process and even the bottom-line problems of small booksellers are dead right.’
New York Times Book Review
‘Goldsmith hands out her characters’ rewards and comeuppances like Jane Austen dealing blackjack … You keep licking your fingers and reaching for the next page as if it were another potato chip.’
Newsweek
To Larry Ashmead
Editor of Genius
Cultivator of Tomatoes
Whose stories of writers, agents, editors, and publishers inspired, awed, and amused me.
This is your book as much as it is mine. Let them sue you.
The year I returned to active publishing there were five varied manuscripts submitted to Davis & Dash; five manuscripts, each by a different author, each with different aspirations. All five made the enormous jump from unpublished manuscript to published book, but only one among them was destined to make the next leap to become the bestseller.
—Gerald Ochs Davis, Sr.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Though it contains incidental references to actual people and places, these references are used merely to lend the fiction a realistic setting. All other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
CONTENTS
One day God decided he would visit the earth. Strolling down the road, God encountered a sobbing man. “Why are you crying, my son?”
The man said, “God, I am blind.” So God touched him and the man could see and he was happy.
As God walked farther he met another crying man and asked, “Why are you crying, my son?”
The man said, “God, I am crippled.” So God touched him and the man could walk and he was happy.
Farther down the road God met yet a third man crying and asked, “Why are you crying, my son?”
The man said, “God, I’m a writer.” And God sat down and cried with him.
