• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Login
  • Register

Publishers Lunch

The Publishing Industry's Daily Essential Read

  • Publishers Marketplace
  • Site Guide
  • Help

Dan Brown Has A New Book Coming; The NYT Keeps Breaking Embargoes

September 14, 2009
By Michael Cader

Last night the NYT broke the embargo on Dan Brown’s THE LOST SYMBOL, posting Janet Maslin’s review (which runs in today’s print edition). She likes this “rip-snorting adventure. As Browniacs have long predicted, the chase involves the secrets of Freemasonry and is set in Washington, where some of those secrets are built into the architecture and are thus hidden in plain sight…. Within this book’s hermetically sealed universe, characters’ motivations don’t really have to make sense; they just have to generate the nonstop momentum that makes ‘The Lost Symbol’ impossible to put down.”

(Maslin’s most quoted graph is bafflingly nonsensical: “Too many popular authors (Thomas Harris) have followed huge hits (The Silence of the Lambs) with terrible embarrassments (Hannibal). Mr. Brown hasn’t done that. Instead, he’s bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead.”
NYT

Nick Owchar follows with a review for the LAT: “All of this is going to feel very familiar to readers of the previous Langdon books, even though Brown has shifted from foreign places to plant his thriller firmly on American soil…. Brown’s narrative moves rapidly, except for those clunky moments when people sound like encyclopedias But no one reads Brown for style, right? The reason we read Dan Brown is to see what happens to Langdon.”
But Ochwar says “it’s hard to imagine anyone debating about Freemasonry in Washington, D.C., the way people did Brown’s radical vision of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in ‘Code.'”
LAT

Following the NYT’s early review, Doubleday’s Suzanne Herz told Sarah Weinman last night that copies would be sent to media outlets a day earlier instead of held until tomorrow.

Over the weekend, in his first interview for the new book, Brown explained to Parade the pressure that held up the writing of Lost Symbol: “I was already writing The Lost Symbol when I started to realize The Da Vinci Code would be big. The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who’s had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Instead of writing and saying, ‘This is what the character does,’ you say, ‘Wait, millions of people are going to read this.’ It’s sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke–you’re temporarily crippled.” Then “the furor died down, and I realized that none of it had any relevance to what I was doing. I’m just a guy who tells a story.”
Parade

Filed Under: Free, New Releases/Forthcoming

sidebar

Primary Free Sidebar

Login


Forgot password
Quick Pass users click here to log in
Get Full Access
The publishing industry's essential daily read

Each Publishers Lunch Deluxe subscription includes full access to our searchable multi-year archive of industry news, a nightly email reporting 10 to 50 deal transactions, and our database of industry contacts, scripts, and posting privileges.

Learn More

RSS Automat

  • Jordan Peterson Suspended on Twitter for "Hateful Conduct" In Comment About Elliot Page July 1, 2022 NY Post
  • Rushdie Will Move From Random House to Knopf for Next Novel, in 2023 (Update: The Bookseller Reported This Incorrectly) June 30, 2022 Bookseller
  • Macmillan Cyber Attack Gets National Coverage; Retailers Don't Mind, But It Still Hurts Authors and the Company June 30, 2022 WSJ
  • Wattpad Is Buying Exclusivity to Some of their Most Popular Authors and Stories with Stipends of Up to $25,000 June 30, 2022 Press Release
  • Supreme Court Declines to Review or Revise Landmark NYT v. Sullivan Libel Standard, Despite Clarence Thomas's Objection June 27, 2022 CNN
  • So Far, Books by Trump Aides Are Mostly...Losers June 23, 2022 Politico
  • Macmillan Nigeria Publisher Charged With Book Fraud June 21, 2022 The Herald
  • All The Exiting Agents Seem to Think ICM's Sale to CAA Will Get Approved Shortly by DOJ June 17, 2022 Deadline
  • Spotify Closes Findaway Acquisition: "Their technology will help propel Spotify into the rapidly growing audiobooks industry" June 17, 2022 Press Release
  • Australian Author John Hughes "Unintentionally" Plagiarized The Great Gatsby And Other Famous Works In His New Novel June 15, 2022 The Guardian
© 2022 Publishers Lunch. All Rights Reserved.