Welcome

A year and a half ago, when we arrived at the Random House building, we were terrifically excited to be starting a new company. To be honest, we were terrified, too. We started out here on day one on a nearly empty floor, just the two of us and a temp, with a row of empty offices and desks between us and what felt like miles of empty bookshelves to fill. We had no books under contract, no editors, no backlist to float us. We’d been through this drill before and we knew that it would take a good, long while, but that there would come a point in time when the promise would start to materialize.

And then it did, in the best possible way, with the publication of Suze Orman’s Women & Money, which instantly hit the New York Times’s bestseller list, where it remained for 19 weeks, and has been changing women’s lives ever since. “Changing lives” is a phrase publishers use liberally—after all, we’re in this business because we believe that books have the power to change us. In the case of Women & Money, though, we speak with confidence: Suze’s book changed our lives! (Read the introduction of her book to find out more.) In the spring, we published our second book, Ghostwalk, at once an extraordinary novel of ideas and a tantalizing literary thriller involving Isaac Newton that reminds us of Iain Pears’s Instance of the Fingerpost. Ghostwalk became a national bestseller, received glowing praise across the country, and has just been nominated for its first international prize. After a long wait with no books at all, it feels great to be off to such a promising start.

Now, as we launch our website, we are also preparing to launch our first full season of books. Our Spring 2008 list is a small one, but the books reflect the personality and range of Spiegel & Grau and suggest the shape of things to come. Our first book out in 2008 marks the fiction debut of a young Australian, Steve Toltz, whose wild, real-life adventures (he’s worked as a private eye, an English teacher, and a telemarketer, among other jobs, in Barcelona, Madrid, Montreal, Sydney, New York, and Paris) pale in comparison to the unusual lives of his characters. His novel is truly brilliant and a genuine discovery: a wild philosophical romp across three continents, charting the tortured and hilarious escapades of a father and son.

And there are more books to come. Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi’s The Great Derangement is a frightening yet hilarious exposé of the dangerous convergence of politics and religion in this unsettling American moment. Jessica Queller, a young L.A.-based screenwriter (she’s currently locked in a writer’s room creating episodes for Gossip Girl) writes poignantly about discovering that she has the gene for breast cancer and her radical decision to take her health and destiny into her own hands—a subject that’s been the topic of much media attention recently. Adam Langer, whose Crossing California was chosen by critics across the country as a favorite novel of the year, is back with a hilarious novel about New York real estate that Barbara Corcoran writes “has captured all of Manhattan's quirky insanity with great style and a huge amount of fun” (and she would know). Adam Mansbach, author of Angry Black White Boy, has followed his editor Chris Jackson to S&G to write his most ambitious novel yet, a generational story called The End of the Jews. And the provocative cultural critic Lee Siegel has written a searing critique about the dangers of the blogosphere to our very humanity.

We see this website as a way to communicate more personally with our readers, to give you a sense of who we are and what we are thinking as we choose which books to publish. We also will use it to share with you the thoughts and experiences of our authors as they work on their books. This month, Lee Siegel inaugurates our “First Person” feature—a forum for writers and publishers to air their current preoccupations. Rebecca Stott, the author of Ghostwalk, shares her reading list with us and it’s predictably fascinating—what one might expect a masterful storyteller and scholar reads on holiday. Matt Taibbi’s travels across Iraq are recorded in this month’s video offering. And our far-flung correspondent Steve Toltz sends in a dispatch that assesses the Manhattan he visited as a struggling writer ten years ago with the Manhattan he (temporarily) resides in today as he awaits the publication of his first novel. Of course all the usual elements one would expect to find on a publisher’s website (reading group guides, links, author listings, etc.) are lodged in our nav bar—and some things you might not expect. We are including a monthly roundtable discussion (see under "About Us") in which we and our colleagues discuss relevant publishing issues. We hope you’ll take a moment and join our mailing list, too.

We feel incredibly lucky to have populated the desks between us with wonderful colleagues, to have found such talented writers to introduce, and re-introduce, to you, and to be starting a collaborative enterprise that makes us eager to get to the office to begin work each day. We look forward to the months and lists ahead and thank you for your interest and your faith in us, past and present. Publishing books is teamwork on a large scale, beginning with the author-editor relationship and then branching out to involve the in-house support, booksellers, and finally our readers. We’re grateful to have you on our team and hope our relationship will be long-lasting, rewarding, thought-provoking, and most of all, enriching for all of us.

Yours,

Cindy Spiegel
Julie Grau