For this item, it’s prudent to start at the very beginning. Which would be 1982, when Bennington freshman Bret Easton Ellis showed up at true crime writer Joe McGinness‘s writing workshop with some sample pieces and ended up with a mentor who went so far with his help as to recommend Ellis to his former editor, Grove/Atlantic’s Morgan Entrekin – which lead to the publication of LESS THAN ZERO.
Twenty-five years later, the story has come full circle. Now it’s Ellis’s turn doing the recommending to Entrekin, but this time it’s a younger Joe McGinness who’s the deal beneficiary. McGinness Jr.’s debut novel THE DELIVERY MAN, described in the Publishers Marketplace deal report as “a portrait of today’s lost generation, set in Las Vegas and involving a teenage-girl escort ring, with an unlikely love story at its heart,” will bow as a trade paperback original from Grove/Atlantic’s paperback arm, Black Cat Books, in the winter of 2008. ICM’s Katherine Cluverius struck the deal, which is for world rights.
Plus ca change, indeed.