Last week, travel writer David Farley celebrated the publication of An Irreverent Curiosity, his book about an Italian village that had its prized holy relic—the foreskin of the baby Jesus—vanish from its church; several of the party guests, including supermodel Paulina Porizkova, dressed as nuns and monks to mark the occasion. But getting that book published wasn’t easy, at least not at first. As Farley explains in an interview with our own Jason Boog, he had to convince editors that people would be interested in reading about the search for an admittedly intriguing but still rather obscure relic of dubious provenance. So he set out to make it not so obscure.
“I pitched [the] New York Times travel section and got an assignment, but it took a long time for the story to come out. I also pitched Slate a more straightforward piece about the holy foreskin; I got the assignment… For a week, my story was [the] No. 1 story on Slate, and I had a New York Times travel section story, too. I wish everything I wrote had that kind of impact… In my bio for Slate, I said I was writing a book about the holy foreskin as a nudge-nudge to somebody in the publishing industry.”
That not-so-casual mention led to a lunch date with Gotham Books editor Patrick Mulligan, setting Farley on the path to publication.
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