Sara Backer‘s debut novel, American Fuji, was first published back in 2001, and Berkley publisher Leslie Gelbman read it when she was considering whether to pick up the paperback. “I thought it was brilliant,” she recalled recently. “And it did fine. It didn’t rock the world, although I always thought it should have. It stayed with me.” Backer’s story about two Americans who meet in Japan stayed with a lot of other Penguin Group employees as well; it’s said that when the book went through its initial printings without renewal, staffers clung to their copies, occasionally letting co-workers borrow them to read.
Gelbman found her old copy of American Fuji a while back, and “even though I knew everything that would happen,” she said, “I loved it just as much the second time, if not more than the first.” So she decided to bring it back, commissioning a new cover and adding a set of readers guide questions in back. She’s hoping the new edition will catch on with booksellers and other readers to give the novel even more word-of-mouth the second time around.