If you look closely in the bottom left corner, you can just make out Lee Siegel walking in the dim light behind Liza Monroy, whose debut novel is coming from Spiegel & Grau this June. Among the many other attendees at the packed launch party for the new publishing house—not just an imprint, Doubleday‘s publisher, Steve Rubin, was careful to point out in his introductory remarks—were (on the right, top to bottom) the freshly hired senior editor and paperback editorial director Tina Pohlman, with Doubleday editor-in-chief Bill Thomas; literary agent Susan Golomb and another S&G debut-er, my former HotWired colleague Janelle Brown; and co-founder Cindy Spiegel with the imprint’s million-copy star, Suze Orman. Earlier in the evening, Spiegel and her partner, Julie Grau, worked the front of the room greeting the usual assortment of high-powered agents, publishing luminaries, and a sprinkling of business reporters.
The centerpiece of the evening, apart from a really fabulous grilled shrimp with garlic aioli I couldn’t get enough of, was—as noted by the Observer—a promotional video in which just about every author with a book coming out from the imprint announced that “I am Spiegel & Grau!” Even Lang Lang (whose CD of Beethoven piano concertos was included in the swag bag, along with galleys from Monroy and Sana Krasikov, and a finished copy of Steve Toltz‘s A Fraction of the Whole) got in the act.