LUV! So you think book publishing is all cut and dried and cutthroat? Here’s a big book-world romance that should curl your toes.
Hyperion is celebrating the acquisition this week of two novels by one Cassandra King. And who is she? Well, among other things, she is a woman who met her current husband, the great fictionmeister Pat Conroy, by bravely asking him back in the ’90s to give her a blurb for her first novel, “MAKING WAVES IN ZION”. The king of such literary gems as “The Prince of Tides” and “The Great Santini” not only gave Cassandra a thumbs-up, he began to woo her, and they ended up married.
So Hyperion loves owning her new work, “THE SUNDAY WIFE”, which will bow a year from now and concerns a preacher’s wife in a small Florida panhandle town. The Disney company also will bring out the paperback of “Making Waves,” which got this whole sweet romance started. That comes in the summer of 2003.
MENTIONING Pat Conroy, let me state here that when he read his work for our Literacy Partners fund-raiser years ago, Pat became, hands down, the greatest author-performer we ever had. He still holds the championship, and I hope someday he’ll return for one of our springtime reading galas. Conroy could have been a marvelous actor!
