The onset of cold and snow here in New York have driven all us Penguins out into the streets, where even now editors and online producers are frolicking and sliding around on the ice. It's near impossible to round up any cohesive group so as to interview them, so we're going to have to wait for the initial joy to abate and for everybody to troop back inside. That should be around February, when we plan to launch a second Imprint Focus Feature on Riverhead, an Imprint that regularly churns out such best sellers as Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Thanks for visiting our blog, have a wonderful holiday, and come back next year to see what else is in the works here at the Penguin Group (USA)!

-- The Penguin Group (USA) Online staff

(View entire post here)

Penguin Group (USA) Scores Four #1 New York Times Bestsellers Simultaneously for the Week of December 23rd

Penguin Group (USA) achieves an outstanding four #1 slots simultaneously on The New York Times bestseller lists for the week of December 23rd. T is for Trespass by Sue Grafton (G. P. Putnam's Sons) debuts at #1 on the hardcover fiction list; The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (NAL) holds at #1 on the trade fiction paperback list in its fourth week; Blood Brothers by Nora Roberts (Jove) stays at #1 on the mass market fiction list in its third week; and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin) returns to the #1 slot, in its 46th week on the paperback nonfiction list. Congratulations to everyone involved with the terrific success of these books.

This represents the second time in 2007 that the house has had four titles simultaneously at #1 on The New York Times bestseller lists. Back in June, Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead Books), Al Gore's The Assault on Reason (The Penguin Press), Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin) and The Book of Useless Information by Noel Botham and the Useless Information Society (Perigee) were all at #1. A Thousand Splendid Suns topped the hardcover fiction list; The Assault on Reason was atop the nonfiction list; Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love was #1 on the paperback nonfiction list; and The Book of Useless Information topped the Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous paperback list, representing the Perigee imprint's first #1 New York Times bestseller — all for the week of June 17th.

(View entire post here)

I woke up one morning with an outline of The Works: Anatomy of a City in my head. It wasn’t long after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had come down -- late in 2001 or early in 2002. If you remember, there was article after article in the papers about what happened to our city’s infrastructure that day -- why the Con Ed substation failed, what happened to Verizon and its telecom connections, how the #1 subway path was obstructed, the impact on the slurry wall under the Trade Center, etc. Many of these articles had fabulous, accompanying graphics -- to show lay readers what things really looked like underground and how they worked.

Now I knew much of this stuff from a previous career at the Port Authority, but seeing these articles made me realize how little people who don’t work for public agencies, or who aren’t involved at all with what lies beneath city streets, know about how things work in a big, complicated city like New York. So I woke up that morning with the idea of doing a David Macaulay (author of the terrific book The Way Things Work)-like book about the way New York City’s infrastructure works, and before I even reached for coffee I had jotted down the half dozen chapters that would feature in it.

(View entire post here)

Top Thirteen Reasons Why Penguin Group (USA) Is "Simply the Best" in 2007 (because we couldn't limit it to just 10)

Penguin Group (USA) has done many amazing things in 2007; things that have reinforced our status as a major power in the industry. As this year comes to a close, we invite you to have a look at the top 13 reasons why we think Penguin Group (USA) can't be beat.

1. Penguin Group (USA) is up across the board in New York Times bestsellers.

* With 162 New York Times bestsellers so far in 2007-65 hardcovers, 61 paperbacks, and 36 young readers-we have 18% more bestsellers than last year!

* We had 16 #1 bestselling titles in 2007, and have dominated the #1 positions on the list with the staying power of our top titles. We've had at least one #1 bestseller for 43 weeks of the year-an amazing 84% of the time!

* With 30 New York Times hardcover bestsellers in 2007, G. P. Putnam's Sons once again reigns as the industry leader and has surpassed last year's total by four titles-with approximately 50% of all of the titles Putnam published in 2007 hitting The New York Times hardcover bestseller lists.

(View entire post here)

Kate Ascher is our guest blogger during the week of December 17th. If you have any questions for Kate Ascher, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about The Works: Anatomy of a City:

Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works gives readers a unique glimpse at what lies behind and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.

About Kate Ascher

Kate Ascher received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in government from the London School of Economics and her B.A. in political science from Brown University. She formerly served as assistant director of the Port at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and worked overseas in corporate finance, before her previous position as executive vice president of the Economic Development Corporation for City of New York. She is currently the director of development at Vornado.

(View entire post here)

The Unquiet Ghost of Robert A. Heinlein

Hi!

This year, 2007, is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Anson Heinlein. You don't have to be an admirer or worshiper to recognize that Heinlein (July 7, 1907 -- May 8, 1988) had an enormous influence on the development of science fiction as a genre: despite his manifest flaws he was hugely inventive, and developed many of the literary tools (and no small number of the genre cliches) that we call on today when we work in the field he pioneered.

I never met Mr. Heinlein, but I've felt his ghost breathing down my neck periodically, ever since I began writing science fiction. And I must admit, I resent it. Why, oh why, do so many otherwise sane writers feel the need to try their hand at writing a Robert A. Heinlein novel? Why can't Spider Robinson, John Scalzi, and John Varley just be their own unique selves, rather than lending their word processors to the restless ghost of --

Oh. You mean it's *my* turn?

(View entire post here)

Somewhere people got the idea that history is "true," and that all a historian has to do is string one "true fact" after another. Actually, we construct it like a puzzle, and sometimes we put pieces in the wrong place. They look right, but are not. That sense of connection with your subject can lead you into this kind of mistake if you're a biographer. You try to make allowances for another time and place, but inevitably, your time and place become intertwined. You only hope that this doesn't distort the history you're trying to tell.

As a feminist, I wanted to make this unorthodox woman a champion for her sex. Du Châtelet certainly acted as a feminist might, challenging the intellectual authorities of her day; insisting that they read her writings on the nature of fire, on metaphysics, on the Bible, on morality, and that they judge them as they would those of a man. I could hear my stepmother asserting: "I pride myself that I think like a man." Barbara Lewis Zinsser was one of three women in her law school class at Columbia University, and always insisted that she didn't understand what the feminists of the 1970s were talking about. So, I thought I understood that part of Du Châtelet's attitudes. I, too, as an admirer of my lawyer stepmother, had once believed "you think like a man," the highest praise one could receive as an intelligent woman. When I remembered that, I avoided forcing Du Châtelet into a twentieth-century feminist mold. This eighteenth-century genius did acknowledge that her successes proved women's capabilities, but she met the challenges for herself, not for all women.

(View entire post here)

Fantasy conjures images of dragons and wizards, and has roots in ancient myths and legends. Magic and other supernatural elements dominate the plot, and it is distinguished from horror and science fiction in both feel and theme, though there is often a great deal of overlap. Internal consistency is as important as it is in science fiction, even if the rules and paradigm are utterly strange and fantastical. From Beowulf to The Lord of the Rings through to the writers of today, Fantasy is a venerable and thriving genre.

Pat McKillip was born in Salem, Oregon, the daughter of an Air Force officer. Between 1958 and 1962 he was stationed with his family in Germany and England. McKillip attended San Jose State earning her B.A. in 1971 and M.A. in 1973, the year she also published her first two books, The Throme of the Erril of Sherrill and The House on Parchment Street, which she had been writing while she was supposed to be studying. She has been publishing novels ever since, moving frequently about the US until settling down in Oregon with her husband. Patricia A. McKillip is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, and the author of many fantasy novels, including The Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy, Od Magic and Cygnet.

(View entire post here)

I'm in an interesting place right now. My brain is still in the highest mountains on Earth, while the rest of me appears to be walking and talking (sensibly, I hope) down in the normal world. If you ran into me at the store, I might appear to be loading up on bread and milk for my family, but really I'm caught up in a horrific global conflict to save mankind.

Sounds crazy, right? It's actually a lot of fun. In two years I've written two books in the Plague Year series. The sequel, Plague War, is on my editor's desk and slated for publication in August 2008.

That's a great feeling. I'm now developing other projects... one of which is a third Plague book. I'm very excited that my publisher wants more. It's a fascinating world full of strong, active people doing their best against impossible challenges-and I get to find out what happens before anyone else! Bwah HA ha ha ha!

(View entire post here)

I always planned the Twelve Houses series to be one long, overarching storyline contained in four books. But while I was writing the fourth installment, Reader and Raelynx, I had an idea for a fifth book that would take place in the same world but revolve around a different set of characters. I wanted to set the story a few years after the war that would be centerpiece of Reader and Raelynx, and I wanted to follow a King's Rider who felt the need to seek personal redemption. My automatic first thought was that this Rider would be a man, but in previous books I had often mentioned that there were a handful of women among the Riders. When I considered this story from a woman's point of view, many of the other details fell in place.

So I created the character of Wen, a scrappy, stoic Rider who nurses an unrequited affection for the Rider Justin. I gave her a few minor scenes within Reader and Raelynx-and a reason to ride away from the royal city as R&R closes. When the new book opens, Wen is riding aimlessly around Gillengaria, trying to atone for her past failings by randomly performing good deeds, such as rescuing abducted serramarra and protecting orphaned children. I confess I was thinking a little about the movie "Shane" when I was developing her story.