» Harlan Coben joins us to discuss his novel, Hold Tight.

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Harlan Coben

Hold Tight

Penguin Podcast

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Books

Penguin Books

Harlan Coben stopped by the Penguin office last week to celebrate and toast his new book, Hold Tight, debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The Dutton team surprised Harlan with a giant cake that was almost as sweet as getting the number one spot!

As always, Harlan was charming, personable, and so very grateful for everyone's hard work.

We're so proud he's part of the Dutton family!

(Harlan Coben, Penguin Group (USA) President Susan Petersen Kennedy, and Dutton President and Publisher Brian Tart are all smiles at the party.)

Harlan Coben, Hold Tight, New York Times, best seller, book party, celebration, cake, mystery, Penguin Books, books

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ELASTIC GIRL: Everyone is special.
DASH: That's just another way of saying nobody is special.
-The Incredibles

Would people buy and read a book full of critical opinions written by two people passionate about the art of perfume? Would they accept that perfume was something worth loving when done well-which is to say, something worth loathing when done badly? Would they indulge the informed but idiosyncratic declarations of two obsessed weirdos prone to both panegyrics and lame jokes? Would they issue a call for our heads? Or would they yawn and consider it all beneath notice? There was one way to find out: write the damn thing, one smelly spritz at a time.

I met Luca via his blog, Perfume Notes, which he kept up for a few months in 2005, around the same time I was keeping up my blog, Brain Trapped in Girl's Body. (It's still up, in all its folly.) Our first collaboration was when I gave him thorough editorial feedback on his manuscript for The Secret of Scent after he explained, sheepishly, that his mother didn't read English, his wife wasn't interested in it, and his scientist friends were bad judges of literary merit. Then he stopped and I stopped blogging when our personal lives were independently unraveling, but we kept up a transatlantic correspondence that I found the source of laughter and perspective in unprecedented quality and quantity. We got to the point that we were finishing and beginning each other's sentences, and around the end of 2006 he phoned me to ask if I wouldn't consider writing a guide to perfume with him.