 First edition | |
| Author | Tom Wolfe |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction novel |
| Publisher | Little, Brown and Company |
Publication date | 2012 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 704 pp. |
| ISBN | 0-316-22424-3 |
Back to Blood is Tom Wolfe's fourth and final novel, published in 2012 by Little, Brown. The novel, set in Miami, Florida, focuses on the subject of Cuban immigrants there.
Wolfe's 1998 novel A Man in Full , about a real-estate mogul in Atlanta during that city's economic boom of the 1990s, was a considerable success. An estimated 1.4 million copies of the book were sold in hardcover alone. Wolfe followed A Man in Full with 2004's I Am Charlotte Simmons , the story of a sheltered teenage girl attending a fictitious prestigious university where she is forced to navigate the world of undergraduate athletics, emerging sexuality, and academic integrity. The book was considered disappointing by many critics, and sales were much lower: Nielsen BookScan placed hardback sales at 293,000 copies and paperback sales at 138,000. [1]
All of Wolfe's essay collections, non-fiction, and fiction had been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux since his first book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in 1965. But after the relatively disappointing sales of I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe was unable to agree on terms for the new novel with his publisher of 42 years. [1] The Associated Press reported that Wolfe had been offered a reduced advance for Back to Blood. [2] An excerpt from the novel was shown to several publishers; Wolfe sold the rights to publish his novel to Little, Brown for a sum of close to US$7 million, according to The New York Times , in an auction that ended shortly before Christmas of 2007. [1]
Even before the novel was finished, some details were reported in the media. The novel has been described as Wolfe's take on "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first." [3] Racial anxieties were a key source of tension in The Bonfire of the Vanities —Back to Blood will similarly feature characters of Cuban, Haitian, Russian, and French ancestry in the melting pot of Miami. [1]
Of the subject matter, Wolfe said, "Two years ago when I got the idea of doing a book on immigration, people would say, 'Oh, that’s fascinating,' and then they would go to sleep standing up like a horse. Since then the subject has become a little more exciting, and in Miami, it's not only exciting, it’s red hot." [1] Wolfe, who is well known for the depth of reporting that goes into his novels, has generated buzz for the novel through his extensive reporting, The Wall Street Journal reported that Miami retailers anticipated strong sales for the novel. [3]
The book was released on October 23, 2012 [4] to mixed reviews. The book debuted at #4 on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List on November 11, 2012. It remained on the list for three weeks. Back to Blood was an even bigger commercial failure than I Am Charlotte Simmons, selling 62,000 copies as of February 2013, according to Bookscan. Considering the publishers paid $7 million for the manuscript, this means the book cost approximately $112 per reader. [5]
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It has been published weekly in The New York Times Book Review since October 12, 1931. In the 21st century, it has evolved into multiple lists, grouped by genre and format, including fiction and non-fiction, hardcover, paperback and electronic.
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques.
Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann in 1998 and remains part of that company today. Ballantine's logo is a pair of mirrored letter Bs back to back. The firm's early editors were Stanley Kauffmann and Bernard Shir-Cliff.
New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction and emphasizing "truth" over "facts", and intensive reportage in which reporters immersed themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. This was in contrast to traditional journalism where the journalist was typically "invisible" and facts are reported as objectively as possible.
A Man in Full is the second novel by Tom Wolfe, published on November 12, 1998, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It is set primarily in Atlanta, with a significant portion of the story also transpiring in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area.
I am Charlotte Simmons is a 2004 novel by Tom Wolfe, concerning sexual and status relationships at the fictional Dupont University. Wolfe researched the novel by talking to students at North Carolina, Florida, Penn, Duke, Stanford, and Michigan. Wolfe suggested it depicts the American university today at a fictional college that is "Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, and a few other places all rolled into one."
A bestseller is a book or other media noted for its top selling status, with bestseller lists published by newspapers, magazines, and book store chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and specialties. An author may also be referred to as a bestseller if their work often appears in a list. Well-known bestseller lists in the U.S. are published by Publishers Weekly, USA Today, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Most of these lists track book sales from national and independent bookstores, as well as sales from major internet retailers such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.
Charles Ray Willeford III was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. Willeford published steadily from the 1940s, but vaulted to wider attention with the first Hoke Moseley book, Miami Blues (1984), which is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of four of Willeford's novels: Cockfighter, Miami Blues, The Woman Chaser, and The Burnt Orange Heresy.
Literary Review is a British literary magazine founded in 1979 by Anne Smith, then head of the Department of English at the University of Edinburgh. Its offices are on Lexington Street in Soho. The magazine was edited for fourteen years by veteran journalist Auberon Waugh. The current editor is Nancy Sladek.
The New Journalism is a 1973 anthology of journalism edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. The book is both a manifesto for a new type of journalism by Wolfe, and a collection of examples of New Journalism by American writers, covering a variety of subjects from the frivolous to the deadly serious. The pieces are notable because they do not conform to the standard dispassionate and even-handed model of journalism. Rather they incorporate literary devices usually only found in fictional works.
The Doorbell Rang is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, first published by the Viking Press in 1965.
Fer-de-Lance is the first Nero Wolfe detective novel written by Rex Stout, published in 1934 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. The novel appeared in abridged form in The American Magazine under the title "Point of Death". The novel was adapted for the 1936 movie Meet Nero Wolfe. In his seminal 1941 work, Murder for Pleasure, crime fiction historian Howard Haycraft included Fer-de-Lance in his definitive list of the most influential works of mystery fiction.
Trouble in Triplicate is a collection of Nero Wolfe mystery novellas by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1949, and itself collected in the omnibus volume All Aces. The book contains three stories that first appeared in The American Magazine:
Murder by the Book is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout published in 1951 by the Viking Press, and collected in the omnibus volume Royal Flush (1965).
Plot It Yourself is a Nero Wolfe detective novel by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1959, and also collected in the omnibus volume Kings Full of Aces.
"Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" is an essay by Tom Wolfe that appeared in the November 1989 issue of Harper's Magazine criticizing the American literary establishment for retreating from realism.
Brent Weeks is an American fantasy writer. His debut novel, The Way of Shadows, was a New York Times Best Seller in April 2009. Each of the five books in his Lightbringer Series made the NYT list as well, starting with The Black Prism in 2010. He lives and works near Portland, Oregon with his wife, Kristi, and their two daughters.
Oscar Jose Corral is a Cuban-American journalist and filmmaker. In 2012, Corral directed and produced a documentary film, Tom Wolfe Gets Back to Blood, which enjoyed a national run on PBS and was screened in more than 40 independent theaters around the country. It is the only film ever made about Tom Wolfe, an iconic author and satirist whose stature in American letters has loomed large for the last half century. The film is about how Wolfe researched his Miami-set novel, Back to Blood, in South Florida.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the thirteenth novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Published on 12 April 2013 in Japan, it sold one million copies in one month.
Blanvalet is a German publishing house, based in Munich, which was founded in 1935 in Berlin and is now part of the Bertelsmann's Random House publishing group. Blanvalet publishes entertainment literature and non-fiction, first in hardcover, and as paperbacks since 1998. The publisher became well known with the novel series "Angélique". More recent authors include Charlotte Link, Marc Elsberg, Karin Slaughter, Diana Gabaldon and George R. R. Martin.