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9781846881282

Bestseller

By Alessandro Gallenzi

ISBN: 9781846881282

288 pages

RRP: Original price was: £7.99.Current price is: £6.39.

Jim Talbot, a writer with a dozen unpublished novels under his belt, has been roundly rejected by every agent and publisher in the land, and is willing to go to extreme lengths to make his dream of literary stardom come true. Charles Randall, the eccentric founder and managing director of Tetragon Press, a small independent publisher that has managed to survive for thirty years in a fierce environment dominated by corporate juggernauts, is about to be brutally sacked by a newly appointed business consultant. In the cut-throat world of modern publishing, Charles and Jim’s paths towards literary salvation are fraught with the most unpredictable dangers.

A novel of intrigue, deceit and sheer desperation, Bestseller is a caustic portrait of contemporary culture and of Britain’s obsession with fame, success and becoming the next J.K. Rowling.

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REVIEWS

  • A fine comic caper and a biting satire on the publishing industry … it is cleverly plotted and lands several juicy thumps on its target.

    Independent on Sunday

  • Gallenzi … slips in sound insider’s judgements on how this business works. Read it for the lowdown on the low trade.

    Boyd Tonkin
    The Independent

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  • Very amusing - a Conrad on the way.

    John Calder

  • Very funny and too awfully right in so many ways.

    Tim Parks

  • While not necessarily directed at paying off old scores … Bestseller shows that its creator clearly enjoys laying about him, not just at the book trade’s monsters and grotesque, but at their consensual victims in the shape of writers and editorial underlings.

    TLS

  • A clever satire on the world of publishing.

    The Times

  • A novel which is light yet serious, funny and painful, somewhat fantastic yet shot through with truth

    Allan Massie
    The Scotsman

  • Sly, tongue-in-cheek novel that will leave readers in stitches of laughter.

    Booklist

  • Too depressing, too accurate.

    Tibor Fischer

Alessandro Gallenzi

Alessandro Gallenzi is the founder of Hesperus Press, Alma Books and Alma Classics, and the successor of John Calder at the helm of Calder Publications. As well as being a literary publisher with over twenty years of experience, he is a prize-winning translator, a poet, a playwright and a novelist. His collection of poetry, Modern Bestiary – Ars Poetastrica, was published in 2005 to critical acclaim. His satirical literary novel, Bestseller, was published in 2010, followed by InterRail in 2012, The Tower in 2014 and Il figlio perduto (Rizzoli, 2018). His verse translation of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock won the Premio Biblioteca di Monselice special award in 2010. His articles have appeared in many papers and journals, including The Times, The Scotsman and The London Magazine. He edited John Keats’s Complete Poems for Alma in 2019, published a translation of Keats’s Letters (La valle dell’anima) with Adelphi and, most recently (September 2022), published a biography of Keats’s final months in Italy, Written in Water.

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