OCT 29 2:02 PMOct 29 2:02 pm THE NEW YORK TIMES On the Menu: Manuscripts By ALEXANDRA ALTER During his more than 30 years in publishing, Peter Gethers, a senior vice president and editor at large at Penguin Random House, has gotten used to having strangers foist manuscripts on him at inopportune moments. The unsolicited novels are rarely good, and almost never good enough to acquire. So his expectations were modest when a young waitress who works at Buvette, a cozy French restaurant in the West Village where Mr. Gethers is a regular, told him she’d just completed her novel — about a young, adrift waitress working at an upscale New York restaurant. As it happens, she was the second waitress at Buvette who let it slip to Mr. Gethers that she was working on a novel. Mr. Gethers delivered his usual polite, deflecting line: have your agent send it to me. “The book came in and within 10 pages, I was going, oh my God, this woman is an extraordinary talent, “ Mr. Gethers said. “One doesn’t see a lot of first novels like this, or any novels like this.” The restaurant connection proved fitting. The novel, “Sweetbitter,” by Stephanie Danler, centers on a recent transplant to New York who gets a job at a fancy restaurant near Union Square. (Ms. Danler worked at the Union Square Cafe, a popular lunch spot for publishing industry executives, for a year after she moved to the city.) The young woman falls into a sort of love triangle with two co-workers. Mr. Gethers mentioned the book to another editor, Claudia Herr, and urged her to buy it. Ms. Herr had already heard about the novel from Melissa Flashman, Ms. Danler’s literary agent, who compared it to Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City.” News of an exciting submission bounced around the office. Days later, in early October, Ms. Herr acquired the book for Alfred A. Knopf, in a pre-emptive high six-figure, two-book deal. “Sweetbitter” is both a coming-of-age and coming-to-New York story, and a novel about the seductive pleasures of food and wine. The story unfolds inside the glamorous, cutthroat and sometimes seedy world of elite Manhattan restaurants. Ms. Danler, 30, who’s from California and went to Kenyon College in Ohio, moved to New York in 2006. Since then, she’s cycled through several restaurant jobs and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the New School, where she studied with Helen Schulman and Jonathan Dee and worked on “Sweetbitter.” Knopf plans to release the novel in 2016. “The way she writes about food, you can actually taste it,” Mr. Gethers said. Mr. Gethers said he’s now looking forward to reading the other novel by the other Buvette waitress. “She hasn’t finished it yet,” he said. “I’ve been promised it by the end of November.”
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 20:18:14 +0000
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