Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop.” Incendiary (Knopf, August 2005) by Chris Cleave. First book, novel. Agent: Jennifer Joel. Editor: Sonny Mehta.
“The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle.” Slow Man (Viking, September 2005) by J.M. Coetzee. Nineteenth book, ninth novel. Agent: Peter Lampack. Editor: Kathryn Court.
“At twenty-four the ambassador’s daughter slept badly through the warm, unsurprising nights.” Shalimar the Clown (Random House, September 2005) by Salman Rushdie. Fifteenth book, ninth novel. Agent: Andrew Wylie. Editor: Daniel Menaker.
“This place is no longer a place, this landscape no longer a landscape.” Vita (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2005) by Melania G. Mazzucco. Fourth book, novel. Translated by Virginia Jewiss. Agent: None. Editor: Jonathan Galassi.
“We were waiting in a windowless room.” Water’s Leaves and Other Poems (Verse Press, September 2005) by Geoffrey Nutter. Second book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Matthew Zapruder.
“Mam says that Dad was pigflesh and pigmind, a huge mucky porker what nabbed her by force, then jogtrotted off beyond the farlands when he understood what had been hatched.” Pigtopia (Miramax Books, September 2005) by Kitty Fitzgerald. Fifth book, fourth novel. Agent: Bill Clegg. Editor: JillEllyn Riley.
“The day Mrs. Linkabaugh moved in next door, I cracked my pubic bone in two places.” Big Cats (Free Press, July 2005) by Holiday Reinhorn. First book, short story collection. Agent: Leslie Daniels. Editor: Amy Scheibe.
“Some / we say we / know go / like a window / dark.” Eye Against Eye (New Directions, September 2005) by Forrest Gander. Tenth book, ninth poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Declan Spring.
“A summer descends to us from earlier years, heir to ancestors it never knew.” Summer Doorways: A Memoir (Shoemaker & Hoard, September 2005) by W.S. Merwin. Thirty-first book, twelfth book of creative nonfiction. Agent: Sarah Chalfont. Editor: Jack Shoemaker.
“There was an angle / where I went for / centuries not as a / self or feature but / exhaled as a knowing / brick tradesman engineered for / blunt or close recall” Pieces of Air in the Epic (Wesleyan University Press, October 2005) by Brenda Hillman. Seventh book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Suzanna Tamminen.
“The station wagon that had met our train bounced along the dirt road that led to the entrance of Camp Seneca, raising enough dust to make me feel I was riding a stagecoach into some earlier time in history.” The Mad Cook of Pymatuning (Simon & Schuster, September 2005) by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Third book, second novel. Agent: Lynn Nesbit. Editor: Michael Korda.
