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New cover for Faithful
Hi
I have a scan of what seams to be the new cover for Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season.
Lilja
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Lilja's Library - The World of Stephen King: http://www.Liljas-Library.com
I have a scan of what seams to be the new cover for Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season.
Lilja
--
Lilja's Library - The World of Stephen King: http://www.Liljas-Library.com
Comments
David Ortiz' pair of game-winning whacks this week kept the Red Sox alive in their pennant fight with the Yankees.
The wins also made Scribner execs the happiest in publishing.
"Faithful," a chronicle of Boston's exciting season by lifelong Sox fanatics Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan, is set for release by Scribner before Christmas with a huge first printing - 500,000 copies.
"I've never been on such a roller coaster," Scribner publisher Susan Moldow said yesterday.
She added: "Throughout this whole season, we've thought, this is going to be the biggest thing in history, and then last Saturday night [when the Sox lost their third straight to the Yanks], we thought no one is going to want it."
Moldow and editor in chief Nan Graham, who signed the authors, are both Red Sox fans.
Asked about horror master King's remark that the deal has a Major League-like clause that will increase the authors' advance if the Sox win the series, Moldow said, "I think it's true."
"I haven't looked at the contract to confirm that, because I think anything could jinx you."
King and O'Nan have kept game-by-game diaries, so parts of their manuscript were in production as the American League Championship Series unfolded.
Plans to publish in December defy the conventional wisdom that baseball books should arrive during spring training or before the World Series.
"I honestly think being a Red Sox fan is a year-round activity," Moldow said. "That the season has ended will mean nothing, because they'll need somewhere to go with all that energy."
Meanwhile, King's "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon," written when the Yankee reliever was closing for the Sox, is out in a new pop-up edition.
Congrats to the Boston Red Sox and all their fans.
Meanwhile, Faithful, the Stephen King/Stewart O' Nan project signed up by Scribner at the beginning of the season whose very title implied a kind of resolve in the face of tribulation (especially Aaron you-know-who) now may be enjoying a boon of a different kind. The book, slated for early December, is up to 50,000 copies ordered as chapters keep getting extended.
"We go into meetings every day and we just kind of throw up our hands and say 'Well, we know it's going to change tomorrow," says Scribner publicity director Suzanne Balaban. "It's hard to imagine this being any more exciting."
King, of whom postseason TV viewers have been getting quick doses (and who, with furrowed visage, seems to be showings signs of the toll of fandom) is writing the book with O'Nan more as a chronological play-by-play than narrative reconstruction. Which may ease the way for it to become "the first instant hardcover" Scribner has ever done, in the phrase of Balaban.
As for potential audience, Scribner's analysis has concluded that "Red Sox Nation" is "20-million strong"--a number likely to contain a certain percentage that will fortunately already have a bandwagon in which to store their copy.
Early in 2004, two writers and Red Sox fans, Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King, decided to chronicle the upcoming season, one of the most hotly anticipated in baseball history. They would sit together at Fenway. They would exchange emails. They would write about the games. And, as it happened, they would witness the greatest comeback ever in sports, and the first Red Sox championship in eighty-six years, as the team put '86 behind them and eighty-sixed the Curse.
A-Rod. Schilling. Sheffield. Foulke. The hot stove league was smoking. In April, the Sox took six of seven from New York Yankees. Youkilis was the Greek God of Walks. Local boy Mark Bellhorn found his bat. June was a disaster. Then Nomar went to Chicago, Varitek shoved A-Rod, Billy Mueller proved to be a Yankee killer, and this team never looked back, logging an astounding August and a solid September to claim the wild card. In the playoffs they killed the Angels, then ran into those damn Yankees. Who saved the Pennant race? David Ortiz. Who hit the only grand slam? Johnny Damon. Who's your daddy? Papi is. Down three games to none, down to their last three outs, the Red Sox rose from the dead to make history. Nothing left to do but sweep up. What began as a Sox-filled summer like any other is now a fan's notes for the ages.
I just emailed my 2 sisters and told them this is first on my Christmas wishlist!
As a diehard, the last 2 weeks have been so crazy and draining. I wish I could have made it back to Boston for the parade... Since I had to work on Saturday, my family back east taped it and will send that out to me too!
The excitement has barely abated in the three weeks since the Sox won the World Series, and an avalanche of books is on the way. But none has been more highly anticipated, or is likely to reflect the fans' experience better, than ``Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season.'' (Scribner, $26, with an astounding first-printing of 500,000. Copies are being rushed to Boston-area stores for Thanksgiving weekend.)
The die-hards are novelists Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan, longtime friends and fellow sufferers whose diaries of the season reflect the hope, frustration, despair and, ultimately, the joy of Red Sox Nation.
As King writes on Opening Day,``the word fan ain't short for fantastic.'' He dates his attachment to the Sox to the 1967 Impossible Dream year, likening it to an addiction: ``doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.''
O'Nan's addiction is more of an acquired taste: 14 years younger than King and born a Pirates fan, he adopted the Sox while at Boston University in the late '70s.
In an e-mail exchange with King, he sees hope for the Red Sox in the victories of such longtime also-rans as the Patriots and the Pittsburgh Penguins: ``It's inevitable. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but that just means our faith has to be strong.''
``Your very argument proves what a striking anomaly the Red Sox are,'' King replies. ``All the clubs you've mentioned . . . have won it all in the last 80 or so years. Do I need to finish this thought?''
King, a Fenway season-ticketholder, and O'Nan follow the Sox in person, in the papers, on radio and TV. They seek no special access to players or management, though O'Nan has a weakness for trying to chat up players during batting practice.
These are fans' notes, full of anticipation in April, discouragement in July and nearly without hope in October as the Sox lose the first three games of the American League Championship Series to the hated Yankees - and King wonders if there is a curse after all.
But their faith endures (be honest, Red Sox fans - did yours?). And we know how the story ends.
So now that they've won, will the Red Sox become just another team? And can the Faithful live with that?
The answer from King is yes, without hesitation.
``No one likes to root for a loser, year after year; being faithful does not save one from feeling, after a while, like a fool, the butt of everyone's joke. . . . The feeling of lightness that comes with finally shedding a burden that has been carried far too long will linger for months or maybe even years.''
And the day after the World Series is won, O'Nan begins to look into arrangements for spring training, barely four months away.
Typical Red Sox fan.
http://www.bangordailynews.com/news/templates/?a=104254