Gawker: bill clegg

The Happiest, Against-All-Odds Book Deal (For a Commenter!)

Sheila — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:34:48 EDT

Hey, do you have a 1,000 page manuscript based on "Wagnerian opera, Lou Reedian post-punk, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Jungian psychology, the life and death of cities, French aestheticism, the magic of memory, gay identity and—most importantly?—cats"? Hah, good luck selling that. But wait... what if a blind query to a big-deal William Morris agent resulted in the book getting sold? That's what happened to editor and commenter Matthew Gallaway, also known as the Gay Recluse.

Eight or nine years ago, we decided to write a novel... when it was done, it was literally 1000 pages long. We sent out some queries and a few people expressed interest. But everyone was like: “Hey, what century do you think you’re living in? Good luck selling a 1000-page novel about opera and philosophy and French aestheticism!”

Whatevs... someone (somewhat tersely) suggested we send a blind query to a “big-concept” agent, which we did.

That would be Bill Clegg at William Morris, who's also working on a memoir, about drug addiction and crack!

He wrote back! And not only that, he helped us streamline the story... these revisions took the better part of a year, but the resulting novel was at least one million times better than the original version.
And then — just like that — he sold it!

Given the choice between a few smaller “literary” houses and a gigantic, multinational conglomerate, we went for the latter. Ha—we sold out!

We read about it this morning in Publisher’s Marketplace, as if we were reading about someone else.

"FICTION: DEBUT

Oxford University Press editor Matthew Gallaway’s THE METROPOLIS CASE, the sweeping tale of an unlikely quartet, bound together by the strange, spectacular history of Richard Wagner’s masterpiece opera, Tristan and Isolde, to Suzanne O’Neill at Crown, by Bill Clegg at William Morris Agency (NA)."

Whoa, congrats! Read the full blog post.

David Carr's Competition

Hamilton Nolan — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:56:16 EDT

Geez, not two months after potato-loving NYT reporter David Carr was declared the next big thing in druggie memoir publishing, the literati is already turning its attention to Bill Clegg, the next druggie memoir star. Which we note mostly so that we can use this picture that we took with our cameraphone last night: David Carr underneath a Barnes & Noble banner with his very own picture on it! Ain't that a kick? Click to enlarge.

Starbucks has just chosen a methy memoir...

Emily Gould — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:00:00 EST

Starbucks has just chosen a methy memoir as the next title in its book program, signing on to sell David Sheff's 'Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Meth Addiction' in more than 6,500 of its stores come February. Now, there are probably a ton of reasons why Starbucks makes its choices, but William Morris agent Bill Clegg has something to do with the process, a factoid that has some publishing types snickering. Well, come on, that's silly! You don't have to have been an addict to like addiction memoirs!

FSG just bought a memoir—actually,...

Choire — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:02:37 EDT

FSG just bought a memoir—actually, a "self-portrait"!—by John Waters. That is great, we cannot wait to read it. The purchasing editor was Jonathan Galassi. The selling agent was Bill Clegg from William Morris Agency. You know what else is funny? A while back, we floated this crazy rumor that Clegg and Galassi had become lovers, after Clegg returned from falling off the face of the earth, and after Jonathan had, we presume, done something with his wife! After we ran that item, we had a couple reactions. One: an email saying we were "ruining people's lives"! Aren't we. And then we ran into a literary pal, who told us that, uh, that was no rumor, it was totally true. And that we should have seen the FSG offices after that item went up, you could have heard a pin drop. Mmm, awkward office moments! But what do we know? At the very least, their business relationship is working out nicely. [PW]

The Hot BEA Gossip: Agent-Publisher Man-Canoodling?

Emily Gould — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:20:52 EDT

Oddly enough, the rumor flying all around this week's Book Expo has almost nothing to do with books, which means that it's actually kind of interesting! It concerns longtime Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Jonathan Galassi and William Morris agent Bill Clegg. The rumor goes that Jonathan is leaving his wife of several decades for Bill. This is nuts. Bill Clegg, of course, is best known for repping Nicole Krauss and Haven Kimmel and Cintra Wilson and for, a while back, having made an "abrupt disappearance" to spend some quality time on his "personal problems." Crazy! But is it, uh, true?

For starters, we hear that the rumor got started because Clegg and Galassi were spotted eating breakfast at a bakery two mornings in a row while "looking at road maps." Though co-poring over road maps does constitute lesbian sex in some states, we're not sure it indicates a gay affair in this instance. We also hear that the two men have "always been close." So maybe they're just still platonic buddy-pals!

But then there's this bizarre tidbit: a publishing person said that Clegg might have started the rumor himself. Why on earth? A source tells us that he might just be craving attention "because there's been no news about him since he got out of—" uh, wherever he was. Developing!