Coming Attractions

December and January are the publishing equivalent of baseball's spring training. The camp is not in Florida or Arizona but in hotels around New York City, where sales conferences are held, where new talents and old reputations are momentarily warmed in the rays of editors' adjectives. As in baseball, it may turn out to be a long, long season, but if only half the new year's big names and projects fulfill their promises, the reader may not have time to follow either baseball or politics in 1968.

Sex & War. Explicit or perverted sex in novels is hardly news, but this year some weighty literary reputations are writing almost exclusively about sex. John Updike's Couples, said to be the "big book" that critics have accused him of shirking for years, is about ten married or mismarried pairs in a New England town, and Updike can be expected to use his apparently limitless descriptive gifts to detail sexual acts. Gore Vidal's new book poses the question of whether a transvestite can find happiness in Hollywood. Mordecai Richler's novel--a satire about movies and publishing in London--is called Cocksure, and the climax describes the ultimate in autoerotic acts. Terry Southern's Blue Movie promises to be a blue book and Lawrence Durrell's first novel in eight years celebrates sensuality under the Mediterranean sun.

A number of women are publishing too: Edna O'Brien (The Lonely Girl) will crank out yet another book about Kate and Baba--now married, unhappily of course. Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images is about a lady executive who of course becomes disenchanted with comfort, possessions and conventional life. Brigid Brophy and Pamela Hansford Johnson are both writing about modern London; Brigid's is comic, Pamela's serious.

Along with 100-odd unknowns, John Kenneth Galbraith and Drew Pearson will publish their first novels; Galbraith's will deal with State Department misadventures in South America, Pearson's, naturally, with a venal U.S. Senator. The new Morris West is about the buildup of the Six Day War in Israel. Following the fashion of pointless pen names, Kingsley Amis calls himself Robert Markham as he takes over the James Bond industry with a suitably unlikely yarn about a convention of Iron Curtain bosses in Greece. Arthur Hailey seems to be starting a literary business too, by following his bestselling Hotel with a novel called Airport. Future possibilities are endless: Pentagon? Water Commission? Credit Bureau?

Treatments & Trips. This year's most noticeable category in nonfiction is the literary biography, notably Andrew Turnbull's Thomas Wolfe and Carlos Baker's Ernest Hemingway (Papa is also the subject of Irwin Blacker's novel, Standing on a Drum). Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, Lytton Strachey, Richard Wright, Nikos Kazantzakis, Nathanael West, Andre Gide and Samuel Taylor Coleridge also get full-length treatment; and there will be an autobiography from Andre Malraux, a second volume of Bertrand Russell memories, and a third of Harold Nicolson diaries.

Among the known nonfiction quantities will be Inside Australia, by John Gunther, a new Julia Child cookbook, a determined tract about women by Feminist Betty Friedan, George Plimpton on a new swinging golfer named George Plimpton, some solemn warnings by General James Gavin, and some unsolemn ones from William F. Buckley Jr. William Manchester is back at work on his study of the Krupp industrial empire; both Robert Lowell and James Dickey have new books of poetry.

Several people are writing up their trips: Sir Francis Chichester his sea adventures, Murray Kempton his sojourn in several American cities, Dan Wakefield a lengthy odyssey taken to find out what Americans think of Viet Nam, Norman Mailer's views of last October's protest march to the Pentagon.

A number of writers will get double exposure. Marshall McLuhan will retard his predicted disappearance of books by publishing a consideration of space in poetry and painting, and a sequel to his picture treatise, The Medium is the Massage. MacKinley Kantor has a book of reminiscences and an antebellum novel about a Southern girl who falls in love with a slave with the unlikely name of Beauty Beast. Stephen Birmingham will issue separate reports on white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Sephardic Jews, Barnaby Conrad a memoir and a how-to-do-it on bullfighting, Muriel Spark poems and stories, Tom Wolfe a collection of essays and a report on Novelist Ken Kesey, the Norman Mailer of the West Coast. But all this conspicuous industry settles into sloth when compared with Mystery Writer John Creasey's publishing schedule for the year: 15 books under four different names.

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