Not all of the presenters at the Equality State Book Festival Sept. 18-20 in Casper are authors. Some are editors --Sarah Crichton is vice president and publisher of Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux which began publishing titles in March 2006. An eclectic mix of smart and vervy books, fiction and nonfiction both, the imprint has already had marked success with Ishmael Beah's bestselling memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and also made bookselling history when it was heavily promoted by Starbucks in stores around the U.S. and U.K.
Other notable books from the imprint's first year are: The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin, which won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for the Best Novel of 2006, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's award-winning love letter to the Kalahari Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People. Some recent books she has published include Eric Wilson's Against Happiness, a small but powerful book in favor of the art- and life-enriching power of melancholy; Melody Petersen's Our Daily Meds, a scathing investigation of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry; and many others.
From 1996 to 2001, Crichton was vice president and publisher of Little, Brown, where she had the good fortune to sign up Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. She published David Sedaris, George Stephanopoulos, David Foster Wallace, George Pelecanos, Anita Shreve, Rick Moody, and Michael Connelly.
Before Little, Brown, Crichton was in magazines. At Newsweek magazine, where she started in 1988, she was one of the top editors responsible for cultural, lifestyle, society and business coverage. Before Newsweek, she was the editor of Seventeen magazine, as well as a widely-published freelance journalist. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, writer Guy Martin, and their 18-year-old daughter, Eliza.
At the book festival, Crichton will appear on the panel: "Publishing from the Ground Up" at 1 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 20, at the Nicolaysen Art Museum.
