The Books We Couldn’t Not Publish: Fortunate Son
We almost didn't read Fortunate Son . The manuscript arrived under a different title, one that gave us completely the wrong idea about the book. It sounded esoteric, far outside anything we were interested in publishing, and for a moment the easiest decision would have been to move on. Fortunately, we opened it anyway. What we found was Moe Richards, seventeen years old in the summer of 1992, dropping out of high school and discovering that freedom isn't particularly useful when you have no idea what to do with it. There was no mysticism. No spiritualism. Just a kid trying to figure out what becoming a man was supposed to mean when nobody had given him particularly good instructions. And we kept reading. That's the strange thing about choosing books. You can talk about markets and genres and audiences. You can make lists of what you're looking for. You can develop criteria and convince yourself that the process is rational. Then somebody sends you a story. Somewhere ar...