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 around the middle of Dennis J. Kafalas's manuscript, all of that disappeared. There wasn't a checklist anymore. There was just Moe, and the people around him, and a thought that had very little to do with publishing:

This is a book I would want my own son to read.

That was it.

Not because it had lessons to teach him. Not because Moe had answers worth following. Quite the opposite. Fortunate Son understood something about being seventeen and staring into adulthood without a map. About masculinity, anxiety, loyalty, work, family, and discovering that the people who make you who you are aren't necessarily the people whose blood you share.

We almost didn't read it because we thought we knew what kind of book it was.

Then we read it.

And we couldn't not publish it.