MARCH 2019 -- 50 Years After Publication of THE GODFATHER!

A BIOGRAPHY YOU CAN'T REFUSE

M.J. Moore's new biography of novelist Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, will be published to honor the 50th anniversary of the Mafia classic's 1969 debut

Heliotrope Books will publish MARIO PUZO — AN AMERICAN WRITER'S QUEST on March 8, 2019

NEW YORK CITY — The tale of writer Mario Puzo is more than a story about a novelist who grappled with fate and finally enjoyed great success with The Godfather.  M. J. Moore’s biography of the author, Mario Puzo — An American Writer’s Quest, does much more than describe what’s already familiar about the arc of Puzo’s life.  Yes, his is one of America’s most vivid rags-to-riches stories, but it is also a heroic odyssey.  Against all odds, the poor, socially awkward son of illiterate southern Italian immigrants made himself into an author whose collected works fill a whole shelf . . . and whose most famous book (30 million copies sold), has seeped into America’s psyche in a way that remains unique.

 

Mario Puzo — An American Writer’s Quest by M.J. Moore will be published by Heliotrope Books on March 8, 2019, fifty years after Putnam’s original publication of The Godfather.

 

One of the major themes to emerge in Moore’s biography is that Mario Puzo’s life is best understood as an immigrant’s inheritance, and an American’s triumph.  Although he is identified more closely with Italian-American culture than almost any other writer of his generation, Puzo chose on most occasions to sidestep the “Italian-American” label.  He said simply: “I’m an American.” 

 

Nonetheless, as the son of southern Italian immigrants, Puzo always retained and effortlessly evoked an enormously important Old World sense of self.  Invariably, those closest to him enjoyed his steadfast gentleman’s manners and romantic generosity.  No matter how much he identified as “an American,” there emerged in Puzo’s body of work a spellbinding recapitulation of the past — an immigrant’s past.

 

But in spite of the Old World echoes enhancing the persona and the writings of Mario Puzo, he was very much a product of his times.  He deserves to be recognized as one of the most talented of his generation’s World War II-era novelists.  His debut novel, The Dark Arena, is no less important than Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead or James Jones’s The Thin Red Line.  Indeed, like Mailer and Jones (and sixteen million other Americans between 1939 and 1945), there were significant years of Puzo’s young adult life spent in uniform.  The woman he married and the narrative he wrote for his first novel demonstrate how the Second World War was transformative for him.

 

But unlike his peers Norman Mailer and James Jones (and others), Mario Puzo did not enjoy youthful success.  In fact, unlike a great many members of his ambitious ex-G.I. generation, Puzo did not ride high during the postwar economic boom.  Nor did the rising American economy of the 1960s benefit him. For well over twenty years after WWII, Puzo struggled to make ends meet and support his family.  He did not live in a house until age 42.  And it wasn’t until 1968, when the paperback rights to The Godfather sold for a record-breaking sum, that his writer’s quest was rewarded financially. 

 

In Mario Puzo’s life, all roads led to The Godfather. Although he received major critical praise for his first two novels (1955’s The Dark Arena and 1965’s The Fortunate Pilgrim), their sales were all but flat. Then . . . badly indebted, with five children, pushing 50 and burdened by stress, he vowed to write a bestseller.  His third novel was The Godfather.  Other major novels followed in subsequent decades.

 

Long before the first Godfather film premiered in 1972, Puzo’s novel The Godfather had already sold millions of copies worldwide.  Subsequently, his co-screenwriting work with Francis Ford Coppola on the three Godfather movies ensured that Mario Puzo was central to what is commonly considered America’s ultimate mythology.  The Godfather has superseded Colonial narratives, Westerns, and Civil War stories as a latter-day blueprint for understanding America’s mythic dreams and varied disasters.

 

Unlike most other authors of his era, Mario Puzo still enjoys a worldwide fan base -- not necessarily limited to The Godfather mystique.  However, there's no denying the power of that mystique: the Facebook page devoted to the first “Godfather” film has tallied 9 million "Likes."  And, again, unlike most of his peers, all of Puzo's novels remain in print at this time.

 

In fact, Puzo lived a first-generation American version of The Hero’s Adventure, a redemption story, and a writer’s quest to boot.  He was “Rocky” with a typewriter. 

 

And yet, there has never been a biography of Mario Puzo . . . until now.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR: M. J. MOORE has worked as a big band drummer, a dishwasher and salesman, a college English teacher and freelance journalist, and a long-term Caregiver for a beloved friend suffering from a chronic illness.  His articles, features, book reviews, and RETRO columns have appeared in The Paris Review ~ Daily, Neworld Review, the International New York Times, HoneySuckle Magazine, Literary Hub, and various major urban  newspapers.  Moore is the author of the novel For Paris ~ with Love & Squalor (Heliotrope Books, 2017).  He holds a B.A. and M.A. in English.  When asked why he wrote this new biography, he said: “Because I’m a firm believer in Toni Morrison’s mandate: ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’” 



 

MARIO PUZO — AN AMERICAN WRITER'S QUEST
By M. J. MOORE
6 x 9 inches, 250 pages
978-1-942762-63-8 trade paperback $17.50
978-1-942762-64-5 e-book $9.9

To be published March 8, 2019 by Heliotrope Books, LLC

PRESS RELEASE HERE

TO REQUEST AN ADVANCE GALLEY OR REVIEW COPY, EMAIL sue.havlish@bigsisterproductions.com

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PASSPORT TO PARIS 

A Memoir by GLYNNE HILLER

A 94-Year-Old Remembers Her Search for Love — in Paris of the '50s. After rescuing the manuscript from a computer “black hole,” the author’s daughter worked to ensure that her mother’s memoir, 12 years in the writing, would finally be published.

In 1950, 26-year-old Glynne Hiller came to Paris with her husband, Joe, and her three-year-old daughter, Cathy, so they could all learn French and study in Paris. But after a year — a year in which she realized she not only wanted a more liberated life, but that she never truly loved her husband — Glynne left Joe and set out to discover herself and Paris, taking her daughter along for the adventure. Saucy and beautiful, Glynne charmed one man after another, including the movie star Jean Gabin. Then she met Maurice and learned that she could indeed fall in love. (In fact, she would continue to “visit” with Maurice through her next two marriages — over the next thirty years.)

During her Paris stay, Glynne met the renowned author Colette, a meeting that had a lasting effect on Glynne, who later became an authority on Colette and wrote extensively on her, including publishing pieces in New York Times Magazine and The Nation. (Glynne even named her younger daughter “Colette.”)

Glynne’s adventurous nature in the early 1950s might be seen as early “women’s liberation,” but she would probably call herself “feminine” rather than “feminist.” And yet her free, liberated spirit is evident in many of the stories she tells:

• Cutting up her passport so that a departing lover could have a picture to remember her by.
• Being trapped in a classroom at the Sorbonne and being instructed to take off her clothes.
• Making motherhood the most important of her “adventures,” reminding all that it’s possible for the same woman to be both sensual ad maternal.

This is the story told by now 94-year-old Glynne Hiller in PASSPORT TO PARIS. But that story almost never got told. After twelve years of writing, Glynne finally turned the project over to her daughter, author and editor Catherine Hiller (JUST SAY YES: A Marijuana Memoir). Catherine had to salvage the manuscript from the bowels of her mother’s cantankerous computer, a herculean task that tested her editorial and technical skills. But she was successful, not only in reviving and revising the manuscript, but in getting it into the hands of a publisher, Heliotrope Books of NYC, who found the project as intriguing as Catherine herself did. They worked overtime to get the project finished while Glynne, who had been ill, could still share the book with her friends and family.

Glynne Hiller was bold in 1950, and she remains bold today, publishing an intimate memoir sure to capture the imagination and appreciation of new generations of women and readers everywhere.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Glynne Hiller, now 94, received her B.A. and her M.A. from Manhattanville College. For many years she taught courses on Colette, Proust, and Virginia Woolf at Manhattanville College and the New School in New York City. Glynne has published numerous pieces about Colette, and in the 1960s, she published two books on teenage health and beauty and served as the beauty editor of American Girl. This book was project-directed by daughter Catherine, who went to Paris with her mother all those decades ago. Glynne Hiller currently resides in Sag Harbor, New York, where she enjoys long walks on the beach and cups of tea with friends. 

 

PASSPORT TO PARIS
A Memoir by GLYNNE HILLER
6 x 9 inches, 230 pages, 12 b&w photos
978-1-942762-48-5 trade paperback $16.00
978-1-942762-47-8 e-book $6.99

To be published May 15, 2018 by Heliotrope Books, LLC

TO REQUEST AN ADVANCE GALLEY OR REVIEW COPY, EMAIL sue.havlish@bigsisterproductions.com

 BOOKS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON HERE

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ESPECIALLY FOR AUTISM AWARENESS MONTH, APRIL

       

POINTING IS RUDE: One Father's Story of Autism, Adoption and Acceptance • DIGGER O'BRIEN

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ESPECIALLY FOR FATHER'S DAY

       

PLAYING CATCH WITH STRANGERS: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age • BOB BRODY

“Bob Brody's Playing Catch with Strangers is a gem. Brody spent years honing his craft as a hard-working newspaper and magazine reporter. He has a reporter's eye for detail and ear for a good story coupled with a writerly heart. This collection is filled with insights, wit, pithy observations, common sense and neighborly decency. This delightful and thought-provoking memoir proves that Brody has developed into a master of the short essay.”

•  Dan Rather, former CBS anchor

 

“Bob Brody is a modern-day E.B. White who writes about everyday life with clarity, honesty and humor. He has a light touch and a piercing intelligence that floats above the swamp gas of most contemporary literature. He is a delight to read.”

•  Bob Guccione Jr., former editor of Spin and Discover magazines





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THE LIFE OF AN OLIVE TREE, written and illustrated by D. Yael Bernhard

To be published October 18, 2016. This work of historical fiction invites young readers, particularly those aged 8-12, to come along on the centuries-long journey of an olive tree in Israel and the children, like themselves, who have related to it over the 2,000 years it has grown and changed.

 

 

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BELOW AVERAGE: A Life Way Under the Bar by Lianne Stokes

If sex sells books, this memoir about a 30-year-old virgin will be a knockout

Lianne Stokes’ hilarious, smart tale of 30 years of virginity and lowered expectations,  will be published September 13 by Heliotrope Books.

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   New! HELIOTOT Books for Young Readers That Encourage Participation and Interaction 

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Growing Up Poor and Black in Affluent White Connecticut

Heliotrope Books Announces New Coming-of-Age Memoir by Award-Winning Journalist Cindy Brown Austin —CINDERS: Stories of an Inner-City Survivor

“For myself and many of my comrades who came of age in [the 1960s and ’70s], growing up black in Connecticut was like being a stranger in your own land, a guest who had overstayed his welcome in someone else’s home.” So begins CINDERS: Stories of an Inner-City Survivor by acclaimed journalist and novelist Cindy Brown Austin. It will be published on May 8, 2016, by Heliotrope Books of New York City.



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“Here I am, a senior citizen … I always have grass on hand.”

      —CATHERINE HILLER

Catherine Hiller’s iconic Just Say Yes: A Marijuana Memoir, her positive account of long-term cannabis use, was released in 2015 — also on National Weed Day. Hiller’s book about smoking marijuana for fifty years was excerpted in The New York Times Opinionator, and Catherine was also profiled in the Times by David Gonzalez (read it here). Her podcast for the Huffington Post was downloaded 300,000 times.

“Likely to loosen up fellow smokers, while adding a personal take to the public discussion of cannabis.”  

—Kirkus Reviews



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NATIONAL WEED DAY IS APRIL 20 

Celebrate with a good read from Heliotrope Books!

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“You can blame marijuana for this story’s uplifting tone and comic diversions.”

      —TOM HUTH

Tom Huth’s new memoir, Forty Years Stoned: A Journalist’s Memoir will be published on Weed Day, April 20. Huth is a former writer for the Washington Post and Condé Nast Traveler. He shares travel adventures as well as the trials of caring for a wife succumbing to Parkinson’s disease, and resolving the identity of his brother’s murderer — against a backdrop of smoking weed to stay calm and peaceful.

“An amazing journey, filled with humor. You will be changed.”

—Melissa Etheridge