(In a scathingly wicked and irreverent portrait of the publishing world, five authors and their books--all handled by big-time New York City publishing house Davis and Dash--compete for a position on the New York Times bestseller list. 125,000 first printing. $175,000 ad/promo. Tour.

For anyone pondering a career in publishing, The Bestseller--a fictional account of the frayed egos, sorted ideas, and strange economics that fuel the book industry--may be a dose of harsh reality. Olivia Goldsmith has created a tale of Davis & Dash, a Manhattan house run by an unspectacular publisher and a talented, but foul, editor. The new line of books doesn't exactly threaten to populate the Pulitzer list, though there's a serious 1,114-page work by a novelist who killed herself after her 23rd rejection letter. Goldsmith, who obviously deserves to be among the published, manages to puzzle these disparate pieces together into a cohesive story of the powers that be and those that hope to.

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