SALT LAKE CITY, UT April 15, 2013
WiDo Publishing
™ is pleased to announce the acquisition of a darkly humorous novel by David Kalish, a former editor and reporter for The Associated Press.
According to WiDo’s Allie Maldonado, “I was blown away by David’s sample pages. And the characters were amazingly real. As I kept reading, it just got better. This makes my job so fun. To discover a book like this by such a talented writer, and to help him realize his dream of publishing it is what it’s all about.”
In this quirky romantic comedy, an ailing angst-ridden journalist finds love in a fiery Colombian doctor who helps him to beat his fear of life — before his illness beats him. Main character Daniel Plotnick, a 30-something writer for The Associated Press, has it all: stable marriage. Decent job. A tony Brooklyn apartment. But when he learns he has incurable cancer, his fortunes fall faster than you can say “Ten Plagues of Egypt.”
David Kalish says, “I guess gratitude best expresses how I felt when WiDo’s submission editor offered me a contract to publish my novel. Up to that point I’d amassed, over many years, a stack of rejections from literary agents and publishers, some more positive than others. I saw myself as some sort of hapless Sisyphus, repeatedly rolling my novel up a mountain only to have it roll back down. Perhaps I was fated to relative anonymity, sharing my words with just a handful of fellow creative writers, friends, family, and readers of rarified literary journals.”
In researching WiDo, Kalish exchanged emails with several other authors who were published by the company. “Everyone had positive things to say about WiDo, particularly the personal care its editors give each writer’s work on the journey to publication,” Kalish states. “I feel like my book has finally found a welcoming place and look forward to teaming up with WiDo to promote my work on its final journey to the bookstore.”
David Kalish earned his MFA at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars. His short fiction has been published in Temenos, Knock, Spectrum, and Poydras Review, his non-fiction in the Writer’s Chronicle, and a short film of his, Regular Guy, won honors in film festivals here and abroad. Before Bennington, he was an editor and reporter at The Associated Press, and his articles have appeared in major newspapers. He is currently working on a second novel, entitled Stoner Hero, and a theatre script for a Latin version of A Christmas Carol. He lives in upstate New York with his wife, daughter, two dogs, and two canaries.