Publishers shy from 9/11 books this year

LOS ANGELES -- Thousands of books were on display this past weekend at BookExpo America, with the next "Harry Potter" novel and the memoirs of Gabriel Garcia Marquez among the favorites at the Los Angeles Convention Center.\nBut one subject, on the minds of so many at last year's publishing convention, is now rarely mentioned: Sept. 11.\nDozens of books came out last year to mark the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the vast majority quickly vanished from memory, and publishers said they see no reason to expect a better response for the second anniversary.\n"The feeling I get from booksellers is that they had enough," said Roger Williams, vice president and director of sales at Simon & Schuster.\n"Some worthy books have been written and will be written, but for now what new is there to say?" said Bill Thomas, editor-in-chief of Doubleday/Broadway. "I'm sure someone will come out with a magisterial history, but that will take a long time to write."\nA handful of books related to Sept. 11 will come out this fall, but publishers insist they not be called "Sept. 11 books." Random House, for instance, is publishing Gail Sheehy's "Middletown, America," the story of a New Jersey community where several Sept. 11 victims lived. But sales director Janet Cooke said "Middletown" should not be compared to many of the books that came out last year.\n"I hate to think of the Sheehy book that way," Cook said. "To me a Sept. 11 book is a big, bulky book of photographs, commemorating the day itself. 'Middletown' is a look at the grieving process."\nRandom House is also publishing Gerald Posner's "Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11." Henry Holt will release "City in the Sky," a history of the World Trade Center by James Glanz and Eric Lipton. Simon & Schuster will have a paperback edition of Steven Brill's "After: How America Confronted the Sept. 12 Era."\n"It's not a Sept. 11 book, it's a Sept. 12 book," Alice Mayhew, editorial director of Simon & Schuster, said with a laugh. "No one wants to call their book a Sept. 11 book, because those books didn't work."\nSome fiction writers will refer to the attacks. Countless novels were in progress at the time, and many authors ended up altering the texts -- or making a conscious effort not to change them. Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner" is a novel set in Afghanistan that was amended slightly after Sept. 11.\nBut David Guterson, author of the best-selling novel "Snow Falling on Cedars," said he was determined to complete his current book, "Our Lady of the Forest," as originally planned.\n"In fiction, your mind goes to a certain place and that wasn't happening after Sept. 11," said Guterson, whose book tells of a migrant mushroom worker in Washington state, far removed in every way from the events of Sept. 11. "So I stopped writing for nine months. It took me that long just to clear my head"