Best known for The Song of Bernadette (1941), which was turned into an Oscar-winning movie, Jewish writer Franz Werfel (1890–1945) was also the author of one of the most popular Book-of-the-Month Club titles ever, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. First released in 1933, the work is a historical novel based on the Turkish deportation and massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. Viking Press sold more than 34,000 copies of the 817-page novel, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop, in the first two weeks of its release. Three decades later, when David Godine was at BOMC in the late ’70s, he said that it was still selling briskly. Continue reading at 'Publishers Weekly'
[ Publishers Weekly | 2012-03-23 00:00:00 UTC ]