BUON ANNO! The God Factor cometh …

Dear friends and family and readers and critics and those of you who just stumbled across this lil’ blog o’ mine:

Many of you have emailed me extremely kind, humbling notes in recent weeks asking about my “big project”: THE BOOK.

So, throwing any semblance of caution about shameless self promotion to the wind (what good is a blog, after all, if you can’t shamelessly self promote?), here is the skinny on my baby:

We’ve named her The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.

Here’s what she looks like:

She will be released (born, birthed, borne, delivered, have her coming out?) on Tuesday, March 14.
Yes, there will be a book party in Chicago. And in New York. Further details to follow in a more personal fashion.

The publisher is Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and, specifically, a new imprint at FSG called Sarah Crichton Books, which The God Factor will be launching. Sarah Crichton is a fabulous woman and I was blessed to have her not only as my publisher, but as my editor, mentor and friend along the way. Sarah has another dozen or so books — fiction and nonfiction — in production for her eponymous imprint at FSG and I look forward to all of them — a wonderful, eclectic, brilliant collection.

FSG is a storied literary house in New York that has published many, many, many extraordinary authors (21 Nobel laureates in literature!) over the years including Flannery O’Connor, Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Marilynne Robinson, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Pablo Neruda, Hermann Hesse, Susan Sontag, Bernard Malamud, Alice McDermott, and (Chicago’s own) Scott Turow.

I feel (quite literally) like the red-headed stepchild who showed up for Christmas dinner. What I am doing in such company I have no idea, but for the company and the opportunity I am tremendously grateful.

My book (which started as a series in the Sun-Times back in March 2004) is a collection of 31 profiles of what we’re calling “culture shapers” (rather than “celebrities”) who I have had exclusive, one-on-one interviews with about their spirituality — what they believe (or not), why they believe it (or don’t) and how what they believe affects the way they live, work, create, play, etc. Each person is a separate chapter. Several of them have appeared previously in the Sun-Times in a different form, but most of them are brand new.

The God Factor gang is (in alphabetical order): Sherman Alexie, Bono, Dusty Baker, Sandra Bernhard, Sandra Cisneros, Billy Corgan, Kurt Elling, Laura Esquivel, Melissa Etheridge, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mike Gerson, Seamus Heaney (who gave me a new poem in lieu of an interview, much to my delight as some of you might remember that a verse from one of Heaney’s poems graced the front of our wedding invitation back in 1998), Hugh Hefner (yes, I interviewed him at the Playboy Mansion), Dr. Henry Lee, Annie Lennox, David Lynch, John Mahoney, Mark Morris, Mancow Muller, Senator Barack Obama, Hakeem Olajuwon, Harold Ramis, Anne Rice, Tom Robbins, Russell Simmons, Jeffrey Sachs , Barry Scheck, John Patrick Shanley , the Reverend Al Sharpton, Studs Terkel, Iyanla Vanzant, and Elie Wiesel.

The foreign and theatrical rights to The God Factor are still for sale. If you happen to be in the market for such things, you can find my agent, Matthew Guma, here.

The book is a little shy of 300 pages and will be published in hardback. The bound galleys (a.k.a. “uncorrected proofs” or “advanced reader copies”) went out to media types (like myself) across the nation about three weeks ago. (The first one showed up for sale on eBay about two days later — from a seller in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which narrows the field down considerably in terms of who might have taken a pass on it …) The first major review (or at least the first one we’re expecting) is supposed to run in Publishers Weekly on Jan. 16. And yes, that thought makes me every-so-slightly light-headed and queasy.

Like I said, the book will hit bookshelves on March 14, but is available for pre-order on Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, Wal-Mart.com, Tattered Cover, Booksamillion.com, and many other places if you Google/Froogle it to shop-and-compare prices.

So that’s the skinny. I will be traveling a bit to promote the book once it’s out, but don’t know my schedule yet. The first book signing is at the Borders on Michigan Avenue in Chicago on March 14. (There’s also a signing at the Borders in Wheaton, Ill. on March 30).

Here’s my book jacket photo (thank you Paul Natkin!) …

And if you’d like to hear (and see) me prattle on about the book a bit more, you can surf over to here with the caveat that it is perhaps the worst looking video of me ever, more or less.

I’ll have a free-standing Web site up for the book sometime in February at www.patheos.com/blogs/thedudeabides.

Until then, thank you for all of your kind words, enthusiasm, and support over the last year. It’s been quite a ride.

Love, grace and peace,

Cathi