SOURCE: "Publish and Perish: First-Time Author Stages His Own Book Tour After Publisher Ignores Him," Detroit News, www.detnews.com, September 5, 1997.

[In the following review, Schleier discusses how Henkin had to do his own promotion for his novel Swimming Across the Hudson, because of the nature of today's publishing industry.]

From the time he was a youngster in New York City. Joshua Henkin knew he wanted to be a writer.

But he thought of writing, he says, like some kids want to be in the NBA or walk on the moon. It was a far-off fantasy rather than something to which he seriously aspired.

When he finished Harvard in 1987 with a B.A. in social studies, however, Henkin went to the San Francisco area, got a job reading fiction for a magazine and discovered how bad the majority of writers were. So bad, he says, that he was...