SOURCE: "Publish and Perish," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 9, 1995, p. 13.

In the following review, Ward compares the publishing world portrayed by James in Original Sin to that portrayed by Zev Chavets in The Bookmakers, and discusses how the two books work as narratives.

As we travel dazed, anxious and weary-eyed in our airbagged, steel-reinforced luxury cars down the blurry Information Superhighway, authors continue to do their less than fashionable job of measuring what will be lost in the new age of the megabyte and sound bite. Writers remain, thank old outdated God, exasperatingly human. They are going to have their own idiosyncratic emotions about the new age, and they are going to be stubborn and old-fashioned enough to actually write (the fools!) about all this. Some scribes are going to deal with it all head on, like the Cyberpunk gang (see William Gibson or my own...