June 10, 2007, New York, NY LAWFUEL – Legal Newswire —Bestselling author John Grisham will publish a new novel this fall about an American football player in Italy, it was announced today by Stephen Rubin, President and Publisher, Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group. The book, entitled PLAYING FOR PIZZA, will have a one day lay down date of September 25, 2007. Rubin bought North American rights from David Gernert, The Gernert Company.
PLAYING FOR PIZZA is a short novel about a fallen American football star who can no longer get work in the National Football League and whose agent, as a last resort, signs a deal for him to play for the Parma Panthers, in Parma, Italy. The quarterback’s move to a small city in a foreign land leads to a series of cultural misadventures. The idea for the novel grew out of time Grisham spent in Italy researching his last novel, The Broker, which was set in Bologna.
“One of the many joys of working with John,” says Rubin, “is the element of surprise. Who would have thought that the master of the legal thriller would write a novel about cotton farming or a novel about the excesses of Christmas? Now, John pulls another rabbit out of his endless supply of hats with PLAYING FOR PIZZA, a romp about a fish out of water that had me laughing out loud.”
“I was pleasantly surprised to find real American football in Italy,” says Grisham, “and as I dug deeper a novel came together. The research was tough – food, wine, opera, football, Italian culture – but someone had to do it.”
John Grisham is the author of 18 novels and the recent #1 New York Times bestselling work of nonfiction The Innocent Man. Doubleday will publish his next legal thriller in Spring 2008.
Doubleday is an imprint of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., whose parent company is Bertelsmann AG.
