NPR and Books Seem to Go Hand in Hand

One of the few sure things in the fickle business of publishing is the enduring friendship between National Public Radio and books.

Authors have been known to berate the publicists who failed to land them an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” A book featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” can ride that exposure into another printing or take a giant step toward the bestseller list.

In addition, working for NPR can ease the way into print. NPR’s Noah Adams of “All Things Considered” and floating anchor Susan Stamberg have written books about their NPR experiences: Adams’ “Saint Croix Notes: River Mornings, Radio Nights,” in 1991, and Stamberg’s “The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road: 23 Variations on a Theme,” in 1992, both from W.W. Norton.

Their fellow anchor Bob Edwards’ warm new memoir, “Fridays With Red” (Simon & Schuster), recalls his friendship with sports commentator Red Barber, a Friday guest on NPR’s “Morning Edition” until his death in 1992.

Enter Marion Winik. Like other contributing essayists to NPR--Andre Codrescu, Daniel Pinkwater, Bailey White--Winik has put her quirky world view between hardcovers.

In a sample of her take on life, she was telling us about herself at the end of NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Valentine’s Day: “Since the day I could cut the shape of a heart from a piece of red construction paper, I fell in love, I fell in love, I fell and fell until I hit the bottom of the pit of rejection.”

Winik--a thirtysomething mother of two who lives in Austin, Tex., and writes manuals for a software company--tells us more about herself in “Telling,” newly published by Villard Books. She tells it, well, like it is--and was.

Subtitled “Confessions, Concessions, and Other Flashes of Light,” the collection is hilarious, wise, grim and heartbreaking. She recalls a blissfully misspent summer on a Jersey Shore boardwalk, a condo rental from hell, the stillborn delivery of her first child and more than a few sordid dates with serious drugs. A favorite essay: “Women Who Love Men Who Don’t Pay Their Parking Tickets.”

Winik says she had been minding her own business, writing confessional pieces for Austin publications, when a regional correspondent for NPR urged her to offer a few to the network. NPR bit, and so did the listeners. She says up to 250 people have written to her in response to each of her radio visits, which total 40 or so since she went on the air in 1991.

“NPR was the magic thing that happened to me,” she says. “I love to read my stuff. Performing is a like a second avocation for me, on the radio and in readings. That seems to be the way to encounter me. I’m certainly not trying to be a private person.”

One impressed listener was literary agent Patricia Van der Leun, who contacted Winik and sold the book to Villard. The publishing house is supporting its 10,000-copy printing, ambitious for a first collection of essays, by putting the author on a reading tour.

This is standard enough for a newly launched writer, but a requisite step here considering Winik’s link to her audience is as much aural as cerebral. Winik will read at 7 p.m. March 9 at Dutton’s Brentwood bookstore. On Tuesday, she sits down with Bryant Gumbel on the “Today” show, a major invitation for a newcomer.

“There’s certainly a huge market for NPR essayists that we recognize as publishers,” says Katy Barrett, director of publicity at Vintage Books, which paid Winik a reported $75,000 to publish a trade-paperback edition of “Telling” that will come out next year. (Vintage also plans to reissue Bailey White’s bestseller, “Mama Makes Up Her Mind,” in time for Mother’s Day in May.)

Those who cozy up to a voice on the radio can feel they know the speaker--but still want to know more. The familiarity may prompt the book purchase.

Indeed, the most successful books by radio personalities bring their radio voices to the printed page in such a seamless manner that we can hear them as we read them. Witness Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon Days”; Bailey’s book, which gives her small world in Georgia universal appeal, and mega-selling titles by Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh.

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On the Racks: The logo of Mademoiselle has been realigned on the March issue by new Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Crow, the clearest sign among many that she intends a more traditional approach than did her ousted predecessor, Gabe Doppelt. The new look of the young woman’s magazine is designed to emphasize coverage of fashion, beauty and relationships. . . . Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management will point out in its March 1 issue that National Review’s recent “exclusive” about the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the software colossus Microsoft had been published nearly word for word in the December issue of the Washingtonian. But the piece by Business Week correspondent Mark Lewyn had different endings: The conservative National Review’s version slammed the FTC for challenging Microsoft, while the Washingtonian heralded the possibility of a “landmark” antitrust ruling. . . .

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B Matter: The Hearst Corp. will start up an American edition of Marie Claire, the French monthly for women, in the fall. . . . Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp. has killed off Married Woman magazine after less-than-convincing newsstand sales for its premiere issue, a collector’s item that featured Rod Stewart and Rachel Hunter on the cover.