I personally know some six hundred booksellers in South America, in Italy, in the U.S.” For Beyond Love, he will do what he did for The City of Joy, his recent best-seller about the inhabitants of a Calcutta slum. I design the jackets, I design the flaps. “So I have set up a whole system in Europe and America. communion between an author and a publisher than just handing over the book,” he explains. Even his sales strategy bears a hint of evangelism. He’s in the midst of a grueling, bicontinental publicity schedule that might break punier writers clearly, he delights in it. On a Saturday morning in his New York hotel suite, Lapierre brims with happy energy, bustling about to make a visitor comfortable, ordering breakfast from room service (“You have brioches? Beautiful!”), and then, when it comes, dumping milk, French-style, into both cups of black coffee. The pope’s a hard man to crack for a blurb, but this is no mere book. Beyond Love (Warner), his paean to the doctors and lab scientists struggling to find a cure for AIDS, has already rocked Europe with huge sales and critical praise, and includes a blurb from the pope it reaches American bookstores in a large first printing next month. And why shouldn’t it be? Youthful and handsome at fifty-nine, Dominique Lapierre appears to have yet another international best-seller on his hands. ‘Beautiful!” It’s his favorite word, his chorus, dressed in that charming French accent and rolled out to punctuate every exchange.
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