“For some at Norton, The Bear Comes Home, whose main character is a saxophone-playing, wise-cracking bear who quotes Tony Curtis and William Blake, is a daunting marketing problem.”
This 1998 New York Times profile of Rafi Zabor is compelling. Zabor won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1998 after years of financial and personal struggles. Gerald Howard (a former Norton editor who has worked with Don Delillo, David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, and Chuck Palahniuk) calls The Bear Comes Home, “the best work of fiction on jazz.” Now, I must read it.
