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Book Mystery

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There’s an author called John Katzenbach. He wrote Hart’s Law and several other bestselling thrillers. This is a very well-known writer who’s been translated into many languages.

One of his most famous novels is The Analyst. It’s about a psychoanalyst called Ricky Starks who finds himself a target of a ruinous conspiracy. It’s really good. I highly recommend to people who like psychological thrillers. An excellent novel.

But here’s the mystery part. In 2018, the sequel to The Analyst was released. And in a few weeks, installment #3 in the series is coming out. But get this. The Analyst 2 and 3 are only available in Spanish (and some people say German.) Katzenbach is an American novelist but The Analyst 2 that’s been selling up a storm in Latin America for 5 years doesn’t exist in English.

Does anybody understand how this is possible?

7 responses to “Book Mystery”

  1. Demotrash Avatar
    Demotrash

    Ghostwritten by a Spanish writer?

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  2. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “Does anybody understand how this is possible?”

    Three guesses in order of probability (according to me):

    First guess: A publisher owned the rights to the name and commissioned a local writer to do the book and it was successful and so now the third installment is due.

    Second guess: It’s not a sequel but a different book by a different author but published under the Katzenbach name (this happened a lot in Poland in the early 90s… new printings of old books by local or less known authors had the names of better known authors slapped on them.

    Third: Japanese commercial time: Just like lots of celebrities who would never do commercials in the west would do them in Japan for very large amounts of money…. Katzenbach just wrote any old thing for the LA market but doesn’t want it published at home.

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      One more guess: He’s just a lot more popular in other countries than the US and so the translations get published before any domestic publisher will look at them.

      This is like William Wharton who wrote one massive bestseller IIRC ‘Birdy’ but for some reason became hugely popular in Poland (all his books sold massively here). Looking at his wikipedia in English there are titles listed in Polish but not English “many of Wharton’s works were translated and published exclusively in the Polish language”

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wharton_(author)

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        He’s definitely much more popular in Hispanic countries where people will read anything titled “The Analyst” almost like a reflex.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          And it’s getting all sorts of coverage in Spanish: https://albertonews.com/entretenimiento/el-psicoanalista-esta-de-regreso-con-una-venganza-que-lleva-cocinandose-mas-de-20-anos/

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I need to read the Spanish sequel to determine if the same person wrote it as the English original.

      People are floating ideas that Netflix bought the English language rights to create a series and isn’t allowing the publication in English to make sure that the series comes out first. But the first sequel was published in 2018! It doesn’t take 6 years for Netflix to film a series!

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  3. Post Alley Crackpot Avatar
    Post Alley Crackpot

    The last time I heard that name connected to anything in English involved the little magazine insert in the Miami Herald that had surprisingly good writing that redeemed the “at the end of the morning” standard issue journoprose in the Miami Herald itself.

    Katzenbach’s connections to literature are via Miami, and so he probably got a start from a publisher of Spanish language books and started writing in Spanish.

    Those sold well enough that he could ignore English as a target market because there wasn’t enough demand, and so an American writer chose to write for the markets that would buy his books.

    It looks like German was added later because of demand for the books in German, and English is slowly being added that way.

    But as for publishers?

    In architecture you could get an Italian or Dutch publisher in some cases a lot easier than an American or British publisher, even if you’re writing in English for an international English audience.

    There are some publishers that are international by default, such as Princeton Architectural Press and the MIT Press.

    Sometimes the books come to English late, which is what happened with some books about financialisation (or what Adam Curtis called “hypernormalisation”) which were written in Italian before they were translated into English.

    And so it seems odd because here’s an American writer who went outside the American sphere of literary influence to become famous outside America, writing in a language other than English, because that’s where the interest for his works was.

    Katzenbach was probably closer to Miami than he was to the rest of America, and it stuck.

    The books in English exist because they’re translations into English, not from it.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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