Barnes & Noble Helps Publisher Discover a Great New Writer

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, is celebrating the March 23 release of Matterhorn (Grove/Atlantic), written by Marine veteran Karl Marlantes. The novel, written over 35 years, comes to market thanks to the author’s perseverance and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program.

For decades, writer Karl Marlantes tried to obtain a literary agent or publisher for Matterhorn, a debut novel set in Vietnam. Finally, a small non-profit press in Berkeley, California, El León Literary Arts, agreed to publish a small print run of the book in May of last year. At the author’s suggestion, El León submitted Matterhorn – the story of a young Marine lieutenant and his Bravo Company comrades who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood – to the Discover Great New Writers program, for consideration in their seasonal promotion. The Discover reading group (comprised of Barnes & Noble booksellers) immediately loved it. Hoping to help this treasure find its way in the marketplace, the Discover program shared their enthusiasm for the novel with the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, a larger trade publishing house (capable of supporting the title with marketing, publicity, and advertising), who quickly saw the extraordinary merit of the book, and is now launching Matterhorn in a major national campaign via a co-publishing effort with El León.

“We were thrilled to help Karl Marlantes secure a better publishing deal and bring this work of great literature to readers everywhere,” said Jaime Carey, chief merchandising officer, Barnes & Noble, Inc. “This powerful and moving story will resonate with both men and women who after reading it, will understand why loved ones who experienced the Vietnam War behave the way they do. It’s a story that stays with you long after you put it down and is destined to become a classic of Vietnam War literature.”

Barnes & Noble will support Matterhorn with e-mail campaigns and online marketing at Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), key in-store placement and a special stand-alone display with signage featuring quotes from authors of highly regarded Vietnam novels such as David Finkel, author of The Good Soldier. Matterhorn will also be featured in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program as a summer selection, featured on Discover displays in Barnes & Noble stores nationwide and in select Barnes & Noble College Bookstores beginning April 29.

“Matterhorn is an inspirational novel and one of the most remarkable publishing stories I’ve ever been involved with,” said Morgan Entrekin, publisher, Grove/Atlantic. “I’m grateful to the booksellers involved with the Discover Great New Writers program who are open to good works from any source. Without them, this amazing book would never have gotten the chance it’s getting.”

“Matterhorn has had a lot of lucky breaks on its road to publication, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has gotten behind it, but the simple truth is that none of it would have happened without the support of Barnes & Noble and its Discover Great New Writers program,” said Karl Marlantes, a recipient of the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation medals for valor, two Purple Hearts and 10 Air Medals for his service in Vietnam, a graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. “They recognized the book’s value and they’ve been championing it ever since. I don’t have the words to say how grateful I am.”

Twenty years ago, the Discover Great New Writers program debuted with the mission of highlighting the best new and undiscovered contemporary writers, and since its inception, has introduced its customers to nearly 2,000 writers who have benefited from the exposure the program offers. Other novels the Discover Program helped reach market success include: The Help, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and Columbine, the winner of the 2009 Discover Award for nonfiction, to name just a few.

ABOUT MATTERHORN

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who arrive in Vietnam to fight an unwanted war amidst chaos, stifling heat and humidity, and an untraceable enemy. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese, but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between the members of their own company: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

ABOUT BARNES & NOBLE, INC.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. BKS, the world’s largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 723 bookstores in 50 states. Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, also operates 639 college bookstores serving nearly 4 million students and over 250,000 faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States. Barnes & Noble is the nation’s top bookseller brand for the seventh year in a row, as determined by a combination of the brand’s performance on familiarity, quality, and purchase intent; the top bookseller in quality for the second year in a row and the number two retailer in trust, according to the EquiTrend® Brand Study by Harris Interactive®. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites, which also features hundreds of thousands of titles in its eBookstore (www.bn.com/ebooks). Customers can buy and read eBooks on a wide range of platforms, including nook^TM by Barnes & Noble, the iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry^® smartphones, as well as most Windows^® and Mac^® laptops or full-sized desktop computers.

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