About Janice Deaner
My Mission
My goal is to edit a book so proficiently and with such excellence that the author has a true opportunity of being published.
Work Experience
Writing reading guides for Simon and Schuster and Carroll and Graff Publishers
Assistant editor for Carroll and Graff Publishers
Editing for over 12 years.
Taught writing workshops in New York on the short story, novel, and screenplay.
Published Novels
Where Blue Begins
The Body Spoken
Notes on Extinction
Inherited (in the process)
Main Services:
Main Services:
Main Services:
Main Services:
Editorial Assessment
Developmental editing
Line Editing
Plot Consultation
Query Letter
Book Coaching
Genres:
Main Services:
Main Services:
Fiction, Literary,
Contemporary, Memoir,
Biographies,
Entertainment,
Non-Fiction, History,
Humor and Comedy.
Books:
Where Blue Begins
Janice Deaner. Dutton Books, $22 (432pp) ISBN 978-0-525-93580-3
Deaner's debut novel is an absorbing and often compelling story of a young girl's obsession with her troubled, secretive mother. Moving from Detroit to a village in upstate New York in 1967, 10-year-old Maddie's fragile family is on the verge of collapse. Her father Leo's new job in the music department of a small college reawakens his passion for jazz, sending her mother, Lana, a semi-invalid who spends her days writing in a closely guarded journal, into a physical and emotional tailspin. As Maddie tries to uncover the source of her mother's odd behavior, she begins to piece together the story of Lana's life with Leon 10 years earlier in New York City--a shadowy world of whorehouses, Harlem jazz clubs, racism and violence. The guilt-ridden Maddie's sleuthing ultimately teaches her some hard lessons about the consequences of keeping secrets--and of divulging them. As an initiation story, the book is not entirely satisfying: instead of helping her reach maturity, Maddie's experiences seem to make her more exhausted, frightened and nervous than ever. However, Deaner does relate an engrossing mystery in graceful prose; her narrative possesses a cinematic momentum--the author is a graduate student in film studies--that relies heaviy upon flashbacks (conveniently obtained from Lana's diaries and several canisters of old film) to solve the puzzle. Though the heart-tugging plot sometimes suffers from an excess of drama, the book has real commercial potential. (Mar.)
The Body Spoken
Janice Deaner. Dutton Books, $25.95 (339pp) ISBN 978-0-525-94414-0
Filmmaker and novelist Deaner (Where Blue Begins) skillfully evokes the framework and dreamy pacing of film in this affecting novel about two strangers who meet on a train. At Manhattan's Penn Station, Hemy Lourde (the apt French name means ""heavy"") boards an Amtrak liner bound for L.A. She sits next to a male passenger and begins their dialogue with the cryptic remark that she's been living as a man, under her beloved brother's name, for five years. As the train makes its way over the American landscape, Hemy recounts the story of her life to the fascinated stranger, who becomes her lover en route. Born in the 1970s in upstate New York to a playwright father and a fervently imaginative mother, Hemy, sister Zellie and brother Oscar grow up working in the family business--a nightclub/bar located in their living room, serving illegal homemade liquor. Hemy's early sexual confusion is exacerbated when she tries to save a man from a racist attack and accidentally shoots off part of the assailant's genitals. Although Hemy and her victim, Mr. Antonovsky, a Russian survivor of Stalinist-era terror, develop a strangely beautiful and healing relationship, Hemy can't escape the persistent rumors of the town gossips, and she begins a tormented period of her life. During the four-day journey, Hemy engages her lover, who is fleeing phantoms of his own, in the story of her failed marriage, her work (as a man) in a prison, speculations on lesbianism and the violent recovery of her sense of womanhood. Told alternately in the first- and third-person, the narrative is lyrically written and urgently paced, a fluid American odyssey that combines the cinematic glamour of Body Heat and Murder on the Orient Express with the black-and-white film verite of a Death Row prison documentary. Through Hemy's gender crisis, Deaner offers a provocative exploration of identity, transforming the young woman's nightmarish past into a bittersweet trajectory toward her unique sexual truths. (Apr.)
Notes on Extinction
Dutton, 2001 - Fiction - 240 pages
Will Mendelsohn is a modern-day Darwin whose first book on extinction has made him a great success. To get underway with work on his follow-up, he sets off on a worldwide research trip. He makes a special visit to Assam, a state in northeast India, so that he can spend time with his mother's friend Mim, a Holocaust survivor in frail health. But once he meets Mim's enigmatic neighbor, a married expatriate screenwriter named Grace Tagore, Will's brief stop turns into an extended stay. As the two are drawn by their haunted pasts into a transformative affair, Assam erupts in political turmoil, setting off an irrevocable chain of events that forever alter their lives.
With a remarkable gift for language and storytelling, author Janice Deaner pens a novel of extraordinary depth and power, where amid the lavish tea gardens of a beautiful yet strife-ridden India, a compelling story of romance, friendship, and self-discovery brilliantly unfolds.