Swift Press has bought Woody Allen’s debut novel, What’s with Baum? Publication is scheduled for September 2025.
Publisher Mark Richards bought UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Susanna Lea at Susanna Lea Associates on behalf of David Vigliano and John Burnham.
The novel’s synopsis reads: “Asher Baum is a middle-aged Jewish journalist turned novelist and playwright, consumed with anxiety about everything under the sun. Baum’s turgid philosophical books received tepid reviews and his prestigious New York publisher has dropped him. His third marriage is on the rocks and he suspects his handsome and successful younger brother may have seduced his Harvard-educated wife.
“He is uneasy with her close relationship with her son, a more successful author than he, and suspicious of her closeness with their neighbour in Connecticut. And he’s about to be consumed by a scandal. He’s started talking to himself. Strangers shake their heads and walk around him on the street. Meanwhile he learns a startling secret.”
Mark Richards said: “We at Swift are thrilled to be publishing Woody Allen’s What’s with Baum? which is, amazingly, his first novel. It is all we could have hoped – funny, clever, engrossing and wonderfully human. Woody Allen may have waited almost 90 years before he wrote a novel but it’s been worth the wait.”
Since the 1970s, Allen has written several books of short stories and essays, as well as a memoir, Apropos of Nothing, published in 2020. The memoir was dropped by its original US publisher, Hachette, after a staff walkout over allegations that Allen sexually abused his daughter in the early 90s, which have come to define his public image in recent years. The memoir was eventually published by Arcade.
Swift Press was established in June 2020. In 2022, it launched an imprint, Forum, to publish “thinkers who expand the realms of debate and aren’t afraid to question contemporary orthodoxies”, and has since published titles including Liberal Bullies: Inside the Mind of the Authoritarian Left by Luke Conway and Gay Shame.
