• Sagasti again offers us a delightful, erudite, lightly tread wandering through his research and his loves—in this case music and musical history
• More personal than Fireflies , A Musical Offering is informed by the death of the author's brother
• The intellectual wanderings of Eliot Weinberger with an emotional overlay that creates new and other interest
• Fireflies had some success with indie booksellers who considered it a hidden gem (Justin Walls included it in his Du Mois book club) and we can expect to expand on that

Marketing Plans

• Simultaneous English/Spanish editions launch
• Social media campaign
• Galleys available
• Co-op available
• Advance reader copies (print and digital)
• National media campaign
• Targeted bookseller mailing
• Simultaneous eBook launch

No one knows why an eighteenth-century Count, with no problems other than those that come with his position – palace intrigues, a damsel’s jealousy, the tedium of protocol – is unable to make peace with his conscience and get to sleep at night, as is God’s will and his own fervent desire. Like all of us, Count Keyserling believes that lying awake in the dark when everyone else has left for the land of Nod is a form of punishment.A punishment that equalises: insomnia makes no distinc- tions when it comes to expiating sins. As the nobility have always done, Count Keyserling attacks the symptom rather than the cause: he commissions the cantor of St. Thomas of Leipzig, one Johann Sebastian Bach, to create a composition that will lull him to sleep at last. In recom- pense he offers a silver goblet overflowing with gold louis. There was no need for such generosity; after all, it was the Count himself who had secured the composer his post in the Court of Saxony. Bach more than rises to the occasion, composing an aria to which he adds thirty separate variations. The compositions are linked not by the melody but by the bass line, the harmonic foundation.The person charged with delivering these musical sleeping pills is an extraordinary harpsichordist who not only is capable of playing anything that is put in front of him but can also read a score upside down, like a rock star playing a guitar behind his back. His name is Johann Gottlieb Goldberg. He is young, which is to say impetuous and pretentious. Nevertheless, he practises the most difficult passages in the evenings, to avoid surprises. And he tries to find the right tempo that will help the nobleman drift off.In honour of its first performer, and thanks to the alacrity with which he undertook his charge, posterity would christen this series of compositions the Goldberg Variations .The most famous performance of the Variations , a feat not unlike swimming across the Magellan Strait, is by the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. In fact, he recorded two: between them stretch twenty-six years in the life of a planet.The first version is as urgent and flamboyant as Baroque music permits, and was taped in 1955, when Gould was just twenty-three years old.The second is a recording made shortly before he died from a stroke at the age of fifty, in 1981. For all his genius, Gould couldn’t escape the fate of the wise: the slower pace of the later version is that of someone who knows we only leave a circle before taking the first step.