Publisher reviving ‘Godfather’ family

Random House is making an offer it hopes a worthy author won’t refuse: resurrecting the “Godfather” characters immortalized by Mario Puzo.

“I love ‘The Godfather’ and just kept thinking about those characters. I wanted to see more,” Jonathan Karp, a vice president and executive editor at Random House, said Tuesday.

In an e-mail to literary agents last week, Karp wrote that he was looking for “someone who is in roughly the same place in life Mario Puzo was when he wrote ‘The Godfather’ at mid-career, with two acclaimed literary novels to his credit, who writes in a commanding and darkly comic omniscient voice.” Puzo died in 1999.

Many consider the movie versions superior to the book, but Karp’s message emphasizes that “the original Puzo novel -- not the films -- are the basis for this sequel. The author can either create a story that occurs after the events in the novel or concurrent with them.”