Pantheon Gets ‘Parental’ With Vellekoop
Sam Hiyate at the Rights Factory sold world English rights to a coming-of-age graphic memoir by Canadian illustrator Maurice Vellekoop. Dan Frank and Chip Kidd at Pantheon acquired the title, and Kidd will be editing. The novel, tentatively called My Three Parents, chronicles three of the significant figures in Vellekoop’s upbringing: his father (a Dutch Calvinist); his mother; and his art school professor, whom Hiyate described as “very ‘out.’” Vellekoop regularly does illustration work for major magazines, newspapers, and book publishers, and his previous books include 2006’s A Nut at the Opera (Drawn & Quarterly) and 1997’s ABC Book: A Homoerotic Primer (Green Candy Press).
Callahan Nabs Cantero’s Debut
Alison Callahan at Doubleday preempted U.S. and Canadian rights to cartoonist Edgar Cantero’s English-language debut, The Supernatural Enhancements. Emma Sweeney, who has an eponymous agency, represented Cantero, a Barcelona-based artist/author who writes a column for the newspaper El Jueve, and has also written two novels published in Catalan. Enhacements, which is scheduled for summer 2014, is, Sweeney said, “part haunted-house chiller, part treasure hunt, part encoded mystery”; it’s told, Sweeney added, through “various structural elements,” employing a range of things from advertisements to security camera footage to diary entries.
A-Trak Gets ‘Needled’ at Scribner
Renowned deejay A-Trak is putting his story on the record (pun intended). The mix master, who won six DJ World Championships (before he turned 20) and was called “the most skillful DJ in the world” by GQ, sold world rights to And the Needle Dropped to Brant Rumble at Scribner. Agent Byrd Leavell, at Waxman Leavell Literary, brokered the deal. The book, Rumble said, will combine the author’s own experiences with “a cultural history” of the rise of deejaying and electronic dance music (EDM).
Meltzer Does One for Kids at PYRG
Bestseller (and History Channel TV host) Brad Meltzer has signed to do an illustrated book series called Ordinary People Change the World, for kids 4–8, at Penguin’s Dial Books for Young Readers. Lauri Hornik, president and publisher of the imprint, bought world English rights from agent Jodi Reamer at Writers House. (Reamer did the deal with Meltzer’s adult agent, Jill Kneerim, at Kneerim, Williams & Bloom.) Cartoonist Chris Eliopoulus will be illustrating the books, which will be biographies of notable people. The first two books, I Am Amelia Earhart and I Am Abraham Lincoln, are set for winter 2014. Speaking to the series, Hornik said it will be an approach to biography that is “fresh, accessible, and ready to inspire our future leaders.”
Cain Moves to S&S
Chelsea Cain is moving houses. The bestselling novelist, who made a splash with her 2007-launched series featuring female serial killer Gretchen Lowell, is leaving St. Martin’s Press for Simon & Schuster. Marysue Rucci took world rights to three new books from agent Joy Harris at Joy Harris Literary. The first two books in the deal will begin a new series featuring a heroine named Kick Lannigan. Rucci described Lannigan as someone who, as a survivor of a childhood kidnapping, is now a woman who has honed survival and defense skills so she will never be victimized again.” The first book in the new series is tentatively titled One Kick. The third book in the deal will continue Cain’s Gretchen Lowell series.
Penguin Pays Seven Figures for Butcher
Penguin Group is continuing its relationship with bestselling fantasy writer Jim Butcher. The author of the Dresden Files and Codex Alera closed a seven-figure, three-book deal with his current publisher for a new series. Anne Sowards, at Roc, took world English rights to The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, and two sequels, from agent Jennifer Jackson at Donald Maass Literary. Butcher recently published the 14th book in the Dresden Files, a series that has been adapted to TV (on SyFy channel) and turned into a comic book (published by Dynamite Entertainment). The Cinder Spires, Jackson said, is set in a world “of black spires that tower for miles over a mist-shrouded surface” and follows a war between two of the Spires: Spire Albion and Spire Aurora.
Lent Closes Double at Bloomsbury
Jeffrey Lent, who published his last three novels with Grove/Atlantic, is moving to Bloomsbury. The author did not use an agent in the deal, selling two novels to Anton Mueller. The first book, In the Fall: The Harvest, is about a Civil War veteran who returns to his hometown in upstate New York and commits a murder that shocks the quiet community. The second book, The Raven’s Tale, begins with, as Bloomsbury described, the arrival and ensuing disappearance of a “sickly stranger” and her two children from a Vermont town in 1935. A decade later, during the “summer of the atomic bomb,” the stranger’s daughter goes looking for answers to her mother’s disappearance. Lent lives in Vermont.
