Instagram Star Lands at Abrams

In a world English rights acquisition, Abrams’s Samantha Weiner bought a book of cartoons by Emmet Truxes. The author is behind the popular Instagram account

@brooklyncartoons, a feed that the publisher described as “the millennial answer to the New Yorker’s domination of pithy pictorial humor.” Truxes’s images, Abrams elaborated, “gently mock our social media addictions, dating woes, and all-too-relatable milestones and struggles.” Sanford J. Greenburger agent Stephanie Delman represented Truxes.

Kang Gets ‘Beautiful’ at Lake Union

YA author Lydia Kang (Control) sold her debut adult novel, A Beautiful Poison, to Jodi Warshaw at Amazon Publishing’s Lake Union Press imprint. Warshaw took world rights, in a two-book deal, from Eric Myers at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. The novel is set in 1918 New York and follows three estranged friends who are each trying to solve a murder in their own life. They are doing so, Myers said, against the backdrop of World War I and the spread of the global flu epidemic.

Morris Dances to Penguin Press

Dancer and choreographer Mark Morris sold a currently untitled memoir, at auction, to Christopher Richards at Penguin Press. Morris is writing the book with novelist Wesley Stace (The Sound of His Own Voice), and, according to Penguin, it will be “a love letter to dance, music, and to the New York arts scene.” Morris, who has an eponymous dance company, will detail his rise to become one of the leading figures of the modern dance movement, along with his creative process. Claudia Ballard at William Morris Endeavor brokered the deal for U.S., Canadian, and open-market rights.

Berkley Nabs Two Debuts

In the first of two deals for novels by first-time authors at Berkley, Cindy Hwang took North American rights, for six figures, to Anne Corlett’s The Space Between Stars. Hwang preempted the book from its U.K. publisher, Pan Macmillan. The dystopian novel is set in a world where humans have colonized other planets and a pandemic has wiped out huge swaths of the civilization. Against this backdrop, the publisher explained, the heroine begins a “journey to return home to Earth in hopes of finding her estranged boyfriend.” Berkley is comparing the book, which is slated for June 2017, to Emily St. John’s Station Eleven and Michael Farber’s The Book of Strange New Things.

In the second acquisition, Kate Seaver nabbed North American rights, in a two-book deal at auction, to Flying at Night by Rebecca L. Brown. The novel, which Jane Rotrosen agent Christina Hogrebe sold, is told from multiple points of view—that of a nine-year-old autistic boy, his narcissistic mother, and his father (who’s recently suffered a heart attack). The book, which is set for early 2018, explores, Berkley said, “universal questions about the nature of family, isolation, and somehow finding your way home again.”