Lane Auctioned Off To Viking

Viking assistant editor Maggie Riggs bought world rights, at auction, to Tim Lane’s debut novel, Rules of Becoming a Legend. Agent Rachael Dillon Fried at Sanford J. Greenburger negotiated the deal for Lane, a former foreign rights manager at Penguin who, prior to that, was a sports reporter for a small-town newspaper in the Pacific Northwest. Lane, who is now back in Portland, writes about a teenage basketball prodigy in the novel, which is also set in Oregon. The author’s short fiction has appeared in literary journals like Dry Erase and The Good Men Project.

Page to Screen

Fox 2000 has optioned Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, which was released by Reagan Arthur Books in July. The option was done on behalf of producer Karen Rosenfelt (The Devil Wears Prada), who is currently developing feature adaptations of Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief and Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up. The novel, which explores the dark underside of competitive teenage cheerleading and was pitched by the publisher as “Fight Club for girls,” is being adapted for the screen by Abbott. Sylvie Rabineau and Jill Gillet at RWSG Literary did the deal on behalf of Dan Conaway at Writers House.

‘America’s Pediatrician’ Goes to Da Capo

Merloyd Lawrence, who has an eponymous imprint at Da Capo, bought world rights to a memoir called Learning to Listen: A Life Caring for Children by a physician who was once known as “America’s Pediatrician,” Dr. T. Berry Brazelton. The book, which is scheduled for spring 2013, was sold by agent Robert Lescher. Brazelton’s current appointments include Clinical Professor of Pediatrics Emeritus at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Psychiatry and Human Development at Brown University. In 1995, Harvard Medical School established the T. Berry Brazelton Chair in Pediatrics. He’s written over 20 books, and a behavioral assessment scale he developed, known as the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, is widely used in hospitals. Da Capo said the book will offer a “candid and revealing” look at the man “whose research taught doctors and parents to see the individuality and power of newborns, and whose practice and advocacy enhanced the lives of children all over the world.”