Wolcott to Doubleday
Gerald Howard at Doubleday acquired North American rights to two new books by James Wolcott via Elyse Cheney. The first is an as-yet untitled memoir of downtown New York in the '70s, when in 1972 Wolcott, at Norman Mailer's suggestion, left Maryland to take a job at the Village Voice as a classified ad taker and eventually became the paper's television and music critic. This impressionistic account of the art, theater, literary and punk music scenes of the period will recall a time when the city was dirty, dangerous, affordable and populated with all manner of free spirits. The second book in the deal will collect the most significant reviews and essays from his 30 years of cultural journalism for the Voice, the New Republic, Vanity Fair and other publications. The memoir is scheduled for fall 2010, with the collection to appear a year later.
S&S Doubles Up
Marysue Rucci preempted world rights to a memoir by 30-year-old photographer Shreve Stockton titled The Daily Coyote: A Year with Charlie, derived from her popular blog of the same name; Stacey Glick at Dystel & Goderich made the sale. The book will chronicle Stockton's first year raising an orphaned coyote cub as a beloved household pet (and brother to tomcat Eli) in her one-room cabin in rural Wyoming; Rucci describes it as “Operating Instructions meets Marley & Me.” The book will also include many of Stockton's photographs, and pub date is scheduled for fall 2008.
Bob Bender at Simon & Schuster beat five other houses in an auction for David Blight's untitled biography of Frederick Douglass; Wendy Strothman sold world rights. Yale historian Blight's 2001 Race and Reunion received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize; his most recent work is A Slave No More, published by Harcourt in November. S&S pub date is sometime in 2011.
Independent Debuts
Richard Nash at Soft Skull, now a Counterpoint imprint, bought world rights to Cristy Road's debut Bad Habits via Holly Bemiss at the Susan Rabiner Agency. The 25-year-old artist, who is already known in the punk scene, has designed CDs for numerous bands and illustrated for magazines like Jane and GQ. Her illustrated memoir about drugs, sex and love in underground New York City will take readers on an uncensored tour of her world, in which street psychopharmacology results in both revelatory and tragic experiences, which Road ultimately leaves behind. Pub date is fall 2008.
Dan Wickett at Dzanc Books bought U.S. rights to a debut story collection by Laura van den Berg titled What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us via Katherine Fausset at Curtis Brown. The stories are thematically linked by the inclusion of myths and legends, from Big Foot to a mythical creature in the Congo. Last year, van den Berg was awarded this new press's inaugural Dzanc Prize, given for a work-in-progress in conjunction with an author's community service literary project (van den Berg will be teaching creative writing at a prison program). Pub date for the collection is fall 2009.
On Limits
Hyperion's Brendan Duffy bought world English rights to Leo Babauta's The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential via Holly Root at the Waxman Agency. This slim book will focus on enhancing productivity by encouraging readers to place limits on themselves, allowing them to do less but be more effective, get more done and simplify their lives. The author is the founder of zenhabits.net, a Technorati top 100 blog; no pub date yet.
