DEAL OF THE WEEK
Gallery Re-ups Christina Lauren
The writing duo of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, who work under the pen name Christina Lauren, inked a new two-book deal at Gallery Books. Jennifer Bergstrom at the Simon & Schuster imprint took world English rights from Holly Root at Root Literary, with senior editor Hannah Braaten set to edit. The first book under the agreement, currently untitled, is set for spring 2022 and, the publisher said, was pitched as “a gender-swapped Romancing the Stone meets The Hangover, where a scrappy canyoneering guide is reunited with her city-boy ex on a deadly treasure hunt in the red rock canyons of Southern Utah.” Gallery has been publishing Lauren since 2013.
FROM THE U.S.
Krans Gets Mystical at Chronicle
Eva Avery at Chronicle Prism bought a new collection in Kim Krans’s Wild Unknown series in a six-figure, world rights deal brokered by Meg Thompson at Thompson Literary Agency. Chronicle called Krans (The Wild Unknown Tarot) “a visionary author who has transformed the world of tarot and oracle art and writing.” The deal includes two stationery items releasing in fall 2021 featuring the author’s mystical art: The Wild Unknown Notebook Set and The Wild Unknown Notecards. Also included in the deal is an oracle deck, The Wild Unknown Alchemy Deck and Guidebook, and a currently untitled daily journal. The latter two titles are slated for spring and fall 2022, respectively.
Bevins Mounts ‘Uprising’ for Priddle
For PublicAffairs, Clive Priddle took world rights to Vincent Bevins’s The Uprisings. Rob McQuilkin at Massie & McQuilkin sold the nonfiction title, which, the publisher said, is “a global survey of the modern era of populist uprisings from Brazil to the Arab Spring to the unrest in Hong Kong.” Bevins’s The Jakarta Method, about CIA interventions in several international conflicts, was also published by PublicAffairs; it was named one of the best books of 2020 by NPR.
Knopf Gets Poetic with Clark
Blood Sisters, Heather Clark’s survey of four American poets, was bought by Deb Garrison at Knopf. The book, subtitled The Boston Years of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Maxine Kumin, was sold by Jacques de Spoelberch at J. de S. Associates in a world English rights deal. De Spoelberch said Blood Sisters paints “a group portrait of four remarkable women who brought ‘confessional’ poetry into the American mainstream.” Clark shows how the women, who all won Pulitzer Prizes, “broke the rules and broke new ground,” writing “poetry that defined their era and jump-started a movement that changed America.”
