Foundry Closes Hat Trick
Foundry Literary + Media closed three deals last week. Agent Mollie Glick sold North American rights to two books: a memoir by the star of The Blair Witch Project, Heather Donahue, and a debut novel by Ka Hancock. Rachel Holtzman at Gotham bought North American rights to Donahue's Growgirl: The Blossoming of an Unlikely Outlaw at auction. Donahue, who made a sudden splash on the big screen at 24 in the cult indie hit Blair Witch, spent the next 10 years in Hollywood languishing in a string of B movies before quitting the business. In Growgirl she chronicles her so-called disappearance from Hollywood—at one point IMDb.com reported her dead—when she moved to the country and started growing cannabis. The book was pitched as a real-life Weeds that, as Donahue explained in her proposal, will also expose a subculture "that few get to see whose tender nuggets touch the lips and minds of 20 million domestic imbibers and 160 million adults worldwide." Hancock's novel, Dancing on Broken Glass, went at auction to Lauren McKenna at Simon & Schuster's Gallery Books imprint; McKenna took North American rights. In the book Hancock, a former psychiatric nurse, follows the rocky but explosive marriage of a bipolar man and a woman with a devastating family history of breast cancer. Glick said that Hancock's experience working with patients with mental illness "shines through in her charismatic hero and tough-as-nails protagonist."
In the third sale, Stéphanie Abou sold Aimee Agresti's novel, Haven, at auction, to Julie Tibbott at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Agresti, a former Us Weekly staffer, follows 16-year-old Haven Terra, who gets an internship at a prestigious Chicago hotel with a group of glamorous staffers called the Outfit. The catch? The Outfit winds up being devils trading in souls. Abou called the book an angels-versus-devils take on The Picture of Dorian Gray.
William Morrow Goes Alt-Reality
Gabe Robinson at William Morrow bought North American rights to two books in a new series about a computer-generated world by Rod Rees. Emma Thawley at Quercus brokered the deal for the Demi-Monde; book one is called The Demi-Monde: Winter. In the series a woman is sent to save the president's daughter from the Demi-Monde, a cyberworld that is inconveniently populated by a collection of famous historical psychopaths.
PublicAffairs Considers ‘Justice'
Clive Priddle at PublicAffairs took world rights to a new book called Justice for the Enemy by William Shawcross, the son of the British lead prosecutor at Nuremberg. In the book, which Lynn Nesbit at Janklow & Nesbit sold, Shawcross examines the case of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (currently on trial and considered one of the chief architects of 9/11), and asks, as the publisher explained: "How does society deal lawfully with the lawless?"
