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Hot Deals John F. Baker -- 11/13/00 Chopra: New Deal, New Publisher | A Cuban Exile at Yale Agents Selling Each Other | Guggenheim Revealed Short Takes Chopra: New Deal, New PublisherDeepak Chopra, now represented by Robert Gottlieb at his new Trident Media Group, has a new two-book deal--for two novels, unusually--and a new publisher. Gottlieb sold the package, hard/soft North American, for a million dollars to Stacy Creamer for Putnam and NAL. The first book is called The Last Kiss and is the story of a marriage in which the wife dies and is then reborn to form a kind of spiritual union with her husband. Gottlieb actually made the deal for Chopra while the author was traveling in India with the Dalai Lama--himself no stranger to book deals (see Hot Deals, Nov. 6). Planned pub date for the first book is next fall or early winter. Chopra's previous venture into fiction, The Return of Merlin, was published five years ago and is still in Fawcett paperback. A Cuban Exile at Yale
Agents Selling Each OtherIt's reasonably newsy when one agent sells the work of another to a publisher; when the second agent then reciprocates by selling the work of the first in turn, something is clearly going on. The relationship in question is that of Henry Dunow, operating under his own shingle, and Betsy Lerner at the Gernert Agency. Six months ago, Lerner sold a book written by Dunow, The Way Home, about coaching his son in Little League, to Broadway, which is publishing in May. Now Dunow is repaying the favor and has just sold a new book by Lerner, called Food and Loathing in New Haven, to David Rosenthal at Simon & Schuster (where it will be edited by Denise Roy). The book is a witty autobiographical account of the author's struggles in life--with mother, with body-image anxiety--and her fight for acceptance. Dunow got six figures for Lerner, world English rights; we forget what she got for him. Guggenheim RevealedA biography of wealthy art collector and (often romantically inclined) patron Peggy Guggenheim will inevitably drop dozens of celebrated names, and Mary Dearborn, no stranger to controversial subjects (she's done books about Norman Mailer and Henry Miller) seems just the person to write it. So thought her agent, Georges Borchardt, who successfully pitched the notion to executive editor Janet Silver at Houghton Mifflin. She paid six figures for U.S. and Canada. Meanwhile, Borchardt also sold Spanish rights to Lumen, and a German auction begun at Frankfurt ended with a sale to Lubbe. U.K. rights went to Virago/Little, Brown. Short Takes
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Hot Deals
Nov 13, 2000
A version of this article appeared in the 11/13/2000 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: