Talk Miramax Books--still alive and kicking--gave movie producer Kathleen DeMarco a good send-off with her first novel, The Cranberry Queen, published last year and just out in paperback, and now editorial director Jonathan Burnham has paid a mid-six figures for her second, The Difference Between You and Me. It's the story of a pair of ill-assorted women in Hollywood, a brashly ambitious would-be movie producer and a bookishly diffident writer who constantly gets in her way. Agent Laura Dail and DeMarco's lawyer, James Adams, sold Burnham world rights on the basis of about 100 pages, and the plan is to publish next summer. Meanwhile, DeMarco, who is John Leguizamo's partner at Lower East Side Films, is working on a screenplay for Cranberry Queen, which is under option to Miramax.
Another re-signing at Talk Miramax was of a new novel by Mark Jude Poirier called Modern Ranch Living. The author, whose first novel, Goats, and story collection Unsung Heroes of American Industry both came from the publisher and won wide critical acclaim, teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop, from which he graduated. Burnham bought North American rights from Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency and plans to publish in the fall of next year.
