After all the sturm und drang of recent weeks at Little Random, a flurry of buys in the past week or so gave every indication that things are returning to normal—although all of them involved people in new positions. New editor-in-chief Dan Menaker, for instance, bought a first book by journalist Judith Shulevitz. It's all about the Sabbath, and how a day of rest and religious observance has become the significant feature it is in the lives of millions in many religions the world over. The book is an expansion of the author's recent article in the New York Times magazine, and it was a world rights buy, hard/soft, from Tina Bennett at Janklow & Nesbit.
New executive v-p Kate Medina bought two more books by Dawn Clifton Tripp before her first novel, Moon Tide, is even out (it's due in July). The author, who lives on the Massachusetts coast, has written in her first novel of a family battling the great New England hurricane of 1938. In the first of her new books, Open Water, her subject is offshore bootleg liquor smuggling in the late 1920s; the second, untitled one is set partly in Massachusetts and partly in Hawaii in the late 19th century. Medina bought North American rights in a major six-figure deal with Bill Clegg at Burnes & Clegg.
And veteran editor Ileene Smith, who's just landed at Random, hit the ground running with a couple of purchases. Her very first was of a first book by journalist and critic Rachel Cohen, called A Chance Meeting, about a series of significant encounters between unlikely twosomes that have helped define our cultural life in the last century: between Gertrude Stein and William James, for instance, or James Baldwin and Richard Avedon. She bought world rights from Eric Simonoff at Janklow & Nesbit with a best bid. Smith's other acquisition was Home Fires: The Tragedy of an American Mining Town, about the persistent coal-mine fire that devastated Centralia, Pa., for 40 years, and the political and environmental wrangling that went into the relocation of the town's inhabitants. It's by Centralia-born reporter and lawyer Joan Quigley and was purchased, world rights, from Betsy Lerner at The Gernert Company.
