The Shawshank Soufflé?
Certainly one side effect of all the editors who become agents—apart from the fact that they no longer mutter about agents—is their ability to sell back to the houses whence they came. Exhibit A: Stephanie Tade, who left Rodale ahead of the company's restructuring this past spring. Lest you think she's been slacking, Tade is back in business with her former firm, selling them a Caribbean cookbook edited by Morgan Freeman. Entertainment luminaries like Hilary Swank, Michael Douglas and Tom Hanks are all being asked by the A-lister for their favorite recipes and island stories, which he's including in Morgan Freeman & Friends: Caribbean Cooking for a Cause.Scheduled for next fall, the book's profits will go to the Grenada Relief Fund, a group set up to help victims of 2004's Hurricane Ivan. The actor/producer has no known Caribbean roots, but felt strongly about doing something for disaster victims well before Katrina made it fashionable. Editorial director Margot Schupf bought world rights.
He'll Take You to Our Leaders
The rich and powerful are the subjects of books all the time, but perhaps not quite like David Rothkopf's Superclass. The title, which FSG editor-in-chief Eric Chinski just bought from Esmond Harmsworth, looks at an international array of powerful figures whom Rothkopf will portray as running the world as they negotiate boardrooms, battlefields, churches, legislatures and high-octane retreats. Not exactly reading you'd want to take on your own vacation, though; the author will demonstrate how the "aggressive pursuit of self-interest by some in this class helped create a world in which inequity is greater than ever and may threaten international stability in our lifetimes." FSG doesn't name names in the announcement, but the book promises to reveal both current and future members of the Superclass. Rothkopf is a former Clinton staffer, runs his own consultancy and is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; his last book, Public Affairs'Running the World, covered America's security agencies. FSG bought world and will pub here in 2008.
Labor Day
Are we eschewing natural childbirth at our peril? So argues former Ms. editor Jennifer Block, who has sold, via Elizabeth Kaplan, a book to Marnie Cochran at Da Capo about the medical and psychological dangers of delivering unnaturally. "In asking why childbirth is currently treated like an emergency instead of an emergence, it challenges the assumption that c-sections, inductions, and epidurals are to be equated with medical progress." The publisher hopes to make it a big title when it brings it out in spring 2007. In a world now littered with Smashed, Juiced, Playedand other monolexical titles, this book may have the best yet: Pushed.
And on the Subjects of Ends and Births...
It's been too short a period that we've had the privilege of writing this column—from the beginning of June to now, not even four months. Yet over this time, despite an alleged summer slowness, we've been able to cover deals involving Michael Crichton, Madeleine Albright, Al Franken, the country's best graphic novelists, Jane Leavy, Bernard Malamud's daughter, Jim Calhoun, a Jane Austen sequel, Roxanne Coady, Michael Tucker, Steve Fraser, Eric Boehlert, Chris Matthews and the Pink Panther (not necessarily in order of importance). We're leaving this column reluctantly, as a result of a job change, and we'll still be covering deals in our new role at Variety, so please keep in touch via the same e-mail address, szeitchik@reedbusiness.com. For coverage in this space, you'll want to talk to the thorough and clever Jason Anthony, whom you may recognize from our Hollywood Reader page, at PWDeals@earthlink.net. In the meantime, thanks for the tips, suggestions and readership that make this one of publishing's most enjoyable columns to write.
