Media Matters
New Viking senior editor Joshua Kendall has acquired world rights to Harper's editor Bill Wasik's My Crowd from Tina Bennett at Janklow & Nesbit. In describing his travels through the new media culture, provisionally inspired by his own social media experiment, the "flash mob," Wasik will reveal a culture thoroughly dependent upon creating and destroying trends. Viking plans to publish in summer 2008.
Andrew Miller at Vintage/Anchor has acquired North American rights to a series of four books of wholly original media criticism by nonprofit research and information center Media Matters for America, led by bestselling author David Brock; Will Lippincott of Lippincott Massie McQuilkin made the deal. The four books will cover a range of political subjects, with the first due out in early 2007.
Math Matters
Just before an anticipated auction involving five houses, T.J. Kelleher at Smithsonian Books preempted North American rights to Cal State mathematician James Stein's How We Know What We Cannot Know, via agent Jodie Rhodes. The book will examine the discoveries of mathematical geniuses throughout the ages, as well as mathematics' sociopolitical role in everyday life. Stein is a coauthor of How to Shoot from the Hip Without Getting Shot in the Foot (Wiley).
Two-Book Deals
Sterling Lord's Doug Stewart has made a two-book adult deal for bestselling children's author Jane O'Connor (FancyNancy); Carrie Feron at Avon bought North American rights to the mystery Deadly Admissions and another book. In Deadly Admissions, a divorced mother of two and freelance copyeditor who works part-time giving tours at a New York prep school must draw on her brainpower when a college admissions adviser turns up dead. Expected pub date is summer 2007.
In a significant six-figure deal for a new middle-grade author, Trident's Alex Glass sold deputy New Republic editor Katherine Marsh's The Night Tourist to Jennifer Besser at Hyperion, at auction. This is a magical adventure inspired by the myth of Orpheus, in which a 14-year-old boy discovers a ghost world underneath the streets of Manhattan. Hyperion holds North American rights in this two-book deal.
Comics Preempt
Mark Siegel of Holtzbrinck's First Second Books, has preempted a graphic novel titled Germantown by Edgar winner Laurence Klavan and television writer Susan Kim; the world rights deal was handled by Victoria Sanders of Victoria Sanders & Associates and Bernadette Baker of Baker's Mark. Set in a WWII-era immigrant neighborhood in New York, the book tells the story of a comics-obsessed girl who decodes a secret spy message in the pages of a romance novel. Klavan is also the author of The Shooting Script and The Cutting Room (Ballantine).
The Briefing
Pegasus publisher Claiborne Hancock has acquired U.S. rights to Up Close and Personal: The Private Diaries of Catherine Deneuve from Marie de Lantsheere at Orion, which published the French film icon's memoir in the U.K. A collection of seven previously unpublished diaries Deneuve kept, and her first autobiographical work, it was published in France by Editions Stock in 2005; Pegasus will publish in April 2007.... Little, Brown's Michael Pietsch and Pat Strachan have acquired world rights to two novels by Clyde Edgerton. The first, titled The Bible Salesman, the story of two North Carolinians living outside the law and the generations that succeed them, will be published in 2008. Liz Darhansoff at Darhansoff, Verrill & Feldman made the deal.... Harper's Tim Duggan has acquired North American rights to a new novel, The Maytrees, by Pulitzer Prize—winner Annie Dillard from Timothy Seldes at Russell & Volkening. Harper will publish the novel, about a Provincetown family in the 1940s and '50s, in summer 2007.
