Wiesel, Minot, Kidder
Georges Borchardt at the Borchardt Agency has negotiated several high-profile deals in recent days. The first is a new novel by Elie Wiesel, titled A Mad Desire to Dance; Knopf's Jonathan Segal bought North American rights. Published in France this year, the novel centers around a Jewish man in his 60s in New York City whose visits to a psychoanalyst explore the question of whether an overabundance of memory can drive one mad. Tentative publication date is spring 2008, and rights have also been sold in six other countries.
Jordan Pavlin at Knopf has acquired North American rights from Borchardt to a new novel by Susan Minot. A love story, the novel is as yet unwritten and untitled, and delivery date is mid-2008. British rights have already been sold to Fourth Estate.
Borchardt sold North American rights to a new work of nonfiction by Tracy Kidder to Random's Kate Medina. Though the subject of the book is at the moment under wraps, it is said to hold appeal to fans of Kidder's 2003 work, Mountains Beyond Mountains. Probable pub date is fall 2010.
Parini to Doubleday
Doubleday's Gerald Howard has signed up novelist and critic Jay Parini for a four-book contract via Geri Thoma at Elaine Markson. First up will be a film tie-in reissue by Anchor of the author's best-known work, The Last Station (1990), a novel set during the last years of Tolstoy's life; rehearsals for a film adaptation are about to begin. The new works by Parini, in order of their projected completion, are to be a nonfiction book, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America; an untitled novel about Herman Melville in New York City; and a novel, Anderson Depot, set in the Confederate Civil War prisoner of war camp, Andersonville. Doubleday holds world rights in all books except The Last Station, to which it holds North American rights.
Rewriting History
George Gibson at Walker/Bloomsbury has preempted Larry J. Sabato's TheConstitution, Revised Edition; Susan Rabiner and Sydelle Kramer at the Susan Rabiner Agency sold North American rights. Sabato, a political commentator and University of Virginia professor, argues that despite widespread dissatisfaction with government, our near-reverence for the founding fathers has prevented us from tracing the problem to its source—a 220-year-old Constitution written to deal with the problems of another age, long overdue for a revision. An October 2007 publication date is planned.
Self-Help Help
Riverhead's Megan Lynch has preempted (in an exclusive submission) Starlee Kine's It Is Your Fault; Ira Silverberg at Donadio & Olson sold world English rights. Kine is a contributor to public radio's This American Life as well as the New York Times Magazine. When she found herself in her early 30s with a mountain of debt, Kine finally decided to take the advice of numerous friends and family members plugging the virtues of one self-help program or another. She will write about her funny, painful experiences as a self-help guinea pig, from the cult of "I Hope You Dance" to the Radical Honesty method. Riverhead plans to publish in 2008.
YA Debut, Ghost
Razorbill's Kristen Pettit acquired world rights, at auction, to Jay Asher's debut 13 Reasons Why; Laura Rennert at Andrea Brown made the six-figure deal. The novel is about a high school student who receives a box of mysterious tapes from his first love and follows her recorded voice on a strange night journey to discover why she committed suicide two weeks before.
Liz Szabla at Feiwel & Friends has preempted Lewis Buzbee's (The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop) middle-grade Steinbeck's Ghost, about a boy who volunteers to save the town's library and gets drawn into a search for a lost town Steinbeck wrote about; agent Rosemary Stimola sold North American rights.
The Briefing
Barnes & Noble Discover Award—winner Lenore Hart has sold her next novel, Becky, to Hilary Rubin in Rubin's first acquisition at St. Martin's Press, via Christine Earle at ICM. This novel imagines the true story of Becky Thatcher, Tom Sawyer's sweetheart and companion, past her days of adventure with Huck and Tom, into her years as a young mother and beyond. St. Martin's holds world rights.... Susanna Porter at Random/Ballantine bought North American rights to Anne Perry's first stand-alone historical epic, titled The Sheen on the Silk; agent Donald Maass made the significant-six-figure deal. The book, set in the late days of the Byzantine empire, tells the story of a woman masquerading as a eunuch physician in order to search for the truth about her condemned brother.... Wiley's Matthew Holt has acquired world rights to Hector Barreto's The Engine of America: The Keys to Small Business Success from Entrepreneurs Who Have Made It! In the book, Barreto, former administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, will reveal 10 principles of entrepreneurial business success based on interviews as well as his own analysis. Rights were acquired directly from the author, and Wiley plans to publish in fall 2007.
