Touch of Evil
After closing various rights deals abroad—in Spain, the U.K., France and Holland—Scott Moyers at the Wylie Agency has sold North American rights to Ed Vulliamy's Amexica to Eric Chinski at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Vulliamy, a veteran journalist who's worked for both the Guardian and the Observer in England, follows the escalating narcotics war along the Mexican-American border. The book, Moyers said, unfolds with “the path of the border itself,” following tales of violence, corruption and human trafficking from the Pacific to Brownsville, Tex., and is “as much the story of a place and people in the time of war as an in-depth analysis of that war itself.” Vulliamy, who's covered everything from Italian organized crime to the aftermath of September 11, has won two British Press Awards for Foreign Reporter of the Year.
Free Press Re-Ups Pulitzer Finalist
Martin Beiser at the Free Press has signed up world rights to the next book from Pulitzer finalist William Hitchcock. The book, a history of the Eisenhower administration called The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s, was sold by Susan Rabiner; it's slated to pub in November 2013. Hitchcock, a historian and chair of the history department at Temple University, got the Pulitzer nod for his 2008 book, also published by Free Press, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe.
Crown Takes a 'Byte'
The New York Times's design integration editor, Nick Bilton, has sold Byte. Snack. Meal. to Crown executive editor John Mahaney. Bilton, who's toyed with various interactive content models at the Times, described the book as a cross between a business and a culture title. In it, he will focus on businesses that have found successful ways of delivering content to a new breed of readers, known as “consumivores,” in a world which has quickly shifted from being print driven to pixel driven. John Brockman brokered the deal, which was for North American rights.
Two Wiggs in One
Margaret O'Neill Marbury, editorial director at Mira, has acquired a mother-daughter take on wedding planning from prolific women's fiction bestseller Susan Wiggs and her daughter, Elizabeth Wiggs. Meg Ruley and Annelise Robey sold world rights; the book grew out of Elizabeth's blog, the beholder (www.iamthebeholder.wordpress.com), in which she chronicles losing her job and planning for her impending nuptials. The book is scheduled for 2011.
Briefs
Da Capo editor Jonathan Crowe has nabbed world rights to Nicholas Jubber's In the Shadow of the Shahs, which looks at the two sides of Persian culture in Iran and Afghanistan, from its place in the underground parties of Tehran to its manifestations in Islamic fundamentalism. Jeff Gerecke brokered the deal and pub is slated for spring 2010. Jubber, a British journalist, wrote The Prester Quest, which Bantam UK published in 2005.
John Glusman, at Harmony, acquired world rights to Paul Collins's Murder of the Century, about a Gilded Age homicide that sparked a tabloid war and led to the beginnings of modern forensics. Collins is a founding editor of the Collins Library imprint at McSweeney's Books and also teaches in the M.F.A. program at Portland State University; Michelle Tessler brokered the deal, and the book is slated for 2011.
