Family Ties

Katie Herman at Soho Press bought world rights to a debut novel titled A Stranger on the Planet by Adam Schwartz. Schwartz, who teaches writing at Wellesley College, chronicles a son's long-running attempt to work out his difficult familial relationships—save a down-to-earth twin sister he's got an unstable mother, a remote father and a religious zealot brother. In the process, the protagonist tries to start a healthy family of his own. Soho is planning to publish the novel, portions of which have run as short stories in the New Yorker, in January 2011. Schwartz did not have an agent in the deal.

GCP Gets Simon's 'Girl'

Grand Central Press editor-in-chief Deb Futter pre-empted world English rights to The Story of Beautiful Girl, a new novel by Rachel Simon. Simon, best known for her memoir Riding the Bus with My Sister (published in 2002 by HMH and later made into a Hallmark TV movie starring Rosie O'Donnell and Andie McDowell), was represented by Anne Edelstein in the deal; the novel, which opens in the late '60s, follows a beautiful, mute white woman and a deaf black man who escape the school for the disable, where they've been incarcerated, with their newborn baby. The police wind up tracking down the mother—after the father escapes—but miss the baby. These three principal characters then spend their lives searching for each other.

Wiley Has Second Helping of Big Daddy

Agent Jane Dystel, of Dystel & Goderich, closed a second cookbook deal for Food Network chef Aaron McCargo Jr., again with Wiley's Justin Schwartz. The Big Daddy Cookbook, which Schwartz bought world rights to, will offer recipes spun off from McCargo Jr.'s show Big Daddy's House (now in its third season). Wiley will be releasing the title next fall, before Simply to Well Done, the McCargo book that Dystel sold to Schwartz this summer.

Caruso-Cabrera Lands at S&S

Host of CNBC's Power Lunch, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, has closed a deal with Threshold Editions for You Know I'm Right. Anthony Ziccardi, v-p and associate publisher of the S&S imprint, bought world rights from Maura Teitelbaum at Abrams Artists Agency, and Mitchell Ivers will edit. The book, slated for October 2010, will, according to S&S, “present a roadmap to correcting the economic and social woes of the nation,” while slamming “hypocrites and radicals on both sides of the political spectrum.”

Gillies Finds Her Voice

Bill Clegg at William Morris Endeavor sold U.S., Canadian, and open market rights to Isabel Gillies's new memoir The Sugar Basket to Barbara Jones at Hyperion/Voice. The book is a follow-up to Gillies's bestselling Happens Every Day: An-All-Too-True-Story (Scribner, 2009), in which the former Law & Order: SVU actress chronicled her life-shattering revelation of her husband's affair (which inconveniently happened after she'd relocated the family, and quit the show, for his job). Voice is planning to publish Sugar Basket in August 2011.

Coben Backlisters

New American Library publisher Kara Welsh acquired U.S. rights to two early novels by bestseller Harlan Coben—Play Dead and Miracle Cure—from Lisa Erbach Vance at Aaron Priest Literary. The Penguin imprint, which is Coben's paperback publisher, is planning to release the books as premium mass markets in 2010 and 2011, respectively, coordinating the pub dates with Orion in the U.K. and Belfond in France. Coben wrote the thrillers in his twenties and both have been out of print for over 15 years.