Vanguard Locks in Bloom
Agent Laura Dail sold North American rights to a book by Lisa Bloom called Think! A Modern Girl's Manifesto for Staying Smart in a Dumbed Down World. Bloom is an attorney and legal analyst for both CBS News and CNN, and frequents the TV circuit—she's appeared on everything from The Early Show to Anderson Cooper 360 and is also a recurring fixture on The Dr. Phil Show. In the book, which Roger Cooper and Georgina Levitt at Vanguard acquired, Bloom, a Yale Law graduate, cautions women against paying too much attention to tabloid media. As Dail explains, she tells them to "toss out dusty old myths and dangerous distractions, and start thinking for themselves again." Vanguard is planning a spring 2011 publication.

Stolz Takes on the Techies
Rodale editor Shannon Welch acquired North American rights to a book by model and TV personality Kim Stolz about how technology and new media is reshaping our culture. The book is currently untitled, and the deal was brokered by Steve Troha at Folio Literary Management. Stolz, a self-proclaimed tech junkie, first gained attention as a contestant on America's Next Top Model. Now the 2005 Wesleyan grad is a correspondent for MTV News who also blogs for True/Slant and the Huffington Post. In the book, Stolz's first, she will combine research as well as personal anecdotes to show how everything from social networking to reality TV have influenced our interactions in dating, politics, friendships, sex, and work. Rodale said Stolz's "unique perspective and position within the world of youth culture will lend a human and relatable voice to the subject matter."

Putnam Nabs YA Debut
G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers has pre-empted world rights, in what it called a "major" deal, to Sara Wilson Etienne's debut YA novel, The Harbinger. The acquisition is part of a two-book deal by editor Stacey Barney and agent Michael Bourret of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. The Harbinger is a paranormal work set in a near-future world in which a diminishing oil supply has led to chaos as cities have fallen prey to mass rioting. The 16-year-old heroine begins the novel trapped in a prisonlike school called Holbrook Academy, where she's tormented by strange visions. These visions lead her to the Harbinger, who has been sent to destroy the world in order to save it. As fate would have it, our heroine is the only one who can stop the titular being. Putnam is planning a spring 2010 publication. Wilson Etienne studied marine biology and lives in California.

Times Books Dips into Jewish Liberal ‘Crisis'
Paul Golob, editorial director of Times Books, took world English rights to Peter Beinart's The Crisis of Liberal Zionism. Tina Bennett at Janklow & Nesbit brokered the deal. The book examines the growing gap—a worrisome gap in Beinart's mind—between liberal American Jews and the state of Israel, and expands on the author's controversial story in the June 10 issue of the New York Review of Books called "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment." According to the publisher, the book will "lay bare the fissures in the Jewish community in the United States and in Israel, tracing the history of this divide and showing how it has come to manifest itself in American politics and Israeli attitudes." Beinart is the former editor of the New Republic and current senior fellow at the New America Foundation; Times Books is planning a late 2011 publication.