Running Press Gets Its ‘Vengeance’

Librarian and children’s author Kristen Remenar, writing as Helen Wrath, sold world rights to Draw with a Vengeance, a journal/coloring book, to Jordana Tusman at Running Press. Gordon Warnock at Fuse Literary represented Remenar, closing the deal at auction, and described the book as “Wreck This Journal meets the Bunny Suicides.” Warnock explained that each page of the book, which is set for Valentine’s Day 2016, features “a drawing prompt for a twisted situation in which to doodle the object of your aversion, making them suffer in outrageous and hilarious ways.” The journal presents everything from a figure hugging a cactus to a figure being sent into a wood chipper.

Beeching Takes ‘Heart’ to HarperOne

Mark Tauber at HarperOne took world rights (excluding U.K.) to Vicky Beeching’s Undivided Heart: Coming Home to Ourselves. The book was sold by Gail Ross at the Ross Yoon Agency. Beeching, a longtime Christian musician and Oxford-educated theologian, became an advisor to the United Nations on LGBTQ equality after coming out in 2014. The book, HarperOne said, is her story about “coming to terms with who she really is, what that means for her faith and her career” and also offers “hope for those looking to find their voice.” Undivided Heart is set for winter 2017.

HC Nabs Swedish Hit ‘Little Old Lady’

Harper’s Cal Morgan has acquired U.S. rights to the international bestseller The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules, by Swedish author Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg. Morgan brokered the deal with Jon Mitchell at Pan Macmillan (which published the novel in Canada), on behalf of Barbara J. Zitwer, who has an eponymous agency. The book, the first in a series, follows a group of retirees who break out of their nursing home and go on a crime spree; it was originally published in Sweden and went on to various houses around the world.

Beacon Takes Poetry Anthology

Helene Atwan, publisher of Beacon Press, took North American rights to the poetry anthology Liberation. The book is subtitled New Works on Freedom from Internationally Renowned Poets and is being published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. All the poems in the volume are previously unpublished, and the work will be edited by Mark Ludwig, director of the Terezin Music Foundation (a nonprofit organization that works to maintain the legacy of composers who died in the Holocaust). Ha Jin, the Chinese-American poet and novelist, will be writing the book’s introduction, and the poems—each one a response to the question, what is freedom?—will be contributed by Billy Collins, Fanny Howe, and Robert Pinsky, among others. Joanna Volpe at New Lead Literary & Media brokered the deal with Atwan. Beacon plans to launch the book at a gala concert in Boston on October 5.