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SubSIDIARY RIGHTS LIST
Uwem Akpan
A Jesuit priest from Nigeria and recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan, Akpan has already enjoyed a success that most writers only dream of: The first two stories he ever submitted for publication landed in The New Yorker, one in their 2005 Debut Fiction Issue, the other in their 2006 War Issue. The collection, comprised of two novellas and three short stories, takes us into the world of African children caught up in impossible situations. Whether telling the stories of child slaves, child prostitutes, street children, child soldiers or genocide orphans, Akpan's steady, unpretentious voice vividly and heart-wrenchingly captures the tragedies, ironies, humor and hope of these characters.
U.S./Canadian rights to Little, Brown (June, 2008) Dutch Rights to DeVuurbaak
Brazilian rights to Ediouro Italian rights to Mondadori
British rights to Little, Brown & Co. Spanish rights to El Tercer Nombre
Chinese rights to Business Weekly Finalist for the Commonwealth Prize
Toby Ball
Somewhere between the work of James Ellroy and Caleb Carr is Toby Ball's The Vaults: a dystopian, almost surreal period thriller in which a chilling series of events leads three different men to join in exposing the legacy of a radical program for punishing murderers. Set in the mid-1930s, at the height of the most corrupt administration ever known in "The City" (reminiscent of Chicago, much in the way "Gotham City" is of New York), the novel opens with a mysterious duplicate file discovered deep in the Vaults -- a cavernous hall containing all of the municipal criminal justice records of the last 70 years. From here, the story follows Arthur Puskis, the Vault's sole, hermit-like archivist, who brings an almost mystical faith to a system he believes must cohere; Frank Frings, a high-profile investigative journalist with a self-medicating reefer habit; and Ethan Poole, a socialist private eye with a penchant for blackmail. All three independently uncover evidence of "The Navajo Project," a penal experiment confining murderers to rural farms which they work in order to support their victims' survivors -- at least as the operation was originally intended... All the while, working to bury a set of increasingly ugly truths, and at any cost, are the mayor, his violent henchmen, and the group of wealthy businessmen who form the mayor's inner circle.
U.S./Canadian rights to Minotaur/St. Martin's Press (Spring 2010)
Amanda Boyden
Spanning the year between Hurricane Ivan, which spares the great, vulnerable city of New Orleans, and Hurricane Katrina, soon to devastate it utterly, Babylon Rolling tracks the lives of a small group of neighbors on Orchid Street. Black or white, striving or simply festering, these people of disparate backgrounds all share the same small patch of ground. The novel unfolds through multiple points of view: Fearius, a black sixteen-year-old recently released from juvenile detention, tells his story of returning to drug dealing. Ariel May, a white thirty-something relocated to New Orleans from Minnesota, relates her shifts as a general manager of a contemporary hotel and restaurant in the French Quarter. While Ariel's husband Ed lets the reader in on his days spent as a househusband and stay-at-home father of two. Cerise Brown, a black woman in her 70s, sits on her porch, watching the changing face of the same block on which she's lived for decades. And then there's Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges, a white, longtime "Uptown lady," who nurses her cancer-stricken husband, even as she passes judgment daily on the rest of the block's inhabitants. Building up a real sense of menace and suspense as it goes, the novel examines what occurs when the characters' paths intersect, indeed, collide -- along the way taking an unflinching look at racism, cultural biases, and mistakes of prejudgment.
U.S. rights to Pantheon (August, 2008) French rights to Albin Michel
Canadian rights to Knopf Canada
Katie Crouch
Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks). But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps South Carolina for a life in New York City. There, she and her fellow displaced Southern friends try to make sense of city sophistication, to understand how much of their training applies to real life, and how much to the strange and rarefied world they've left behind. When life's complications become overwhelming, Sarah returns home to confront with matured eyes the motto "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia"- and to see how much fuller life can be, for good and for ill, among those who know you best. Girls in Trucks introduces a narrative voice that is astonishing and irresistible - a true, sweet, and wise voice that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent.
U.S. rights to Little, Brown & Co. (April, 2008) British rights to Bloomsbury UK
Katie Crouch
On a warm April evening in 1985, Buzz Legare--notoriously charming general practitioner and family man--went on a routine fishing trip in the mouth of the Charleston harbor. Two days later, his boat was found drifting, holding nothing but his fishing pole and his waiting Labrador Retriever. Now, it is 2008, and the family Buzz left behind is still struggling in his wake: His son, Palmer, a veterinarian, has crafted a seemingly perfect life for himself. But although he has a loving partner and a fabulous, envied home, Palmer feels frustratingly numb to it all. Buzz's daughter, Hannah, on the other hand, lives a rudderless existence. Plagued by delusions of seeing her lost father in crowds, and certain that he must still be alive, she finds herself undermining her marriage. And then there is Buzz's wife, the (well) re-married Daisy, who, despite having much to say about her childrens' lives, is almost pathological about keeping her own feelings under lock and key. On the brink of the dissolving economy, Hannah faces a shake up damaging enough to land her back home in South Carolina for a month. There, she decides to find out once and for all what really happened to her father two decades prior.
U.S. rights to Little, Brown & Co (April, 2010) British rights to Bloomsbury UK
Jon Loomis
Jon Loomis's sharp and witty debut, High Season, starring Detective Frank Coffin, a onetime Baltimore homicide detective who came back to his hometown after one too many grisly crime scenes started to take their toll, was one of The Washington Post's best mysteries of the year and an editor's choice title for The New York Times Book Review. Now, in Loomis's winning follow-up, Coffin has to get a grip in order to investigate the murder of one of the town's most "popular" women. Beautiful and the heir to a tremendous fortune, Kenji Sole had an active love life---a very active love life. When she's found stabbed to death on the floor of her bedroom dressed only in a negligee, it's clear someone very close to her is probably responsible. Since she didn't care about her many lovers' marital status, Frank and his partner Officer Lola Winters have their work cut out for them interviewing all of her lovers---not to mention their jealous wives---to find out who killed the much-sought-after Ms. Sole. With Mating Season, another wry and wickedly suspenseful mystery, Loomis continues to be one of crime fiction's most promising stars.
U.S./Canadian rights to Minotaur/St. Martin's Press (May, 2009)
Lish McBride
Sam Corvus LaCroix, a sweet but aimless drop-out, spends his days flipping burgers in Seattle. The job bores Sam, but at least he's surrounded by his crew: Ramon, his best friend and fellow skateboarding enthusiast; Brooke, a mouthy high school senior; and Frank, a new employee desperately in need of an infusion of self-confidence. An unfortunate flying potato incident brings Sam to the attention of the evil Douglas, a local necromancer who makes a nice living raising dead celebrities and politicians for cash. When Douglas discovers that Sam possesses latent necromancy powers (which is news to him) he gives Sam seven days to join forces with him—or else. With its fast-paced narrative, appealing humor, and world populated with memorable creatures, McBride's debut novel recalls early Christopher Moore. Necro House, the second book in the series, will be published in 2011.
World English to Holt Books for Young Readers (2010)
Don Lee
Don Lee's bold new novel, Wrack and Ruin, is a hilarious, incisive romp about two estranged brothers. Lyndon Song, once a famous sculptor, is now a Brussels sprouts farmer in a small California town. His brother, Woody, formerly a financial planner who squandered all of his clients' money, including their parents', is now a movie producer. He's trying to get financing for a remake of a Hong Kong action film, and with less-than-scrupulous intentions, he visits Lyndon for the weekend only to wreak havoc on his brother's life. The novel, with its deft plotting and razor-sharp prose, serves as a brilliant satire on art, ethnicity, and environmentalism, and reads with an exhilarating comic verve akin to The Wonder Boys and Sideways. Don Lee is the author of the novel Country of Origin, which won an American Book Award, and the story collection Yellow, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction.
U.S./Canadian rights to W.W. Norton (April, 2008)
Maaza Mengiste
Maaza Mengiste's haunting debut is the story of a family living through the Communist-backed revolution that threw Ethiopia into what was at that time one of the most violent and bloody coups in African history. In 1974, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed in what Ethiopians were promised would be a "bloodless coup", a military revolt that would oust a monarchy dating back to the days of King Solomon. No one, however, could have anticipated the violent years that would follow the Emperor's removal from his throne. Mengiste's beautiful and powerful novel is about a family who has everything to lose as they discover that their loyalties to each other and to themselves rest on the faintest, thinnest of lines. There is Hailu, the patriarch of the family and a prominent doctor. As much as he tries to stop his youngest son, Dawit, from getting involved in political activities, it is he who is thrown into the turmoil when he becomes one of the revolution's key instruments in keeping a torture victim alive to ensure her return to jail for more questioning. Meanwhile, Dawit, headstrong and determined, disobeys his father and joins an underground resistance to combat the Marxist regime. His devotion to his childhood friend, Mickey, is challenged when Mickey a member of the police force rises in the ranks as the revolution continues to get bloodier. Hailu's oldest son, Yonas, wants nothing more than to ignore the changes in his country and his family. He finds a refuge in prayer, but even that isn't enough once Hailu is ordered to report to jail for reasons that no one in the family knows, and about which Hailu will not speak. Beneath the Lion's Gaze is a novel that questions what it means to live a life that is worth fighting - and dying - for.
U.S. rights to W.W. Norton (2010) Dutch rights to Ambo/Anthos
Brazilian rights Record Italian rights to Neri Pozza
British rights to Jonathan Cape
Joe Meno
Like everyone else in the weeks leading up to the 2004 Presidential Election, the Casper family is looking for answers. Jonathan, a professor of marine paleontology, is searching for the prehistoric giant squid, an animal, if found alive, will certainly help solve the dilemma of evolution once and for all. His wife, Madeline, an animal behaviorist, tired of Jonathan's ongoing obsession and constant forgetfulness, has had enough. Ignoring her own failing experiment, Madeline begins following a peculiar cloud around their Hyde Park, Chicago neighborhood. Amelia, their eldest daughter, a junior in high school and dedicated Marxist, has decided she is going to overthrow capitalist society, even if it involves using explosives. Thisbe, their youngest daughter, a high school freshman, rides her bicycle around, searching for her neighbor's pets to baptize, continually praying for a better singing voice. Henry, their grandfather, imprisoned in a dreary retirement home, dreams of an imaginary war, a battle which began when he was a boy and had been forced to live in an American internment camp in Texas, the world of sci-fi radio serials his only escape. With wit and humor, The Great Perhaps is a novel about the necessity of complicated answers to complicated questions and how our fear and acceptance of this complexity often shapes our world.
U.S./Canadian rights to W.W. Norton (April, 2009) UK rights to Picador
Lydia Millet
T. is a young Los Angeles real estate developer consumed by power and political ambitions. His orderly, upwardly mobile life is thrown into chaos by the sudden appearance of his nutty mother, who's been deserted by T.'s now out-of-the-closet father. After his mother's suicide attempt and two other deaths, T. finds himself increasingly estranged from his latest project: a retirement community in the middle of the California desert. As he juggles family, business, and social responsibilities, T. begins to nurture a curious obsession with vanishing species. Soon he's living a double life, building sprawling subdivisions by day and breaking into zoos at night to be near the animals. A series of calamities forces T. to a tropical island, where he takes a Conrad-esque journey up a river into the remote jungle. Millet's devastating wit, psychological acuity, and remarkable empathy for flawed humankind contend with her vision of a world slowly murdering itself. Millet is the author of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, short-listed for the 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction. Her other work includes George Bush, Dark Prince of Love and My Happy Life, winner of the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction.
U.S./Canadian rights to Counterpoint (February, 2008)
Paperback rights to Harvest
British rights to Heinemann/Vintage
French rights to Cherche Midi
Tom Perrotta
"Perrotta is that rare writer equally gifted at drawing people's emotional maps... and creating sidesplitting scenes. Suburban comedies don't come any sharper." -People
From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Children, comes a novel that takes on the growing influence of the evangelical movement. When Sex Ed teacher Ruth Ramsey is told she must teach abstinence education instead of sex education, she becomes increasingly concerned with the power Pastor Dennis's evangelical Tabernacle of Truth wields over the community. Ruth is further appalled when her daughter's attractive, born-again soccer coach, Tim Mason, leads the team in prayer after winning a match. A former alcoholic and drug addict, Tim is also grappling with the church: he has never agreed with Pastor Dennis's more fanatical beliefs and doesn't want his sudden, innocent decision to pray after the game to turn into a political movement. Perrotta expertly and intimately portrays Ruth and Tim as they fight desperately for what they believe in -- and, moreover, to discover just what that is.
U.S. rights to St. Martin's Press (October, 2007) French rights to Editions de l'Olivier
Brazilian rights to Saraiva Italian rights to Edizioni e/o
British rights to Fourth Estate/HarperCollins Portuguese rights to Pergaminho
Canadian rights to Random/Vintage Romanian rights to Editura Trei
Croatian rights to Algoritam Spanish rights to Salamandra
Dutch rights to De Bezige Bij Swedish rights to Natur & Kultur
Film rights to Warner Independent Turkish rights to Siren
Eileen Pollack
"Eileen Pollack writes with great acuity, humor, and intelligent resignation about the various ways family love is called upon and revealed. This book is terrific company."
-- Lorrie Moore
Taking on the hidden surfaces and interior worlds beneath any family unit, In the Mouth, is witty, affecting, and irresistible. Pollack shows us how secrets that might sunder a family often become its strongest connection. Whether in the form of an unopened safe a family is selling in a yard sale, or a son realizing his father is guilty of murder, these stories investigate the nerve endings of human relationships. Pollack writes about times of tragedy and transition insightfully, aware of their everyday quality and of their gravity. In the Mouth is a window onto the amazing tenderness and irrationality of human life. One of the stories, "The Bris," was selected for The Best American Short-Stories 2008 edited by Stephen King.
U.S./Canadian rights to Four Way Books (April, 2008)
Lucinda Rosenfeld
What if your best friend, whom you've always counted on to flail around in love and luck, suddenly starts to surpass you in every way? Wendy Murman's best friend Daphne has always been dependably prone to catastrophe. And Wendy has always been there to help. When Daphne veers from suicidal to madly in love, Wendy offers her encouragement. But when Daphne is suddenly engaged, pregnant, and decorating a fabulous townhouse in no time at all, Wendy is...not so happy for her. Caught between wanting to be the best friend a girl could ask for and crippling jealousy of flighty Daphne, Wendy takes things to the extreme, waging what seems to be a full-scale attack on her best friend-all the while wearing her best, I'm-so-happy-for-you smile-and ends up in way over her head. I'm So Happy for You is a darkly funny, razor-sharp novel about the competitive side of female friendship.
U.S./Canadian rights to Little, Brown & Company (July, 2009)
Rakesh Satyal
"The best fiction reminds us that humanity is much, much larger than our personal world, our own little reality. Blue Boy shows us a world too funny and sad and sweet to be based on anything but the truth." -- Chuck Palahniuk
Twelve-year-old Kiran Sharma is a very confused child. For starters, he is an Indian kid growing up in a small Ohio town. He spends most of his days dancing ballet around his house and playing with dolls, often to escape the constant humiliation he faces at school. At the same time, he has developed a nasty habit of looking at dirty magazines and raiding his mother's make-up drawer. One day Kiran has an epiphany: What if he is, in truth, a reincarnation of the beautiful, gender-bending Hindu god Krishna? Wouldn't that explain why he's so different from everyone else? Too precocious for his own good yet determined to turn his peculiarities into something positive, Kiran sets to the task of crafting his own existence after the blue god's, from Krishna's diet to his musical skill. And then there is the question of who will be his wife and consort, a problem Kiran reflects on with his usual blend of imagination and denial. In a stroke of creative excitement, he decides that he will unveil his newly polished persona at his elementary school's fall talent show, but on the way, he must challenge his classmates, a few teachers, his one friend, and even his parents to prove that he is worthy of their acceptance and admiration. What happens at the performance will be an eye-opening experience for all involved.
U.S./Canadian rights to Kensington Books (May, 2009) Indian rights to Roli Books
Liza Ward
Spanning ten years during and immediately following the First World War, The Influence of Stars tells a story of alienated heroism and disillusionment in marriage that carries echoes of classics like The Angle of Repose and The Great Santini. Luck Ames is one of the first pilots to fly for a newly instituted and still shaky U.S. Air Mail. Jenny Wheelright is the society girl from Brooklyn Heights who becomes his good luck charm, and then his wife. We follow the Ameses through the tumultuous end of the Great War and a New York ravaged by the Spanish Influenza, on into the Roaring Twenties, and their return to the Nebraska farm of Lucky's youth. There he begins experimenting with transcontinental night flights between Omaha and North Platte, even as Jenny becomes increasingly unhinged by the endless land and the lonely nights -- to say nothing of the gradual realization that her husband can never love his ties to the earth half as much as he loves the sky. Just as she did in her highly acclaimed first novel, Outside Valentine, recently short-listed for the inaugural Dylan Thomas Award in the U.K., Ward shows us with stark honesty just how human and vulnerable we truly are.
World English rights to Riverhead (2010)
British rights to Chatto & Windus
Nancy Woodruff
Actress Georgie Connelly is thrilled to leave her stifling suburban existence behind and move to London with her husband and three young sons. Almost immediately, she lands her dream role, playing 18th century actress and royal mistress Dora Jordan in a one-woman show. Dora Jordan, a real life figure, was the most famous stage actress of her time, mistress to the Duke of Clarence (later King William IV of England) and mother to thirteen beloved children. Dora's story, "Shakespeare's Woman," unfolds as a play-within-the-novel, and as Georgie rehearses her part she feels a growing connection to Dora, whose struggle to combine the family she loves with work she adores strikes Georgie as remarkably similar to her own. As the play opens to great acclaim, Georgie also finds herself increasingly drawn to the playwright, Piers Brighstone, and when they leave London for a short run at a countryside theatre, she and Piers begin an affair. My Wife's Affair is about infidelity and its devastating effects on a good marriage, but more than that it is about the wrenching conflicts one woman must face between work and family, mother and children, art and life. The novel is narrated by Georgie's husband Peter, a failed writer turned businessman whose discovery of the affair leads to harrowing consequences that none of them could possibly foresee.
World rights to Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (January, 2010)
Contact: Lance Fitzgerald (Lance.Fitzgerald@us.penguingroup.com)
Daniel P. Erikson
From the Bay of Pigs fiasco to exploding cigars, the deadly serious threat of nuclear war with the Soviets to the Mariel boatlift, Elián Gonzales to the current controversy over the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay; few relationships between nations rival that between Cuba and the United States for drama, passion, and sheer conflict. With the illness and seemingly impending death of Fidel Castro, this dynamic has only intensified, leaving global attention focused on two very important questions: What will happen in Cuba when Fidel Castro dies, and what does the U.S. plan to do about it? In The Cuba Wars, Cuba expert and Washington D.C.-based commentator Daniel Erikson explores the possible outcomes of what promises to be one of the most dramatic political transitions of the 21st century. Through years of research conducted during a dozen trips to Cuba, including meetings and conferences with many of the island's leading political figures, Erikson sheds light in the darkened corners of Cuba's current social and political realities: The details (and difficulties) of Castro's own succession plan, the possibilities for a more open-doored Cuban economy, the potential role in Cuba's transition of new actors on the world stage like China and Venezuela, and the drastic changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba that have been quietly instituted under George W. Bush. With verve and clarity, he paints a vivid and penetrating portrait of a nation that, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of its last revolution, finds itself on the verge of a different kind of revolution entirely.
U.S. rights to Bloomsbury (November, 2008)
J. Malcolm Garcia
In nearly seven years of travel after 9/11 between Kansas City, where he lives, and a post-Taliban Afghanistan, J. Malcolm Garcia found an emotional and professional center--one that, in spite of other assignments and war reporting, drew him back to the region over and over again. Unlike fly-by reporters traveling through the country armed with a sat phone and a ticket on the next flight to Islamabad, Garcia settles into Afghanistan--learning its history, meeting its resilient people, and forging life-long connections. In the midst of ongoing chaos, he rescues a dog from being killed, naming him Maggot, and shepherding him safely out of the country; he befriends his driver and translator, Khalid (aka ‘Bro'), a relationship which broadens his understanding of the complex situation for Afghani people. And, he gets to know six war orphans and, almost to his surprise, commits to improving their lives. At a time when Afghanistan is on the brink, Garcia offers a gritty, raw, and unsentimental memoir about friendship, humility, and transformation in the midst of a war torn country.
U.S./Canadian rights to Beacon Press (Fall, 2009)
Kristin Hersh
Set in 1985-1986, Rat Girl recounts a monumental year in the life of celebrated indie rock icon and Throwing Muses founder Kristin Hersh. Starting college at fifteen at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI, by seventeen the preternaturally intelligent Hersh was already living on her own. Squatting at various abandoned apartments around nearby Providence and sometimes living out of her car, Hersh forms an improbable friendship with the much-divorced 1950s film star Betty Hutton, a recovering alcoholic then in her sixties and also enrolled at Salve. As Throwing Muses begins to take off in the Boston music scene, Hersh is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. A fragile Hersh recovers, but soon after Hersh is broadsided by another life-altering event: an unplanned pregnancy and the birth of her first son. Inspired by her richly-detailed diary, Rat Girl features playful dialog, vivid characters, and warm prose (to say nothing of an extremely appealing sense of humor) and will appeal to fans of Susanna Kaysen's Girl Interrupted.
U.S./Canadian rights to Penguin (June, 2010) British rights to Atlantic Books (March, 2010)
John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell
The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable draws clear and essential lessons from perhaps the greatest Hollywood movie ever made to illustrate America's changing geopolitical place in the world and how our country can best meet the momentous strategic challenges it faces. In the movie The Godfather, Don Corleone, head of New York's most powerful organized-crime family, is shockingly gunned down in broad daylight, leaving his sons Sonny and Michael, along with his adopted son, consigliere Tom Hagen, to chart a new course for the family. In The Godfather Doctrine, John Hulsman and Wess Mitchell show how the aging and wounded don is emblematic of cold-war American power on the decline in a new world where our enemies play by unfamiliar rules, and how the don's heirs uncannily exemplify today's three leading American foreign-policy schools of thought. Tom, the left-of-center liberal institutionalist, thinks the old rules still apply and that negotiation is the answer. Sonny is the Bush-era neocon who shoots first and asks questions later, proving an easy target for his enemies. Only Michael, the realist, has a sure feel for the changing scene, recognizing the need for flexible combinations of soft and hard power to keep the family strong and maintain its influence and security in a dangerous and rapidly-changing world. Based on Hulsman and Mitchell's groundbreaking and widely debated article, "Pax Corleone," The Godfather Doctrine explains for everyone why Francis Ford Coppola's epic masterpiece about a Mafia dynasty holds key insights for ensuring America's survival in the twenty-first century.
World English rights to Princeton University Press (January, 2009)
Sheila Isenberg
Author and biographer Sheila Isenberg peels back the many layers of the fascinating and controversial Muriel Gardiner. A compelling heroine, Muriel was born to a wealthy family in Chicago but moved to Europe after college in the 1930s. She grew deeply worried by the increasing power of the fascists and began her vital work for what soon became the Austrian underground, using the code name "Mary." She met one of the leaders of the democratic movement, Josef Buttinger, and amidst their dangerous work together, fell in love. When Hitler annexed Austria in March of 1938, Buttinger, along with Muriel's daughter, fled Austria, and Muriel stayed behind, bravely working to smuggle Jews and anti-fascists out of Vienna. Ultimately reunited, the family left France for the United States-but Muriel, using her wealth and network of friends which included Sigmund and Anna Freud, continued to rescue many trapped behind Hitler's lines. In the post-war years, Muriel and Josef worked to build the International Rescue Committee into an essential organization devoted to helping refugees around the world. Isenberg weaves a compelling and intimate story of a woman of privilege whose choices in life lent strength and spirit to so many.
World English rights to Palgrave Macmillan (Fall, 2010)
Charles King
Odessa tells the epic story of the rise, decline, and renewal of Russia's greatest seaport-Odessa-the ancestral homeland of literally tens of thousands of Americans, Israelis, and others. The city was originally scouted by a Spanish-Irish mercenary, named by a randy Russian empress, governed by her one-eyed secret husband, built by a French nobleman on the lam, modernized by a cuckolded Cambridge-educated count, and celebrated by his wife's Russian-African lover-and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had a population that was a third Jewish. The city was later the scene of the greatest act of genocidal violence against Jews ever committed by non-Germans: the deportation and murder of some 60,000 Jews by Romanian fascists during the Second World War. From the 1790s to the 1990s, Odessa has been the site of remarkable cultural achievements-from the lyric poetry of Pushkin to the wry short stories of Babel. Wonderfully written, shaped by a compelling narrative and informed with original research, Odessa brings the Odessa of the past to vivid life.
U.S./Canadian rights to W.W. Norton (2010)
Romi Lassally
Romi Lassally provides a judgment-free zone where women can reveal their mommy misdemeanors. From not feeling like cleaning up vomit in the middle of the night, to barking something completely inappropriate to the children, to wanting to be pawed by hands that aren't covered in jelly, the confessions pour in daily. Heartfelt and hilarious, naughty and nasty, frank and outrageous, the confessions culled together for this book represent the best--or the worst?--of those humbling hidden secrets of motherhood in all its glorious messiness as improvisation and triage. They dare to suggest that it's okay for moms to make mistakes, to have unkind thoughts, to publicly or privately embarrass themselves--and above all to be human.
U.S./Canadian rights to Berkley (April, 2009)
Jonathan Lopez
It's a story that has been told and retold for sixty years: a lifetime of disappointment drove misunderstood genius Han Van Meegeren to create a series of forged Vermeers, one of which he sold to Hermann Goering at the height of World War II to save the cultural patrimony of the Dutch people. The only problem with the story: it's just not true. As Jonathan Lopez reveals in The Man Who Made Vermeers, the only thing faker than the pictures he painted was Van Meegeren himself. No trickster folk hero but rather an ingenious, dyed-in-the-wool-crook, Van Meegeren spent most of his adult life working with a ring of shady art dealers selling fake Old Masters to collectors including Andrew Mellon and Baron Heinrich Thyssen, mastering skills he would later parlay into a career laundering assets seized from Holocaust victims during the Occupation. That the self-serving myth he fabricated to cover for his crimes has persisted into contemporary understanding is a testament to Van Meegeren's capabilities as a con man, a genius at matching what people wanted to hear with what he wanted them to believe. Painstakingly researched and deftly written, Lopez's unvarnishing of the career of the master forger is also an excellent cautionary tale about the uses and abuses of history.
World rights (excluding British) to Harcourt (September, 2008)
Contact: kent.wolf@harcourt.com
Jonathan Lyons
Amidst the pillage of the First Crusades, the realm of Arab science and philosophy that had existed for centuries out of sight and out of mind of the Western world came unexpectedly into focus. Few knew of the learning practiced so ably and widely by the Arabs, with their new ways to measure space, draw maps, treat the sick, and explore humanity's place in the universe. Europe was frozen in its Dark Ages, barely able to tell the time of day. For the Crusaders, sorcery and magic and Holy Writ led the way forward in 1095. One man, however, was unsatisfied with the extent of Western learning. Adelard of Bath, a heretofore obscure English scholar, shrugged off the tenor of his times-that Islam was an evil faith and a sacred enemy-to scour the Arab East for knowledge undreamed of in Europe's finest schools. In The House of Wisdom, author and journalist Jonathan Lyons takes the reader on a thrill-ride through the 12th Century, charting Adelard's odyssey of intellectual and scientific discovery from West to East, from Tours to Antioch to the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Adelard returned to England a wiser man to be sure, but the West profited from his journey as well. Five centuries later, his intellectual heir-and there were many, as Lyons illustrates-Galileo took on the religious orthodoxy of his day and sparked the very beginning of the Western scientific revolution. As the author asserts, without control over clock and calendar, the rational organization of society was unthinkable. So was the development of technology, and industry. Muslim science and philosophy rescued the Christian world from ignorance; without it, the very idea of the West would have been impossible.
U.S. rights to Bloomsbury (2009) Chinese rights to New Star Press
Arabic rights to Arab Scientific Publishers Portuguese rights to Presença
Brazilian rights to Zahar Turkish rights to Dogan Egmont
British rights to Bloomsbury UK
Joe Queenan
Like Queenan's previous books, including the national bestsellers Balsamic Dreams and Red Lobster, White Trash and The Blue Lagoon, Closing Time is unmistakably marked by the razor-sharp wit that has made him such a favorite among readers of, among other periodicals, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Playboy, in the U.S., as well as The Guardian, The Independent, and the Times of London in the UK; his humor is smart, surprising, and infectious. Unlike all of his other books, however, this one is no mere collection of essays or riffs -- it is a memoir that marks Queenan as far more engaging, than just a humorist who happens to be blessed with a wicked turn of phrase. Closing Time tells the story of a smart kid growing up in the projects of North Philadelphia with a drunken and often violent father he tries dearly to love and respect, and yet can't. The book goes deep into the nature of father/son conflict, as well as the pressures of class and class mobility. So there's some tough stuff here, no question. But somehow reading this book is always a pleasure. For, against all odds, there is no shortage of joy that the young Joe Queenan takes in the life that he finds himself first inheriting and, later, beginning to carve out for himself: He takes joy in the rather improbable characters that litter his youth; he takes joy in the discoveries of music, paintings, and books; and, above all, he takes it in the human comedy he sees all around him. Never any shortage of that...
U.S./Canadian rights to Viking (February, 2009) British rights to Picador UK
Robin Romm
From the critically acclaimed author of The Mother Garden, a stirring and intimate memoir about the three weeks before her mother's death. With her signature wit and rare honesty, Romm opens the doors to her family's home and invites us to witness the collapse of her known world-the death of her mother. With relish, Romm disposes of clichés about grief and healing as she reveals the particular nature of loss in her family. Untrained dogs, mischievous cats, a slow-witted hospice nurse, and a yelping grandfather clamor for attention as Romm, with her father and closest family friends, navigate problems ranging from medications to the search for God. Crystalline in its detail and piercing in its focus, The Mercy Papers reveals the sharp and tender truths that lurk around every corner in the midst of heartbreak. Bending time in fantastic ways, Romm expands these three weeks into their own universe. Family stories wind through the strangeness, providing us with an intimate window into a bond between a child and her mother. In the eye of the storm, there's room to remember sex talks and birthdays, meals, outfits, trips and quarrels. The Mercy Papers captures, with great passion, the awe and fear of a daughter losing her mother. Romm has created a moving tribute to family and an indelible portrait that will speak to anyone who has ever loved and lost.
U.S./Canadian rights to Scribner (February, 2009)
Zach Shore
The War on Drugs. Dien Bien Phu. The Asian economic collapse. Iraq. Why do nations, focusing their best and brightest minds on a particular problem, so often go horribly wrong? Why don't decisionmakers learn the patently obvious lessons of history? In his new book, Zach Shore introduces us to what he calls cognition traps-the rigid ways in which people approach and solve problems on the basis of preconceived notions and patterns of thought. On macro levels just as surely as personal ones, cognition traps lead us to overlook vital questions of context in events and the human players shaping them. Shore wants us to attend to those questions. A tour de force of history and prescriptive non-fiction, Blunder is accessible, creative, and fun to read. As a Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of two previous books, Shore knows how to craft an argument and deliver it convincingly. And as a frequent contributor to opinion pages and thought-leading magazines on a number of subjects, he is able to reach a wide audience looking for a better understanding of why we manage not to avoid the mistakes we ought to.
U.S./Canadian rights to Bloomsbury (November, 2008)
Romanian rights to Antet XX Press Chinese rights to Cheers Books
Jane Smith
A century ago, Luther Burbank was the most famous gardener on the planet, his name inseparable from a cornucopia of new and improved plants for both home gardens and commercial farms and orchards. He developed novelties like the white blackberry and the Shasta daisy, as well as staples like the blight-resistant potato that put an end to the Irish Potato Famine. Indeed, the Burbank Russet-rescuer of the Irish potato fields, darling of McDonald's French fries, celebrity of Idaho license plates-still dominates commercial potato farming. At a time when the science of genetics was in its infancy and agriculture was often a perilous combination of guesswork and luck, the man known as the Wizard of Santa Rosa had learned the secret of teaching nature to perform for man, breeding and crossbreeding ordinary plants from farm and garden until they were tastier, hardier, and more productive than ever before. By the early years of the twentieth century, he was known as the man who had coaxed twenty thousand plum twigs from baby buds to fruit-bearing trees in an astonishing six months, developed a winter rhubarb so profitable farmers called it "the mortgage-lifter," and transformed the familiar orange California poppy into a deep red flower. The Garden of Invention will be neither an encyclopedia nor a biography; rather, Smith's goal is to highlight significant moments in Burbank's life (itself a fascinating story) and use them as a way to explore larger trends that he embodied and, in some cases, shaped. Distinct and idiosyncratic details join to create an overarching story of the business of gardening in an age of rapid economic growth. The road from the 19th-century farm to 21st-century agribusiness twists and turns, of course, but a good part of it passes straight through Luther Burbank's garden.
U.S./Canadian rights to The Penguin Press (April, 2009)
Lauren Weber
In 2005, our national savings rate went negative for the first time since 1933, in the thick of the Great Depression. And Americans carry record levels of revolving consumer debt, which doesn't even begin to include mortgages, car and education loans: $879 billion, or approximately $2,931 for every man, woman and child -- even as our government has us in the hole by some $8.5 trillion, a national spending spree that's being financed by the Chinese and Japanese central banks, whose prodigious purchases of American treasury securities have kept our interest rates low for the last decade. No doubt about it: we've forgotten how to live within our means. How did this come to be? What happened to thrift as a guiding American value? And why -- when we as a nation are so dangerously over-leveraged, when all of us could use a little more parsimony in our daily lives -- is it considered an insult to be called cheap? Lauren Weber's IN CHEAP WE TRUST: The Biography of a Misunderstood American Virtue covers more than 200 years of American history, harnessing its arguments and observations about our ever-evolving conception of thrift to stories of the famously frugal, as well as more obscure penny-pinchers, such as housewives, immigrants and lesser-known public figures. The majority of these characters, however, appear in a single chapter only, as we trace the book's larger biography -- that of thrift itself. Our uses of money are personal, often eccentric and deeply inconsistent, adhering above all to some personal calculus we each concoct from the stew of factors that influence our attitudes toward the subject. Using diaries, memoirs, interviews, literature and other forms of popular culture, Weber provokes us to think about the values, emotions and instincts we bring to the tasks of saving money, as well as spending it.
U.S./Canadian rights to Little Brown & Co. (October, 2009)
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