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SubSIDIARY RIGHTS LIST
Toby Ball
"Had George Orwell and Dashiell Hammett ever decided to collaborate on a book, they might have come up with something like The Vaults. Toby Ball's novel is superbly plotted, stylishly written and entirely unique. A wonderful debut from a writer to watch."
-- Michael Harvey, author of The Chicago Way
Set in the mid-1930s, at the height of the most corrupt administration ever known in “The City,” 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 seventy 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 something called “The Navajo Project”. But the mayor, his violent henchmen, and the group of wealthy businessmen who form the mayor’s inner circle are going to have serious a problem with this discovery…
U.S./Canadian rights to Minotaur/St. Martin's Press (Fall 2010)
Italy: Piemme
France: 10/18
Complex Chinese: Motif Press
Russia: AST
Romania: Editura Rao
Toby Ball
"A treat for fans of noir and science fiction—and pretty much anyone in between."
-- Booklist
Lieutenant Piet Westermann is roused in the middle of the night with an unusual request: move the body of a dead girl from where it was found on the bank of a river near the utopian Uhuru Community, a Negro shantytown led by the charismatic Father Wome. Westermann really has no choice because the person making the request, journalist Frank Frings, knows a secret from his past that could end his career. Westermann, along with Detective Torsten Grip, a staunch anti-Communist, and his sociopath partner Detective Larry Morphy, investigate the death of this girl and a string of possibly related deaths and disappearances, the scope of the investigation broadening to include not only the Uhuru Community, but the apocalyptic Church of Last Days led by End Times preacher Prosper Maddox. As the investigation deepens and the politics of the mayoral race come to bear, Westermann’s rationalist worldview is challenged by the ecstatic religious experiences he witnesses, Grip is confronted with how far he is willing to go to promote his ideology, and Frank Frings works Mel Washington and other Negro Communists to salvage the Uhuru Community’s reputation before its enemies provoke its destruction. Scorch City is the second novel of a trilogy set in the City, a sprawling, multi-ethnic, noir landscape, where compromised men and women wage an ideological struggle beneath the surface of crime and bureaucracy.
U.S./Canadian rights to Minotaur/St. Martin's Press (September, 2011)
Kate Bernheimer
"Let’s open the door to the green room and peek to see who is waiting. A bevy of beauties . . . an evanescence of sprites . . . an abundance of adversaries . . . a passel of princes . . . Maybe we should have brought that bubbly; but there’s something being served here more deeply inebriating than champagne. Hush."
-- Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, from the Foreword
The fairy tale lives again in these enchanting new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction: Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and more than thirty other extraordinary writers. Inspired by everything from the classics of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and folk tales from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico, here are stories—most of them original to this collection—soaring into boundless realms, filled with mischief and mystery and magic, and renewed by the lifeblood of invention. Rooted in hundreds of years of tradition, they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature.
World English to Penguin (October, 2010)
Contact: Hal Fessenden(hal.fessenden@us.penguingroup.com)
Kate Bernheimer, ed.
"Let’s open the door to the green room and peek to see who is waiting. A bevy of beauties . . . an evanescence of sprites . . . an abundance of adversaries . . . a passel of princes . . . Maybe we should have brought that bubbly; but there’s something being served here more deeply inebriating than champagne. Hush."
-- Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, from the Foreword
The fairy tale lives again in these enchanting new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction: Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and more than thirty other extraordinary writers. Inspired by everything from the classics of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and folk tales from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico, here are stories—most of them original to this collection—soaring into boundless realms, filled with mischief and mystery and magic, and renewed by the lifeblood of invention. Rooted in hundreds of years of tradition, they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature.
World English to Penguin (October, 2010)
Contact: Hal Fessenden(hal.fessenden@us.penguingroup.com)
Belle Boggs
* Winner of the 2009 Bakeless Prize for Fiction
"Strongly imagined, finely controlled, and well crafted. These stories are good because they are true, true in that way that only good fiction can be."
-- Percival Everett, Bakeless Fiction Judge
Set on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation and in its surrounding counties, the stories in this linked collection detail the lives of rural men and women with stark realism and plainspoken humor. A young military couple faces a future shadowed by injury and untold secrets. A dying alcoholic attempts to reconcile with his estranged children. And an elderly woman’s nurse weathers life with her irascible charge by making payments on a decrepit houseboat—the Mattaponi Queen. The land is parceled into lots, work opportunities are few, and the remaining inhabitants must choose between desire and necessity as they navigate the murky stream of possession, love, and everything in between.
World rights to Graywolf Press (June 2010)
Contact: Kate Dublinski(dublinski@graywolfpress.org)
Angie Chau
"Heartbreaking tales of ordinary people lost between the extraordinary circumstances of history. Bitter and beautiful all at once."
-- Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
Quiet As They Come is a beautiful, brutal and humorous portrait of ordinary people caught between two cultures. Set in San Francisco from the 1980s to the present day, this debut collection explores the lives of Vietnamese immigrants as they struggle to adjust to life in their new country. As a result of history and circumstances, three families are forced to share a Victorian house in San Francisco's Sunset District. With one family to each bedroom, each closet brims with desire and suppression, secrets from the past, and dreams for the future. While some are able to survive and assimilate, others are crushed by the false promise of the “American Dream.” As the families branch out, their lives illuminate the distinctive struggle of refugees; people who have found shelter yet continually search for home.
U.S./Canada: IG Publishing (2011)
Catherine Chung
"Catherine Chung is a writer whose first novel I've been waiting for, and her debut, Forgotten Country, more than fulfills what I hoped for -- a boldly imagined novel of Korea and America, of a curse between sisters and a family trying to outrun a war that will not let them go. Chillingly beautiful and magnetic, unforgettable.”
-- Alexander Chee
When Janie’s sister Hannah is born, Janie is warned that their family has lost a daughter in every generation since the Japanese occupation of Korea, and so she is charged with keeping Hannah safe forever. Years later, when Hannah cuts ties with her family and inexplicably disappears, it falls to Janie to comfort her parents. In the midst of this crisis their father is diagnosed with a grave illness, and decides to return to Korea seeking experimental treatment. Sent to find Hannah and reunite her family, Janie instead finds herself sabotaging her mission at the critical moment, abandoning her sister and going to Korea to join their parents, alone. There, as she watches her father struggle to survive against grim odds, Janie begins to explore a family history that has long been kept hidden from her. What she discovers forces her to confront the choices her parents have made, their sudden move to America 20 years ago, and ultimately her conflicted feelings towards her sister and her own role in the forces that threaten to tear her family apart. Forgotten Country the story of a family struggling to escape a history filled with violence and loss, and Janie’s personal quest to navigate the entangled obligations to family and self, duty and freedom.
US/Canada: Riverhead(March, 2012)
Audio: AudioGo
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
Nikolai Grozni
Following the exploits and travails of the fifteen-year-old Konstantin, a pianist of exceptional sensitivity and accomplishment, Wunderkind offers a vividly observed, tragicomic glimpse behind the Iron Curtain between 1987 and 1989, just before it all came crashing down. Graced by unparalleled explorations of the beauty and freedom of music, even as he is cursed by all the cant and numbing mind controls of the party members and apparachiks it seems are running his life, Konstanin struggles to come to terms with becoming an adult in an environment where expression of any kind can, and often does, come at terrible cost. Through it all, the piano is at once Konstantin’s refuge and the thing tethering him to a world he cannot abide. Nor is it at all certain which, in the end, will prove stronger, his self-destructiveness or his ability as an artist to tap straight into the beauty of the world.
World rights to Free Press (July 2011)
Bulgaria: Ciela Soft & Publishing
France: Plon
Korea: Dasan Books
Spain: Libros Del Asteroide
Sweden: 2244 / Bonnierförlagen
Contact: Paul O'Halloran(paul.o'halloran@simonandschuster.com)
Chandra Hoffman
Chandra Hoffman’s debut is an unflinching and compulsively readable novel that exposes the social and emotional complexities of the age-old practice of adoption. Set over four months in rainy Portland, Oregon in 2000, the novel follows Chloe Pinter, a twenty-five-year-old caseworker who manages both birth and adoptive parents at The Chosen Child adoption agency. Becoming overly involved with her clients, she struggles as well with the ethical problems posed by a boss who wants adoptions to go through at all costs. At the same time, her semi-employed fiancé is drawn to a windsurfing lifestyle in Maui and pressures Chloe to check out of the grown-up world and the endless winter rain and join him. Several lives also unfold around the central character: Paul and Eva Nova, an upwardly-mobile Portland couple who connected with the agency during a period of infertility, but are now expecting their own baby; John and Francie McAdoo, the Novas’ infertile friends from the agency and neighbors in Portland Heights, dependent on Chloe Pinter for their long-quested baby; and Jason and Penny, an indigent couple who, stringing the agency along for financial support, choose the McAdoos as potential parents, with vague plans of extorting money from them. Chosen builds to a dramatic conclusion as all of these lives become dangerously entangled.
U.S./Canadian rights to HarperCollins (September, 2010)
Lucy Jackson
Slicker tells the overlapping stories of Yale student Desirée Cohen and her mother, Nina. Desirée finds herself for the summer in Honey Creek, Kansas (population 1,623) to be with her new love, Bobby McVicar. Almost immediately, she becomes the talk of the town, discovering as an urbanite and “half Jew,” she is regarded as the ultimate outsider. Also regarded as outsiders, Bobby’s parents, Starshine and Wayne, aging hippies who, never in the three decades they’ve been together felt the need to marry, welcome Desirée warmly. Her relationship with Bobby and with his parents blossoms over the course of the summer, and Desirée begins to imagine the possibility of blowing off her junior year at Yale and remaining with Bobby indefinitely. Her father, Patrick, and his lover, Jordan Sinclair, fly out to Kansas in an effort to dissuade her, and their presence as a gay couple in Honey Creek creates only more of an uproar. Meanwhile, back in New York, Nina still struggles to make peace with her ex's homosexuality, and to acknowledge the evolution of a different sort of relationship with him, even as she struggles to be a devoted daughter to her invalid father, a role that has never come naturally to her. By the novel’s end, Desirée and Nina have been transformed by their experiences over what turns out to be a surprising summer for them both.
U.S./Canadian rights to St. Martin's Press (August, 2010)
Roy Kesey
Jack Tarn’s wife was murdered a year ago. His failed search for the murderer has left him unbalanced, and his revenge fantasies, ever more bizarre. His massive bulk and strength are of little use as he attempts to raise his infant daughter in Piura, a small city on the desert coast of Peru where the surreal is commonplace and the stifling heat is ever-present. Shadowed both literally and metaphorically by the pacazo, an immense but rarely-seen lizard that haunts the university where he works, he constructs bit by bit a livable life. But then come the storms of El Niño: three months of savage rains, insect plagues, and collapsed bridges, during which Jack just barely keeps his sanity intact through his contact with his daughter, his few friends and his students. Finally the rains subside, leaving behind a desert teeming with life. Soon Jack meets Karina, a damaged, secretive young woman who works at a knick-knack shop and dreams of Italy. They plan ways to use their tiny plot of common ground, but one last encounter with the alleged murderer puts everything they have built at risk.
U.S./Canadian rights to Dzanc (January, 2011)
U.K.: Jonathan Cape
Nancy Kricorian
Set in Paris during the Nazi Occupation, among the working class Armenians of Belleville, All the Light There Was meticulously and lovingly recreates the life of young Maral Pegorian, whose path from girlhood to motherhood travels from terror and tragedy toward an uncertain, unexpected happiness.
U.S./Canadian rights to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt(Winter 2013)
Ann Leary
Hildy Aldrich lives in a small town Boston's north shore. By day, she's a successful real-estate broker, good neighbor, mother and grandmother, but each night, she drinks at home alone with her dogs, and these are her happiest times. Months ago her daughters staged an intervention and sent her to rehab, which was a huge betrayal. Hildy knows she doesn't really have a drinking problem and though she stays sober for a while, she eventually begins to drink at home alone. In part the story of the loneliness of the secret drinker, Out of Mind but is also the story of the town in which she grew up – a craggy New England seacoast town that harbors any number of secrets from both the past and the present.
U.S./Canadian rights to St. Martin's Press(Winter 2013)
Don Lee
"Few writers have mined the [genre of ethnic literature] as shrewdly or transcended its limits quite so stunningly as Don Lee….Elegant and engrossing.”
-- Los Angeles Times
A sparkling bildungsroman about friendship and betrayal, art and race. In 1988, Eric Cho, an aspiring writer, arrives at Macalester College. On his first day he meets a beautiful fledgling painter, Jessica Tsai, and another would-be novelist, the larger-than-life Joshua Yoon. Brilliant, bawdy, generous, and manipulative, Joshua alters the course of their lives, rallying them together when they face an adolescent act of racism. As adults in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the three friends reunite as the 3AC, the Asian American Artists Collective—together negotiating the demands of art, love, commerce, and idealism until another racially tinged controversy hits the headlines, this time with far greater consequences. Long after the 3AC has disbanded, Eric reflects on these events as he tries to make sense of Joshua’s recent suicide. With wit, humor, and compassion, The Collective explores the dream of becoming an artist, and questions whether the reality is worth the sacrifice.
U.S./Canadian rights to W. W. Norton(2012)
Jim Lehrer
A riveting novel a novel based on Jim Lehrer's experiences as a Dallas newspaper reporter covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Bubble Top is the fictional story of a Secret Service agent's severe trauma flowing from his belief that he was responsible for Kennedy's death.
U.S./Canadian rights to Random House(2013)
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 Swedish rights to Forum
French rights to Actes Sud Audio rights to Tandor Media
German rights to Wunderhorn Verlag
Maaza Mengiste
In 1935, thirty-nine years after Italy’s first attempt to colonize Ethiopia ended in humiliating defeat, Mussolini vows to conquer the country and claim Italy’s “place in the sun”. As Italy’s threats turn into an invasion then war, the fearless Ethiopian army, led by the famed warrior Ras Kidane, manages to keep the Italian army at bay for a time, due in no small part to the countless Ethiopian women who joined their men side-by-side on the battle field. Among these female warriors is a peasant girl Hirut, stolen from her family and made Kidane’s slave. Hirut transforms from a slave to a soldier, but at night she remains, still, a girl battling her own private wars with Kidane. But none of them know – or ever imagine—is that in addition to black-shirted soldiers, and hundreds of tanks, Mussolini will use tons of poison gas across the hills of Ethiopia, wiping out villages. The war becomes an easy victory after the use of poison gas. Ettore, the son of a proud Fascist, answered il Duce’s call to create an empire to rival Ceasar’s. In his letters home, he writes that he marched with a victorious army, led by General Carlo Fucelli, the conqueror of Libya. He doesn’t mention the ferocious Ethiopian armies, the divisions commanded by women who fought as ruthlessly as the men, he doesn’t write that there is talk amongst his camp of who is Italian, who is native; who is Aryan, who is not. He keeps to himself all his questions about what his Catholic baptism means to his Jewish heritage as he begins his life in the new colony. But in 1938, Mussolini takes a step closer to Hitler and passes laws that ban Jews from jobs, schools and the military. Confused, Ettore walks away from it all, retracing his march, one decimated town at a time, to the village where before the poison rain, a group of Ethiopian Jews had lived. But the Ethiopians refuse to concede. Led by Kidane, these guerrilla fighters continue to battle. With them is Minim, Haile Selassie’s unwitting double, who takes his place as the emperor goes into exile in England. This is the Shadow King, a mute peasant who will inspire a struggling nation without a word. Behind the Shadow King, Ethiopia’s men and women fight side by side, reclaiming their land one kilometer at a time. When Mussolini joins the war with Hitler, the Allies pledge aid to Ethiopia and England sends her best, the eccentric, Orde Wingate, to lead an army of Ethiopian and British troops called the Gideon Force. Ethiopia is liberated and the crown is restored to Emperor Haile Selassie as Minim, the Shadow King, watches. Minim has been privy to complaints about Haile Selassie’s rule, his arbitrary system of reward, his absence during the war. Only he understands that the Ethiopia the emperor takes over is not the one that he, the Shadow King, knows to exist.
U.S. rights to W.W. Norton(2013)
Lydia Millet
Hal is a mild-mannered if somewhat acerbic middle-aged bureaucrat with a paraplegic daughter, Casey, and a wife, Susan, to whom he’s devoted, but when he comes home early from his work at the IRS one day after a fender bender and feels the first inkling of a suspicion that his wife is sleeping with a younger coworker, Hal’s entrenched routine begins to spin out of control. Both Susan and Casey are preoccupied with the long absence of Susan’s employer, T., who has taken a trip down to the tropics and vanished; on impulse, desperate to get away from his unfaithful wife and a daughter he’s just discovered is making her living through a 1-900 sex line, Hal volunteers to fly to Central America to search for the missing man. What follows are his adventures in the strange land — an encounter with a beautiful yet alienating family of Germans, the surreal descent of a massive military machine, and the surprising discovery of lost things.
U.S./Canadian rights to W.W. Norton(Fall, 2011)
Lydia Millet
* 2010 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
"Brilliant and audacious Millet archly plucks famous people out of history books and the tabloids and places them at the nucleus of acerbic yet elegiac tales about stark encounters with other species."
-- Booklist (starred)
Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants—all of these have shared the spotlight and tabloid headlines with celebrities ranging from Thomas Edison to Sharon Stone. Hilariously tweaking these unholy communions, Millet runs a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture in general. Elsewhere in fiction, animals often exist as symbols of good and evil or as author stand-ins but in Millet’s ruthlessly lucid prose, they represent nothing but themselves. Implacable in their actions, the animals in Millet’s spiraling fictional riffs show up their humans as bloated with foolishness, yet curiously vulnerable—as in a tour-de-force, Kabbalah-infused interior monologue by Madonna after she shoots a pheasant on her Scottish estate. These strange, charismatic tales show Millet treading newly imaginative territory.
U.S./Canadian rights to Soft Skull Press(October, 2009)
Tom Perrotta
What if the Rapture happened and you got left behind? Or what if it wasn’t the Rapture at all, but something murkier, a wave of mysterious, apparently random disappearances that shattered the world in a single moment, dividing history into Before and After, leaving no one unscathed? How would you rebuild your life in the wake of such a devastating event? This is the question confronting the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, a formerly comfortable suburban community that lost over a hundred people in the Sudden Departure. Kevin Garvey, the new mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his traumatized neighbors, even as his own family falls apart. His wife, Laurie, has left him to enlist in the Guilty Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence but haunt the streets of town as “living reminders” of God’s judgment. His son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy prophet by the name of Holy Wayne. Only his teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she’s definitely not the sweet A student she used to be. Through the prism of a single family, Perrotta illuminates a familiar America made strange by grief and apocalyptic anxiety. The Leftovers is a startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection, and loss.
U.S. rights to St. Martin's (September, 2011)
Brazil: Intrínseca
Canada: Random House
France: Fleuve Noir
Italy: Edizioni E/O
Taiwan: Rye Field
Turky: Siren
U.K.: Fourth Estate
Film: HBO
James Reich
Judas Iscariot is the historical symbol of betrayal. But what really happened at the Garden of Gethsemane? What really compelled Judas to hang himself from a tree? I, Judas reimagines Iscariot’s relationship to Jesus Christ and explores Judas's orchestration of the elaborate con of the divinity of Jesus Christ, subverting the legend of Judas as he inhabits some of our most notorious literary and historical figures in their darkest hours. Custer, Sexton, Van Gogh: these famous suicides converge through the figure of Judas in a cutting-edge piece of fiction that exposes the dangers of seeking universal truths in myth.
U.S./Canadian rights to Soft Skull Press (October, 2011)
Brazil: LeYa
James Reich
Judas Iscariot is the historical symbol of betrayal. But what really happened at the Garden of Gethsemane? What really compelled Judas to hang himself from a tree? I, Judas reimagines Iscariot’s relationship to Jesus Christ and explores Judas's orchestration of the elaborate con of the divinity of Jesus Christ, subverting the legend of Judas as he inhabits some of our most notorious literary and historical figures in their darkest hours. Custer, Sexton, Van Gogh: these famous suicides converge through the figure of Judas in a cutting-edge piece of fiction that exposes the dangers of seeking universal truths in myth.
U.S./Canadian rights to Soft Skull Press (October, 2011)
Brazil: LeYa
Lucinda Rosenfeld
In their youth, each of the Hellinger Sisters of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York received their label: “the Perfect One,” “the Political One,” and, yes, “the Pretty One." Now on the cusp of 40, Imperia (“Perri”) is the c.e.o. of a budding home organization empire and mother of three, living in suburbia. Augusta (“Gus”), 36, is a lesbian, a law professor, and a Legal Aid lawyer who defends poor women in the South Bronx. And Olympia (“Pia”), age 38, is the manager of a conceptual art gallery in Chelsea, a frustrated artist herself, and a single mother with a fraught romantic past. But an unexpected series of events, beginning with a freak traffic accident that seriously injures their mother, force the Hellinger Sisters to reexamine their identities, their upbringing, and their often prickly relationships to one another. The Pretty One is a comic novel that also probes the paradoxical intimacy and distance between sisters—the way they can know so much about each other and, at the same time, understand so little.
World: Little, Brown & Co. (Winter, 2013)
Contact: Tracy Williams(tracy.williams@hbgusa.com)
Deborah Schupack
"Sylvan Street is a work of pure magic, as funny as it is wrenching, as mysterious as it is revealing, and ultimately an astonishing feat of social observation. Deborah Schupack has created a brilliant cast of complex, compelling characters in a riveting literary novel that raises timeless questions about money, class, and the daily deceptions among friends and neighbors, husbands and wives."
-- Kate Walbert, author of A Short History of Women
Deborah Schupack's spellbinding second novel is a story large in scope and intimate in detail. Set in a small town in Westchester, the novel opens as a group of neighbors gather for a weekend pool party, only to discover a suitcase filled with one million dollars in the shed. They decide to keep it—and earthly consequences begin to rain down on the harmonious Hudson Valley cul-de-sac. Moral compromises are struck; secrets abound. As boon turns to burden, lines are crossed, friendships tested, marriages riven, and lives are forever changed. With page-turning storytelling, graceful prose and deep, true emotion, Sylvan Street explores the ultimate power—and limitations—of money. Readers of thrillers and character-driven dramas alike will find a sweet payoff by the novel’s dramatic conclusion.
U.S./Canadian rights to Plume (June, 2010)
Magdy El-Shafee
Metro, Egypt’s first graphic novel, was originally published in 2008. It was quickly declared an "offense to public morals" by Egyptian authorities and destroyed by the police. Metro follows one young man in Cairo as he comes face-to-face with the corruption ingrained at every level of Egyptian society. Plagued by debt, Shihab is determined to make a new start with the help of one of his neighbors. However, before he can get Shihab the connections and money he needs, the neighbor is murdered by a group mysteriously referred to as “the Cavalry.” Disgusted with the corruption and violence, Shihab decides to take radical action—robbing a bank with his close friend Mustafa. Once at the bank, however, Shihab and Mustafa find themselves beat to the punch by a corrupt politician awaiting a massive, unsecured “loan.” Enraged, Shihab threatens the politician, takes the money, and forces him to face the anger of the citizens out on the street. As his journalist friend-turned-lover Dina uncovers the identity of the Cavalry, the city erupts into demonstrations pitting friend-against-friend as hired government forces beat and murder protesters.
World English rights to Metropolitan Books (March, 2012)
Contact: Devon Mazzone (devon.mazzone@hholt.com)
Italy: Editrice Il Sirente
Enid Shomer
"As brilliantly sensual as it is finely psychological, this novel is a tour de force of twenty-first century storytelling.”
-- Gillian Gill, author of Nightingales
In 1849, Florence Nightingale, the younger daughter of a prominent English family, set sail up the Nile, accompanied by an older couple and her maid. Much to her family’s chagrin, Nightingale was, at 29, well on her way to spinsterhood. Horrified by the privileged domestic life that her family envisioned for her and convinced that God had called her to a life of service, Nightingale had been searching, often in a state of anguish, for the exact path of her usefulness. And in a definitive blow to her parent’s hopes, she had refused her only serious marriage proposal shortly before retreating, with their grudging permission, to the “Orient.” The very same week Gustave Flaubert embarked on a journey up the Nile with his good friend, the journalist Maxime Du Camp. Acting as his assistant, Flaubert helped Du Camp document the then largely-unknown monuments of ancient Egypt. Flaubert was only too happy to seek refuge outside of France. Traumatized by the deaths of his father, his only sister and his best friend, and plagued by mysterious seizures, he had dropped out of law school in Paris and returned home to Croisset to write his first novel, an effort promptly deemed a failure by his literary coterie and consigned to a drawer. At 28, Flaubert was a failed writer with a failing body. 1992 Iowa Fiction Prize winner Enid Shomer's The Twelve Rooms of the Nile picks up where the facts of history leave off and imagines that these two geniuses of passion meet and form a relationship that alters their destinies in the early, heady days of the European exploration of the Nile.
U.S./Canadian rights to Simon & Schuster (August, 2012)
U.K.: Simon & Schuster
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)
China: New Star
Taiwan: Éditions du Flâneur
Contact: Lance Fitzgerald (Lance.Fitzgerald@us.penguingroup.com)
Susi Wyss
"In The Civilised World almost all the characters live, whether from choice or necessity, between countries and cultures. I am full of admiration for how vividly Susi Wyss brings to life Ethiopia, and Ghana and for the empathy with which she explores the longings of her characters, African and American, for children, home, money, work and family. A beautiful and timely book."
-- Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture and Banishing Verona
A glorious literary debut about five unforgettable Ghanaian and American women—two of them haunted by a terrible crime—whose lives intersect in unexpected and sometimes explosive ways.
When Adjoa leaves Ghana to find work in Ivory Coast, she hopes that one day she’ll return home to open a beauty parlor. Sure enough, she realizes this dream, though not before she suffers a devastating loss—one that will haunt her for years, and one that also deeply affects Janice, an American aid worker who no longer feels she has a place to call home. The bustling Precious Brother Salon is not just the “cleanest, friendliest, and most welcoming in the city”: it’s also where locals catch up on their gossip; where Comfort, an imperious busybody, can complain about her American daughter-in-law, Linda; and where Adjoa can get a fresh start on life--or so she thinks, until Janice moves to Ghana and unexpectedly stumbles upon the salon. At once deeply moving and utterly charming, The Civilized World follows five women as they face meddling mothers-in-law, unfaithful partners, and the lingering aftereffects of racism, only to learn that their cultural differences are more than outweighed by their common bond as women. With vibrant prose, Susi Wyss explores what it means to need forgiveness—and what it means to forgive.
U.S./Canadian rights to Henry Holt & Co. (March, 2011)
Jacques Berlinerblau
How to Be Secular starts from the premise that no single term in the lexicon of politics has endured more abuse of late than “secularism.” From Pope Benedict, to Tony Blair, to Newt Gingrich – everyone, it seems, has identified secularism as the greatest credible threat to human souls far and wide. Taking as its starting point the astonishing “return of the sacred” witnessed over the past 50 years, How to be Secular charts the dramatic downfall and fade to near irrelevance of secular movements in an age of organized, focused and forceful “political religions” such as Islamism, American Evangelicalism, traditional Catholicism and ultra-Orthodox Judaism. What can be done to save secularism, the book asks, but even more urgently, what exactly is secularism? Is it simply a theory about the proper relation of religion to government? Or is it a brash statement about the non-existence of God? Arguing that it has traditionally been more of the former than the latter, How to Be Secular undertakes to resurrect secularism by rethinking its most basic precepts. Is Science really the answer? Must secularism always be associated with anti-theism? When and under what circumstances can religious actors play a useful role in public life? Can even non-believers partake of spiritual life? Must atheists and agnostics always isolate themselves from their compatriots? How to Be Secular seeks to reinvigorate a secular movement that has grown old, spiteful and all too irrelevant, politically. U.S./Canadian rights to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2012)
Jean-Vincent Blanchard
A major new biography of one of history's most powerful and fascinating statesmen. Chief Minister to King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu was the architect of a new France in the 17th century, and the force behind the nation's rise as a European power. One of the first statesmen to understand clearly the necessity of a balance of powers, he was, in the wake of Niccolo Machiavelli, one of the earliest realist politicians. He became, as well, a cultural icon, appearing, for example, as an important character in Alexandre Dumas’ classic The Three Musketeers. Forging a nation-state amidst the swirl of unruly, grasping nobles, widespread corruption, wars of religion, and an ambitious Habsburg empire, Richelieu's hands were full. Serving his fickle monarch, however, and mastering the politics of absolute power provided Richelieu with his greatest challenge and ultimately determined his legacy to France and to all those who practice statecraft today. Jean-Vincent Blanchard's rich and insightful new biography brings Richelieu fully to life—at court, on the battlefield, at times cruel and ruthless, always devoted to creating a lasting central authority vested in the power of monarchy, a power essential to France’s position on the European stage for the next two centuries. Eminence offers a rich portrait of a fascinating man and his era, and gives us a keener understanding of the dark arts of politics.
U.S./Canadian rights to Bloomsbury USA (Spring, 2011)
France: Belin
Thomas Bradbury PhD & Benjamin Karney PhD
Eat less. Move more. The fundamental principles of losing weight have never been clearer yet even now obesity rates are skyrocketing around the world. Somewhere between knowing how to lose weight, really wanting to lose weight, and actually losing weight, people have experienced a disconnect. UCLA professors Thomas Bradbury and Benjamin Karney’s show us precisely where: What’s missing, they explain, is a critical recognition that the way we consume and burn calories is deeply embedded in the relationships we have with other people. And no one affects us more than our intimate partner. Deciding to take action about our weight, then, necessarily means changing the life we share with that person. Because if our partner is not making those decisions with us, the challenges of maintaining healthier behaviors will be even greater. The point is as simple as it is overlooked: for people in close relationships, healthy eating and regular exercise require collaboration and cooperation. Diet and exercise books are written for individuals, as though one’s spouse or partner were not centrally involved. Weight-loss companies and gyms, too, market almost exclusively to individuals. Health and fitness are woven deeply and inextricably into our intimate relationships, but nowhere is this simple, powerful fact reflected in the multi-billion-dollar industry influencing our decisions about our weight. Even when partners are aware that they need to manage their weight as a team, they find themselves unprepared for the challenges involved in communicating effectively about diet and exercise. Bookstore shelves are crammed with volume after volume addressing either the audience seeking answers about their relationships or the audience seeking answers about dieting. The needs of these two audiences overlap substantially, however, and the simple fact is that there is no book currently in print that recognizes this fact and unites their two interests. Written on the strength of 20 years worth of important research, Bradbury and Karney’s Love Me Slender steps into this gap, showing its readers the way to a healthier life alongside their life partner.
U.S./Canadian rights to Free Press (2013)
Brazil: Record
Will Bunch
The election of Barack Obama as American president in November 2008 marked a turning point in U.S. politics—both as the election of the first-ever black president in a nation long torn by racial strife and as a repudiation of Obama's predecessor George W. Bush, who'd alienated so much of the world with the invasion of Iraq and the prison camp at Guantanamo, among other abuses. But those who expected that Obama's ascendency would mark a new Aquarian Age for the United States failed to account for one thing—that 46 percent of American voters did not want a new direction for country, and millions of these people are now as mad as hell. Some on the U.S extreme political right even refuse to acknowledge Obama's legitimacy as president. In less than one year of the Obama administration, America has been rocked by angry outbursts and violence at political meetings, by conspiracy theories claiming that Obama is not a U.S. citizen but a closeted Muslim or Communist, and by a series of right-wing shootings that have claimed the lives of police officers, a doctor who performed abortions, and even a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Sales of guns and ammunition have skyrocketed, and some once-respectable politicians in the South are once again at least talking about seceding from the Union, as happened in the Civil War. Has America finally lost its collective mind, or is the rise of right-wing violence and hate speech in the Obama era the harbinger of something even darker to come?
U.S./Canadian rights to HarperCollins (September, 2010)
Rory Carroll
Veteran journalist and The Guardian’s chief correspondent in the Americas Rory Carroll has covered war zones, survived a kidnapping by the “head cutters” of Iraq, reported on the transition to full democracy in South Africa, but his tragic-comic story of life in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is perhaps the richest chronicle yet of human nature and its relentless capacity to disappoint even the most faithful. Not a simple story of folly in the tropics, The Illusionist reveals how the charisma of one man and the universal idea of revolution can seduce a nation—and much of the world—while unleashing absurdities worthy of Latin America’s most lyric magical realism. The Illusionist lifts the story of a particular place and time to a larger stage on which hope collides with ambition and delusion. And with insight, wit, and extraordinary access to the looking glass world of Chavez’s royal court, Rory posits a fundamental question: When does a nation’s descent into black comedy stop being funny?
U.S./Canada: The Penguin Press (January, 2013)
Brazil: Intrínseca
World: Canongate
Meryl Comer
An Emmy-award winning journalist and producer, Meryl presents a highly personal and political manifesto that takes its lead from the great activists of past decades in both HIV/AIDS and cancer, for whom the personal is political on the battlefield of healthcare. For Alzheimer’s is an epidemic: Every 69 seconds someone in the world is diagnosed with this progressive, fatal disease. Part memoir, part call-to-arms, Slow Dancing with A Stranger is sure to change the conversation around one of the most serious health issues facing the world today. Profiled on the PBS NewsHour, ABC’s Nightline, in GQ’s “Rock Stars of Science” and in HBO’s Alzheimer’s Project, Meryl is a powerhouse who will reveal the challenges of care-giving, how to prepare for the future if you receive a diagnosis, and the latest science behind Alzheimer’s research and the race for more effective therapies.
U.S./Canada: HarperOne(September, 2013)
Rebecca Dana
To outsiders, Rebecca Dana was living the Manhattan Dream. With a tall and handsome attorney boyfriend and a cute West Village apartment, the fantasy seemed complete. Then, in one devastating conversation, he confessed to cheating on her: a result, he said, of her not being “beautiful.” Her dignity shattered yet her sense of humor amazingly intact, Rebecca picks herself up and answers an ad on Craigslist for an apartment share: “$650 KOSHER kitchen.” She makes the trek out to Crown Heights, the largest Lubavitcher community in the U.S., and the door is answered by one Kasriel “Cosmo” Zaslavsky, a thirty-year old Russian émigré and rabbi who loves the electric bass and is justifiably proud that his facial hair resembles Brad Pitt’s. Determined to get as far away from the heartbreak across the river–- and lured by the chance to live right in the center of an insular community that has long intrigued her–-Rebecca takes the room. What follows is an unforgettable “cultural exchange” as these two unlikely roommates gradually introduce each other to their disparate worlds. Rebecca Dana is a senior correspondent for The Daily Beast, where she writes and edits stories about fashion, culture and politics. Previously, Dana was a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Observer. Her work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair Italia, Slate, Men’s Vogue, The Washington Post, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, Men’s Journal, and The New York Times.
World rights to Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (Fall, 2011)
Contact: Lance Fitzgerald (Lance.Fitzgerald@us.penguingroup.com)
Will Dobson
Dictators are making a comeback. And they are far more sophisticated, savvy, and nimble today than the West has given them credit for being. For a handful of authoritarian regimes, the challenge posed by democracy’s advance led to experimentation, creativity, and cunning. These autocrats have successfully honed new techniques, methods, and formulas for preserving power, refashioning dictatorship for the modern age. But if dictators have become more nimble, so have those who threaten their rule. Across the globe, there is a struggle being fought to determine the balance of power between dictatorships and democracies. It is no longer a static, two-sided conflict between the world’s most powerful democracy and dictatorship, circa the Cold War. Instead, the contest has fractured in a thousand directions, with new rapidly modernizing regimes squaring off against a rag-tag army of dissidents, philanthropists, students, ideologues, bloggers, lawyers, environmentalists, and millionaires. The Dictator’s Learning Curve will tell the story of the hidden, unconventional war between 21st century authoritarians and the brave people who are targeting their tyranny. Traveling across China, Russia, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, and many places in between, it introduces readers to the dictators and how these modern day despots are constantly honing new strategies to oppress their people and preserve their power. And it brings to life the stories of the men and women in the trenches, who dedicate themselves to combating tyrants around the globe. The Dictator’s Learning Curve will be the first book to reveal the dramatic, behind-the-headlines struggle between these warring camps, as the future of democracy and dictatorship hangs in the balance.
World rights to Doubleday(Fall, 2011)
Germany: Blessing Verlag
Contact: Carol Janeway (cjaneway@randomhouse.com)
R. Tripp Evans
A work of biography as meticulous in its research as it is artful in its telling, Grant Wood explores the life and work of the man best known for his iconic 1930 painting, American Gothic. Critics from Wood’s day forward have alternately praised and maligned this image – along with the artist himself – as exemplars of conservative, “American” character. Evans strips away this shopworn image of the artist, considering the ways in which Wood’s deeply-closeted homosexuality, unorthodox family relationships, and complicated love/hate relationship with his native region in fact shaped his work and public persona. Relying upon newly-discovered archival sources, this biography not only deepens our understanding of Wood’s haunting imagery, but calls into question any number of assumptions about what American virtue really means as it tells his fascinating, ultimately tragic story.
U.S./Canadian rights to Knopf (October, 2010)
Christopher L. Hayes
In Twilight of the Elites, Nation magazine’s editor-at-large and MSNBC host Chris Hayes analyzes two trends of the last ten years—growing inequality and the series of public and private fiscal failures that span Enron to the meltdown on Wall Street—and argues that they share an unlikely genesis—the decline of that most American ideal, meritocracy. In just ten years, the basic social consensus on accountability and equity has been thoroughly destroyed, leaving the balkanized, toxic postmodern political conversation we now have. In the absence of the trust in our institutions that once grounded our public debates, the system has failed. It is this fundamental but poorly understood failure that has, Hayes argues, become the driving force of American life. In a braided narrative that looks into the past and future, Hayes traces the strange and destructive path on which America finds itself. He argues, in the first serious work of political autopsy of the Obama years, that the key to moving forward is for elites and citizens alike to define a new system of accountability for our national cultural, political, and religious institutions.
U.S./Canada: Crown(June 2012)
Audio: Random House Audio
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)
Spain: Alpha Decay
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 (December, 2010)
Adam Jortner
In death, William Henry Harrison was cast as a Christian martyr who had successfully opened the western frontier for white settlers. The Christian God, however, was not the only deity stalking America in the first decade-and-a-half of the 19th century. There was another god, the so-called Great Spirit, whose agent was a recovered alcoholic of the Shawnee nation, “of a common size, rather slender, & of no great appearance.” Tenskwatawa, too, claimed his god had great plans for a chosen people in the wilderness of America, and formed his own settlements on the western frontier—first at Greenville, in Ohio, and then at Prophetstown, in Indiana. These were settlements unlike any yet known among Native Americans. No longer would there be any distinction made between Iroquois or Shawnee, Ojibwe or Sioux; at Prophetstown, there was only the Indian Nation...United under the Great Spirit. And so, when Harrison and Tenskwatawa clashed on the American frontier, their gods clashed as well. Had Tenskwatawa won that struggle, any god-blessed notion of a Manifest Destiny would have been nipped in the bud, and the history of the American nations and gods might have looked radically different. For it was the gods, as well as the peoples of Prophetstown, who created the American frontier, in all its terror and glory. A dual biography of great narrative appeal, Adam Jortner’s The Gods of Prophetstown is a book about religion and violence, ever-present items on the contemporary American agenda—and in particular the all too often symbiotic relationship between American politics and American Christianity.
World rights to Oxford University Press(Fall, 2011)
Contact: Jeremy McLaughlin (jeremy.mclaughlin@oup.com)
Andrew Kaufman
Considered by many critics the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is also one of the most feared. And at 1500 pages, 365 chapters, or 566,000 words, it’s no wonder why. Still, new editions keep appearing. For three years the novel has been one of the top 50 bestsellers in Amazon’s world literature category, and its third bestselling book about war. In July 2009 Newsweek put War and Peace at the top of its list of 100 great novels, just ahead of Orwell’s 1984, which came in second, and Joyce’s Ulysses, third. A 2007 edition of the AARP Bulletin, read by millions, included the novel in their list of the top four books everybody should read by the age of fifty. And a New York Times survey from 2009 identified War and Peace as the world classic you’re most likely to find people reading on their subway commute to work. What might all those Newsweek devotees, senior citizens, and harried commuters see in a book about the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800’s? A mirror of our times. War and Peace is many things. It's a love story, a family saga, a war novel. But at its core it is a book about people trying to find their footing in a ruptured world. It is a novel about human beings attempting to create a meaningful life for themselves in a country torn apart by war, social change, and spiritual confusion. The world, Tolstoy tells us, is a mysterious place where things aren’t always what they seem, today’s tragedy often paving the way to tomorrow’s triumph. In Give War and Peace A Chance, University of Virginia assistant professor Andrew Kaufman’s combines biography, history, literary appreciation, and human interest with self-help to help reframe readers’ very understanding of what it means to be alive in troubled times and to survive them. Throughout, the book employs the same light sort of tone and user-friendly topical structure as Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life to appeal to general readers while also satisfying a more scholarly audience. The ideal companion to War and Peace, this book will also be enjoyable to those who have never read a word of Tolstoy, and will certainly make that masterpiece more approachable, relevant, and fun.
U.S./Canadian rights to Free Press (January, 2013)
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 (January, 2011)
Russian: Olga Moroozova
Todd Kliman
"The Wild Vine is beautiful and eye-opening…It’s a mystery story, a history lesson, a personal journey between hard covers: a great American vintage."
-- Darin Straus, author of Chang and Eng
A rich romp through untold American history, studded with extraordinary characters, The Wild Vine is the tale of a little-known American grape that rocked the fine-wine world of the nineteenth century, just as it is again poised to do today. Reaching back more than a hundred years before California wines were thought to have put America on the map as a wine-making nation, The Wild Vine weaves together the lives of a fascinating cast of renegades, beginning with the suicidal Dr. Daniel Norton, tinkering in his experimental garden in 1820s Richmond, Virginia. Half on purpose and half by chance, he creates a hybrid grape that can withstand the harsh New World climate to produce good, drinkable wine, thus succeeding where so many others had failed so fantastically before, from the Jamestown colonists to Thomas Jefferson himself. Thanks to an influential Long Island, New York, seed catalog, the grape moves west, where it is picked up in Missouri by German immigrants who craft the historic 1873 bottling. Prohibition sees these vineyards burned to the ground by government order, but bootleggers keep the grape alive in hidden backwoods plots. Generations later, retired Air Force pilot Dennis Horton, who grew up playing in the abandoned wine caves of the very winery that produced the 1873 Norton, brings cuttings of the grape back home to Virginia. Here, dot-com-millionaire-turned-vintner Jenni McCloud, on an improbable journey of her own, becomes Norton’s ultimate champion, deciding, against all odds, to stake her entire reputation on the outsider grape. Brilliant and provocative, The Wild Vine shares with readers a great American secret, resuscitating the Norton grape and its elusive, inky drink, and forever changing the way we look at wine, America, and long-cherished notions of identity and reinvention.
U.S./Canadian rights to Clarkson Potter (May, 2010)
Jim Lehrer
"In his quiet but intense way, Jim Lehrer earns the trust of the major political players of our time. He explains and exposes their hopes and dreams, their strengths and failures, as they try to put their best foot forward.”
-- Barbara Walters
Author of twenty novels and anchor for PBS NewsHour Jim Lehrer is the “Dean of Moderators” and has presided over eleven presidential and vice-presidential debates in forty years. TENSION CITY gives readers a ringside side for some of the most memorable and epic political battles that helped determine the outcome of America’s elections. As the man “in the middle seat,” Lehrer isolates the “Major Moments” and “killer questions” that defined the debates from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain. The ultimate insider account of some of the most dramatic moments in American political history, with key interviews with the candidates, and backstage moments that add color and insight into the presidential oratorical arena, TENSION CITY delivers an absorbing, personal, and historical account of politics as it unfolded live on television in the United States and around the world.
U.S./Canada: Random House(October, 2011)
Martin Lemelman
(graphic memoir)
"On virtually every page, Lemelman skillfully juxtaposes haunting pencil drawings, family photos and handwritten text. His unique contribution to Holocaust literature will doubtless educe comparisons to Maus yet many may find Lemelman’s more realist work more approachable, immediate and ultimately, unforgettable."
-- Booklist
The follow-up to his award-winning 2007 graphic memoir Mendel’s Daughter, Brooklyn is the bittersweet eyewitness account of one family’s journey from the Neu Freimann Displaced Persons Camp in Germany to the crowded streets of Brooklyn, New York. We follow a husband and wife as they struggle to begin a new life in the land “where the streets are paved with gold.” And we meet a most engaging boy growing up in back of a candy store in the 1950s. Along the way, we meet the characters who enliven the old neighborhood; walk its streets, experience the smells and tastes of a Brooklyn that no longer exists… Just hurry past the Prospect Place Market and you’ll get to Teddy’s Candy Store. Have a frappe. Make a malted. Sip an egg cream. As the 1950s turn into the 1960s, we witness the changes in the neighborhood. In the pivotal and explosive year of 1968, racial strife begins to fester as surely as it did back in the old country, and the Lemelmans regretfully decide to move on once more. Martin Lemelman’s black and white pencil drawings along with actual photos, documents and relics of his boyhood, utterly bring back to life this wonderful, lost world.
U.S./Canadian rights to Bloomsbury USA (September, 2010)
J.E. Lendon
"Brilliantly analyzed."
-- William Grimes, New York Times
"Lendon’s prose takes us through clear explanations of tactics and vivid descriptions of famous fights."
-- London Review of Books
A boldly revisionist recounting of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War—challenging many of the assumptions and arguments of Thucydides himself, and thus the very foundations of what we call Political Realism—Song of Wrath offers a lively military and diplomatic narrative of ancient Greece from 479 BC, the end of the Persian Wars, until 421 BC, the end of the Ten Year's War, which marked the first section of the larger, twenty-seven-year conflict. This period, which saw the rise of democratic Athens to the status of a great-power, her growing rivalry with Sparta, and finally her victory in the bloody war ignited by that rivalry, is one of the most exciting periods in the history of the West. But this engrossing book goes far beyond the work of other historians, using the ancient Greeks to offer a new way of understanding national strategy and foreign relations, one which is just as powerful when applied to the modern world, in particular the contemporary Middle East, as it is to the ancient world. One of the most prominent historians of the ancient world working today, Lendon asks of the ancients very contemporary questions: How, in a war without clear battle-lines, can you tell whether you are winning? And how can peace be made when national honor is engaged? Rightly understood, the experience of fifth-century Greece is a useful commentary on our own recent motives and actions—indeed, a commentary that may explain our behavior rather more clearly than the newspapers and journals of our own time.
World rights to Basic Books (November, 2010)
Contact: Isabelle Bleecker (Isabelle.Bleecker@perseusbooks.com)
Dutch: Ambo/Anthos
Michael Levy
We hear a lot about China’s dynamic growth these days. But what about the Other Billion, the Chinese who live outside the industrial and financial centers along the coast? Kosher Dog Meat takes us into a rural China wrestling with high-velocity modernity and hyper-capitalism. Writer Michael Levy provides this smart snapshot of how Guiyang, the capital city of Guizhou province (aka “flyover country”) is developing at a furious pace. He and his wife were Peace Corps volunteers who served two years in Guiyang and witnessed the struggle between the past and the present and the promise of the future in this particular Chinese microcosm. From the first page, however, the reader will discover that this is not a typical book on China. Michael details the heretofore unexplored Chinese obsession with Judaism. He takes this in stride—especially as his students and fellow professors believe being Jewish, following Jewish ways, is the key to success. So while the book is first and foremost about China, it’s also a story about how and why a Jewish guy from Philadelphia dresses up as Santa Claus and chases Wal-Mart shoppers with a rubber mallet and Silly String—screaming at them to buy, buy, buy! Guizhou province was the birthplace of Mao’s political ascension—it is also the source of current premier Hu Jintao’s political power. As the author writes, “any culture that can comfortably combine Maoism and capitalism, Judaism and pork, mahjiang and Americans—not to mention Christmas and Silly String—has the creativity to thrive in, and perhaps dominate, the turbulence and change that will surely mark the 21st century.” Above all, in Kosher Dog Meat, we get a sense of the patriotism, confusion, and humor that mark life in interior China.
World rights to Hentry Holt & Co. (July, 2011)
Contact: Maggie Sivon (maggie.sivon@hholt.com)
Jonathan Lyons
With the “first Drudgery” of creating the new American settlements now well and truly past, Benjamin Franklin announced in 1743, it was high time that “Virtuosi or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies” begin meaningful collaboration to improve the lot of humankind. Here, in the new world, Franklin and his future collaborators in what was later to emerge as The American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia, for Promoting Useful Knowledge, were giving voice to one of the most cherished notions of the Enlightenment. At its core, this idea is a disarmingly simple one – that the value of learning and knowledge is directly proportional to its practical import or utility. Yet, this same idea has left a profound mark on American society and culture and on the very idea of America itself – and through it, on the world as a whole. Its echoes can be detected in the Declaration of Independence and other acts of the Founding Fathers; in the humming and hissing of the early steam engines that once captivated the agrarian idealist Thomas Jefferson; in the emergence of grassroots democratic institutions and the Great Awakening, with its emphasis on experiential religion; and in the rise of the nation’s industrial and technological might throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book, with Benjamin Franklin at its heart, traces the birth of practical societies in the new world and, how, along the way, this quest for useful knowledge has shaped America’s social, economic, cultural, and political institutions.
World rights to Bloomsbury (2012)
Contact: Lauren Shekari (lauren.shekari@bloomsburyusa.com)
Susan Mattern
The written output of the physician known simply as Galen comprises an astonishing one-eighth of all surviving classical Greek literature; and from the later Roman Empire through the Renaissance, medical education would be based primarily on his works. Yet for many, Galen has been reduced to a handsome classical bust atop the typical doctor’s office bookcase—an arcane, disembodied corpus of ideas long since rendered obsolete by the advent of germ theory and modern physiology. In the process, we've lost sight of the extent to which his intellectual legacy, the very foundation of western medicine, was grounded in his practice—in what he observed, experienced, dared, performed and accomplished. In Physician of Rome, Susan Mattern, professor at the University of Georgia, seeks to address this rather big gap in our memory and understanding. Intended to reach not only core markets including students of classical literature or the history of medicine, but general readers of popular history as well, the book carefully positions Galen in his time and environment, bringing the classical world to gritty, pungent life. The character of Rome, in particular, plays a role in this biography second only to that of the physician himself. Brawls, wrestling injuries, impromptu debates, bloody dissections or vivisections of animals, random encounters with rivals or patients: In Galen we have an eyewitness to all of these features of Ancient Roman life, for he was a highly visible public figure, quite typical of Rome's intense, competitive environment, with most of his rivalries played out in the open air, in the streets, and in the city's crowded fora and baths. Here, truly, is the very first trade biography of the father of medicine.
U.S./Canadian rights to Oxford University Press (2012)
UK rights to Oxford University Press (2012)
Media Matters for America - David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt
With 11 million monthly visitors, Media Matters for America has grown into one of the ferocious watchdog and fact-checking organizations in the world. In this explosive narrative, New York Times bestselling author David Brock shows how Fox News has evolved from a news network to an active campaign arm for the conservative movement under the aegis of veteran politico-cum-newsman Roger Ailes, intent on bringing down the Obama administration. Weaving in unpublished emails and memos, with an up-to-the-minute review of the Rupert Murdoch scandal in the United Kingdom, The Fox Effect will likely increase scrutiny of a network gone “rogue.”
U.S./Canda: Vintage/Anchor(January, 2012)
Audio: Random House Audio
Ethan Michaeli
Begun at the turn of the last century by a University of Chicago Law School graduate who, even after graduating at the top of his class, found himself unhireable at a conventional law firm, The Chicago Defender quickly became one of the most important voices in the politics of race in America. From its early days relentlessly battling the South's intransigent culture of lynchings and Jim Crowe laws, and its pivotal role in The Great Migration, to its success in integrating the armed forces as well as ensuring the election of John F. Kennedy, and right up through the election of America's first African-American president, The Defender featured writers like Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, WEB DuBois and Jesse Jackson as they reported on and criticized race relations and politics in America. An invaluable vehicle by which to tell the story of African American politics in the 20th century, The Defender also chronicles the rise and fall of the incredible family that ran it, cultivating power and triangulating it to enormously beneficial effect, only to find itself in later decades out of step with more aggressive political postures, and displaced by new forms of media that would have greater effect upon modern black politics. Through first-hand experience working at the newspaper and with unparalleled access to the family’s archives, Ethan Michaeli shows how The Defender shaped the American identity by giving a voice to people who had had none, and demanding that the country fulfill its promise to all its citizens.
U.S./Canadian rights to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July, 2012)
Simon Morrison
*Winner of Guggenheim Fellowship, 2011-2012
On the night of February 20, 1948, Lina Prokofiev received an unexpected telephone call at her Moscow apartment. She was lured outside, muscled into a waiting car by Soviet police, and taken into custody. After a brutal interrogation and show trial, she was sentenced to twenty years in the Gulag, of which she served eight. Lina assumed that her estranged husband, the eminent composer Sergey Prokofiev, had also been arrested. He had not. Lina actually grew up in New York City, which is where she met Sergey Prokofiev, a dazzlingly impudent musician of prodigious talent. Together they lived an eclectic international life out of a riot of suitcases, breezing through the Jazz Age in Europe and America before relocating to Moscow in 1936. Lina witnessed the breathtaking transformation of Russia into the Soviet Union; the arrests, exiles, and murders of Stalin’s Great Terror; the siege of Moscow in World War II; and diplomatic maneuvers by the USSR and the West during the Cold War. She defected in 1974 and lived to see the crumbling of Communism and fall of the Berlin Wall. Her biography reads like a novel, yet no novelist could invent such a tale. This book offers facts—not only about her, but also about her century and its turning of utopian dreams into totalitarian nightmares. Lina’s life speaks to tragedy on a personal level as well as a global scale. That it does so without hyperbole or ideological axe-grinding is testament to its grounding in reality. This biography is based on Lina’s intimate journals, voluminous letters to Prokofiev and their two sons, her arrest file, official interrogation reports, and other bombshell documents in the possession of the family or sealed in the Moscow archives, but to which Morrison has been granted exclusive, unfettered access.
World English rights to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (January, 2013)
Contact: Debbie Engel(debbie.engel@hmhpub.com)
Janice P. Nimura
In December of 1871, soon after the collapse of the samurai state and the opening of Japan to the west, five small girls were sent abroad to learn how to become cosmopolitan western women. As young as six, these girls would spend ten years studying in America in the homes of progressive intellectuals. Three would stay the full term, and of those two would attend Vassar, one becoming valedictorian. In 1882, now young women, these wholly Americanized girls returned to Tokyo, fired with enthusiasm to revolutionize the education of women inJapan. But while the 1870s had been a decade of breathtaking social and political change inJapan, the Land of the Rising Sun wasn’t ready for three young bluestockings, elegantly attired in western clothing, in the habit of sitting on chairs and eating with forks, speaking their mother tongue with halting difficulty, and reading it not at all. They were told to get married. One did, and for love, settling into relative obscurity. Another married the minister of war, a widower eighteen years her senior, and used her elite social status to promote change from within. And one remained stubbornly single, founding one of the most prestigious women’s colleges inJapan. The three little girls who grew up in America became women with the odd ability to see their native Japan through foreign eyes, at once insiders and perpetual outsiders. Though they were “home,” they felt homesick for the rest of their lives. Their stories are largely forgotten, but the challenges they faced are startlingly modern: cultural alienation, the choice between work and family, the tension between tradition and innovation, and the struggle to overturn fixed ideas about what a woman should be.
U.S. Canada: W.W. Norton(2014)
Dave Philipps
* 2010 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
*2010 Livingston Award Recepient
*2010 Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award
"A startling and compelling human drama that exposes the raw truth: that the cause of PTSD lies not within the soldier who suffers it, but in the nature of war itself, and what we ask them to endure. David Philipps shows that 'supporting our troops' must mean far more than cheering them on in the field. This book is a must for anyone who cares about our soldiers, the lives of those they touch, and what kind of a country we aspire to be."
-- Richard North Patterson, best-selling author of Balance of Power and Exile
Lethal Warriors is the dark saga of one American infantry regiment’s repeated deployments to Iraq and how the gruesome brutality of combat ultimately brought the horror of the war home to America. The story follows the 506th Infantry Regiment through deployments to the two bloodiest spots in war-time Iraq, where soldiers learn to fight the insurgents using torture and extra-judicial killing, and back to Colorado Springs, a military town that has long been one of the war's staunchest bastions of support. The battalion is welcomed home, however, by an Army command ill-equipped to treat the deep psychological wounds of war, and many of the soldiers worst off are subsequently kicked out of the military for poor behavior or drug use, drifting deeper into substance abuse and violence until several are arrested for murder. Many of the crimes are shockingly random and leveled at civilians who had nothing to do with the war or the soldiers. By the end of the second tour, the 500 soldiers of the battalion help drive up a homicide rate over 100 times greater than nearby cities. The murders and mayhem compel the leadership at Fort Carson, Colorado to address Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the physiological wounds of war. Lethal Warriors is both a horrifying account of combat, abroad and at home, and a primer on the biology, symptoms and treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In selecting Lethal Warriors as a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award, the judges noted that “ultimately, Philipps’ book has the promise that it may bring to life the devastating impact of the damage wrought by the Iraq War—violence that is even more disturbing because it takes place on the home front.”
World English rights to Palgrave Macmillan (November, 2010)
Mark Rotella
"Like the singers and songs it celebrates, Amore gets a lot done in a tight, memorable, heartfelt way. This isn't just a book about Italian-American crooners -- it's an intimate account of immigrant life, a history of an enduring art form, a tribute to family, an evocation of the power of song, and a deeply personal reckoning with the music itself. It's a love song in its own right, and it's beautifully sung."
-- Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Amore is Mark Rotella’s celebration of the “Italian decade”—the years just after World War II and before the Beatles, when Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett, among others, won the hearts of the American public with a smooth, stylish, classy brand of pop. In Rotella’s vivid telling, the stories behind forty Italian American classics (from “O Sole Mio,” “Night and Day,” and “Mack the Knife” to “Volare” and “I Wonder Why”) show how a glorious musical tradition became the sound track of postwar America and the expression of a sense of style that we still cherish. Rotella follows the music from the opera houses and piazzas of southern Italy, to the barrooms of the Bronx and Hoboken, to the Copacabana, the Paramount Theatre, and the Vegas Strip. He shows us the hardworking musicians whose voices were to become ubiquitous on jukeboxes and the radio and whose names— some anglicized, some not—have become bywords for Italian American success, even as they were dogged by stereotypes and prejudice. Amore is the personal Top 40 of one proud son of Italy; it is also a love song to Italian American culture and an evocation of an age that belongs to us all.
World English rights to Farrar, Straus & Giroux (September, 2010)
Contact: Devon Mazzone (dmazzone@fsgbooks.com)
David Sirota
Back to Our Future looks at how the movies, television, toys, video games, music and pop culture of the 1980s not only endure in today's Hollywood remakes and stand-up comedy jokes, but still shape politics in the United States, frame the public debate, and define the global psyche. As the era that first culturalized the generation that now runs much of the world, its impact is everywhere –from the Iraq and Afghanistan War, to the financial crisis, to the recent Tea Party rallies to the unending battle over race. Which is hardly surprising. Anthropologists often say, "Show me the games of your children, and I'll show you the next 100 years." The same could be said of the 1980s. As the first moment of corporate and media integration, its cultural zeitgeist left a permanent mark on human consciousness—a mark that has gone largely unexplored. In intertwining an examination of 1980s pop culture with a journey through American political, military and economic history, New York Times bestselling author David Sirota shows that the past has become our future. Back to Our Future argues that if we don't recognize this reality, we are doomed to repeat the 1980s and its very worst mistakes.
U.S./Canadian rights to Ballantine (Spring, 2011)
Jacob Soll
In America, in Europe, even in a newly powerful modern China, we find ourselves right now facing serious financial crises of accounting and accountability. Across the globe there seems little certainty today about debt levels or the reliability of private auditors and public regulators meant to clarify the world of finance. Few seem curious about the origins of our crisis beyond the obvious example of the events leading up to the Great Depression. Yet history surely provides other useful lessons for understanding and coping with our current crisis. Newly minted 2011 MacArthur "Genius" (for his work studying the origins of the modern state) and 2009 Guggenheim Fellow Jacob Soll’s The Reckoning examines just where our mode of mixing politics and accounting comes from and seeks to help us get a historical handle on the big numbers that rain down upon us every day. It shows how, in the right hands, accounting can be a tool to build companies, states and empires; while, in the wrong hands, it has contributed to cycles of destruction, either through the ineptitude of those responsible for accounting, or because cooked account books constitute such a dangerous tool for abuse and fraud.A complement to titles like Niall Ferguson's bestselling The Ascent of Money, The Reckoning looks to make some sense of our own massive crisis of financial circumlocution by looking backwards seven hundred years to the very origins of finance and political accountability, and then tracing the unfolding story of how states kept accounts and audited themselves and their institutions, from fourteenth-century Genoa, to the Stock Market Crash of 1929. It is a retelling of history we may have thought we knew—the rise of accounting, finance, states, banks and modern economies. But while the basics of what Soll covers here may at first look familiar, many of the crucially revelatory details and interpretations he provides will be new even to seasoned readers of financial history.
World Rights: Basic Books (2013)
Brazil: Record
Japan: Bungei Shunju
Contact: Isabelle Bleecker (isabelle.bleecker@perseusbooks.com)
Debora Spar
President of Barnard College and author of numerous books Debora Spar argues that the challenge for today's women lies in simultaneously redefining both work patterns and women's expectations if they are ever to achieve both equality and equanimity. In her untitled book, Spar tracks the key stages of a woman's life—from childhood to adolescence, bodies, dating and sex, marriage, contraception, motherhood, careers, and aging—blending memoir with feminist theory and contemporary story-telling to reveal what was supposed to happen to the liberated woman and what befell her instead.
U.S./Canadian rights to Sarah Crichton Books/FSG (2013)
Stephanie Staal
Like so many women, journalist Stephanie Staal found herself blindsided when she became a wife and mother. Suddenly forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about being a woman, her old freedoms and potential seeming to vanish by the diaper-load, Staal made a daring decision: She would return to Barnard College to retake a class on feminist classics, armed with her new perspective on marriage and motherhood, yet determined to keep fresh the notions of female identity. What she didn't expect was just how much reading these books and learning about their authors' lives would set her on a true journey of self-discovery, surprising and challenging any number of assumptions she might have picked up along the way. Part memoir, part literary adventure, part social observation, Reading Women maps out a lively tour through the works of such authors as Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Carol Gilligan, while also taking us inside the classroom and introducing us to a whole new generation of students who are reading these revolutionary women writers for the first time.
World English rights to Public Affairs (February, 2011)
Contact: Jennifer Thompson (jennifer.thompson@perseusbooks.com)
Korea: Minumsa
Micahel Thomas
* Winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2009
* New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of 2007
From the author of the critically acclaimed novel Man Gone Down, The Broken King is Michael Thomas’s compellingly uninhibited memoir about fathers and sons, lovers and beloved, trauma and recovery, race and de-racination, success and failure, and the Boston Red Sox. Through the collective narratives of four generations of men in his family, from his grandfather to his own two sons, Thomas investigates the many forces that shape our lives, and illuminates the very nature of the human spirit—both its profound strength and its devastating fragility. It is a groundbreaking work—darkly skeptical and genuinely optimistic—on the pursuit of wholeness and redemption, set against the backdrop of the last 140 years in American history; from reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement to the present day.
U.S./Canadian rights to Grove/Atlantic (Spring, 2011)
Dominic Tierney
How do Americans think about and understand war? Can these beliefs explain why the public supports some conflicts, but not others, and why the United States wins or loses on the battlefield? How We Fight uses letters, poems, novels, opinion polls, memorials, newspapers, posters, photographs, country music, Star Trek, and even the engravings on Zippo lighters, to explore the American experience of war since the Revolution. The book argues that Americans are addicted to regime change while allergic to the rigors of nation-building. We see wars against foreign countries as glorious crusades to topple enemy tyrants. In stark contrast, we view missions to fight insurgents and stabilize foreign societies as wearying quagmires—whether or not they are actually successful. In a narrative that sweeps from Gettysburg to Manila Bay, from the bloody killing fields of France to the improvised explosive devices in Iraq today, we see the United States roused into a crusading fervor before falling into deep regret, only to be roused yet again for the next conflict. But as we have witnessed all too clearly in the Iraq War, a love of overthrowing tyrants, coupled with an aversion to dealing with the consequences, can yield terrible (and terrifying) results in today’s highly unstable security environment.
World rights to Little, Brown & Co.(November, 2010)
Contact: Tracy Williams (tracy.williams@hbgusa.com)
Henry Tricks
As The Economist’s bureau chief in Tokyo, Henry Tricks has access to some of the best minds in Japan and in the wake of the March disaster, the book will weave the personal observations of a foreigner living and working in Japan with a journalist’s reporting on the very real challenge that lies before the nation: How and in which direction will Japan pivot in its third decade of little or no economic growth, with a rising China, a distracted America, and in recovery from a catastrophe of epic proportions? It’s an opportunity for a re-set and Japan’s extraordinary moment to choose between further isolation or re-engagement with the world around it, or perhaps to find a uniquely Japanese solution. Either way, it’ll make for a gripping narrative at a critical time for this entirely original society.
World rights to PublicAffairs, excluding UK/Commonwealth (2014)
Australia: Scribe
Jim Walsh
Dr. Jim Walsh, an MIT and Harvard international security expert and one of the few Americans to have traveled to North Korea to discuss their nuclear program with Korean officials at the highest levels, examines how most of our assumptions regarding North Korean are dangerously wrong—and what we need to do to prepare ourselves for the coming regime change as Kim Jong Il fades from power. Contrary to popular belief, Walsh argues that North Korea’s actions are, in fact, entirely logical, with the ultimate goal of a normalized relationship with the United States, and that North Korea’s touchy relationships with not only the U.S., but China, Japan, and of course South Korea, will predict how the regime change will play out. In the current climate, the stakes could not be higher, and Walsh offers several suggestions for how America and the world should proceed, in order to avoid a disastrous mishandling of this misunderstood country.
World rights to Yale University Press (Fall, 2013)
Contact: Anne Bihan (anne.bihan@yaleup.co.uk)
Philip White
The year 1945 was a chaotic one, both for the world, of course, and for Winston Churchill. Communism was on the march and the people of Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland all found themselves in the grip of the Soviets. The Red Army occupied a large German territory, and the Kremlin was manipulating post-war food shortages, labor disputes, and social unrest in Greece, France, and Italy.
Having spent his "wilderness years" in the late 1930s warning of the dangers of diplomatic and military weakness and the growing menace of Nazism, in 1946 Churchill made a trip to Fulton, Missouri, to deliver a speech entitled "The Sinews of Peace"—now known as the Iron Curtain Speech—which served to fundamentally define the dangers of Soviet totalitarian Communism. This is the story of that pivotal speech and how it came to be given, and a portrait of the irrepressible man who delivered it.
World rights to PublicAffairs
UK: Duckworth
Kate Bernheimer, Illustrated by Chris Sheban
When a wonderful new book arrives at the library, at first it is loved by all, checked out constantly, and rarely spends a night on the library shelf. But over time it grows old and worn, and the children lose interest in its story. The book is sent to the library's basement where the other faded books live. How it eventually finds an honored place on a little girl's bookshelf—and in her heart—makes for an unforgettable story sure to enchant anyone who has ever cherished a book. Kate Bernheimer and Chris Sheban have teamed up to create a picture book that promises to be loved every bit as much as the lonely book itself.
World Rights: Schwartz & Wade/Random House (April, 2012)
Contact: Jocelyn Lange (jlange@randomhouse.com)
Katie Crouch
An unlikely Southern debutante discovers voodoo secrets and scandal hidden beneath Savannah society's perfectly glossed veneer in this exciting young adult debut from Katie Crouch, bestselling author of Girls in Trucks. After the death of her free-spirited hippie mother, 16-year-old Alexandria Lee is forced to move from Northern California to Savannah, Georgia to live with her wealthy and matriarchal grandmother, Mrs. Dorothy Lawson Lee. By birth, Alex is a rightful if at first resistent member of The Magnolia League, Savannah's longstanding debutante society, but she soon discovers that something sinister lies beneath the League member's ostensibly perfect lives. The Mags, as Alex's younger friends call the League members, have actually made a pact with a legendary Voodoo master: In exchange for long lasting beauty, wealth, and power, the women of the Magnolia League can never leave Savannah—and neither can their daughters.
U.S. rights to Little, Brown & Co/Poppy (Spring, 2011)
Audio: Brilliance
German: Hanser
Katie Crouch & Grady Hendrix
Book two of the Magnolia League series finds our heroine, Alexandria Lee, studying under her grandmother in order to be deemed "suitable" to assume her role as head of the Magnolia League. However, Alex is only trying to learn the Voodoo codes in order to free her mother, Louisa, from her prison in the "haint blue" room of Miss Lee's mansion. Unfortunately, Magnolia sisters Hayes and Madison are unaware of her real intentions. And when Alex changes her image to "Bristol Palin at mega-church," throwing over Thaddeus to spend more time with her grandmother and the boys she recommends, the MG's can only assume that the once refreshingly independent Alex is selling out. What they don't know is that another power-hungry Magnolia has put their new friend's life in grave danger. In fact, Alex herself only becomes aware of this after two mysterious attempts on her life. Soon she realizes she has just one chance to save herself and liberate her mother at last: putting herself under the protection of Sina—by far the least trustworthy of the voodoo-proficient Buzzard family. Moreover, she 's got to do this all while feigning allegiance to Miss Lee as a mysterious and charming new boy, Chad, shows up at the River School with an uncanny level of understanding of all of their lives. Intentionally or not, he soon has all of the MGs working against each other. And,when real tragedy strikes, the bonds of the League are tested. Will Hayes, Madison and Alex be able to unite in order to save not only Alex's mother, but themselves as well?
U.S. rights to Little, Brown & Co/Poppy (May 2012)
T.M. Goeglein
Having just turned sixteen, Sara Jane Rispoli’s birthday is anything but sweet. She barely registers on the social radar at her Chicago private school, Casimir Fepinsky Preparatory, and the extracurricular Classic Movie Club she founded has all of three members—including her crush Max Kissberg, who despite his name isn’t exactly making the moves on her. Worse, Sara Jane’s beloved Grandpa Enzo, owner of the neighborhood landmark bakery Rispoli & Sons, has just passed away, unleashing long-simmering resentments between Sara Jane’s father and his younger brother. A violent confrontation at Enzo’s funeral between her dad and her adored Uncle Buddy, a lovable loser who introduced Sara Jane to the ring when she was a child and gave her an enviable set of boxing skills, leads to her uncle’s banishment. It’s a lot for the awkward, sheltered Sara Jane to handle, but nothing compared to what happens next: returning from her first high school dance, Sara Jane walks into a ransacked home and finds her family missing, the dog maimed and a psychopath in a ski mask who won’t rest until she’s dead. With nothing to go on but a cryptic Etch-a-Sketch message left by her brother and a clue hidden in a bust of Frank Sinatra, Sara Jane jumps into her dad’s 1965 Lincoln Continental and drives into the night. The clues lead her to an abandoned speakeasy under the family bakery and an ancient, worn notebook that contains a guide to a Chicago hiding in plain sight— safe houses, secret doors, mysterious phone numbers are all suddenly at Sara Jane’s disposal. But the notebook also contains darker, more troubling secrets concerning the Rispoli family, including the revelation that a rare and powerful hereditary trait passed down from the time of Alexander the Great enabled certain male members of the Rispoli clan to become major figures in the Outfit, Chicago’s storied crime syndicate. Sara Jane quickly realizes the secrets contained in the notebook are the reason why her family was taken, and why she’s being pursued by three different factions: her turncoat uncle, Police Detective Dotty Smelt, and the huge, shambling freak in the ski mask. Learning of the gift awakens a realization in Sara Jane that she, too, possesses the powerful phenomenon.
With the help of a weight-challenged sidekick, an angry Italian greyhound, and a legion of guardian angel sewer rats, Sara Jane is chased, attacked, and fights back with cold fury, staying one step ahead of her pursuers and circumnavigating the male-centric Outfit while also keeping a growing romance alive.
World English rights to Putnam (March 2012)
Contact: Helen Boomer (helen.boomer@us.penguingroup.com)
France: Editions Milan
Germany: Heyne
The Netherlands: Prometheus
Jesse Karp
Set in the very near future, a wounded New York struggles with the aftermath of a power plant explosion that plunged the city into fourteen days of violence and darkness. An enormous bug-like dome is hastily constructed to keep toxic gases from escaping the site. “Big Black,” as it is soon christened by the media, casts a gloomy pall over the city, serving as a bleak daily reminder of the tragedy. Bruised and battered, seventeen-year-old Mal returns to the Brooklyn home of his foster parents one night to discover that his older brother Tommy has vanished after leaving a strange message on his phone. Mal launches a search for his estranged brother that leads to a forebidding, apparently vacant Manhattan skyscraper, and once inside, makes a careless mistake that reveals hidden cracks in the surface of the world we know. Meanwhile, Laura, a sweet college-bound high school senior is shaken from her quiet suburban life when her parents inexplicably abandon her, following which two agents from Homeland Security armed with a hypodermic needle show up at her Long Island home. Soon the two teenagers are thrown together with a cynical and bitter high school teacher named Mike, and Jon Remak, a covert agent for a shadowy cooperative. These strangers share little in common, save for one terrifying fact: someone or something has wiped them from the memories of every single person the four have ever known. Only by working together can Mal and Laura hope to reclaim a past that was stolen from them—and start a future no one can take away.
U.S./Canadian rights to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children's Books(Spring, 2011)
Lish McBride
"This is a scary funny book or a funny scary book. In either case, it is a great book. I love it."
-- Sherman Alexie, author of, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
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)
Australia: Penguin
France: La Martiniere
Indonesia: Serambi
Contact: Holly Hunnicutt(holly.hunnicut@macmillan.com)
Lish McBride
With the defeat of the evil necromancer Douglas behind him, Sam LaCroix is getting used to his new life. Ok, so he hadn't exactly planned on being a powerful necromancer with a seat on the local magical council and a capricious werewolf sort-of-girlfriend, but things are going fine, right? Well...not really. He's pretty tired of getting beat up by everyone and their mother, for one thing, and he can’t help but feel that his new house hates him. His best friend is a were-bear, and while Sam realizes that he himself has a lot of power at his fingertips, he's not exactly sure how to use it. Which, he has to admit, is a bit disconcerting. But when someone close to Sam turns up dead, he decides it's time for him to step up and take control. His attempts to do so just bring up more questions, though, the most important of which is more than a little alarming: Is Douglas really dead?
World English rights to Holt Books for Young Readers (September, 2012)
Contact: Holly Hunnicutt(holly.hunnicut@macmillan.com)
Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet’s middle-grade novel, The Fires Beneath the Sea, is the first in a proposed series following the adventures of thirteen-year-old Cara, her two brothers, Max and Jax, her friend Hayley, and others in the Sykes children's expanding personal circle as they embark on a quest to find their missing mother and bring her home—and, as it turns out, save the world in the process. The kids' search for Cara's mother soon reveals a much larger backstory—a hidden world beneath Cape Cod that draws us into a mysterious, complex universe that interacts with the familiar one in profound and unsettling ways. Each book will see the progressive unraveling of the enigmas behind her mother's disappearance even as it ratchets up the tension as our heroes battle a conspiracy to turn life on earth into something no longer recognizable. Part epic, part fable, part family drama, the series is inspired by works like the A Wrinkle in Time. Set squarely in the here and now, in present day New England, it moves between a commonplace scene of high school, the Internet, mass culture, all the vagaries of middle-class adolescence, and a fantastic glimpse of the unknown that teems just beneath the surfaces of things–—a mysterious parallel world that's invisibly driving the historic events we see on TV and read about in the news. Here is a decidedly character-driven coming-of-age story married brilliantly with the kind of ecological and mystical elements for which Millet is known and loved.
World rights to Small Beer Press (April, 2011)
Contact: Whitney Lee (wlee@us.fieldingagency.com)
Rob Sharenow
Fourteen-year-old Karl Stern has never thought of himself a Jew. But to the bullies at his school in Nazi-era Berlin, it doesn’t matter that Karl has never set foot in a synagogue, or that his family doesn’t practice religion. Demoralized by relentless bullying for a heritage he’s never accepted as his own, Karl longs to prove his worth to everyone around him. Help comes in the form of Max Schmeling, champion boxer and German national hero. Max makes a deal with Karl’s art-dealer father to provide boxing lessons in exchange for a painting. A skilled cartoonist, Karl never had any interest in boxing but now he sees it as the perfect chance to reinvent himself. And as Max becomes the mentor Karl never had, soon Karl finds both his strength and his art flourishing. But when Nazi violence against Jews in Berlin escalates, Karl must take on a new role: protector of his family. Karl longs to ask his new mentor for help, but Max himself has become a symbol of German pride, forced to associate with those who despise Karl most. With little guidance and less hope, can Karl balance his dream of boxing greatness with his obligation to keep his family out of harm’s way?
World: HarperTeen (April, 2011)
Contact: Alpha Wong (alpha.wong@harpercollins.com)
Brazil: Editora Rocco
Italy: Piemme
A Junior Library Guild Pick
Jen Violi
At fourteen, Donna Parisi watches her world fall tragically apart when her father succumbs to a long bout with cancer just as she’s scheduled to start Dayton, Ohio’s Woodmont High. By senior year, even as Donna’s friends and classmates are excitedly planning the next chapter of their lives, Donna remains stuck in place. She’s never had a boyfriend, she’s powerless against the jabs of her “frenemy” Patty, and the ghost of her father hangs over every interaction with her mom, a devout Catholic who finds comfort in dogmatic truths that utterly fail to satisfy Donna’s big questions about faith and loss. Then, after a fellow student unexpectedly dies, Donna has an epiphany at the girl's funeral: figuring she already knows death, she decides to become a mortician. Understandably, Donna’s mother is less-than-pleased with her decision, and the rift escalates until Donna moves out and into a spare room at a local funeral home where she works while attending a local school of mortuary science. Guiding mourners through the grieving process and learns that part of living means honoring death, Donna finds a peace and a purpose that finally enables her to let go. She finds wisdom and strength in people as varied as the self-possessed new girl in town, Liz, a churchgoing divorcee named Leaf, and her estranged Wiccan aunt, Selena. In the end, a stronger Donna determines not to let the unavoidable fact of death stifle her own life. The novel culminates in an ending that will move readers to tears.
U.S./Canadian rights to Hyperion Children's (June, 2011)
China: Guangdong Yongzheng
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