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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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
Contact: Holly Hunnicutt(holly.hunnicut@macmillan.com)
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
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)
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)
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)
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 (July, 2011)
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
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 (Fall, 2011)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
System Fail diagnoses the profound and wrenching crisis of authority currently defining American public life. Over the last decade, the U.S. has experienced a cascade of institutional scandals and crises that have thrown the entire social order into question. From Major League Baseball, to General Motors, to the Catholic Church to Congress and Wall Street, nearly every store of reputational capital has been bankrupted. The result is historically low levels of public trust in institutions, which continues to be governed by a meritocratic elite that increasingly lacks both moral authority and legitimacy. With rigorous reporting, System Fail uncovers the roots of these crises, the institution and social dynamics that brought about such catastrophic failures. Washington, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation and MSNBC contributor Hayes explores the social, moral and epistemic effects on a society where trust is increasingly rare and public consensus nearly impossible to achieve. The book lays out a vision for a broad Reformation of American society aimed at breaking down old oligarchic hierarchies, valuing small “d” democracy, and increasing the equality of accountability.
U.S./Canadian rights to Broadway Books(Spring, 2012)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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. (April, 2011)
Contact: Maggie Sivon (maggie.sivon@hholt.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)
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
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 (2011)
Contact: Debbie Engel(debbie.engel@hmhpub.com)
Dave Philipps
* 2010 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
*2010 Livingston Award Recepient
*2010 Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award
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
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)
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)
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)
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