FAMINE:
THE UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE 1932-33 by Anne Applebaum (history)
DELIVERY: DECEMBER 2015
Anne Applebaum investigates the famine that
swept the Soviet state during 1932 and 1933, the most lethal in European
history and the most carefully covered up from the international world, in
three parts. Of the 5 million who lost their lives during these food shortages,
3 million were Ukrainians. Applebaum will argue that this famine amounted to a
state sanctioned genocide, that the policy of collectivization was used to kill
millions and end political resistance in Ukraine. Part one will explain the
famine’s background, part two will describe how Soviet leadership turned a
disaster into genocide against Ukrainian people, and part three will examine
the consequences of the famine, both in the immediate aftermath and over many
years.
Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the
Washington Post and Slate, covering U.S. and international politics. She also
runs a program on global transitions at the Legatum Institute in London, and in
2012-2013 held the Phillipe Roman chair in History and International Affairs at
the London School of Economics. Her book, Gulag:
A History, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, as well as
Britain's Duff-Cooper Prize. Her most recent book, Iron Curtain, was nominated for a National Book Award.
*U.S.
and Canada rights to Doubleday
*U.K.
rights to Penguin UK
PAUL
DE MAN by Evelyn Barish (biography)
PUBLICATION: FALL 2013
Evelyn Barish
chronicles de Man’s fascinating upbringing and family background, his highly
reprehensible behavior during the war, his involvement with a variety of women
(including Mary McCarthy), and his “stellar” career in this country based on
lies and deceptions. Barish has
unearthed totally original material regarding de Man’s background and
activities (his ambition, misguided political activities during the war, his
shady financial dealings, his seductiveness, and his manipulation of the
American academic world.)
Evelyn Barish, a Professor at the Graduate center of the City University of New
York, is the author of EMERSON: THE ROOTS OF
PROPHECY (Princeton University Press), for which she won the Christian Gauss
prize in 1990.
*US & Canada rights to WW
Norton
UPDIKE by Adam Begley (biography)
DELIVERY: JUNE 2013
UPDIKE
will be an authoritative full-length biography that unsparingly explores
the life and times of John Updike as well as the influence they had on his
remarkable body of work, including his groundbreaking novels, essays, stories,
poetry, and criticism. It will offer the most revealing, in-depth portrait to
date of this towering figure in American life.
Adam Begley, who
was for years the books editor of The New
York Observer, says “Most writers are only interesting in so far as they
write books we value. Their daily lives are generally bereft of high drama.
Though Updike’s life can only be described as sedentary (how else could he have
produced more than 60 books in just 76 years?), his character was more colorful
than most (he was an attractive man easily attracted to others), and manifestly
complex (he was a kind man who was ruthlessly competitive and a gentle man with
a vicious wit). My principal aim in writing his biography will be to illuminate
for the reader the nature of his character and of his greatest
accomplishments.”
*World English language rights
sold to HarperCollins
FROM EXILE TO WASHINGTON: A MEMOIR OF
LEADERSHIP IN THE 20TH CENTURY by Michael Blumenthal (memoir)
PUBLICATION:
OCTOBER 2013
Born in Weimar Germany, W. Michael
Blumenthal grew up during the ascent of the Third Reich. He and his family fled
from the Nazis to the other side of the world--first to Shanghai, then to
America. There, he made a career in business and politics, as an adviser to
President Kennedy and as the Secretary of the Treasury under President Carter.
In 1997, after a half century as an American, he did what many German Jews
would never consider: He returned to Berlin.
In From Exile to Washington, Blumenthal explains how his life
experiences led him to reaccept his German homeland. He vividly describes his
youth in Berlin during Nazi rule, his dramatic escape to Japanese occupied
China, and the life he made in the United States. Whether as a professor of
economics, a business leader, or a presidential adviser, Blumenthal has always
been keenly attuned to current events. With the authority of an elder
statesman, Blumenthal presents a compelling view of a new Germany--one that has
been forced to confront its own dark past and become a world leader once again.
*World
English language rights to Overlook Press
LOLITA: A BIOGRAPHY by Brian Boyd and Paul
Benedict Grant (non-fiction)
DELIVERY: SPRING
2014
LOLITA: A BIOGRAPHY presents the
complete, unabridged story of Nabokov’s infamous novel. Drawing on archival material, private
correspondence, interviews, and hitherto unpublished sources, it traces the
origins of LOLITA in its precursors and prototypes; chronicles its composition,
publication and reception, the controversies and court battles it spawned;
examines its translations – including its landmark translation into Nabokov’s
native Russian – and its international reception; provides detailed readings of
its adaptations from page to stage and screen; and discusses the other (often
Bizarre) works it inspired.
*World English language rights to Harvard University
Press
COLLECTED STORIES VOLUME II by TC Boyle
(fiction)
PUBLICATION: OCTOBER
2013
A collection of stories including
past collections AFTER THE PLAGUE, TOOTH AND CLAW and WILD CHILD plus 15 brand
new stories.
TC Boyle is the
acclaimed author of thirteen novels. His
stories are frequently published in the New Yorker. He was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award
for Excellent in Short Fiction. His novel WORLD’S END received the
PEN/Faulkner Award. More recently his
novels DROP CITY, THE WOMEN and SAN MIGUEL have all appeared on the New York
Times bestseller list.
*US and Canada rights to Viking
*UK rights to Bloomsbury
*German rights to Hanser
THE EMBRACE OF UNREASON by Frederick Brown
(history)
DELIVERED
Starting where FOR THE SOUL OF
FRANCE ended, Frederick Brown explores the intellectual and political climate in France from
World War I to World War II.
Frederick Brown is the author
of Flaubert, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in
biography, and Zola, named an Editor's Choice by The New York Times Book Review
as one of the best books of the year. Brown has twice been the recipient of
both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He lives
in New York City.
*US and Canada rights to Knopf
THE LONGINGS OF WAYWARD GIRLS
by Karen Brown (fiction)
PUBLICATION: JULY 2013
In the summer of 1974, Sadie and
her friends seem to lead a perfect life in the suburbs of Northern Connecticut,
writing plays, organizing a scary tour through the Haunted Woods for other
local children and spending lazy days with their mothers at the nearby
pond. But their tranquil days are shattered when what appears to be a
harmless childish prank leads to the disappearance of a neighborhood
girl. Twenty years later Sadie is all grown up, a lonely housewife still
living in her hometown and now a mother of two. When she has an affair
with a recently returned adolescent crush, secrets of her childhood idyll are
suddenly revealed and nightmares of the past come back to visit.
Karen Brown’s
short story collection, Leaf House, was chosen for the Prairie Schooner
Book Prize. Karen Brown teaches Creative
Writing at the University of South Florida. Her work has appeared in
magazines and journals such as Good Housekeeping, The New York Times, Epoch,
and American Short Fiction, and has been anthologized in Best
American Short Stories and twice in the PEN/O’Henry Prize Stories. Her
first collection of stories, PINS AND NEEDLES, won the AWP’s Grace Paley Prize
for Short Fiction and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press.
*World English language
rights to Atria
QUARTET by Carolyn Burke
(biography)
DELIVERY: FALL 2014
The most
sensational art event in Manhattan during the winter of 1921 was Alfred
Stieglitz’s portrait series of Georgia O’Keeffe—45 graphic black and white
photographs of her hands, breast, neck, and face, but especially the
provocative close-ups of her nude torso. The Master’s first show in eight
years, it marked the renewal of his creative zest through his liaison with the
artist and her emergence as a public figure—one of the new women who seemed to
take their autonomy for granted. At the show’s opening in the large,
light-filled Park Avenue gallery, shocked Manhattanites whispered to each other
about the demurely dressed O’Keeffe, whose composure that night made a striking
contrast to her unconventional presence on the wall. Perhaps the most
attentive members of the crowd, the photographer Paul Strand and his
wife-to-be, Rebecca Salsbury, may have replied that stimulated by the example
of Steiglitz and O’Keeffe, they too were engaged in a portrait series, with
Rebecca—who bore a resemblance to Georgia--as Paul’s muse and model. What
they could not have known was that their union would be entwined with that of
the older couple for over a decade. Three of these interlinked lives have long
dominated accounts of American modern art; the fourth, Rebecca Salsbury Strand
James (her full complement of names) remains almost unknown. This book explores
the ways in which the foursome inspired, excited, and unsettled each other
while playing out their dreams of artistic innovation “in the American grain.”
*US and Canada rights sold to
Knopf
I AM ABRAHAM: A NOVEL OF
LINCOLN AND THE CIVIL WAR by Jerome Charyn
PUBLICATION: FEBRUARY 2014
This
novel, narrated in Lincoln’s own voice, traces the historic arc of Abraham
Lincoln’s life from his picaresque days as a gangly young man in Illinois,
through his improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit
to war-shattered Richmond only days before his assassination. I Am Abraham
hews to the familiar Lincoln saga, braiding Lincoln family members and military
figures with a parade of fictional extras—wise-cracking knaves, conniving
hangers-on, patriotic whores, and dying soldiers. Using biblically cadenced
prose, cornpone nineteenth-century humor, and Lincoln’s own letters and
speeches, Jerome Charyn concocts a profoundly moral but troubled commander in
chief, whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and sons—Robert, Willie,
and Tad—is explored with penetrating psychological insight, utmost compassion,
and the most ingenious novelistic license. Seized by melancholy and imbued with
an unfaltering sense of human worth, Charyn’s President Lincoln comes to
vibrant, three-dimensional life in this haunting portrait.
*U.S. and Canada
rights sold to WW Norton
BRUNIST DAY OF WRATH by
Robert Coover (fiction)
PUBLICATION: OCTOBER 2013
The Brunist Day of
Wrath, is the long awaited sequel to Robert Coover’s debut novel, The
Origin of the Brunists. Robert Coover has published fourteen novels, three
short story collections, and a collection of plays since The Origin of the
Brunists received the The William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in
1966. At Brown University, where he has taught for over thirty years, he
established the International Writers Project, a program that provides an
annual fellowship and safe haven to endangered international writers who face
harassment, imprisonment, and suppression of their work in their home
countries. In 1990, he launched the world’s first hypertext fiction
workshop, was one of the founders in 1999 of the Electronic Literature
Organization, and in 2002 created CaveWriting, the first writing workshop in
immersive virtual reality. Michiko Kakuntaini of The New York Times has said
“Of all the postmodern writers, Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most
malicious, mixing up broad social and political satire with vaudeville turns,
lewd pratfalls, and clever word plays that make us rethink both the mechanics
of the world and our relationship to it.” Coover has also received awards from
the Lannan Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment
of the Arts, and the Rea Lifetime Short Story Award.
*US and Canada rights to
Dzanc
KANSAS CITY LIGHTNING: THE
RISE AND TIMES OF CHARLIE PARKER by Stanley Crouch (biography)
PUBLICATION: SEPTEMBER 2013
Kansas City Lightning is the first installment in the
long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of
the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on
jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified
the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto
saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug
addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on
interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Kansas City
Lightning recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days
navigating the Kansas City nightlife; and on to New York, where he began to
transcend the music he had mastered.
*US
and Canada rights to HarperCollins
AMERICANS: A British View
Terry Eagleton (humor)
PUBLICATION: JUNE 2013
An Englishman’s
take on the difference between the US and the rest of the world, and how we’re
divided by a common language.
Terry Eagleton is
a British literary theorist and critic.
He has written over forty books, most recently ON EVIL and WHY MARX WAS
RIGHT.
*World English language
rights sold to WW Norton
*Japanese rights sold to
Kawadeshobo-Shinsha
DIARIES by Mavis Gallant
(memoir)
DELIVERY: SUMMER 2014
Mavis Gallant entrusted her
diaries to a loyal and old friend, who will transcribe the diaries and lightly
edit from the 50s and 60s. These, in
turn will be edited by Frances Kiernan The final book will also include two
pieces which appeared in The New Yorker some years ago dealing with 1968
that were collected in THE PARIS NOTEBOOKS.
Mavis Gallant was
born in Montreal and worked as a journalist for The Standard before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing
fiction. After traveling extensively she
settled in Paris, where she still resides.
Her stories first appeared in The
New Yorker in 1951.
*US rights sold to Knopf
*Canadian rights sold to
McClelland & Stewart
*British rights sold to
Bloomsbury
*German rights sold to
Schoeffling & Co.
PROBLEMS
WITH PEOPLE by David Guterson (short stories)
PUBLICATION: SPRING 2014
This
is a new short story collection from bestselling author David Guterson, his
second during his writing career.
David Guterson is the author of the novels Ed King, East of the Mountains, The Other, Our Lady of the Forest, and
Snow Falling on Cedars, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as a
story collection, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind, and Family
Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense. He lives in Washington State.
*U.S.
and Canada rights sold to Knopf
MY
BROTHER, MY SISTER by Molly Haskell (memoir)
PUBLICATION: FALL 2013
On a visit to New York, the
brother of well-known film critic Molly Haskell dropped a bombshell: Nearing
age sixty, and married, he had decided to become a woman. Haskell chronicles
her brother Chevey’s transformation through a series of psychological
evaluations, grueling surgeries, drug regimens, and comportment and fashion
lessons as he becomes Ellen. Despite Haskell’s liberal views on gender roles,
she was dumbfounded by her brother’s decision. With candor and compassion, she
charts not only her brother’s journey to becoming her sister, but also her own
path from shock, confusion, embarrassment, and devastation to acceptance, empathy,
and love.
Molly’s articles
have appeared widely in publications such as Town and Country, Ladies’ Home
Journal, Family Circle, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Vogue, Ms., and
Woman’s World. She is primarily known as a film critic (her books include the
now classic FROM REVERANCE TO RAPE: THE TREATMENT OF WOMEN IN THE MOVIES
(Chicago, 1987) and, most recently, FRANKLY, MY DEAR: “GONE WITH THE WIND”
REVISITED (Yale, 2009)), but also wrote an earlier memoir describing her
husband’s illness (A MEMOIR, LOVE AND OTHER INFECTIOUS DISEASES (Morrow, 1990)).
She received a Guggenheim Award for this book in 2010.
*US
rights sold to Viking
AMERICANS IN SPAIN by Adam Hochschild (history)
DELIVERY: JANUARY 2016
A look into the Spanish Civil War
and the Americans who were involved in it, as journalists, advisors and members
of the Lincoln Brigade, fighting for an independent Spain.
A co-founder of Mother Jones
magazine, Adam Hochschild has won awards from the Eugene V. Debs Foundation and
the Overseas Press Club of America. He
is the author of many books including KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST, BURY THE CHAINS
about the first human rights movement and most recently TO END ALL WARS . He has also written about human rights in
South Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.
*US
rights to Houghton Mifflin
THE MISSIONARY’S DAUGHTER by
Apricot Irving (memoir)
PUBLICATION: SPRING 2015
A memoir about
growing up on a missionary compound in Limbe, Haiti, with an eye toward her
father’s work and devotion to the country and the personal toll it took on his
family. It is also the larger story of Haiti and the explorers and reformers
who have shaped its history.
Apricot Irving is a writer based in Portland, and
the winner of a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and 2012 Oregon
Literary Arts Fellowship in Literary Nonfiction. She grew up on a missionary
compound in Limbe, Haiti, and is now at work on a memoir of her time there.
Irving returned to Haiti to cover the earthquake’s aftermath for NPR’s This
American Life, and has also written for various magazines, including Granta
and More. She is the founder of the renowned oral history project Boise
Voices, a collaboration between youth and elders in a changing Portland
neighborhood, about which she was interviewed recently on the Oregon Public
Radio show The Speakeasy.
*World English language
rights to Free Press
WHEN BLACKNESS WAS A VIRTUE
BY Michael Jaffe (novel)
PUBLICATION: JANUARY 2014
The book delves into the painful
effects of a messy divorce and a father’s struggle to provide for his children
after sudden unemployment (through the nontraditional means of collecting
gamblers’ debts for a sports bookie...). Jaffe captures the chaos of the
protagonist’s sudden downturn in his personal life, dealing with an ex-wife who
makes his life miserable, and trying to keep his children happy in the midst of
it all. He finds release for his frustrations through the physical violence of
his bookie job as he tries to make sense of what happened to the life he worked
so hard to create.
Michael Grant
Jaffe is the author of DANCE REAL SLOW, WHIRLWIND, and SKATEAWAY
*US and Canada rights to
Dzanc
THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN by
Scott Johnson (memoir)
What happens when a father asks his son to
lie for the greater good?
PUBLICATION: JUNE 2013
Growing up, Scott Johnson always suspected that his dad was different. Only as
a teenager did he discover the truth: his father was a spy, one of the CIA’s
most trusted agents. And, as Scott came to realise, his father had been living
a double life for so long that sometimes he wasn’t sure where reality ended and
illusion began.
When, as an adult, Scott embarked on a career as a war correspondent, he
returned to the countries of his youth. In the dusty streets of Pakistan and
Afghanistan, the cold urbanity of Yugoslavia, and the mysterious alleys of
Mexico City, he came face to face with his father’s murky past, and with his
own complicity in it.
The Wolf and the Watchman is a provocative, meditative reckoning on
concepts such as truth, deception, and manipulation, and the fidelities we owe
to ourselves and to our families. It is also an intensely personal story of a
bond between father and son that endured when tested by one of the world’s most
secretive and unforgiving institutions. It marks the arrival of a powerful new
voice.
“Scott Johnson has written
an aching, lyrical father-son story of the spy world that is dark and
intriguing.”
–
Evan Thomas
*World English language
rights sold to Scribe
*US rights sold to WW Norton
*Spanish rights sold to
Ediciones B Mexico
PAUL ENGLISH by Tracy Kidder
(narrative non-fiction)
DELIVERY: DECEMBER 2016
The
story of the founder of kayak.com. Since
writing SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE more than thirty years ago, Tracy Kidder returns
to the topic of computer technology.
Tracy Kidder will explore Paul English’s childhood, his management
style, his character and his relationship with his employees and ultimately
seek to convey what makes Paul English write “beautiful code.”
*US and Canada rights to
Random House
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS by John
Lahr (biography)
DELIVERED
This long-awaited
literary biography is a follow up to Lyle Leverich’s Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams and will be a full account of
Tennessee Williams’s life and work, drawing upon numerous interviews and John
Lahr’s own impressive experience in the dramatic world. John Lahr is an
American drama critic and writer, and was the senior drama critic for The New Yorker for twenty years. Son of
the legendary actor Bert Lahr, he has written several acclaimed biographies as
well as both writing and editing other nonfiction books.
*US and Canada rights to WW
Norton
*UK rights to Bloomsbury
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY by John
Lukacs (history)
PUBLICATION: SEPTEMBER
2013
Renowned historian John Lukacs offers a concise
history of the twentieth century—its two world wars and cold war, its nations
and leaders. The great themes woven through this spirited narrative are
inseparable from the author's own intellectual preoccupations: the fading of
liberalism, the rise of populism and nationalism, the achievements and dangers
of technology, and the continuing democratization of the globe.
Lukacs explores in detail the
phenomenon of national socialism (national socialist parties, he reminds us,
have outlived the century), Hitler's sole responsibility for the Second World
War, and the crucial roles played by his determined opponents Churchill and
Roosevelt. Lukacs also casts a hard eye at the consequences of the Second World
War—the often misunderstood Soviet-American cold war—and at the shifting social
and political developments in the Far and Middle East and elsewhere. In an
eloquent closing meditation on the passing of the twentieth century, he
reflects on the advance of democracy throughout the world and the limitations
of human knowledge.
*World English rights to Harvard University
Press
*Dutch rights to Prometheus
*Hungarian rights to Europa
THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS by Claire
Messud (novel)
PUBLICATION: APRIL
2013
Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, long ago compromised her dream to be a successful
artist, mother and lover. She has instead become the “woman upstairs,” a
reliable friend and neighbor always on the fringe of others’ achievements. Then
into her life arrives the glamorous and cosmopolitan Shahids—her new student
Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale, and his parents:
Skandar, a dashing Lebanese professor who has come to Boston for a fellowship
at Harvard, and Sirena, an effortlessly alluring Italian artist. Nora is drawn
deep into the complex world of the Shahid family; she finds herself falling in
love with them, separately and together. Nora’s happiness explodes her
boundaries, and she discovers in herself an unprecedented ferocity—one that
puts her beliefs and her sense of self at stake.Claire Messud is the
best-selling author of THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN which was named one of the best
books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. She lives with her husband, the critic James
Wood, and their two children in Massachusetts.
*US and Canada rights sold to
Knopf
*UK rights sold to Virago
*Spanish language rights sold
to RBA Libros
*French language rights sold
to Editions Gallimard
*Italian language rights sold
to Bollati Boringhieri
*Dutch language rights sold
to Ambo Anthos
*Swedish rights sold to
Natur & Kultur
*Korean rights sold to Vega
Books
*Turkish rights sold to Marti
Yayin Grubu
UNTITLED ON THE KORAN by Jack Miles (non-fiction)
DELIVERY: DECEMBER
2014
A follow-up to his Pulitzer
Prize-winning GOD: A Biography and CHRIST: A Crisis in the life of God, Jack
Miles’ next book will illuminate the God portrayed in the Koran and worshiped
by Muslims for the wide audience of curious and uninformed English-language readers.
To do so, he will juxtapose passages of the Koran with passages from the Tanakh
and New Testament in a lively narrative emphasizing the literary and historical
interpretations of these great books to create an intelligent and accessible
dialogue between them.
Jack Miles spent
ten years as a Jesuit seminarian studying at the Pontifical Gregorian
University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before enrolling at Harvard
University where he completed a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages in 1971. His
first book, God: A Biography, won a Pulitzer Prize and has been translated into
fifteen languages. He is fluent in several modern languages.
*US and Canadian rights sold
to Knopf
*German rights sold to Hanser
THIRTY GIRLS by Susan Minot
(novel)
PUBLICATION: FEBRUARY 2014
Jane
finds herself in Africa, escaping her life in America, and investigating the
abduction of children in Uganda by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Her story is told in juxtaposition to that of
Esther Akello’s, one of thirty girls abducted from her Catholic school in the
middle of the night. Jane will journey
from Kenya to Uganda, all the while becoming more and more passionately
embroiled with Harry, a traveling companion, and putting her own stability to
the test while interviewing emotionally scarred children.
Susan Minot is the author of five other books
including MONKEYS, winner of the Prix Femina Étranger. Her novel EVENING was adapted into a
film. She is also the winner of a Pushcart
Prize and O. Henry Prize for her writing.
*US and Canada rights sold to
Knopf
*UK rights sold to Fourth
Estate
*French rights sold to
Mercure de France
THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES IN THE
OTTOMAN EMPIRE/TURKEY, 1894-1923
by Benny Morris and Dror Zeevi (non-fiction)
DELIVERY: DECEMBER 2013
This will be a comprehensive
history of Ottoman/Turkish treatment of the Armenian minority during the waning
years of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish war of independence, which ended in
1923. It will focus on the massacres and the question of whether what occurred
in World War I was a planned genocide. This will be based on new documentary
material evidence from national, regional and personal archives in Turkey and
Syria as well as in the US, UK, France, and Germany. The subject, hotly disputed
for decades by the Turkish and Armenian camps, has in recent years become
topical against the backdrop of Turkey's resurgence as a medium-sized power and
its problematic relations with the West, Iran and Israel, not to mention the
on-going dispute between Turkey and Armenia concerning these events. The new
documentary material consulted includes a great deal of first-hand testimony by
survivors and witnesses of the Turkish atrocities, of the death marches and
massacres, and will make the book moving and graphic, as well as historically
potent.
*US and Canada rights sold to
WW Norton
INVISIBLE
BEASTS by Sharona Muir (fiction)
DELIVERED
INVISIBLE BEASTS is a fictional work in which
imaginary animals, based on real science, are described by a narrator in a
series of playful tales. Each chapter
weaves intriguing information from the life sciences -- from quirky facts to
important ideas – into connected tales, as the narrator pursues her questions
about love, sex, evolution, extinction, truth, and self-knowledge. “Every day
the world seems more like Aesop’s ‘Fables,’” says a recent review in The
Economist’s science section. Today, we
confront the natural world in new and urgent ways. Mass extinctions, global warming, and related
issues are new territory for our cultural imagination, while the very
definition of “human” is under discussion in the academy. Sharona Muir’s goal is to engage readers
imaginatively and in new ways with nature and human nature; this book could be
called, “Aesop for the age of extinction.”
Sharona Muir is a professor of English and
creative writing at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of ARTIFICIAL PARADISE:
SCIENCE FICTION AND AMERICAN REALITY and DURING CEASEFIRE, a collection of
poems.
*World
English rights to Bellevue Press
KISSING
THE SWORD by Sharnush Parsipur, trans. Sara Khalili (memoir)
PUBLICATION: MAY 2013
Shahrnush Parsipur was an important writer
and television producer in her native Iran until 1979 when the Islamic Republic
began imprisoning its citizens. Kissing the Sword captures the surreal
experiences of serving time without being charged with a crime, and witnessing
the systematic destruction of any and all opposition to fundamentalist power.
It is a memoir filled with both horror and humor: nights blasted by the sounds
of machine gun fire as hundreds of prisoners are summarily executed, and days
spent debating prison officials on whether the Quran demands that women be
covered. Parsipur, one of the great novelists of modern Iran, known for magic
realism, tells a story here that is all too real. She mines her own painful
memories to create an urgent call for one of the most basic of human rights:
freedom of expression.
Parsipur began her career as a fiction writer and
producer at Iranian National Television and Radio. She was imprisoned for
nearly five years by the religious government without being formally charged.
Shortly after her release, she published Women Without Men and was
arrested and jailed again, this time for her frank and defiant portrayal of
women's sexuality. While still banned in Iran, the novel became an underground
bestseller there, and has been translated into many languages around the world.
Parsipur is also the author of Touba and the Meaning of Night, among
many other books, and now lives in exile in northern California.
*U.S.
and Canada rights sold to Feminist Press
GOLDEN
STATE by Michelle Richmond (fiction)
PUBLICATION: MARCH 2014
While the citizens of California come out
to vote on whether or not to secede from the rest of the United States, San
Francisco descends into chaos. Streets are blocked, transportation
stopped and protestors take to the streets. Julia must make her way
across town on a broken ankle to deliver her estranged sister’s baby. Her
own internal turmoil mirrors that of the city: her marriage is falling apart, a
beloved child has been taken from her, and soon she will find herself at the
center of a hostage situation.
As in her past two novels, the best-selling
THE YEAR OF FOG and NO ONE YOU KNOW, Michelle Richmond combines the suspense of
a thriller with the intricate, heart-wrenching details of love and
family.
*World
English language rights sold to Bantam
DARLING:
A SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Richard Rodgriguez
PUBLICATION: OCTOBER 2013
Rodriguez’s stylish new memoir—the first
book in a decade from the Pulitzer Prize finalist—moves from Jerusalem to
Silicon Valley, from Moses to Liberace, from Lance Armstrong to Mother Teresa.
Rodriguez is a homosexual who writes with love of the religions of the desert
that exclude him. He is a passionate, unorthodox Christian who is always
mindful of his relationship to Judaism and Islam because of a shared belief in
the God who revealed himself within an ecology of emptiness. And at the center
of this book is a consideration of women—their importance to Rodriguez’s
spiritual formation and their centrality to the future of the desert religions.
Richard Rodriguez is a journalist,
essayist, and author whose books include Days of Obligation, Brown,
and Hunger of Memory. Hailed in The Washington Post as “one of
the most eloquent and probing public intellectuals in America,” he is a
contributor to Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, the Los
Angeles Times, and Time.
*US
& Canada Rights sold to Viking
STRAY
by Elissa Sussman (Young Adult fiction)
PUBLICATION: JANUARY 2014
A cross between The
Handmaid’s Tale and Wicked with a dash of Grimm's Fairy Tales, STRAY takes place in a world where magic is a curse
that only women bear and society is dictated by a strict religious doctrine
called The Path. The first in a planned six book series, STRAY follows the young Princess Aislynn who knows all too well the
powers of her curse. Its magic is a part of her, like her awkward nose
and thin fingers. But it’s also something she can't control. And girls who
can’t control their abilities have a tendency to disappear. So when Aislynn fails to contain her magic at her introduction
ball, she is “redirected” into the order of Fairy Godmothers, where she
must spend the rest of her life chaste and devoted to serving another royal
family. Tasked with tending to the sweet, but sheltered Princess Linnea,
Aislynn also finds a reluctant friend in the palace gardener, Thackery, who
makes no secret of his disdain for her former life. The more time they spend
together, though, the more she begins to doubt the rules she has observed so
obediently. As Aislynn’s feelings threaten to undo the sacred vows she has
taken, she risks not only her own life but Linnea’s as well.
Elissa Sussman
received her BA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has spent
the last several years learning the art of fairy tales working at Disney on the
animated features TANGLED and THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG.
*US
and Canada sold to HarperCollins
A
MOODY FELLOW FINDS LOVE AND DIES by Doug Watson (Fiction)
PUBLICATION: SPRING 2014
This is the story
of Moody Fellow and his quest for love in “some, not all, of the wrong places
and in quite a few of the wrong ways.” The book follows its main character’s
search for love from age twelve to early adulthood. Along the way he plays
tennis and the piano, thinks about elves, goes to college, protests two wars,
gets mixed up in the arts scene in “the City,” and does other things too, like
deliver coffee beans for a modest living and cry because his dog has died.
Doug Watson works
as a Copy Editor at Time magazine. He has an MFA from Ohio State University and
his stories have appeared in Tin House, One Story, Fifty-Two Stories and
in the Anthology of New England Writers. He is the winner of the Tara M.
Kroger Award, the Marjory Bartlett Sanger Award for Short Fiction and the Best
of Ohio Writers Contest. His first collection of stories, THE ERA OF NOT QUITE,
was just published by BOA editions this spring and was celebrated at One
Story’s annual Literary Debutant Ball.
*US
and Canada to Outpost 19
PÈRE
MARIE-BENOÎT AND JEWISH RESCUE: HOW A FRENCH PRIEST TOGETHER WITH JEWISH
FRIENDS SAVED THOUSANDS DURING THE HOLOCAUST by Susan Zuccotti (non-fiction)
PUBLICATION: JUNE 2013
Susan
Zuccotti narrates the life and work of Père Marie-Benoît, a courageous French
Capuchin priest who risked everything to hide Jews in France and Italy during
the Holocaust. Who was this extraordinary priest and how did he become adept at
hiding Jews, providing them with false papers, and helping them to elude their
persecutors? First from a monastery in Marseille and later in Rome, Père Benoît
worked with Jewish co-conspirators to build remarkably effective
Jewish-Christian rescue networks. Despite a cold reception from Pope Pius XII,
who declined to assist in their efforts, they persisted in their clandestine
activities until the Allies liberated Rome. To tell this remarkable tale, in
addition to her research in French and Vatican archives, Zuccotti personally
interviewed Père Benoît, his family, Jewish rescuers with whom he worked, and
survivors who owed their lives to his network.
Susan Zuccotti is an American historian specializing
in the Holocaust. She has won numerous
awards for her work and has taught at Barnard and Trinity College.
*World English to University
of Illinois Press
*French rights to Bayard