Short Takes
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 7/16/2001
Australia's Kate Grenville won Britain's wealthy Orange Prize for her tenderly comic romance, The Idea of Perfection, and Viking senior editor Paul Slovak bought U.S. rights from agent Kim Witherspoon, for publication next spring.... Another Viking deal, this time for a YA writer with Viking Children's Books and Puffin Books, was a two-book hard/soft one signed with Laurie Halse Anderson, who wrote the NBA-nominated Speak. The new titles, bought at auction for six figures by publisher Regina Hayes from agent Amy Berkower at Writers House, are tentatively titled God and Doughnuts and Prom, and the first is scheduled for fall 2002.... Colombian novelist Laura Restrepo, who recently made a three-book deal with Ecco (Deals, June 18), has sold her 1993 Crown novel, Leopard in the Sun, to Muse Films, in a deal co-agented by Bill Contardi at William Morris for her literary agent, Thomas Colchie.... Ibooks has acquired book and electronic publishing rights to a series of titles based on the popular NBC-TV dramatic series Law and Order, to be distributed through Simon & Schuster by ibooks publisher Byron Preiss.
