Viking Going Ahead with Vreeland
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 7/15/2002
Viking Penguin's Jane von Mehren has signed up Susan Vreeland, author of two bestselling books centering on artists, Girl in Hyacinth Blue and The Passion of Artemisia, to a new two-book deal for a major sum. She bought world rights from agent Barbara Braun at Barbara Braun Associates in two novels, to be published respectively in early 2004 and 2006; Braun retains movie rights. The first, tentatively titled Cedar Spirit, revolves around the celebrated Canadian painter Emily Carr and her involvement with the Indians of British Columbia, whose remarkable totem poles she often depicted. The second, The Potato Eaters, shows Vincent Van Gogh at a time he was creating one of his early masterpieces in Holland, the picture of a poor farm family he had come to know closely. Both novels will be later Penguin paperbacks. The publisher aims for a new Vreeland book each year, and in 2005 it will be a book of short stories, tentatively titled Life Studies, written under her previous contract. Her latest, the Artemisia title, will be in paperback next January, and the author, a bookseller favorite, will be on tour for it again.
