Short Takes

Terry Karten at HarperCollins has signed Japanese-American author Susan Choi, author of the admired The Foreign Student, for a second novel, American Woman, centering on a young Japanese-American terrorist active here. It was a significant six-figure advance for North American rights, paid to agent Bill Clegg at Burnes & Clegg....Warner executive editor Rick Wolff bought a new book by Robert Whiting, whose You Gotta Have Wa, on American baseball stars in Japan, he had published 12 years ago at Macmillan; for his new outing, Whiting is writing the opposite, about a Japanese star, Ichiro Suzuki, in the U.S. and the influence Japanese players wield here. He bought North American rights from Amanda Urban at ICM, will publish in spring 2004.... Neal Porter at the Roaring Brook imprint of Millbrook won an auction for a first novel for young readers by acclaimed India-born author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni; it's The Conch Bearer, a quest fantasy set in contemporary India, and will be published in fall 2003. The agent was Sandra Dijkstra.... A book about the generation of young movie directors who made a huge impact on Hollywood in the past decade, including Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, was preempted by Henry Ferris for HarperEntertainment. It's called The Rebels and is by Sharon Waxman, Los Angeles–based entertainment writer for the Washington Post. Ferris bought world rights from agent Andrew Blauner... A new book by four-time Tour de France winner (and cancer survivor) Lance Armstrong was bought by Stacy Creamer, who published his last bestseller at Putnam and is now at Broadway Doubleday; the untitled book will again be written with Sally Jenkins, handled by Esther Newberg at ICM; Armstrong himself is repped by manager Bill Stapleton. Publication: probably October 2003.