Points for Counterpoint

Executive editor Dawn Seferian at that Perseus literary imprint has made a couple of recent deals, for a first novelist and a prize-winning Canadian author, that help keep the house firmly in its tradition. From Toronto agent Bella Pomer she bought U.S. rights in a novel called Garbo Laughs by Elizabeth Hay, whose A Student of Weather won Canada's prestigious Giller Prize. The new book is about a lonely woman so infatuated by the movies she constantly watches that she is no longer of this world. The first novel buy was a world rights purchase of Eleanor and Abel by Annette Sanford, and it's the story of a romance between two people "old enough to know better." The deal was made with David Hale Smith at DHS Literary in Dallas.