Deals

When Coast agent Jodie Rhodes recently sent out five pages of a YA novel by a newcomer, California schoolteacher Suzanne Phillips, the response was the keenest she's ever experienced. No fewer than 10 U.K. editors and 17 U.S. ones asked to see the rest, and a feeding frenzy ensued. The book, Chloe Doe, tells of a 17-year-old Los Angeles girl, fleeing a brutal stepfather, who sells herself on the streets until she is picked up by the cops and treated by a determined psychiatrist. The race was won here by Andrea Spooner and Sangeeta Mehta at Little, Brown, and in the U.K. by Harriet Wilson at Macmillan. Both sides are looking to publish in spring 2007. There's movie and foreign interest, too.

Some years before she had an international bestseller with The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger, who teaches letterpress printing and fine book design in Chicago, had hand-printed her pictorial novel The Incestuous Sisters. Who better to publish for the trade than Harry Abrams, where Tamar Brazis just bought it for a large-format art book? She made the deal with agent Joe Regal at Regal Literary, and the house plans an ambitious first run of 50,000.

A novel of manners set in the Wall Street world prompted a flurry of bids last week, with Cindy Spiegel at Riverhead emerging as the winner with a major bid for two books. Author Dana Vachon, 26, works at J.P. Morgan Chase, and came to the attention of agent David Kuhn through a blog he wrote about his life there. Kuhn persuaded him to take up journalism, and he's now writing for Salon and the NYT (he did a recent piece on men bathing nude). The novel, bought on the basis of an outline and sample pages, is still being worked on; Riverhead has world, audio and first serial.

At Viking, Paul Slovak has bought a collection of letters exchanged over the years by Beat icons Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Their correspondence, he says, is endlessly revealing of them and their times, and is being edited by their respective estate executors, Jason Shinder and David Stanford; the deal was done with Sterling Lord for Kerouac's estate, Andrew Wylie for Ginsberg's.