Living on the Edge

Joey Kramer, drummer for Aerosmith since the band's founding in 1970, has sold a memoir, Little Boy Burning, to Roger Freet at HarperOne via Jill Kneerim at Kneerim & Williams. Kramer's account will cover years of wild excess, getting off drugs and his subsequent struggle with depression. Bill Patrick, coauthor of memoirs by Sidney Poitier and Magic Johnson, will collaborate, and likely pub date is early 2009. HarperOne holds North American rights.

Gary Fisketjon has bought his third book from Martin Clark, titled The Legal Limit; Joe Regal at Regal Literary made the six-figure, world English rights deal. The story of a murder coverup that wreaks widespread havoc, the novel borrows from actual courtroom events in which circuit court judge Clark himself played a role. Clark's first novel, The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, was a New York Times Notable Book; Knopf published Clark's Plain Heathen Mischief in 2004. Planned pub date for The Legal Limit is next summer.

Daniel Halpern and Emily Takoudes at Ecco have preempted Pork Belly & Chili Crab: Zak Pelaccio's Global Flavors at Home by Pelaccio and Kathryn Kellinger; agent William Clark sold North American rights (Kellinger is represented by Vicky Bijur). The cookbook will feature about 100 recipes adapted for the home cook from Pelaccio's travels throughout southeast Asia as well as from his popular restaurants Fatty Crab, 5 Ninth, Suka London and the recently opened Borough Food and Drink. Tentative pub date is spring 2009.

John Freeman, literary critic and president of the National Book Critics Circle, has signed with Colin Robinson at Scribner to write a book on the tyranny of e-mail; Sarah Burnes at the Gernert Company sold world English rights. Freeman will argue that our inboxes are taking over our lives, with profound and deleterious implications for the way we work, write and even think; it's time to rediscover a slower, less obsessive means of communicating with each other. The book is yet to be titled.

Mark Siegel at :01 First Second has acquired world rights to Farel Dalrymple's graphic novel The Wrenchies, concluding an auction conducted by Bernadette Baker at Baker's Mark. This 250-page, full-color comic is a postapocalyptic fantasy that takes place 3,500 years in the future, featuring a group of street children called “The Bolts.” Dalrymple, cofounder of the comic anthology Meathaus, is also illustrating a new Marvel 10-issue series, Omega the Unknown, to be written by Jonathan Lethem. Pub date for The Wrenchies is fall 2009.

Merloyd Lawrence has acquired world rights to a new book by child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan, M.D., for her imprint at Da Capo, titled I Never Met a Child Who Couldn't Learn. Greenspan will show parents and teachers how to “raise the ceiling” for all children, including those who learn with difficulty and those who learn differently. Nancy Thorndike Greenspan will coauthor, as she did Greenspan's First Feelings. Pub date is fall 2009, and the project was unagented.

Lawrence also bought North American rights to Australian journalist Andrew Darby's Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling via U.K. publisher Allen and Unwin. This natural and human history of whaling will weave profiles of each kind of whale throughout descriptions of the centuries of international conflict the slaughter of whales has engendered. Pub date is spring 2008.