Deals: Knopf Takes the Bacon

Sonny Mehta has acquired the next work by de Kooning authors Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, to be a biography of artist Francis Bacon; Clare Conville at Conville and Walsh sold North American rights. Stevens and Swan will have full access to Bacon's archives and papers. No pub date yet; Knopf published de Kooning in 2004, and it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Harper will publish the Bacon bio in the U.K.

Within 24 hours of submission, David Gale at Simon & Schuster Children's made a preemptive offer for world rights to a new YA series by The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp author Rick Yancey; a day later, a three-book deal was in place with Brian DeFiore. The first book, titled The Monstrumologist, is the story of an orphaned boy in the late 1800s, an apprentice to a scientist whose field of expertise is far from ordinary—and whose adventures in search of dark creatures take him to mysterious places around the world. Kropp, presently in development at New Regency, and its two sequels were published by Bloomsbury. Probable pub date for The Monstrumologist is fall 2009.

Anna deVries at Scribner won an auction for Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, the best writings from the 10-year-run of the now-defunct cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity; Hannah Brown Gordon at Foundry sold North American rights in her first deal for the agency. Edited by the magazine's publisher, Loren Rhoads, the collection will tell readers everything they always wanted to know (or didn't) about death, disease and the just plain weird. A late 2009 publication is tentative.

Touchstone senior editor Trish Grader preempted North American rights to Debra Grubb's first novel, Daughter of Kura, in a two-book deal with Ann Rittenberg. Set during the first stirrings of religious thought among homo erectus in Africa 500,000 years ago, the novel imagines a matriarchal society based on the intricate social structure of hyena packs. Rittenberg, who found the novel in the slush pile last year, sent out the manuscript on June 26 and made the deal with Grader three days later. Grubb is a former obstetrician and amateur paleoanthropologist; tentative pub date is summer 2009.

Gary Goldstein at Kensington bought two new novels by Charlie Carillo via Anne Edelstein, who sold world English rights. The first, Your Mother Will Kill Us When She Finds Out, follows a divorced veteran tabloid journalist and his son as they embark on a voyage of mutual discovery after the dad loses his job and the son gets kicked out of his final year at an exclusive Manhattan prep school—while his mother is away at an academic conference. Carillo, a former columnist at the New York Post, is also the author of YA title Shepard Avenue as well as My Ride with Gus. Tentative pub date is September 2009, with the second novel to be delivered within a year.

Rose Hilliard at St. Martin's Press preempted world rights to four books by editor-turned-author Louisa Edwards via Deidre Knight. Set amid the New York restaurant scene, the first book in the series is called Can't Stand the Heat and is slated to launch in fall 2009, with subsequent titles to appear every six months. Knight is a romance author as well as agent, and Edwards was her first editor at NAL. When Edwards left New York publishing, Knight briefly worked with Hilliard, who subsequently left for SMP.