Dutton Preempts Gottlieb; Wally Lamb Returns...Finally

By Matthew Thornton & Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 3/17/2008 7:51:00 AM

On the heels of her Jenna Blum auction win, Dutton editor-in-chief Trena Keating made another big buy, preempting world rights to a new book by Lori Gottlieb. The untitled work will be based on a controversial article that appeared in this month’s The Atlantic Monthly under the title "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough," in which Gottlieb suggests that maybe women are too picky in their search for a mate. Liv Blumer made the sale, and Dutton will likely publish in 2010.

Gottlieb is the author of Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self, published by Simon & Schuster in 2000, and since optioned for film by Martin Scorsese. Gottlieb is also a regular commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and is currently doing her internship to become licensed as a psychotherapist. She is represented for film and television by Bob Gumer of Kaplan Stahler.

Two-time Oprah book club honoree Wally Lamb, who hasn't released a new title in 10 years, has a new work on the horizon. HarperCollins' flagship imprint will release The Hour I First Believed in November 2008. The book follows a couple that relocates from Colorado to Connecticut, after the wife is traumatized from surviving the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. Once on the East Coast, at the husband's family farm, she tries to regain her footing while he must confront secrets from his family past.

The publisher is calling the novel, by the bestselling author of She's Come Undone (Atria) and I Know This Much is True (Harper), "an extraordinary work of prodigious scope and ambition" and Lamb's editor, Terry Karten, said the author's gone "well beyond his earlier work to deliver a literary tour de force."

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