Hot Deals
John F. Baker -- 4/24/00
A New Faludi for Holt
Susan Faludi, bestselling author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, has signed with Henry Holt's Metropolitan Books imprint for a new book. Holt president John Sterling and Metropolitan associate publisher Sara Bershtel jointly announced the buy of North American rights from agent Sandra Dijkstra, for an undisclosed sum. Bershtel said the new book, which she hopes to publish in winter 2002, will employ extensive reporting by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to explore the way contemporary women, with so many freedoms now won, choose to live and what their hopes and aspirations are. Her previous publishers were Crown and Morrow.
Banish Fear, Dutton's Here
That publisher's Brian Tart beat out several other aspirants with a six-figure bid that included world rights--and a first-ever paperback partnership with Perigee--to land Fearless Living, a guide to help people identify, and break through, their everyday fears. The author is Rhonda Britten, a California-based guru who leads seminars, coaches people on how to improve their lives and careers, and is a successful public speaker. Her own early experiences, plus feedback from her workshops and speaking engagements, have helped her develop a program she feels can help people cope better with debilitating anxieties. The agent who made the deal was Elly Sidel at John Hawkins & Associates.
Hindenburg Disaster Novel to Talese
A German novel by the son of a survivor of the spectacular explosion and fire that destroyed the Zeppelin Hindenburg at its New Jersey mooring in 1936 has been bought, after a brief auction, by Nan A. Talese for her imprint at Doubleday. The seller, acting on behalf of the book's German publisher, Bertelsmann, is a familiar face about to take on a new role: Susanna Lea, who, as rights director for Paris's Editions Laffont, sold Marc Levy's If Only It Were True to Pocket Books and to the movies, both for huge sums. Lea is about to set up on her own in Paris, and this is her first deal in that role. The book's author is Henning B tius, and his The Ph nix traces an attempt to find out why the pride of Nazi engineering blew up, with the world watching. Lea has also sold the book to HarperCollins in the U.K.; to Laffont (naturally) in France; Longanesi in Italy; de Bezige Bij in Holland; and Objectiva in Brazil.
New Look at Our Revolution
The way the American Revolution has been handed down to us in the history books, as if all the patriots were of one mind in the creation of a new nation, requires some adjustment, according to UCLA history professor (and author) Gary Nash. He's written a book to advance the notion that America in fact grew out of many conflicting agendas put forward by a wide variety of people, and West Coast agent Sandra Dijkstra sold it, for a solid six figures, to Viking senior editor Wendy Wolf, who took it against strong competition from both trade and university presses. The book, untitled so far, was bought for U.S., Canadian, first serial and audio, and Viking expects to publish in 2003.
Buddhist Baby Heard From
Ivan Richmond is a 27-year-old Silicon Valley guy, and therefore living a typical 21st-century American life. He is also, however, a Buddhist, the son of a celebrated Buddhist author, Lewis Richmond, and all his life has had to reconcile two radically different approaches to religion and life. Now he has written a book, Silence and Noise: Growing Up Zen, which agent Eileen Cope at Lowenstein Associates has just sold to new Pocket Books editorial director Tracy Behar as one of her first buys in her new spot. She preempted the book with a six-figure U.S. and Canadian rights bid, and will probably publish in early 2002. Behar also signed two new books by Michael Gurian, whose parenting books, The Wonder of Boys and A Fine Young Man, were done by Putnam/Tarcher. The new titles, for which Behar bought world rights in an auction held by agent Candice Fuhrman, are The Wonder of Girls and The Soul of the Child, tentatively set for winter 2002 and 2003, respectively.
Short Takes
Pam Thomas, a veteran editor at several houses, is doing a book, Fatherless Daughters, about the difficulty of growing up without one, which agent Jane Dystel has sold, for North American rights, to Sydny Miner at S&S.... The Free Press's Bruce Nichols has bought the official tie-in to a 2002 PBS-TV series called Great Projects: The Building of America, the story of our great engineering achievements. James Tobin is the author, and Christy Fletcher and Michael Carlisle of Carlisle & Co. agented.
Hot Deals will be on vacation the week of May 1.
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