Transit Publishing, the small Montreal-based house that made headlines for selling the rights to Ian Halperin’s now-bestselling Michael Jackson biography Unmasked, is looking to get back in the headlines with another Halperin tell-all, this one about Hollywood power couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Unlike Unmasked—Transit sold the U.S. rights to that title to Simon & Schuster—the house will be publishing Brangelina: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie itself in the States. Currently planning a 100,000-copy printing and already out with a press release that promises a dish-y scoop—it claims Halperin has obtained “shocking new information about superstar Jolie” with some “startling discoveries about [her] past”—Transit will be releasing the book here on December 1 and following with a French language edition that will drop in Canada and France in January. NBN will distribute the title in the U.S.; Hachette distributes Transit in Europe, Georgetwon Publications in Canada, and the house also has a co-publishing deal with a publisher in Spain, to release Spanish language editions there.

Pierre Turgeon, a Canadian publishing veteran who founded Transit in February 2009, said the genesis of the company began with a conversation he had with Halperin. Turgeon, who published Top Models, the French language edition of Halperin’s 1999 expose of the modeling industry (called Shut Up and Smile in English), said he spoke with Halperin over a year ago about some ideas the author had for new books. Turgeon said Halperin had been unhappy with his last experience publishing with a major U.S. house—Halperin claimed his book was published with little-to-no editorial feedback—and discussed three book ideas. The first idea, a biography on the billionaire owner of Cirque du Soleil, Guy Laliberte, was published by Transit in September. The Jackson biography was the second project Halperin and Turgeon discussed, and the third was the Pitt-Jolie book.

Although Halperin’s work has been the lynchpin of Transit’s catalog thus far, the house will be publishing other authors. Its focus will remain on celebrity bios and forthcoming are titles about Kiefer Sutherland (Kiefer Sutherland: Living Dangerously, January 2010) and Britney Spears (Little Girl Lost: Money, Fame and Britney Spears, April 2010), as well as a book about the recently deceased David Carradine (David Carradine: The Eye of My Tornado, June 2010) by his ex-wife, Marina Anderson.

In the U.S. Turgeon has Jarred Weisfeld at Objective Entertainment handling public relations. Weisfeld also happens to be the agent who’s sold Turgeon a number of his books, including the Halperin titles and the Carradine book. Weisfeld also closed a deal for Dustin Diamond with Transit. After Diamond’s autobiography Behind the Bell got dropped by Penguin for legal reasons, Weisfeld sold the book to Transit, which published the title in September.

Turgeon (who is distantly related to the famous Canadian hockey player who shares his name) is looking to capitalize on the international appeal of celebrities like Spears, Jackson, Pitt and Jolie and, when possible, simultaneously publish books in French and English. He’s also seemingly overcome some bad local press—when Halperin’s Jackson book was announced Quill and Quire reported that Turgeon had pleaded guilty to fraud after his previous venture, the publishing house Trait d’union, went bankrupt—to launch what looks to be a promising start-up.