Leaner and Leaner
Christine Lydon, who holds an M.D. from Yale and is a contributor to Oxygen magazine and a fitness coach and model, has sold Ten Years Thinner: The Ultimate Lifestyle Program for Simultaneously Winding Back Your Physiological Clock—and Your Bathroom Scale! The book details a six-week program based on Lydon's diet and exercise regime. Da Capo's Marnie Cochran bought world rights (minus Canada) from agent Rick Broadhead, and plans to publish late fall 2007.
ICM's Andrea Barzvi just sold world rights to Jillian Michaels's (Winning by Losing) health and fitness book, titled The 30 Day Shred, to Crown's Heather Jackson. This is a no-nonsense, step-by-step program to help women shred (and shed) those last, pesky 10—20 pounds. No pub date yet.
Raging Baumbach
Jonathan Baumbach, whose fiction-writing career (B; Reruns) spans 14 books and several decades, has sold a new novel, You: The Invention of Memory, to Christopher White at Ohio-based startup Rager Media; agent Andrew Blauner sold North American, hardcover rights only. This novel's narrator remembers or imagines or invents an ambiguous relationship with a complex woman known in the book only as "You." Baumbach, cofounder of the Fiction Collective (now FC2) is former director of the Brooklyn College M.F.A. in Creative Writing program, and has made obscure appearances in all three of his son Noah's films, most recently The Squid and the Whale. Rager will publish You in fall 2007.
Dijkstra's Double Dip
Agent Sandra Dijkstra has negotiated a deal for two new books by USC law professor and historian Mary Dudziak. The first is Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey, which sheds new light on the Supreme Court Justice's civil rights work, and the second is How War Made America: A Twentieth Century History, which argues that war was the central influencing factor in the last century of American life. Oxford's Dedi Felman bought world rights, and Oxford plans to publish the Marshall book on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2008.
Dijkstra also just accepted a preemptive offer for North American rights to Adrienne Sharp's second novel, The True Memoirs of Little K, from Courtney Hodell at FSG. The book is based on the life of Mathilde Kschessinska, mistress of the last Romanov tsar, lover of three grand dukes, and prima ballerina of the Mariinski Theatre. Sharp, a former dancer, is the author of the collection White Swan, Black Swan and the novel First Love (now published in paperback as The Sleeping Beauty). FSG tentatively plans a spring 2008 publication.
Rosenberg Back to Avon
Avon's Lyssa Keusch has acquired her fourth consecutive title from comic novelist Saralee Rosenberg via agent Deborah Schneider, who sold North American rights. The new book, All in the Cards, is set in the author's home turf of Long Island and features two bickering, it's-your-day-to-drive moms. Rosenberg is the author of the trilogy A Little Help from Above, Claire Voyant and this month's Fate and Ms. Fortune, all published as paperback originals by Avon. Cards, another paperback original, is slated for a late 2007 pub date.
The Briefing
Atria's Wendy Walker has acquired North American rights to Hello, Charlie: Letters from a Serial Killer by Charlie Hess and Davin Seay, from agent William Clark. The book will detail how retired FBI agent Hess, along with two other volunteers, coaxed confessions from convicted killer Robert Charles Brown to as many as 48 murders committed between 1970 and 1995; Atria will pub in 2008.
