Walden Pond Gets ‘Heroic’ With Brown
At HarperCollins’s Walden Pond Press imprint, Jordan Brown took world English rights to a middle-grade novel, and a new middle-grade trilogy, by Christopher Healy (Hero’s Guide series). The four-book deal was brokered by agent Cheryl Pientka at Jill Grinberg Literary. The standalone, called The Worst Thing About Saving the World, is about a 12-year-old boy who, Pientka explained, is left to wonder “what’s left for him” after he saves the world from an evil alien. The adventure series, called A Perilous Journey of Danger and Mayhem, is set during America’s “age of industry and invention,” as Pientka put it, and is inspired by the works of Jules Verne. The Worst Thing About Saving the World is set for fall 2015.

Rehr Talks 20th-Century Terrorism for Graphic Universe
For Lerner Publishing’s Graphic Universe imprint, Carol Hinz and Andrew Karre acquired world English rights to Henrik Rehr’s Terrorist: The Life of Gavrilo Princep (the book will be published in France this June with the title Gavrilo Princip, l’homme qui changea le siècle). Karre descibred it as “a brutal and gripping documentary graphic novel” about the man who assassinated Austria’s Archdruke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. (The event is often cited as precipitating the outbreak of World War I.) Sylvan Coissard brokered the deal with Lerner, on behalf of French publisher Futuropolis; the English translation is set for spring 2015.

Wearing Goes ‘Fringe’ at UCP
Christie Henry at University of Chicago Press bought world English rights to Judy Wearing’s Fringe Benefits. The nonfiction book, which Eddie Schneider at JABberwocky Literary sold, is, he said, in the vein of Mary Roach. Schneider said the author “combs through our tangled relationship with our body hair, looking at it from both biological and cultural perspectives, with a healthy dose of humor.” Wearing (Edison’s Concrete Piano) has a degree from Oxford in evolutionary biology.