RIGHTS GUIDE 2020 MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING Brooklyn, NY • London, UK Rights Guide Fall, 2020 Contact us at [email protected] Find a list of our subagents at www.mhpbooks.com/rights FRONT LIST NON-FICTION 3 Until the World Shatters 4 Midnight's Borders 5 Twilight in Hazard 6 Trout Water 7 Pedro's Theory FICTION 9 Northern Heist 10 Leonard and Hungry Paul 11 Night in Tehran 12 The Fugitivities 13 The Care of Strangers 14 Useless Miracle 15 U UP? 16 The Revisionaries 17 The Ancient Hours THE LAST INTERVIEW 19 Frida Kahlo 20 Toni Morisson 21 Ruth Bader Ginsburg BACK LIST 24 NON-FICTION 32 FICTION FRONT LIST NON-FICTION UNTIL THE WORLD SHATTERS Truth, Lies, and the Looting of Myanmar DANIEL COMBS This first in-depth piece of reportage about the largest natural resource heist in Asia reveals Myanmar's world of secret-keepers and truth-tellers In Myanmar, where civil war, repressive between the insurgent army his family government, and the $40 billion a year supports and the business and military jade industry have shaped life for decades, leaders his career depends on. His attempt everyone is fighting for their own version of to get rich quickly leads him to Myanmar's the truth. Until the World Shatters takes us biggest, worst kept secret: the connection deep into a world in which journalists seek between the jade industry and the longest to overcome censorship and intimidation, running war in the world. ethnic minorities wage guerilla war against Until the World Shatters weaves Phoe a government they claim refuses to grant Wa and Bum Tsit's stories to reveal a larger basic human rights; devout Buddhists portrait of Myanmar's history, politics, and launch violent anti-Muslim campaigns; people in a time and place where public and artists try to build their own havens of trust has disappeared. free expression. In the bustling city of Yangon we meet Phoe Wa, a young photojournalist pursu- ing his dream at a time when the govern- ment is jailing reporters and nationalist voices are on the rise. In Myanmar's far north, we meet Bum Tsit who is caught DANIEL COMBS is an award-winning author and international security professional who has spent the past six years studying Myanmar's ethnic conflicts. In addition to Myanmar, Daniel has lived in and reported from Ethiopia, the Congo, Vietnam, and Israel. He is the former editor of the Asia Pacific Affairs Journal, and his writing and commentary have ap- peared on NPR, The Diplomat, and Asia Times, among others. Daniel is a graduate from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. In a past life, he was a chef and restaurant reviewer. On Sale March 2021 | HC | Rights Available: World, Translation, Audio 3 MIDNIGHT'S BORDERS A People's History of Modern India SUCHITRA VIJAYAN The first true people's history of modern India, told through a five-year, 9,000 mile-journey along its many contested borders Sharing borders with six countries and of colonialism and the stain of extreme spanning a geography that extends from violence and corruption. The result is the Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world's ground-level portrait of modern India largest democracy and second most pop- we've been missing. ulous country. Yet most of us don't under- stand it, or the violent history still playing Including more than 25 stunning out there. In fact, India as we know it didn't photographs documenting Vijayan's travels. exist until the map of the subcontinent was redrawn in the middle of the 20th century— the powerful repercussions of which are still being felt across South Asia. To tell the story of political borders in the subcontinent, Suchitra Vijayan spent seven years travelling India's 9,000-mile land border. Now, in this stunning work of narrative reportage, she shares what she learned on that groundbreaking journey. With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan shows us the forgot- ten people and places in the borderlands and brings us face to face with the legacy SUCHITRA VIJAYAN was born and raised in India, studied law at the University of Leeds in England, and now lives in New York. Her essays have appeared in The Hindu, Foreign Policy, GQ, Boston Review, and Huffington Post Magazine. She has embedded in Afghanistan to conduct research on counterinsurgency practices, worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and co-founded the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo. In the fall of 2017, Vijayan founded The Polis Project. On Sale February 2021 | HC | Rights Available: World excl. Indian Subcontinent, Translation, Audio 4 TWILIGHT IN HAZARD An Appalachian Reckoning ALAN MAIMON Reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist searches for the soul of America in the stories and lives of the people in Eastern Kentucky "Most people who live in Louisville have never been to Eastern Kentucky and have no idea what's happening there. We would want you to cover the area like a foreign cor- respondent would." That's what Alan Mai- mon's editor at the the Louisville Courier- Through the stories he covered then, and Journal told him in a job interview in the follows up on today, Maimon—now forever early days of the 21st century. linked to the region having married into a When Maimon took the job and arrived coal mining family—offers a broader view in Hazard, Kentucky as the Journal's re- of the region than we've had in recent por- gional bureau chief, he realized that he was trayals. With the bureau he ran now shut- reporting on a much bigger story than the tered, he offers a unique perspective in an county's otherness. It was a region in the age when media outlets have cut back or grip of ecological devastation, a man-made eliminated coverage of the most distressed prescription pill epidemic, and where the regions of the country. aftermath of September 11th was taking an outsize toll. He witnessed first hand the enchroaching structural forces that would keep the region in poverty for decades to follow, even as many of those forces remain unacknowledged today. ALAN MAIMON is an award-winning journalist and author. As a reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, he was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a series about Kentucky's justice system. He started his professional writing career as a news assistant and reporter in the Berlin bureau of The New York Times. He attended Brown University and is a former Fulbright scholar. He lives in Princeton, NJ. On Sale March 2021 | HC | Rights Available: World, Translation, Audio 5 TROUT WATER A Year on the Au Sable JOSH GREENBERG An elegiac memoir on the spiritual side of fly-fishing on America's greatest trout stream At the beginning of trout fishing season, Josh Greenberg—proprietor of a fishing tackle store on America's most famous trout-fishing stream, the Au Sable River—is struggling to cope with the slow death of a close friend. Over the course of the fishing season, he'll revisit that relationship and its importance to him as he takes solace, and maybe something more, from fishing. JOSH GREENBERG is manager of the famous Gates Au Sable Lodge, and writes a popu- lar, on-line fishing report that draws as many as 40,000 hits a month. He has contributed to several magazines, including Fly, Rod & Reel and Fly Fisherman. He is the author of Rivers of Sand: Fly Fishing Michigan and the Great Lakes Region. On Sale March 2021 | HC | Rights Available: World, Translation, Audio 6 PEDRO'S THEORY Reimagining the Promised Land MARCOS GONSALEZ There are many Pedros living in many Americas . One Pedro goes to a school where they take away his language. Another disappears in the desert, leaving behind only a backpack. A cousin Pedro comes to visit, awakening feelings that others are afraid to make plain. “An impressive amalgam of autobiography, A rumored Pedro goes missing so complete- family portraiture, political diagnosis, ly it's as if he were never there. cultural history, literary criticism, In Pedro's Theory Marcos Gonsalez ex- and novelistic aria . a stunning debut plores the lives of these many Pedros, real by a powerful writer.” and imagined. Several are the author him- —Wayne Koestenbaum self, while others are strangers, lovers, ar- chetypes, and the men he might have been “An insightful and brilliant dismantling in other circumstances. All are journeying of the traditional American Dream. to some sort of Promised Land, or hoping This book is a beautiful fusion of lived to discover an America of their own. experience and cultural criticism. Gonsalez With sparkling prose and cutting in- belongs on the same shelf as Claudia sights, this brilliant literary debut closes the Rankine and Maggie Nelson.” gap between who the world sees in us and —Michele Filgate who we see in ourselves. Deeply personal yet inspiringly political, it also brings to life “Pedro's Theory is . an exploration of not those selves that never get the chance to be only what it means to be brown, Indigenous, seen at all. queer and mad, but what it means to be a human in a world that values not who you are, but what you can sacrifice with a smile.” —Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground MARCOS GONSALEZ is an essayist and professor of literature. His work has appeared in Literary Hub, Inside Higher Education, Plough-shares, Catapult, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere.