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UPCOMING MEMOIR & BIOGRAPHY UPCOMING MINDFULNESS / SELF-HELP
BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER YOU CAN’T F*CK UP YOUR KIDS RUST THE WEDGE BECOMING KIM JONG UN HEART, BREATH, MIND LEARNING BY HEART THE HILARIOUS WORLD OF DEPRESSION THIS IS BIG HI, JUST A QUICK QUESTION BETSEY: A MEMOIR BE WATER, MY FRIEND LAUGH LINES GROWING YOUNG SPACE IS THE PLACE THE SECRETS OF SILENCE THE EQUIVALENTS TRUE AGE ROCKAWAY MIRACLE COUNTRY UPCOMING NARRATIVE NONFICTION BRIGHT PRECIOUS THING HEAD OF THE MOSSAD THE WOMEN WITH SILVER WINGS GUCCI TO GOATS THE DOCTOR WHO FOOLED THE WORLD HOW TO SAY BABYLON BLOOD RUNS COAL WHICH GOD DO YOU MEAN? SPRINTING THROUGH NO MAN’S LAND BLIND AMBITION STRANGERS RHAPSODY MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH CRYING IN THE BATHROOM CHASING THE THRILL NOTHING PERSONAL THE MISSION DOT DOT DOT TALKING FUNNY AUGUST WILSON SQUIRREL HILL REBEL TO AMERICA PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST UNTITLED MEMOIR BY TOM SELLECK INTELLIGENT LOVE I REGRET I AM ABLE TO ATTEND WATER AND SALT MUHAMMED THE PROPHET GUN BARONS CAN’T KNOCK THE HUSTLE THE SEEKERS CURE-ALL HORSE GIRLS NOSTALGIA KIKI MAN RAY THE SECRET HISTORY OF HOME ECONOMICS MURDER BOOK SPOKEN WORD ONBOARDING OSCAR WARS CONQUERING ALEXANDER FIRST TO FALL TANAQUIL THE VORTEX
UNFORGETTABLE UPCOMING FICTION THE KINGDOM OF PREP THE GOLDEN DOOR HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE BLOOD AND INK THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT OTHER FRONTS ONLY THE RIVER THE RED WIDOW YOU EXIST TOO MUCH GOOD COP THE DISTANT DEAD THE SISTERHOOD HOME BEFORE DARK WE DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU ANYMORE WANT WINTER COUNTS and WOUNDED HORSE UPCOMING SCIENCE / BUSINESS/ THE GREAT OFFSHORE GROUNDS CURRENT AFFAIRS WHEN WE WERE YOUNG AND BRAVE THE ROCK EATERS ADVICE FOR LADY ADVENTURERS 2030 PLACEBO BREAK IT UP BREAD AND FISH EDITING MANKIND IMMEDIATE FAMILY BATTLE TESTED BEND YOU TO REMAIN GOOD COMPANY THE COMMUNITY BOARD TOGETHER WE WALK TOWARDS THE FIRE
FIRE HALF YOUR STAFF
LET’S FIX WORK
FINDING NORMAL
WHEN ECOSYSTEMS COLLIDE FIRST STEPS BRAIN INFLAMED PROJECT TOTAL RECALL THE KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS FROM AROUND THE CORNER TO AROUND THE WORLD CHANGING GENDER EVER GREEN THE CAUSES OF BLACKNESS SUPERSIGHT RUNNER’S HIGH THE RISE OF THE MAMMALS THE PRECISION PARADOX
UPCOMING MEMOIR & BIOGRAPHY
BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker
By Barry Sonnenfeld
US publisher: Hachette Books (North American rights) US editor: Brant Rumble; To publish: March 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Barry Sonnenfeld's philosophy is, "Regret the Past. Fear the Present.
Dread the Future." Told in his unmistakable voice, BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER is a laugh-out-loud memoir about coming of age. Constantly threatened with suicide by his over-protective mother, disillusioned by the father he worshiped, and abused by a demonic relative, Sonnenfeld somehow went on to become one of Hollywood's most successful producers and directors.
Written with poignant insight and real-life irony, the book follows Sonnenfeld from childhood as a French horn player through graduate film school at NYU, where he developed his talent for cinematography. His first job after graduating was shooting nine feature length pornos in nine days. From that humble entrée, he went on to form a friendship with the Coen Brothers, launching his career shooting their first three films. Will Praise for BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR Smith once joked that he wanted to take Sonnenfeld to Philadelphia MOTHER: public schools and say, "If this guy could end up as a successful film director on big budget films, anyone can." This book is a fascinating and " Zesty anecdotes about family, marriage, and fatherhood combine with hilarious roadmap for anyone who thinks they can't succeed in life because of a rough beginning. Hollywood gossip to make for an entertaining romp.” – Kirkus
“If I went to prison, and saw that Barry Sonnenfeld was going to be my Barry Sonnenfeld made his directorial debut with The Addams Family in 1991, and has gone on to direct a number of films including Addams cellmate, I would think, ‘Oh, this will be a breeze.’”— Jerry Seinfeld Family Values, Get Shorty, and the first three Men in Black films. His television credits include Pushing Daisies, for which he won an Emmy, and The extraordinary thing about Barry is how many truly strange and amazing most recently Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events. chapters he's had in his life." – Neil Patrick Harris
RUST A Memoir of Steel and Grit
By Eliese Colette Goldbach
US publisher: Flatiron Books / Macmillan (North American rights) US editor: Bryn Clark; To publish: March 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Rights sold: Korea (Maumsanchaek) UK/Commonwealth (Quercus)
A debut memoir of grit and tenacity, as one young woman returns to the conservative hometown she always longed to escape, to earn a living in the steel mill that casts a shadow over Cleveland.
In RUST, Eliese brings the reader inside the belly of the mill and the middle American upbringing that brought her there in the first place. She takes a long and intimate look at her Rust Belt childhood and struggles to reconcile her desire to leave without turning her back on the people she's come to love. The people she sees as the unsung backbone of our nation. Faced with the financial promise of a steelworker’s paycheck, and the very real danger of working in an environment where a steel coil could crush you at any moment, Eliese finds unexpected warmth and camaraderie among the gruff men she labors beside each day. Praise for RUST:
Appealing to readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Educated, RUST is a story of the "An affecting, unblinking portrait of working-class life.” – Kirkus humanity Eliese discovers in the most unlikely and hellish of places, and the hope that therefore begins to grow. "A female steelworker's soulful portrait of industrial life.” – Publishers Weekly Eliese Goldbach is a steelworker at the ArcelorMittal Cleveland Temper Mill. She received an MFA in nonfiction from the Northeast Ohio Master "Goldbach displays refreshing candor and hard-earned knowledge about the of Fine Arts Program. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Western issues that divide us and the work that unites us.” – Booklist Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Best American Essays 2017. Eliese has received the Ploughshares Emerging "This beautifully told, nuanced memoir will strike a chord with fans of Writers Award and a Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant from the Ohioana Hillbilly Elegy and pique the interest of sociology scholars." – Library Library Association, which is given to a young Ohio writer of promise. Journal
BECOMING KIM JONG UN A Former CIA Officer’s Insights into North Korea’s Enigmatic Young Dictator
By Jung H. Pak
US publisher: Ballantine / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Brendan Vaughan; To publish: April 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Rights sold: Finland (Otava) Germany (DuMont) Holland (Prometheus) Hungary (Nouvion)
Korea (Dasan Books) Norway (Pantagruel) Poland (W.A.B./Foksal) UK/Commonwealth (Oneworld)
When Kim Jong Un became the leader of North Korea in 2011, predictions about his imminent fall were rife. North Korea was isolated, poor, unable to feed its people, and clinging to its nuclear program for legitimacy. But instead, the opposite happened. Now, Kim has solidified his grip on his country and brought the United States and the region to the brink of war. Still, we know so little about him—or how he rules. Enter CIA analyst Jung Pak, whose brilliant Brookings Institution essay Praise for BECOMING KIM JONG UN: "The Education of Kim Jong Un" cemented her status as the go-to authority on the calculating young leader. Pak has been at the forefront of “Highly readable, thoughtful, and dispassionate, this book offers important shaping U.S. policy on North Korea and providing strategic assessments insights into an enigmatic leader who will shape the destiny of not only the for leadership. In this masterly book, she traces and explains Kim's ascent Korean Peninsula but of the Northeast Asian region and the world. It’s the on the world stage, from the brutal purges he carried out to consolidate next best thing to receiving a top-secret CIA briefing.” – Sue Mi Terry, his power, to his abrupt pivot to diplomatic engagement with President former CIA analyst and Korea director at the National Security Council Trump.
“Jung H. Pak’s sober but absorbing portrait should be the starting point for Jung H. Pak has held senior positions at the CIA and the Office of the any scholar, journalist, or policymaker trying to make sense of the most Director of National Intelligence. She is a senior fellow and the SK-Korea dangerous regime on earth.” – Michael J. Green, former Asia adviser to Foundation Chair in Korea Studies at the Brookings Institution's Center President George W. Bush for East Asia Policy Studies.
LEARNING BY HEART An Unconventional Education
By Tony Wagner
US publisher: Viking / PRH (World English rights) US editor: Kathryn Court; To publish: April 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Rights sold: Korea (Hanmunhwa) Romania (SC Publica)
“A page turner. With candor and clarity, Tony Wagner tells the story of his remarkable life and, in so doing, tells the story of our education system.” – Angela Duckworth, New York Times bestselling author of Grit
One of the world's top experts on education delivers an uplifting memoir on his own personal failures and successes.
Tony Wagner is an eminent education specialist who has taught at Harvard and MIT; done significant work for the Gates Foundation; and speaks all over the world. But before he found his success, Tony was kicked out of middle school, expelled from high school, and dropped out Praise for LEARNING BY HEART: of college. LEARNING BY HEART is his powerful account of his years as a student and teacher. "Wagner’s passionate memoir serves as blueprint for educators looking to Tony eventually learned a radically different approach to individualized inspire their own students." – Publishers Weekly learning—one based on understanding each student's core questions and interests. From being labeled a failure in high school to experiencing the "This honest and thoughtful memoir reminds readers what’s at the heart of joy of learning, Tony’s story is one that sheds light on critical issues facing learning—a unique individual—and that school cannot be a one-size-fits-all today's educators and parents, and reminds us that trial and error, and approach.” – Booklist respect for the individual, is at the very heart of all teaching and learning. "Tony Wagner has written an irresistible coming-of-age memoir that is an Tony Wagner is a Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy extended reverie on education—what it is, what it’s not, and why it matters. Institute. He is the previous author of Creating Innovators, The Global This story of mental, emotional, and moral awakening will touch your heart.” Achievement Gap, and Most Likely to Succeed. – Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive
THIS IS BIG How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World (and Me)
By Marisa Meltzer
US publisher: Little, Brown (North American rights) US editor: Vanessa Mobley; To publish: April 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Rights sold: UK/Commonwealth (Chatto & Windus / PRH UK)
The story of a cross-generational, beyond-the-grave and beyond-the- scale friendship, one that led to the first breakthrough Marisa
Meltzer ever had in her quest for self-improvement.
Marisa Meltzer began her first diet at the age of 5. Growing up an indoors-loving child in Northern California, she learned from an early age that weight was the one part of her life she could neither change nor even really understand.
Fast forward nearly four decades. Marisa, a contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times, comes across an obituary for Jean Nidetch, the Queens, NY housewife who founded Weight Watchers in 1963. Praise for THIS IS BIG:
Weaving Jean's incredible story as weight loss maven and pathbreaking "Marisa has written a book that perfectly captures our country's obsession entrepreneur with her own journey through Weight Watchers, Marisa with THIN and the struggle with obesity at this moment in history.” – Busy chronicles the deep parallels, and enduring frustrations, in each woman's Philipps, author of This Will Only Hurt A Little decades-long efforts to lose weight and keep it off. The result is funny, unexpected, and unforgettable. "THIS IS BIG is a brave, bold, funny, honest, riveting book that made me have every kind of feeling in the world." – Jami Attenberg, author of All Marisa Meltzer is a journalist based in New York who writes the “Me Grown Up Time” column for The New York Times Style section and has contributed to The New Yorker, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, and Vogue among numerous "A witty and meaningful look at our obsession with weight and other major national publications. dieting…Marisa Meltzer crafts an amusing story with universal insights.'' – Sheila Weller, author of Girls Like Us
BETSEY A Memoir
By Betsey Johnson
US publisher: Viking / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Rick Kot; To publish: April 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
A memoir by the internationally famous fashion designer and style icon.
Mention the name "Betsey Johnson" and almost every woman from the age of 15 to 75 can rapturously recall a favorite dress or outfit; whether worn for a prom, a wedding, or just to stand out from the crowd in a colorful way. Betsey is famous for her iconic pink stores (she had 65 shops across the US) and for her habit of doing cartwheels and splits down the runway at the close of her fashion shows. Throughout her decades-long career, she's taken pride in producing fun but rule-breaking clothing at an accessible price point. What they might not know is that she built an empire from scratch, and brought stretch clothing to the masses in the 80s and 90s.
Betsey will take the reader behind the tutu and delve deeply into what it took to go from a white picket fence childhood in Connecticut to Praise for BETSEY: becoming an internationally known force in a tough, competitive business. The book will feature Betsey's candid memories of the fashion and “In this celebration of female entrepreneurship, Johnson writes about downtown scene in the 60s and how she started her own business from creating one’s own opportunities and blazing forward despite the odds… the ground up after designing successfully for multiple other companies. captures the spirit and irreverence of Johnson’s colorful personality and She will discuss that business's ups and downs and reinventions (including clothing.” – Publishers Weekly bankruptcy), and her thoughts on body image, love, divorce, men, motherhood, and her bout with breast cancer. Richly illustrated with many “The stories revealed…will surprise and delight.” – Vogue of her landmark clothes, fashion sketches, and personal photos—the book is a perfect memento and gift for every girl (of any age) for whom Betsey "This inspiring book is literally a manual for how to succeed in fashion and in is, as a recent New York Times profile noted, "a role model still." life, all the while remaining completely and utterly true to yourself." – Simon Doonan, Creative Ambassador for Barney’s New York Betsey Johnson is an internationally renowned fashion designer.
LAUGH LINES My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier
By Alan Zweibel
US publisher: Abrams (World English rights) US editor: Jamison Stoltz; To publish: April 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
With his tender, funny memoir of four decades in the business, Alan Zweibel traces the history of American comedy in LAUGH LINES.
Alan Zweibel started his comedy career selling jokes for seven dollars apiece to the last of the Borscht Belt standups. Then one night, despite bombing on stage, he caught the attention of Lorne Michaels and became one of the first writers at Saturday Night Live, where he penned classic material for Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and all of the original Not Ready For Prime Time Players. From SNL, he went on to have a hand in a series of landmark shows—from It’s Garry Shandling’s Show to Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Throughout the pages of LAUGH LINES, Zweibel weaves together his own stories and interviews with his friends and contemporaries, including Richard Lewis, Eric Idle, Bob Saget, Mike Birbiglia, Sarah Silverman, Judd Praise for LAUGH LINES: Apatow, Dave Barry, Carl Reiner, and more. The book also features a charming foreword from his friend of forty-five years Billy Crystal, with “An amiable, big-lug, heart-of-gold sort of book…[A] pleasant, amusing tale whom he co-wrote and co-produced the upcoming film Here Today that of a life in jokes, suitable for budding comedians and students of the form.” stars Crystal and Tiffany Haddish. LAUGH LINES is a warmhearted – Kirkus cultural memoir of American comedy. "Any comedy fan will thrill to see the contemporary art's invention through Alan Zweibel is an original Saturday Night Live writer who has won the eyes of consummate funny man Alan Zweibel." – Mary Karr multiple Emmy and Writers Guild of America awards for his work in television. He also collaborated with Billy Crystal on the Tony Award– “I interviewed Alan for my high school radio station when I was sixteen and winning Broadway play 700 Sundays and won the Thurber Prize for have been hungry for comedy and life insights from him ever since! Finally, I American Humor for his novel The Other Shulman. have the Zweibel bible!” – Judd Apatow
SPACE IS THE PLACE The Lives and Times of Sun Ra
By John Szwed
US publisher: Pantheon 1997, revised and updated edition Duke University Press 2020 (North American rights) To publish: April 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Rights sold: Italy (Minimum Fax) UK / Commonwealth (Canongate)
Reissued over twenty years after its original printing, the revised and updated edition of SPACE IS THE PLACE brings Sun Ra into the twenty-first century.
Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra—aka Herman Blount—was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto- space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed's SPACE IS THE PLACE is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century's greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting Praise for SPACE IS THE PLACE: the whole of Sun Ra's life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to "Szwed has produced a rare jazz biography—one that takes full account of impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters by the history that shaped the music and its central personalities.” – The New performing music with the Arkestra that was as vital and innovative as it York Times was mercurial and confounding. Szwed's readers—whether they are just discovering Sun Ra or are among the legion of poets, artists, intellectuals, “One of the great jazz biographies.” – The Guardian and musicians who consider him a spiritual godfather—will find that, indeed, space is the place. “Through deft writing and detailed chronology, Szwed manages to make the seemingly unintelligible, shiny-turbaned pioneer of big-band free jazz more John Szwed was director of the Center for Jazz Studies and is a former professor of Music and Jazz Studies at Columbia University in New York. accessible to society at large.” – Publishers Weekly
THE EQUIVALENTS A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s
By Maggie Doherty
US publisher: Knopf / PRH (North American rights) US editor: LuAnn Walther; To publish: May 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
The timely, never-before-told story of five brilliant, passionate women who, in the early 1960s, converged at the newly founded Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study and became friends as well as artistic collaborators, and who went on to shape the course of feminism in ways that are still felt today.
“Superb… A welcome spotlight on an overdue ‘experiment.’” – Kirkus
In 1960, Harvard's sister college, Radcliffe, announced the founding of an Institute for Independent Study, a "messy experiment" in women's education that offered paid fellowships to those with a PhD or "the equivalent" in artistic achievement. Five of the women who received fellowships--poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen--quickly formed Praise for THE EQUIVALENTS: deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves "the Equivalents." Drawing from “Doherty’s prose dazzles, and she skillfully integrates her copious research notebooks, letters, recordings, journals, poetry, and prose, Maggie into the narrative while toggling between biographical, creative, and political Doherty weaves a moving narrative of friendship and ambition, art and matters. This empathetic, wide-angled portrait will resonate with fans of the activism, love and heartbreak, and shows how the institute spoke to the individual artists as well as feminists and readers of women’s history.” condition of women. – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
Maggie Doherty is a literary scholar, historian, and critic based at Harvard, where she earned her PhD in English and where she currently “With great psychological acumen, and ever-mindful of the nuances of class, teaches writing, literature, and history. Her writing has appeared in many race, and gender, Maggie Doherty brings these women vividly to life, allowing publications, including The New Republic, The New York Times, n+1, and The us to hear them speak, to feel their conflicts and their triumphs.” – Kate Nation. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own
ROCKAWAY Surfing Headlong into a New Life
By Diane Cardwell
US publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (North American rights) US editor: Deanne Urmy; To publish: June 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
The inspirational story of one woman learning to surf and creating a new life in gritty, eccentric Rockaway Beach.
“Toes to the nose, knees to the chin, Diane Cardwell’s memoir about learning to surf in midlife shows us how to pop up again and again, with style.” – Jill Eisenstadt, author of From Rockaway and Swell
Unmoored by a failed marriage and disconnected from her high-octane life in the city, Diane Cardwell finds herself staring at a small group of surfers coasting through mellow waves toward shore—and senses something shift. ROCKAWAY is the riveting, joyful story of one woman’s reinvention—beginning with Cardwell taking the A Train to Rockaway, a neglected spit of land dangling off New York City into the Atlantic Ocean. She finds a teacher, buys a tiny bungalow, and throws her not-overly-athletic-self headlong into learning the inner workings and rhythms of waves and the muscle development and coordination needed Diane Cardwell is an award-winning journalist who has covered a variety of to ride them. subjects, including alternative energy, popular culture, politics, crime, and New York’s hospitality industry. A former reporter for the New York Times, As Cardwell begins to find her balance in the water and out, superstorm she was among the inaugural writers of “Portraits of Grief,” the Times’ Sandy hits, sending her into the maelstrom in search of safer ground. In signature profiles of those killed in the 9/11 World Trade Center attack and the aftermath, the community comes together and rebuilds, rekindling its helped found Vibe magazine. She lives, gardens, and surfs in Rockaway bacchanalian spirit as a historic surfing community, one with its own Beach, New York. quirky codes and surf culture. And Cardwell’s surfing takes off as she finds a true home among her fellow passionate longboarders at the Rockaway Beach Surf Club, living out “the most joyful path through life.”
ROCKAWAY is a stirring story of inner salvation sought through a challenging physical pursuit.
MIRACLE COUNTRY A Memoir
By Kendra Atleework
US publisher: Algonquin (North American rights) US editor: Kathy Pories; To publish: June 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
MIRACLE is an extraordinary mirroring of the spirit and losses of a family, reflected in the spirit and losses of a landscape—a gorgeously written, poignant narrative of a young woman discovering solace in the natural world.
Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero. Kendra’s family raised their children to thrive in this harsh landscape, forever at the mercy of wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Most of all, the Atleework children were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. But it came at a price. When Kendra was six, her mother was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease, and she died when Kendra was sixteen. Her family fell apart, even as her father tried to keep them together. Kendra took flight from her bereft family, escaping to the enemy city of Los Angeles, and then Minneapolis, land of all trees, no deserts, no droughts, full lakes, Praise for MIRACLE COUNTRY: water everywhere you look. “Blending family memoir and environmental history, Kendra Atleework conveys a fundamental truth: the places in which we live, live on—sometimes But after years of avoiding the pain of her hometown, she realized that painfully—in us.” – Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee she had to go back, that the desert was the only place she could live. Like Members and The Shakespeare Requirement Wild, MIRACLE COUNTRY is a story of flight and return, bounty and emptiness, and the true meaning of home. “Kendra Atleework has an uncanny wisdom and a deep sense of people and their origins, and she writes like an angel.” – Charles Baxter, author of Kendra Atleework received her MFA in creative writing from the There's Something I Want You to Do University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and is the recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writer Award and the AWP Into Journals Project Award. “Kendra Atleework can really write. She flies with burning wings." – Luis Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2015 and The Atlantic. Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
BRIGHT PRECIOUS THING A Memoir
By Gail Caldwell
US publisher: Random House (North American rights) US editor: Kate Medina To publish: July 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
Rights sold: China (Pan Press) Korea (Uknow Books)
From the New York Times bestselling author of Let’s Take the Long Way Home comes a moving memoir about how the women’s movement revolutionized and saved her life, from the 1960s to the #MeToo era.
In a voice as candid as it is evocative, Gail Caldwell traces a path from her west Texas girlhood through her emergence as a young daredevil, then as a feminist—a journey that reflected seismic shifts in the culture itself. Caldwell’s travels took her to California and Mexico and dark country roads, and the dangers she encountered were rivaled only by the personal demons she faced. BRIGHT PRECIOUS THING is the captivating story of a woman’s odyssey, her search for adventure giving way to Gail Caldwell is the former chief book critic for The Boston Globe, where she something more profound: the evolution of a writer and a woman, a was a staff writer for more than twenty years. In 2001, she was awarded the struggle to embrace one’s life as a precious thing. Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. She is the author of three previous memoirs and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Told against a contrasting backdrop of the present day, including the author’s friendship with a young neighborhood girl, BRIGHT PRECIOUS THING unfolds with the same heart and narrative grace of Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home, called “a lovely gift to readers” by The Washington Post. Bright Precious Thing is a book about finding, then protecting, what we cherish most.
HEAD OF THE MOSSAD In Pursuit of a Safe and Secure Israel
By Shabtai Shavit
US publisher: University of Notre Dame Press (NA rights) US editor: Eli Bortz; To publish: August 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Rights sold: Holland (Karakter) Israel (Yedioth) Poland (Publicat) Romania (Grup Media Litera)
Shabtai Shavit, director of the Mossad from 1989–1996, is one of the most influential leaders to shape the recent history of Israel.
Shavit combines memoir with sober reflection to reveal what happened during the seven years he led what is widely recognized today as one of the most powerful and proficient intelligence agencies in the world. Shavit provides an inside account of his intelligence and geostrategic philosophy, the operations he directed, and anecdotes about his family, colleagues, and time spent in, among other places, the United States as a graduate student and at the CIA.
Shavit’s tenure occurred during many crucial junctures in the history of Praise for HEAD OF THE MOSSAD: the Middle East, including the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War era; the first Gulf War and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s "HEAD OF THE MOSSAD is a gripping book drilling deep down into navigation of the state and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during the central intelligence issues. I highly recommend reading this truly special conflict; the peace agreement with Jordan, in which the Mossad played a central role; and the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Shavit book.” – Eli Amir, author of Jasmine and Scapegoat offers a broad sweep of the integral importance of intelligence in these historical settings and reflects on the role that intelligence can and should "The book captures the thoughtful and lucid reflections of the former play in Israel's future against Islamist terrorism and Iran’s eschatological director of the Mossad regarding the role that intelligence can and should vision. play in the decision-making process in Israel.” – Clive Jones, author of Britain and the Yemen Civil War 1962–1965 Shabtai Shavit served in Israeli intelligence for 32 years, where he rose to become the Director of Mossad from 1989-1996.
GUCCI TO GOATS HOW TO SAY BABYLON A Memoir By Safiya Sinclair By Jake Keiser US publisher: 37 Ink (Atria) / Simon & Schuster (NA rights) US editor: Dawn Davis; To publish: Spring 2021 US publisher: The Dial Press / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Anna Pitoniak; To publish: Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Rights sold: Korea (Munhakdongne) UK/Commonwealth (Picador UK) GUCCI TO GOATS is an enchanting memoir by a city girl who leaves behind a six-figure salary to move by herself to a farm in the Like Tara Westover’s inspiring Educated and Jeanette Walls’s The middle of Mississippi. Jake Keiser’s story is for folks who dream of Glass Castle, HOW TO SAY BABYLON is the story of one girl’s fiery reconnecting with nature. It’s for people who are looking for determination to live life on her own terms. inspiration and flock to memoirs by powerful, risk-taking women, like Cheryl Strayed or Elizabeth Gilbert. Safiya Sinclair was born into a strict Rastafarian family in Montego Bay, where luxury hotels line pristine beaches. But Safiya’s Jamaica is not the Jake Keiser was living the high life in Tampa, Florida, running a high- island paradise of tourist brochures and bouncy reggae. On this heavily powered PR firm and juggling drinks dates, shopping sprees, and charity Christian island, Rastas were literally outlawed as a religious minority, living in galas. But at age 38, following a failed marriage, a series of painful poverty in an isolated world of rigid patriarchal rule. miscarriages, and a blistering breakup, she begins to suffer from extreme anxiety. Hit with the realization that no amount of Botox can fill the hole Safiya’s father, a hot-tempered itinerant reggae musician, adhered to the Rasta in her heart, she longs for something money can’t buy. Which leads her to belief that women are wholly subordinate to men. But when Safiya’s father the impulse purchase of a lifetime: a farm of her own. was on the road, her mother brought the world beyond to her very bright children. Safiya’s imagination leapt beyond her father’s borders, and so with her defiance came increasingly violent clashes with her father. Through trial by fire, Jake learns to fix a well, weatherproof a house, and muck out a stall. She learns to haul wood, shoot a gun, and kill a snake. Safiya’s extraordinary journey to selfhood takes readers beyond the And she learns to care for over 75 animals—hens, geese, chickens, experience of one family’s history and inside a world few of us understand. turkeys, goats, and quail. But scarred by a fresh heartbreak and haunted by The legacy of colonialism is echoed in the oppressive religion in which she the accumulated pain of her past, Jake hits rock bottom. With nowhere was raised. The social isolation of her family is echoed in her personal left to run, she’s finally forced to confront a bracing reality—the farm isolation from her religion and the society that disdained her. Her coming can’t save her. Only she can save herself. into her own as an independent woman is mirrored in the island’s liberation from England. Above all, the beauty of her relationship with her mother is Jake Keiser moved to Mississippi in November 2012, and shortly echoed in the beauty of the island itself. thereafter began her blog documenting farming life. GUCCI TO GOATS is her first book. Safiya Sinclair is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Cannibal.
WHICH GOD DO YOU MEAN? BLIND AMBITION
By Daniel Levin By Chad E. Foster
US publisher: Algonquin (World English rights) US publisher: HarperLeadership / HarperCollins (WE rights) US editor: Amy Gash; To publish: Spring 2021 US editor: Tim Burgard; To publish: Spring 2021
Material available: Full MS available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 An exhilarating and agonizing true story of one man’s search to find a missing person in Syria over eighteen grueling days. Chad E. Foster might not, at first, seem like a truly extraordinary man. But what makes Chad’s story something more than just the tale of very An unlikely hero, Daniel Levin, a lawyer turned armed-conflict mediator, successful executive, adventure sports fan and family man, is the fact chases one lead to the next, from the head of Hezbollah in Beirut to the that he’s done all of this completely blind. king of the Captagon trade (the ISIS drug of choice) in Amman and Dubai. He dives into a darkness where reporters don’t have access—an Coding software applications that allow visually impaired people to work on underground world where arms, drugs, and people are for sale, and if customer relationship management software is more than what 99% of the you’re not selling, you’re probably buying. It is there that he finds the rest of us could do. But can you imagine doing it when you’re blind devil, but also the courage, kindness, and redemption no evil can destroy. yourself? Hitting the airport for a flight to Tokyo, then working late with
clients, poring over complicated spreadsheets, and making precise WHICH GOD DO YOU MEAN? is a searing political memoir adjustments would be hard enough for any of us. But imagine doing it wrapped in a thriller—a must-read for anyone interested in hidden levers blind—all of it—navigating a complex and confusing city when you can’t see of power, international affairs, current events, the Middle East, or our the streets or read Google maps; filling out forms that governments insist growing number of forever wars. With the pacing and cinematic style of a upon when you travel with a guide dog; designing long and complicated Jason Matthews’ novel, and the urgency and emotional depth of the Excel documents with a group of people you cannot see; and, even, just Pulitzer Prize winning memoir The Return by Hisham Matar this will finding your way to the bathroom once you finally get inside your hotel appeal to readers of gripping narrative nonfiction, such as The Looming room. Chad isn’t superhuman. He knew by age three that, at some point in Tower by Lawrence Wright, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter his life, he would lose his eyesight. He tried to make believe that this was Pomerantsev, and Ghost Wars by Steve Coll. never going to happen. But when he was a sophomore in college, the truth became impossible to deny, an Everest-sized challenge he’d have to After a career in law and academia, Daniel Levin has spent the last overcome or crumble under. In the attached pages, Chad is going to share twenty years working with governments and institutions, focused on with readers the details of his extraordinary journey. He believes that, economic development and political reform through financial literacy, whatever life throws at you, you have to face it and embrace it without political inclusion, and constitutional initiatives. Over the past ten years, excuses. he’s run the Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance, through which he’s worked with state and nonstate actors in armed conflicts, After losing his sight in his teens, Chad E. Foster became the first blind including, most recently, in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and the DR Congo, and graduate of the Harvard Business School leadership program. He is an helped monarchies modernize and democratize their political foundations. executive at Red Hat and a leading speaker to business audiences.
RHAPSODY CRYING IN THE BATHROOM The Life and Legacy of Freddie Mercury By Erika L. Sanchez By Jason King US publisher: Viking / PRH (North American rights) US publisher: Dey Street / HarperCollins (North American rights) US editor: Georgia Bodnar; To publish: Spring 2021 US editor: Carrie Thornton; To publish: Spring 2021 Material available: Full MS available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 CRYING IN THE BATHROOM is the debut essay collection from the
Rights sold: Holland (Xander) New York Times bestselling author and the National Book Award Russia (Eksmo) finalist, Erika L. Sanchez. UK/Commonwealth (Bloomsbury UK) CRYING IN THE BATHROOM follows in the tradition of Samantha Have you ever tried to explain, let alone sing the words to, Irby, Esme Weijun Wang, Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay and Sandra Cisneros— Bohemian Rhapsody? It’s a “delirious puzzle”, much like the creator a compilation of personal anecdote and political examination, told in Erika’s incomparable and irrepressible voice. Erika’s essay about an epic, life- himself—one of pop music’s most misinterpreted and misunderstood changing vaginal infection is followed by an astute indictment of white stars. feminism and its limits. The final essay in the collection, Difficult Sun, is an affecting exploration of depression. Twenty-seven years after his death from AIDS, Mercury’s fans are still trying to figure out this complex and multi-layered celebrity, one who CRYING IN THE BATHROOM is Erika L. Sanchez at her most self- deliberately concealed his true self from the public for the duration of his aware, her most forthright, her most singularly perceptive, she has an career. Jason King will reveal that self in RHAPSODY, the first serious, uncanny ability to connect with readers in her prose. The collection’s strength sustained, and in-depth critical biography of the singer, a book that will speaks for itself, but when asked why she wanted to write it, Erika says: “I’ve finally capture Mercury in all his many dimensions. always looked for books that mirrored my experiences, but I rarely found them. Even now, there hasn’t been an essay collection by a Latina author that RHAPSODY will be more than a standard bio; King intends to illustrate has reached a mainstream audience.” CRYING IN THE BATHROOM how Mercury operated in four different but interrelated closets through stands as this majorly overdue essay collection. his professional career. Mercury was closeted about his queer sexuality, his nationality, his ethnic and racial background, and his AIDS diagnosis. King will argue that the closet, for Mercury, was a place of possibility Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. A poet, essayist, from which he could stage his momentous career. He valued privacy and and fiction writer, she is the author of the New York Times bestselling young mystery and from that created a compelling and meaningful public life. adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, which is a National Book Award Finalist, and the poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, which is a Jason King, who holds a Ph.D. from NYU, is a musician, DJ, producer, finalist of the Pen America Open Book Award. Her nonfiction has been curator, writer, and Associate Professor of The Clive Davis Institute of published in Al Jazeera, Cosmopolitan, ESPN.com, The Guardian, NBC News, Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Rolling Stone, Salon, and elsewhere.
NOTHING PERSONAL DOT DOT DOT When Technology Became Humanity and Things Got By Nancy Jo Sales Complicated
US publisher: Hachette (North American rights) By Laurie Segall US editor: Mauro DiPreta; To publish: Fall 2021 US publisher: Dey Street / HarperCollins (North American rights) Material available: Proposal available US editor: Jessica Sindler; To publish: Fall 2021 Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available NOTHING PERSONAL is part raw personal narrative detailing Edited MS available in Spring 2021 one women’s unfiltered, timely truth about sex, men, love, and power in the city and Silicon Valley, and part blistering, Tech isn’t our salvation or damnation; it’s a mirror of who we are, and meticulously documented exposé on Big Dating and how it monetizes who we can become. and facilitates rape culture. With the insight, wit, and effervescence of a Millennial Carrie Bradshaw, Nancy Jo Sales was first on the scene with her internet-breaking Laurie takes us on a spirited and authoritative journey through one of the investigative articles for Vanity Fair on social media and Big Dating, most important decades, and cultural shifts, in modern history. Dotted with making national headlines and igniting debate. But all the while that she icons like Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ev Williams, her story is about was telling on Silicon Valley, Sales had a secret: she herself had become the arc of success—how it changes people and at what price—and the search utterly addicted to dating apps and the sex she found there with much- for meaning in an increasingly filtered world. It’s about staying scrappy and younger men. Lots of younger men. And it was making her insane. having the strength to walk away from “good enough.” And it’s about the tension between rebellion and stasis, success and failure, image and At the age of 50, before almost anyone her age was yet on Tinder or authenticity, and connection and disruption. Bumble or Hinge, Sales couldn’t get off the apps. Even though the sex was mostly hilariously bad and sometimes even dangerous. Even though An evergreen journey of self-discovery, DOT DOT DOT follows in the she was often harassed online and in person by the young men she met, footsteps of industry-busting books such as Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, not for being older (they loved that about her) but for not getting naked and like Katy Tur’s bestseller Unbelievable, it gives a facelift to media-classics fast enough, for not catering to their every sexual whim. As Nancy Jo dug such as Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper and The Vanity Fair deeper with her reporting and discovered dark truths about the apps, she Diaries by Tina Brown, pulling back the curtain on kingmakers, blowhards, knew she should just delete them for her sanity and safety. But she didn’t. and hard-boiled journalists. And her double life continued, until she fell deeply in—and out—of love with a 23-year-old man named Caleb. Laurie Segall is an award-winning investigative journalist. She was named one of Forbes’ “30 under 30,” Mashable’s “Top Journalists to Subscribe to Nancy Jo Sales is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and on Facebook,” and one of the “Top Journalists Followed by CEOs.” filmmaker. She’s renowned for two decades of articles on youth culture, Formerly the senior technology correspondent for CNN, she developed and technology, crime, art and celebrity for major publications, including hosted a series of docuseries that explored the impact of technology on sex, Vanity Fair, where she’s a Contributing Editor. love, and death.
AUGUST WILSON REBEL TO AMERICA The Kiln in Which He Was Fired A Memoir of an Uprising
By Patti Hartigan By Kareem “Tef Poe” Jackson
US publisher: 37 Ink / S&S (North American rights) US publisher: W.W. Norton (North American rights) US editor: Dawn Davis; To publish: Fall 2021 US editor: Tom Mayer; To publish: Fall 2021
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Edited MS available in Spring 2021
The first and fully authorized biography of August Wilson by REBEL TO AMERICA is the story of a young man coming of age in veteran theater critic, Patti Hartigan, who has covered August the beating heart of Saint Louis, Missouri. It’s a generational story Wilson for three decades. about black culture between the coasts; about the clash between youths and the police; about loving families and dangerous gangs; about hope Playwright August Wilson’s story begins with his birth in a two-room and hip hop and a new civil rights movement coming alive in the tenement in Pittsburgh. Wilson’s mother, Daisy, a daughter of American Midwest. sharecroppers, was a spirited and disciplined mother who made time to play dodgeball and baseball with her children. Wilson’s father, Through his story, Tef explores the history of the community from which he German-born, left the family when he was a young boy. These two came. He delivers a rich portrait of a city divided by race. He captures stories themes of abandonment and a loving, but strict mother play out in about his brothers, his ride-or-die friends, his girlfriends who made him into Wilson’s life and art. a man, the golden age of open mics in the U-City loop, a legendary
destination for aspiring artists, and the spirit of revolution that culminated in Jazz saved him and by the time he was 37, Wilson was accepted by the uprising in Ferguson and the dawn of a new black consciousness. the National Theater Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Soon, his plays were produced on Broadway and he was receiving Pulitzers and Tony’s. Most important, Wilson changed Rapper and 2018 Nasir Jones Fellow at Harvard University, Tef Poe’s work American theater and culture. He set out to write a series of plays has been featured in Time, Vice, XXL, Billboard, Rolling Stone, Atlanta Black chronicling the experience of African Americans in the 20th Century, Star, and The Source. REBEL TO AMERICA is his first book. and his American Century Cycle is the true attempt at an American epic in the vein of Homer, Virgil, and Dante. It is an unprecedented achievement. But demons bubbled underneath this achievement. Hartigan tells a fascinating, complicated, page-turning biography of extravagant success, internal vulnerability and an ability to grow.
Patti Hartigan is currently a contributing editor to The Boston Globe. She is a former theater critic of The Boston Globe.
UNTITLED MEMOIR I REGRET I AM ABLE TO ATTEND
By Tom Selleck By Jessica Craig-Martin
US publisher: Dey Street Books/ HarperCollins (NA rights) US publisher: Spiegel & Grau / PRH (World English rights) US editor: Carrie Thornton; To publish: Fall 2021 US editor: Julie Grau; To publish: Fall 2021
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Edited MS available in Spring 2021
Rights sold: Germany (Hannibal) Famed photographer Jessica Craig-Martin chronicled New York City’s UK (HarperCollins UK) society gatherings (uptown and downtown) for fifteen years. Like Marilyn Minter, Lauren Greenfield, and Nan Goldin, Jessica has used Tom Selleck’s story is the story of a half-century of Hollywood. her lens to burst the bubbles of fashion, wealth, and social status. He kicked off his movie career by co-starring with Mae West. He gave Frank Sinatra his last acting job, a guest spot on Magnum P.I.. He filmed a A stealth, gimlet-eyed sociologist masquerading as a party photographer movie with Marlon Brando—a terrible movie. He met or worked with whose work appears in the permanent collections of The Guggenheim, The everyone from John Wayne to Farrah Fawcett to F. Murray Abraham to Whitney, The New Museum, The Saatchi Collection, among others, Jessica’s Whoopi Goldberg. As a late bloomer in the entertainment industry, visual talent for observing and documenting human behavior and society is Selleck was able to grow into a uniquely sensitive performer and person, matched equally by her talents as a writer. In her memoir, she turns the lens as well as an actor who both embodied and subtly subverted the clichés of on herself, and recounts a latchkey bohemian childhood in the 1970s as the onscreen manhood. It is also the story of half a century of America: as a precocious offspring of two free spirited artists (her father is the acclaimed Baby Boomer who lived through Vietnam and its aftermath, he watched painter Sir Michael Craig Martin). Her account of growing up between some close friends lose their way and others lose their lives. London and New York’s Soho is a vivid social and cultural history of 70s and 80s bohemia. It’s the story of a man who had to learn how to balance his personal and professional lives, and who frequently felt the need to adjust his career to She offers a snapshot of a now almost mythic moment in New York City protect his family’s privacy and normalcy. And above all, it’s the story of a history that she witnessed almost by accident, from selling seafood to Jean man who has continued to follow his moral compass despite the Michel Basquiat in the early days of Dean & Deluca to working for Anna temptations and distractions of the entertainment industry—and who has Wintour as an assistant at British Vogue. Her social satire follows in the always tried to push himself and his career into new territory. footsteps of Nora Ephron and Fran Liebowitz, barbed yet deeply human; this is the story of a clever yet self-doubting young woman trying to find her Tom Selleck is an actor and producer best known for his roles as place in the world with little adult instruction or supervision. Thomas Magnum on the original Magnum P.I. television series, Dr. Richard Burke, Monica’s older boyfriend on Friends, and NYPD Jessica Craig-Martin is a photographer whose work appears in permanent Commissioner Frank Reagan on the hit crime drama Blue Bloods. He has collections. Her photography has appeared in Vogue, New York, Vanity Fair, also made numerous films including Three Men and A Baby, in which he and The New Yorker. played Peter Mitchell, The Closer, and Mr. Baseball.
MUHAMMED THE PROPHET THE SEEKERS Meetings with Remarkable Musicians By Mohamad Jebara By John Densmore US publisher: St. Martin’s / Macmillan (North American rights) US editor: Elisabeth Dyssegaard; To publish: Fall 2021 US publisher: DaCapo Press / Hachette (NA rights) US editor: Ben Schafer; To publish: Fall 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Rights sold: Portugal (Saida de Emergencia) Rights sold: Germany (Hannibal) He’s been described as a ruthless warrior and a tree-hugging Russia (Eksmo) peacenik, a radical fundamentalist and a transcendent prophet. The culmination of 27 years of research, MUHAMMED THE In his extraordinary new book, John Densmore deploys his privileged PROPHET will tell the gripping story of Muhammad as he’s never access to many iconic musicians and world-class artists and performers been seen before. to explore the origins of creativity itself.
For the first time in Western literature, we’ll see Muhammad as a young In THE SEEKERS, Densmore takes readers on a rich journey into the soul orphan struggling to make his late-mother proud; a rebellious teenager of the artist and into the realm of everyday inspirations. Densmore mines bucking up against tradition; and an idyllic man fighting to promote the author’s personal notebooks and experiential archives from the last fifty liberty, innovation, equality, and a constitutional government a thousand years of our cultural history—and serves up a guide to readers for how to years before the Age of Enlightenment. We’ll meet the women who acted understand creativity’s roots and to access the life-affirming power of as his advisors and partners; the social outcasts who became his followers inspiration that he maintains we all possess. and supporters; and the old guard elite who opposed his every move. By rigorously analyzing over 5,000 sources—examining the cultural context, Readers from all walks of life will draw inspiration and empowerment from historical record, and usage of Arabic and Semitic languages—Jebara will this title, as the author digs deep into his own process—and sheds new light correct misinformation and fill in key narrative gaps. Though Western on the approaches of artists from Janis Joplin to Patti Smith, Paul Simon to historians have done important work in this area, they simply don’t have Jerry Lee Lewis, Lou Reed to Ram Dass, Bob Marley to Jim Morrison, the expertise or training to dig up old archives, vet out etymological wunderkind Vienna and Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo inconsistencies, or create full-bodied characters This will be the first Dudamel to Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreria. THE SEEKERS will account written by someone who can understand the material on its own appeal to the enormous audiences of readers who’ve flocked to books such terms, and the first account that comes to life. as Adam Grant’s The Originals, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, and Brene Brown’s Braving the Wilderness. Mohamad Jebara is an Arab language specialist and scholar of Islamic studies and the former Chief Imam of Ottawa. He’s earned Ijazah (formal John Densmore is a New York Times bestselling author and drummer of the Islamic academic certifications) in Arabic, Qur`anic Studies, and various Doors. Mathahib (schools of Islamic jurisprudence).
HORSE GIRLS KIKI MAN RAY
Edited by Halimah Marcus By Mark Braude
US publisher: Harper Perennial / HarperCollins (NA rights) US publisher: Norton (North American rights) US editor: Sarah Stein; To publish: Fall 2021 US editor: Amy Cherry; To publish: Fall 2021
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal Available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Edited MS available in Spring 2021
In a series of essays that promise to be by turns emotional and funny, Rights sold: Germany (Suhrkamp) introspective and entertaining, this collection explores the deeply UK/Commonwealth (Two Roads / John Murray) engrained cultural stereotype of the “horse girl,” tells stories about equestrian loves and losses, and shows the broad range of women A propulsive human drama about Kiki de Montparnasse—the “It Girl” (and writers) those dreamy young girls grew up to be. of Paris between the World Wars.
HORSE GIRLS maps a broader understanding of the special connection A groundbreaking performer who directly or indirectly paved the way for a girl sometimes has to a horse and how that connection is lost or multi-hyphenates such as Edith Piaf, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, Kiki filled maintained in adulthood, with essays from National Book Award finalist cabarets and sold out art shows. And she shepherded along the career of a Carmen Maria Machado about being a “wannabe” horse girl; novelist relatively unknown American photographer named Man Ray. Adrienne Celt reflecting on pursuing riding in her thirties and grappling with privilege; poet Rosebud Ben-Oni meditating on what it means to be KIKI MAN RAY is the only book to tell the twinned love story of Kiki and wild; memoirist T-Kira Madden on how training to be a jockey Man Ray. Set in post-war France from 1921 to 1929—at a time of eroding contributed to body dysmorphia; Courtney Maum on how riding helped traditions, shattered faith, and radical reinvention—Kiki and Man Ray her through depression and insomnia; and New York Times bestselling become Zelig-like figures, embodying and shaping their community, and the novelist Maggie Shipstead on a friendship that was built on horseback, era at large. They subvert norms, create art that changes the way we see the with more to come. The horse girl is, perhaps, more deeply seeded into world, and push each other until they break apart. Theirs is a story of our cultural fabric than we know. ambition, creativity, love, success, control, suspicion, and power. And when the dust settles, we’re forced to wonder: who do we choose to remember and As with collections like Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on who do we choose to forget? What is the line between an artist and a muse? the Decision Not to Have Kids and Well-Read Black Girl, which are powered Where does female empowerment cross into exploitation? And who controls mostly by female and non-binary contributors and the readers who love the narrative of history? them, HORSE GIRLS will be not just for the equestrian reader, but for the readers interested in powerful personal stories about female strength, Critically acclaimed author Mark Braude is a former postdoctoral fellow at independence, and wildness. Stanford University, where he was also a lecturer in the departments of Art History, History, and French. He will be the Spring 2020 Visiting Fellow at Halimah Marcus is the Executive Director of Electric Literature and the the American Library in Paris. His writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Editor-in-Chief of its weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading. The Los Angeles Times, and The New Republic.
MURDER BOOK ONBOARDING A Black Girl’s Guide to Navigating Race, Relationships, and By Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell Mess While Surviving at a New England Boarding School
US publisher: Andrews McMeel (World English rights) By Kendra James US editor: Allison Adler To publish: Spring 2022 US publisher: Grand Central / Hachette (World English rights) US editor: Maddie Caldwell; To publish: Spring 2022 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2021 If you’re a true crime junkie, you can’t get enough of the dark details: blood spatter patterns, serial killer profiles, Forensic Files re-enactments. In 2006, Kendra James was the first African-American legacy student to And if you’re Hilary Campbell, you turn your lifelong obsession with graduate from the Taft School since its founding in 1890. With whip-smart murder into an entertaining, hilarious graphic memoir that asks, “why is it insight into the mythical world of elite prep schools, ONBOARDING joins so goddamn fun to think about dismemberment?”. Through the lens of works such as Lorene Carey’s classic memoir Black Ice and Curtis Sittenfeld’s her own family and relationships, Hilary delves into famous murders, true bestselling novel Prep. As a writer, Kendra follows in the footsteps of crime history, and how we as a society eat up these stories and turn them bestselling authors like Roxanne Gay, Morgan Jerkins, and Michael into pop culture. Arceneaux whose linked essays explore the intersection of race, gender, class, pop culture, and personal experience. Hilary is an accomplished cartoonist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She has illustrated the The stories Kendra tells in ONBOARDING all occurred before this books Feminist Fight Club and Are You My Uber?, and keeps a robust and generation’s Woke student activists. Yet as Kendra shows, the issues she and growing Instagram account with 63.6k followers. Like Julia Wertz’s Towers, her fellow non-white, non-straight, and even non-skinny, students faced Tenements, and Trash, MURDER BOOK is a personal take on a larger remain all too relevant today. With its combination of incisive social critique, topic, which gives it an audience outside the traditional graphic memoir uproarious depictions of its characters and events, and unerring ability to space. relate them to themes in our current and popular culture, ONBOARDING will resonate with anyone who has ever been The Only One in a room, dealt Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell is the author of the forthcoming true crime with racial microaggressions, or even just suffered with an extreme case of graphic memoir Murder Book. She is a cartoonist, illustrator, stand-up homesickness. And it will speak to those who are going away to high school comedian and documentary filmmaker. Her cartoons have appeared in The or college, entering a new – wealthier and whiter – environment for the first New Yorker, The New York Times, Barron’s and elsewhere. She has illustrated time. several books, including Feminist Fight Club and Are You My Uber? and her films won top prizes at festivals across the country before becoming Kendra James was Senior Editor at Shondaland for two years and is Vimeo Staff Picks. currently the Managing Editor for StarTrek.com. Her writing has been published widely from Elle, Marie Claire, Women’s Health Magazine, ESPN, The Daily Beast, Catapult, and The Toast among others
CONQUERING ALEXANDER TANAQUIL By Elizabeth Samet Le Clercq, Balanchine, and a Life at the Forefront of the 20th Century US publisher: Liveright / W.W. Norton (World English rights) US editor: Bob Weil; To publish: Spring 2022 US publisher: Simon & Schuster (North American rights) US editor: Ira Silverberg; To publish: Spring 2023 Material available: Edited MS available in Fall 2021 Material available: Proposal available CONQUERING ALEXANDER will trace the life of Alexander the Edited MS available in Spring 2022 Great, the charismatic world conqueror, of which he is the historical original. Elizabeth aims to write a comprehensive and subversive Rights sold: UK/Commonwealth (Faber UK) retelling of the many different lives of Alexander to be found in history, fiction, and popular culture. In the mode of Stacy Schiff’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Verá , the novelistic story of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife and their fifty-two-year marriage, Obsessed with fame in an ancient culture where the battlefield was the TANAQUIL will carry all the cultural heft of a “ballet book.” Le surest place to win it, Alexander spent his entire adult life on campaign. Clercq’s and Balanchine’s love story is one for the ages, akin to those During its 13-year campaign, Alexander’s army marched over 20,000 depicted in Amanda Vaill’s Everybody Was So Young and Sam miles, through most of the regions where the US has concentrated its Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger’s Furious Love. military energies since 2001. He was there before us. George Balanchine was to dance what Picasso was to painting—not just a In our present moment, so alive to the idea of “greatness,” an examination genius, but an inventor of a modern art form, and a defining artist of his of Alexander and his myth can open a rich discussion about both the century, founding what would eventually become the New York City Ballet. personal and national ambition to be great. Alexander’s life is the template Tanaquil Le Clercq would rise through Balanchine’s school to become the against which those of subsequent conquerors from Julius Caesar to fledgling City Ballet’s star dancer, a sly performer whose unprecedented lines Genghis Khan to Napoleon have been compared. Alexander’s career, like perfectly expressed the choreographer’s radical vision. She became his fifth that of Caesar, became a lesson in the dangers of a military despot. and final wife, and the only one—according to friends and fellow dancers— However, political and cultural trends suggest a surprising hunger for who truly understood him and loved him for who he was, rather than what latter-day Alexanders. he could do for her. In 1956, during City Ballet’s European tour, Le Clercq was stricken with polio, leaving her without the use of her legs. Her life and Balanchine’s stalled as their efforts at rehabilitation failed along with their An English professor at West Point, Elizabeth Samet received her BA marriage. And yet, even after their divorce, with Le Clercq confined to her from Harvard and her PhD from Yale. Soldier’s Heart won the Los Angeles wheelchair, she remained Balanchine’s trusted adviser, a quietly astute Times Book Prize for Current Interest and was also named one of The New observer of his work who refused to let tragedy diminish her enjoyment of York Times’s 100 Notable Books in 2007. life and dance.
Holly Brubach has worked as a staff writer and editor at The New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic, where she won a National Magazine Award in Essays & Criticism
UPCOMING SELF-HELP / MINDFULNESS TITLES
YOU CAN’T F*CK UP YOUR KIDS A Judgement-Free Guide to Stress-Free Parenting
By Lindsay Powers
US publisher: Atria / S&S (North American rights) US editor: Sarah Pelz To publish: March 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Rights sold: Korea (Hanmunhwa) Ukraine (Vivat)
Cribsheet meets The Sh!t No One Tells You in this no-holds-barred, judgment-free parenting guide that sets the record straight on every hot-button parenting topic by longtime journalist and founder of the viral #NoShameParenting movement.
What if you could do more for your kids, by doing a whole lot less? Parenting today has become a competitive sport, and it seems that everyone is losing. From the very moment that little line turns blue, parents-to-be find themselves in a brave new world where every decision they make is fraught, every action they take is judged, and everything they Praise for YOU CAN’T F*CK UP YOUR KIDS: do seems to be the wrong thing. Lindsay Powers—creator of the #NoShameParenting movement—is here to help parents everywhere "A well-researched, common-sense compendium on child-rearing.” – Kirkus breathe a collective sigh of relief. This laugh-out-loud funny, accessible, and reassuring book sets the record straight on all of the insane conflicts “Whether it happened today or 10 years ago, you can still remember the that parents face. judgey jerk who told you that you were doing something horribly wrong as a parent. Guess what? You weren't. And finally, we've got proof: THIS Lindsay Powers is creator of the #NoShameParenting movement, a viral WONDERFUL BOOK!” – Lenore Skenazy, president of Let Grow and Internet. Before joining Sirius XM, she was the founding editor-in-chief of founder of Free-Range Kids Yahoo Parenting. Her clarion journalistic voice has been published in the New York Post, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Us Weekly, and the Hollywood Reporter, “A timely and reassuring look at contemporary parenting…You need this and she has appeared on Good Morning America, the Today Show and book!” – Amy Tuteur, MD, Harvard-trained OB/GYN and author of CNN. Push Back
THE WEDGE Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human Resilience
By Scott Carney
US publisher: Foxtopus, Ink (North American rights) To publish: April 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Rights sold: Poland (Galaktyka)
In this thrilling exploration of the human body's potential, Carney searches the globe for people who understand the subtle language of how the body responds to its environment.
Thrive or die: That's the rule of evolution. Despite this brutal logic, some species have learned to survive in even the most hostile conditions. Others couldn't—and perished. While incremental genetic adaptations hone the physiology of nearly every creature on this planet, there's another evolutionary force that is just as important: the power of choice. In this explosive investigation into the limits of endurance, journalist Scott Carney discovers how humans can wedge control over automatic physiological responses into the breaking point between stress and biology. We can reclaim our evolutionary destiny. Praise for THE WEDGE:
Scott Carney confronts fear at a cutting-edge neuroscience laboratory at "Scott Carney tackles big topics—stress, resilience, and the linkage between Stanford and learns about flow states by tossing heavy weights with physicality and spirituality—and once again shows his willingness to challenge partners. He meets masters of mental misdirection in the heat of a Latvian our conventional assumptions." – Brad Stulberg, bestselling author sauna, experiments with breathing routines that bring him to the cusp of of Peak Performance transcendence, searches his mind in sensory deprivation tanks, and ultimately ends up in the Amazon jungle with a shaman who promises either madness or universal truth. All of this in service of trying to "Prepare to enter an intriguing world of self-improvement and physical and understand what we're really capable of. What if there are no true limits? mental performance that you've never before discovered […] sure to improve your life and longevity forever." – Ben Greenfield, New York Times Bestselling author of Beyond Training Scott Carney’s books include the New York Times bestseller What Doesn't Kill Us as well as The Red Market and The Enlightenment Trap.
HEART, BREATH, MIND Train Your Heart to Conquer Stress and Achieve Success
By Dr. Leah Lagos
US publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (North American rights) US editor: Deb Brody To publish: May 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
Rights sold: China (Huazhang) UK/Commonwealth (Orion)
Stress is not in your head, it’s in your body.
This is the key to peak performance that Leah Lagos, PsyD, BCB, an internationally known expert in biofeedback and sport and performance psychology, wants us to know. In this book, she shares with readers for the first time the same program that she uses with top athletes, CEOs, business leaders—anyone who wants and needs to perform at their best.
What makes her scientifically proven 10-week program unlike any other is that she recognizes the link between heart rhythms and stress to create specific, clinically tested exercises and breathing techniques that allow Leah Lagos, Psy.D. is an internationally renowned health and you to control your body’s physical response to stress. She pairs this performance psychologist specializing in heart rate variability (HRV) training with cognitive-behavioral exercises to offer a two-tiered process biofeedback. With nearly 15 years’ experience integrating the mind and for strengthening health and performance, enabling readers to respond body to reduce anxiety and boost resilience, Dr. Lagos is a leader in peak more flexibly to stressful situations, let go of negative thoughts and performance training. In addition to consulting at the annual NFL emotions, and ultimately be more focused and confident under pressure. scouting combine and providing onsite support on multiple PGA tours, she works with elite performers in sports, entertainment, medicine and With HEART, BREATH, MIND, readers will gain the tools of elite business—from CEOs and hedge fund managers to Olympians, surgeons, athletes and CEOs, enabling them to respond more flexibly to stressful and ballerinas. A consulting expert for the media, Dr. Lagos has been situations, let go of negative thoughts and emotions, and ultimately be featured in more than 100 outlets including the Today Show, CNN, NBC more focused and confident under pressure. Nightly News, MSNBC, Golf Digest, Sports Illustrated, Harper’s Bazaar, Psychology Today, and Shape Magazine. Dr. Lagos combines biofeedback and psychological strategies to help clients achieve optimal performance in health and life.
THE HILARIOUS WORLD OF DEPRESSION
By John Moe
US publisher: St. Martin’s Press / Macmillan (NA rights) US editor: Elisabeth Dyssegaard; To publish: May 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
A moving, portrait of depression, from the host of the podcast The Hilarious World of Depression.
For years John Moe, critically-acclaimed public radio personality, struggled with depression; it plagued his family and claimed the life of his brother in 2007. As Moe came to terms with his own illness, he began to see similar patterns of behavior and coping mechanisms surfacing in conversations with others, including high-profile comedians who’d struggled with the disease. Moe saw that there was tremendous comfort and community in open dialogue about these shared experiences and that humor had a unique power. Thus was born the podcast The Hilarious World of Depression.
Inspired by the immediate success of the podcast, Moe has written a remarkable investigation of the disease, part memoir of his own journey, part treasure trove of laugh-out-loud stories and insights drawn from years of interviews with some of the most brilliant minds facing similar challenges. Throughout the course of this powerful narrative, Praise for THE HILARIOUS WORLD OF DEPRESSION: depression’s universal themes come to light, among them, struggles with identity, lack of understanding of the symptoms, the challenges of work- "Moe is exactly the right person to give an attentive, irreverent voice to life, self-medicating, the fallout of the disease in the lives of our loved those suffering with depression." – Booklist ones, the tragedy of suicide, and the hereditary aspects of the disease. The Hilarious World of Depression illuminates depression in an entirely "A funny, honest book about depression, and what you can do…a very fresh and inspiring way. serious book that also manages to be funny about things we are not supposed to laugh at." – Neil Gaiman John Moe has served as host of national public radio broadcasts such as Weekend America, Marketplace Tech Report and from 2010- 2015, Wits. His "[D]eeply moving and, against all odds, life-affirming. It's an ode to the writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, McSweeney’s, The blues that makes you feel better about being human." – Susan Orlean Seattle Times, MSN, and he’s the author of three books.
HI, JUST A QUICK QUESTION BE WATER, MY FRIEND Queries, Advice, and Figuring It All Out The Extraordinary Teachings of Bruce Lee
By Beth Evans By Shannon Lee
US publisher: William Morrow / HarperCollins (WE rights) US publisher: Flatiron Books / Macmillan (WE rights) US editor: Emma Brodie; To publish: June 2020 US editor: Sarah Murphy; To publish: November 2020
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2020 Edited MS available in May 2020
HI, JUST A QUICK QUESTION is a creative and fun mix of Rights sold: Brazil (Tordesilhas) Randall Munroe’s forthcoming How To, Ruby Elliot’s It’s All China (Ginko) Absolutely Fine, and a Dear Abby-style advice column. France (Tredaniel) Germany (Piper) In this project, Beth Evans, author of I Italy (Piemme) Really Didn’t Think This Through, takes a Portuguese (20/20 Editora) list of 50 questions gleaned from her Russia (AST) followers, regarding how to accomplish Spain (Alfaomega) certain tasks and navigate one’s Turkey (Nemesis) emotions, giving a brief written response accompanied by a healthy Just as Bruce Lee himself authored a martial-arts / philosophy book in helping of the hilarious and insightful 1975 that went on to sell more than 1 million copies, his daughter comics she’s best known for. Shannon will deliver a new bestselling modern classic: BE WATER, MY FRIEND to a new generation of readers who have flocked to Shannon by the millions to understand her father’s “secret sauce.” Publishers of I REALLY DIDN’T THINK THIS THROUGH After the death of her older brother, actor Brandon Lee, during a tragic stunt Korea (Korean Economic Daily & Business) accident on the set of The Crow, she stepped up and assumed stewardship of Portugal (La Galera) her father’s estate. The astoundingly large and deeply passionate following Spain (PRH Spain) she has built is a testament to the authenticity of her message. It resonated Taiwan (China Times) with many, and it has inspired deep loyalty. For more than a year, fans have Vietnam (Skybooks) been asking Shannon when she will commit her lessons and her father’s wisdom in a book. She is excited to write that book. Beth Evans is the creator of the hit Instagram account: @bethevansart and the author of I Really Didn’t Think This Through, a book featuring Shannon Lee is the daughter and sole surviving child of Bruce Lee and the comics about adulthood and dealing with life. CEO of Bruce Lee Enterprises.
GROWING YOUNG THE SECRETS OF SILENCE A Simple Guide to Age Reversal Reclaiming Clarity in a World of Noise
By Sergey Young By Justin Zorn & Leigh Marz
US publisher: BenBella Books (World English rights) US publisher: HarperWave / HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Glenn Yeffeth; To publish: Fall 2021 US editor: Karen Rinaldi; To publish: Spring 2022
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Edited MS available in Fall 2021
Rights sold: Germany (Mosaik) One of the most exciting and daunting scientific developments of our Japan (Toyo Keizai) era is happening right now—and it promises to dramatically extend Korea (Sigongsa) our lifetimes. It is the explosion in the science of longevity that is The Netherlands (Thomas Rap) finally allowing us to treat aging as a reversible condition. Poland (Znak) UK/Commonwealth (Ebury / PRH UK) In GROWING YOUNG, Sergey provides readers with a birds-eye view into everything that is happening in the longevity space, with a focus on A major “big think” book that looks at the science, psychology, information readers can use to become empowered consumers and philosophy, and spirituality of silence and will change the way you healthier people. The book is divided into three sections. The first, hear the world. Horizon 1, specializes in options that are available now that can help readers reach an achievable goal—living to 100 years old. This section In THE SECRETS OF SILENCE, Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz share what focuses on preventing diseases like heart disease that, today, shorten our scientists, philosophers, spiritual practitioners, creatives, and businesspeople lifespans. Horizon 2 focuses on treatments that are almost ready today, that have discovered about the nature of silence. They look at the toll of noise on will help us live to 150, covering genetic editing, personalized healthcare, our bodies and minds and the scientific evidence for our need for quiet. Why regenerative medicine and AI-assisted diagnostics. The final section, are we letting silence slip away, and what can we do stop it? Justin and Leigh Horizon 3, explores treatments that are still a few decades away that could offer answers to these questions and more, as they look to work of finding lead to unlimited life extension. and ritualizing quiet for oneself through several guiding principles. They examine how we can be quiet together—and create group norms among Sergey has dedicated his professional life to the battle against ageing, colleagues, families, and partners. In the final section, they will present 30 founding the Longevity Vision Fund, a $100 million investment fund practices that are flexible and adaptable tools shared by the broad range of providing Series C funding to biotech and life extension companies. He is people featured in the book. also the founder, with Peter Diamantis, of the XPRIZE for Longevity. Justin Zorn is a Truman National Security Fellow and a Senior Advisor for Economic and Policy Research. Sergey Young has been an investor and venture capitalist for twenty years, with a multi-billion portfolio under management. GROWING Leigh Marz specializes in working with scientists, engineers, and mission- YOUNG is his first book. driven organizations.
TRUE AGE What Your Biology Actually Reveals About Your Internal Age
By Dr. Morgan Levine
US publisher: Avery / Penguin Random House (NA rights) US editor: Caroline Avery; To publish: Spring 2022
Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2021
What if there was a way to measure our biological age by scientifically calculating the age at which our body and internal systems are functioning—our True Age? And what if there were ways to slow down or even reverse the aging process? These questions are at the heart of Dr. Morgan Levine’s groundbreaking TRUE AGE.
As TRUE AGE will reveal, while we may be powerless against the march of time, our biological age is something we can affect. TRUE AGE shares with readers paradigm-shifting news from the front lines of scientific studies in aging and longevity. Dr. Levine’s goal in TRUE AGE is to guide every reader toward developing personal regimens, diets, and routines specifically tailored to keep them as young as possible—both inside and out. Poised to become the next major bestseller in the science, health, and wellness market, TRUE AGE provides readers and their doctors the unprecedented peak behind the curtain they need to identify their personalized aging process and increase their “healthspan”—the years they spend free of disease and disability.
Dr. Morgan Elyse Levine, PhD, is a professor at Yale University’s School of Medicine and runs her own lab aimed at developing the “Biomarkers of Aging.” Her research has been featured in major outlets, including: The Guardian, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and many others. TRUE AGE is her first book.
UPCOMING NARRATIVE NONFICTION
THE WOMEN WITH SILVER WINGS The Inspiring True Story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II
By Katherine Sharp Landdeck
US publisher: Crown / PRH (World English rights) US editor: Emma Berry; To publish: April 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
The thrilling true story of the daring female aviators who helped the United States win World War I—only to be forgotten by the country they served.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Cornelia Fort was already in the air. She and her student were in the middle of their lesson when the bombs began to fall, and they barely made it back to ground that morning. Still, she became one of just over 1,100 women from across the nation to make it through the Army’s rigorous selection process and earn her silver wings. The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) gave women like Fort a chance to serve their country—and to prove that women aviators were just as skilled as men. Praise for THE WOMEN WITH SILVER WINGS: While not authorized to serve in combat, the WASPs trained male pilots for service abroad, and ferried bombers across the country. Love and “A must-read for those interested in women’s and World War II history.” Cochran’s social experiment seemed a resounding success—until – Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW Congress clipped the women’s wings. But the bonds they’d forged never failed, and over the next decades they came together to fight for “Drawing on memoirs, archives, and interviews with surviving WASP recognition as the military veterans they were—and for their place in members, Landdeck creates palpable portraits of many women's experiences history. and their lives after the program was disbanded. A compelling history that brings forgotten heroes back in the spotlight.” – Kirkus Katherine Sharp Landdeck is an Associate Professor of History at Texas Woman's University and the world's foremost expert on the history “Entertaining…this colorful history soars.” – Publishers Weekly of the WASPs.
THE DOCTOR WHO FOOLED THE WORLD Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines
By Brian Deer
US publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press (NA rights)
US editor: Matt McAdam
To publish: May 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
Rights sold: France (Editions Les Novateur) Poland (Poznańskie) UK/Commonwealth (Scribe)
The astonishing true story of a plot to sabotage one of medicine’s greatest triumphs.
Controversy over vaccines is erupting around the globe. Parents’ confidence wanes. Infectious diseases return. And a strident, worldwide “anti-vax” movement has emerged to challenge immunization. From Rio to Rome, Seattle to Shanghai, fear is spreading. But why?
In THE DOCTOR WHO FOOLED THE WORLD, investigative journalist Brian Deer reveals the full findings from his acclaimed 15-year investigation, which exposed what the British Medical Journal dubbed the “elaborate fraud” behind this growing international crisis. In a riveting, Praise for THE DOCTOR WHO FOOLED THE WORLD: stranger-than-fiction detective story, Deer unmasks the real people and specific facts behind a conspiracy that threatens children’s health. Where “Brian Deer is the world's foremost authority on Andrew Wakefield." did it begin? Who is responsible? What did they do? Who paid? At the – Peter J. Hotez, MD, PhD, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's spine of this narrative is the rise, fall, and rise again of Andrew Wakefield, so-called “father of the anti-vaccine movement.” Here, human interest Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism meets public interest as Deer battles gagging lawsuits and smear Dad campaigns to uncover fraudulent research, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with autism, and the scientific deception of our time. “It has taken the diligent scepticism of one man, standing outside medicine and science …” – British Medical Journal Brian Deer is a multiple award-winning investigative reporter, best known for his inquiries into the drug industry, medicine, and social issues “Can one person change the world? Ask Andrew Wakefield” for the Sunday Times of London. – New Indian Express
BLOOD RUNS COAL SPRINTING THROUGH NO MAN’S LAND The Yablonski Murders and the War for the Soul of the United Mine Workers of America By Adin Dobkin
By Mark A. Bradley US publisher: Little A / Amazon (North American rights) US editor: Laura Van der Veer; To publish: Fall 2020
US publisher: W. W. Norton (North American rights) Material available: Proposal available US editor: John Glusman; To publish: October 2020 Edited MS available in Spring 2020
Material available: Edited MS available in May 2020 On June 28, 1919, World War One officially ended with the signing of
the Treaty of Versailles. One day later, on June 29, 1919, a new battle The shocking assassination of a major rival to UMWA president th began: the 13 edition of the Tour de France. Tony Boyle catalyzed groundbreaking reform in the coal mining industry. Beginning at the close of the bloodiest war the world had ever seen, the 13th Tour de France was the most difficult edition in history. 67 cyclists took In the early hours of New Year’s Eve 1969, in the small soft-coal mining off from Paris, but only 11 finished. While the length of the legs, the incline borough of Clarksville, Pennsylvania, longtime trade union insider Joseph of the Pyrenees, and the poor road conditions were challenging, the most “Jock” Yablonski and his wife and daughter were brutally murdered in unbearable obstacle was psychological. As the men passed over-stuffed their old stone farmhouse. Seven months earlier, Yablonski had cemeteries, crater-filled fields, and abandoned ports, they saw a country announced his campaign to oust the corrupt president of the United Mine shattered by economic turmoil, death, and disease. It was up to them to Workers of America (UMWA), Tony Boyle. Boyle had long embezzled revive the spirit of the country and show the world how to move on. UMWA funds, silenced intra-union dissent, and served the interests of Big Coal companies. He was enraged about his opponent’s bid to take over. The Boys in the Boat meets Into the Silence, this is the irresistible story of resilience and hope set against a sweeping historical backdrop. We see it An extraordinary portrait of one of the nation’s major unions on the brink appealing to anyone interested in war literature, international relations, high- of historical change, Blood Runs Coal comes at a time of resurgent labor stakes competitions, microhistories, and, of course, sporting events movements in the United States and the current administration’s attempts (particularly cycling). Drawing on the men’s journals, local and international to bolster the fossil fuel industry. Brilliantly researched and compellingly newspapers, and decades’ worth of research, Adin will tap into the psyche of written, it sheds light on the far-reaching effects of industrial and a nation and show the seeds of a new world order. socioeconomic change that unfold across America to this day. Adin Dobkin writes about the intersection of war, culture, and memory for Mark A. Bradley is an award-winning author and national security expert publications such as The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and the New York Times. In who served for years at the CIA and Department of Justice and, was addition to pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University, he’s appointed by President Obama to the Director of the Information the president of the Military Writers Guild and the co-creator of the podcast Security Oversight Office at the National Archives. “War Stories,” which traces the technological development of warfare.
STRANGERS MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH
By Joe Keohane By Julian Sancton
US publisher: Penguin Random House (NA rights) US publisher: Crown / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Mark Warren; To publish: February 2021 US editor: Kevin Doughten; To publish: May 2021
Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Rights sold: China (CITIC) Germany (Goldmann / PRH Germany) Rights sold: Germany (Piper) Holland (HarperCollins Holland) Holland (Hollandsdiep) Israel (Matar) Italy (Corbaccio) Korea (Across Publishing) Poland (Media Rodzina) Romania (Grup Media Litera) Romania (SC Publica) Taiwan (BWP) UK/Commonwealth (WH Allen /PRH UK) UK & Commonwealth (Viking UK) MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH is a gripping story of Why don’t we talk to strangers? And furthermore—what happens the world’s first adventurers to endure an Antarctic winter aboard a when we do? sailboat trapped in ice.
There are many reasons. There’s fear or shyness or personal disinclination. A century of science and social science has established that there is a deep MADHOUSE opens with the recruitment of the Belgica’s eccentric if intrepid biological imperative in us to distrust, diminish and discriminate against crew, which comprised more than twenty Europeans and a single American. people who are not “like us. Throughout the history of western The Belgica set sail in August 1897, and the crew were intent upon becoming civilization, the fate of cultures has been greatly impacted by their idea and the first scientific expedition to reach the South Pole. But they soon realized treatment of strangers. It’s a through-line—as Joe puts it, “from the Torah the vessel would not reach the pole before winter, and knew that if they to the Trumps”—that elucidates our shared history and offers surprising pressed on, they would encounter an unimaginably harsh climate. Yet, they and compelling insights into our own social and political moment, when courageously surrendered the ship to the pack ice, howling winds, sub-zero nearly every morning we wake up to a news feed filled with instances of temperatures, and to months of total darkness—a fate that had spelled doom xenophobia, nationalism, and racism. STRANGERS is the kind of book for past polar expeditions. Julian Sancton will movingly depict the crew that, like Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, offers a unified theory of the life members’ friendships and conflicts, while dramatizing their triumphant of humans and their societies. In the same way that Quiet, by Susan Cain, escape. He will also explore the grim effects of darkness, cold, and isolation used a big idea to make us understand something fundamental about our upon these survivors, and pay tribute to the pioneering resourcefulness of the ship’s doctor’s treatments and cures. own emotional well-being, so too will STRANGERS help us to examine and reconsider the way in which everyday interactions with strangers can impact our lives. Julian Sancton has worked as a reporter for Vanity Fair, Esquire, and Departures. MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH is his first book. Joe Keohane is an Executive Editor at Medium.
CHASING THE THRILL THE MISSION A Young Christian’s Fatal Voyage to Save a Lost Tribe By Daniel Barbarisi By Jeffrey Gettleman US publisher: Knopf / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Tim O’Connell; To publish: Spring 2021 US publisher: Henry Holt (North American rights) US editor: Paul Golob; To publish: Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 A fascinating look inside a little-explored subculture and an engrossing adventure, CHASING THE THRILL will appeal to the A literary thriller about exploration, adventure, lost tribes, lethal ambition readers of David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, Douglas Preston’s The and enduring faith. Lost City of the Monkey God, and Robert Kurson’s Pirate Hunters. Based on Gettleman’s widely read recent series for the Times, THE In 2008, a wealthy art dealer named Forest Fenn hid a treasure chest full MISSION will tell the incredible true story of John Chau, the charismatic 26- of gold and jewels in the Rocky Mountains and then published a poem year-old evangelical missionary, killed by a remote band of hunters and with nine clues to its location. Initially, Fenn’s treasure hunt was nothing gatherers as he approached their isolated island. Undeterred by repeated but a local curiosity, but five years later, the hunt’s popularity exploded— warnings, Chau swam up to North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea tens of thousands of people have undertaken the search, with author carrying gifts and a waterproof Bible, obsessed with fulfilling his lifelong Daniel Barbarisi becoming one of the hunters. mission of bringing Christianity to one of the last truly untouched places on earth. CHASING THE THRILL takes us inside this obsessive, beguiling, and sometimes lethal world. With Daniel as our guide, we’ll get to know the Treating Chau with empathy and compassion but also unflagging journalistic inimitable Forest Fenn himself—a showman, guru, and perhaps a rigor, Gettleman will take readers deep inside the world of modern-day criminal. Daniel will also follow four of the larger-than-life leading hunters evangelism, as well as the colonial history of Indian islands like North out on the trail, recounting their vastly different backgrounds, solves, and Sentinel. Whether readers find this young man noble or foolish, they will clever treasure-hunting strategies. Daniel will also document the epic tales admire Chau’s authenticity and unswerving dedication, which included a stint of fortune-seekers throughout recorded history—from Spanish at a grueling missionary boot camp in preparation for his approach Conquistadors in the 1500s, to English treasure-hunters of the 17th and towards—and conversion of—the island tribe. Inspired by narratively rich 18th centuries, and to our modern-day treasure-hunting technology that and intellectually rigorous bestsellers like Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the has raised ancient galleons from depths of the sea. Boat, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, THE MISSION promises to be an enthralling work of literary merit—and Daniel Barbarisi is the author of the acclaimed Dueling with Kings A exponential commercial promise. senior editor at The Athletic, Dan was the Yankees beat reporter for the Wall Street Journal for several years, has written for The Boston Globe and Jeffrey Gettleman has written for many publications, including National The Providence Journal, and is extremely well connected to the media. Geographic, GQ, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New York Review of Books. He is the previous author of the memoir Love, Africa.
TALKING FUNNY SQUIRREL HILL Comedians Tell Me About Their Lives, And My Life Too A Neighborhood, a Killer, and the Fight for America’s Soul
By David Steinberg By Mark Oppenheimer
US publisher: Knopf / PRH (World English rights) US publisher: Knopf / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Victoria Wilson; To publish: Spring 2021 US editor: Jonathan Segal; To publish: Spring 2021
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Edited MS available in Fall 2020
TALKING FUNNY is a tour de force through the greatest minds of Structured around the eleven months of grieving mandated by the comedy, as David Steinberg blends his personal stories and a Jewish faith, SQUIRREL HILL will offer a moving, intimate portrait selection of candid interviews with a cast of dozens of the best forces of the neighborhood’s recovery and a timely lesson as to how we might in comedy—Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Sarah Silverman, Chris cultivate the shared humanity that can save our community. Rock, Billy Crystal, Ellen DeGeneres, and Robin Williams, to name a few. SQUIRREL HILL will reckon with the recent tragedy in Pittsburgh, the rising tide of anti-Semitism in America, and the profound, life-affirming David Steinberg came into stardom in the late ‘60s and ‘70s when stand- model of the community targeted by the attack. Squirrel Hill, home of the up was still counter-culture, and often adversarial; when David’s Tonight Tree of Life synagogue where 11 congregants were killed on the morning of Show impressions of “Tricky Dick” became too popular, Richard Nixon’s Saturday, October 27, is a historically Jewish neighborhood with a reputation gang tried to kick the talk show off the air and had the FBI follow David as one of the most diverse and accepting places in America. Its values of around. It was an era when mobsters still prowled the streets of New respect and care for one’s neighbors are, as Mark will argue in the book, both York; when David’s stage mates Burt Reynolds, George Carlin, and salve and antidote to the hateful ideologies espoused by the gunman, Robert Richard Pryor doused themselves in heroin, cocaine, and liquor to fuel Bowers, and propagated in the dark corners of the internet. their genius before careening off the rails.
Though chaos swirled around his closest friends, David managed to stay Mark Oppenheimer is editor at large of the Jewish online magazine Tablet, on his feet, and he went on to become an instrumental force behind the founder and co-host of the podcast Unorthodox, and director of Yale success of some of the most culture-shaping television of the next three University’s Journalism Initiative. For six years, he wrote the biweekly decades. He guest-hosted The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 130 times “Beliefs” column at the New York Times; he continues to write regularly for (more than anyone else) and as an in-demand director he directed the New York Times Magazine, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, the countless episodes of Golden Girls, Friends, Seinfeld, and Curb Your Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Nation, among others. Enthusiasm.
David Steinberg is a comedian, director, and producer. He guest-hosted the Johnny Carson show 130 times and has directed countless episodes of Golden Girls, Friends, Seinfeld, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST INTELLIGENT LOVE
By Hugo Huerta Marin By Marga Vicedo
US publisher: Prestel Publishing (World English rights) US publisher: Beacon Press (North American rights) US editor: Holly La Due; To publish: Spring 2021 US editor: Joanna Green; To publish: Spring 2021
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Edited MS available in Fall 2020
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST is a thoughtful, introspective look at The story of Clara Park, a Massachusetts writer and homemaker, and a celebration of the type of art that only women can create. It's whose two-year-old daughter, Jessy, refused to connect with others and an art piece in and of itself, a book that prompts us to ask why we would not answer to her own name. create and, most importantly, how that creation shapes the world around us. In the early 1960’s, Clara took Jessy to a specialist, hoping he would give her suggestions that would help her daughter. Instead, following the conventional Hugo Huerta Marin has been drawn to art created by women for as long wisdom of the time, the psychiatrist blamed Clara for being the source of as he can remember. Their work, more than any other, shakes the Jessy’s isolation and strangeness. The prevailing scientific view even before structures of our established belief systems and questions norms that psychiatrists invented the autism diagnosis was that children who showed a we've long been conditioned to accept. Women don't just observe culture failure to achieve normal relationships with others did so because their or create within it, they drive it forward, ignoring the borders and breaking mothers had starved them of affection. Clara fought back and became a the rules. prominent speaker and activist who led the way for autistic children to receive education in public schools, working to improve the lives of people As Marina Abramović's art director, Hugo has seen this firsthand, and he with autism into the early years of this century. Her daughter, Jessica, now explores gender and cultural identity in his own art. To that end, he's works full time and has become an accomplished painter. spent the last few years interviewing and photographing female artists including (but certainly not limited to) Björk, Cate Blanchett, Annie INTELLIGENT LOVE is a fascinating history, peppered with names like Liebovitz, Anjelica Huston, Julianne Moore, Isabelle Hubbert, Annie Bruno Bettelheim, Anna Freud and, even, Norman Mailer. It is also a fierce Lennox, Debbie Harry, St. Vincent, and Diane von Furstenberg to create defense of a mother’s right to love intelligently as well as instinctively and a the all-new PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST, with completely original and call to arms in favor of a woman who stood up to male “experts” on never-before-seen content. motherhood and their flawed conventional wisdom. Clara’s story is as important and interesting as Henrietta Lacks’ and, that in her role as scientist Hugo Huerta Marin is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer and activist, her story will appeal to readers of books like Hidden Figures and based in New York City, whose work centers on subjects of gender and Code Girls. cultural identity. Marga Vicedo is a professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto.
WATER AND SALT GUN BARONS A Palestinian, A Jew, and a New Narrative The Rapid-Fire Arms that Transformed America and the Men Who Invented Them By Penina Eilberg-Schwartz and Sulaiman Khatib By John Bainbridge US publisher: Beacon Press (North American rights) US editor: Amy Caldwell; To publish: Spring 2021 US publisher: St. Martin’s Press (North American rights) US editor: Charlie Spicer; To publish: Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Rights sold: UK/Commonwealth (Biteback)
A Palestinian grows up in the West Bank, and when he’s 14-years- Material available: Proposal available old, he stabs an Israeli soldier. He’s sentenced to fifteen years in Edited MS available in Fall 2020 prison, and by the time he gets out, he’s transformed from a Fatah militant to a nonviolent activist. He forms an organization called Veteran reporter John Bainbridge vividly brings to life five charismatic Combatants for Peace and devotes his life to bringing together men who changed the course of history through the invention and Israelis and Palestinians scarred by a shared trauma. refinement of the repeating weapon – the precursor to today’s automatic weapon. Written by Penina in a close third person, the narrative is very much a shared authorship that underscores the struggle to inhabit a shared space, These men are household names today: the huckster and hard living Samuel as well as the essential hope that such a thing is possible. A story about Colt; the seemingly dull but cunning former shirt maker Oliver Winchester; stories, memory, and the radical power of imagination, WATER AND the constant tinkerer Horace Smith; the resilient and innovative SALT is a mirror-view of Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land. It explores businessman Daniel Wesson; and the skinny abolitionist Christopher universal themes of struggle, hope, and identity, and follows in the Spencer. In this beautifully written account, we follow these men as they tradition of evergreen books such as Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by compete ferociously, each trying to corner the market for repeating weapons Yossi Klein Halevi, The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan, Blood Brothers by Elias in the years running up to the outbreak of the Civil War and during the war Chacour, and the Parisian by Isabella Hammad. itself. In this wide-ranging work, Bainbridge tells a gripping story of tenacity, noble conviction, innovation, debauchery, and pure heartless greed. He Sulaiman Khatib is a peace activist and a co-founder of Combatants for shows how the Gun Barons’ industrial practices led to the birth of the Peace, a bi-national, grassroots nonviolent movement in Israel and assembly line long before Henry Ford’s famous factories. GUN BARONS Palestine. He has been called “the savior of Palestine” and the “Palestinian will appeal to history buffs, hunters and sportsmen, business readers and fans Yitzhak Rabin.” of great ingenuity.
Penina Eilberg-Schwartz is a writer interested in identity, memory, John Bainbridge Jr. is an attorney, freelance writer, and former newspaper gender, and power, and how these issues relate to Israel/Palestine. She has reporter and coauthor of American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman and been published in +972 Magazine, All That’s Left, Reform Judaism, and The the Shoot-out That Stopped It. Rumpus.
CAN’T KNOCK THE HUSTLE CURE-ALL Diagnosing the Modern Wellness Epidemic By Matt Sullivan By Amy Larocca US publisher: Dey Street / HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Matthew Daddona; To publish: Spring 2021 US publisher: Knopf / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Lexy Bloom; To publish: Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 One of the great stories about our popular culture is happening right now in New York. Well, specifically it’s happening in Brooklyn, but In CURE-ALL, Amy offers a nuanced portrait of the weird world of that just makes it better. wellness, its engines, its strategies, and its snake oil salesmen. She has found that beneath the surface, wellness expresses something thorny and Over the last few years, the NBA has intruded into the public conscience profound about the modern world. more and more often. One can’t help but be a little thrilled by the new era of player activism—the ways LeBron or Steph get into the president’s face on Twitter. And one can’t help but be moved by the players’ solidarity Amy will peel back the layers of the wellness movement and reckon with its with Colin Kaepernick and by the on-court protests they instigated after promises and profits. Her mission is to combine cultural anthropology and the deaths of Tayvon and Eric Garner. It’s clear, even to a casual fan, that memoir to entertain and enlighten anyone who’s tried an acroyoga class, the NBA has become the future of sports and a force for good in the contemplated cutting red meat out of their diet, or investigated the benefits overall culture. And then Kevin Durant, the best player in the game and of healing crystals. CURE-ALL will take readers into the communities that Kyrie Irving, the strangest and most talented player in the league decided swear by their activated charcoal toothpaste and green juice enemas. to team up and play for the Brooklyn Nets. And that same Nets team Throughout, Amy will hold a magnifying glass to alternative medicine and (chock full of outspoken activists and personalities) was acquired by Joe nouveau lifestyle prescriptions and present her incisive assessment of how Tsai, the Jeff Bezos of China, right in the middle of Trump’s trade war. the wellness industry embodies our (gendered, class-based, racialized) And don’t forget a third of the Nets roster is represented by maybe the perceptions of care and self-improvement, and how it preys upon our biggest star the borough of Brooklyn has ever produced, Jay-Z. unshakeable fear of the unknown.
CAN’T KNOCK THE HUSTLE can be compared to Halberstam’s The Amy Larocca is the Fashion Editor-at-Large for New York Magazine where Breaks of the Game, even though it goes far beyond sports. It will be as on- she has identified trends and uncovered the machinations of the zeitgeist in time as Astroball and as controversial as Big Game, and it will be as knowing award-winning narratives, essays, and profiles. Her journalism and essays and politically aware as Andre Iguodala’s The Sixth Man. have appeared in Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Allure, Glamour, Esquire, The Times of London, and The London Review of Books. She lives in Matt Sullivan is an award-winning journalist who has worked Brooklyn with her husband, the theatre director Will Frears, and their two for Esquire, The New York Times, the Atlantic, The Guardian and, most children. recently, as Managing Editor of Bleacher Report.
NOSTALGIA THE SECRET HISTORY OF HOME ECONOMICS How the Emotion Shapes Who We Are and What We Believe By Danielle Dreilinger
By Amanda R. Martinez US publisher: W.W. Norton (North American rights) US editor: Amy Cherry; To publish: Fall 2021 US publisher: St. Martin’s Press / Macmillan (NA rights) US editor: Tim Bartlett; To publish: Fall 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Once you know what Home Ec really was, your view of the 20th century will be forever changed. Rights sold: Brazil (HarperCollins Brazil) UK/Commonwealth (S&S UK) Home Economics was never meant to be about baking brownies. The earliest home economists, including founder Ellen Swallow Richards and her small NOSTALGIA is the first book to examine the emotion—and now, posse of like-minded revolutionary women, were the first to locate power in cultural phenomenon—in all its complex facets. the private home—to see the personal as political—and the first to harness that power for larger causes. Under the “cover” of home economics, women It’s clear that a positive wave of nostalgia has taken hold as a cultural became engineers, chemists, professors, international diplomats, corporate phenomenon, and it is a far cry from the dangerous manipulation by consultants, and even a Cabinet member. They lived boldly as they chose in a demagogues who exploit the emotion to advance their populist time when such choices were frowned upon at best. agendas. In NOSTALGIA, Amanda R. Martinez crosses the globe where she meets people who shared anecdotes of their own golden age, and Spanning more than a century, Danielle will take readers from the lowliest of discovered nostalgia playing out in wondrous ways. She tours with a farms to the shining halls of the White House, from Victorian suffragists to Grateful Dead tribute band followed by thousands of fans; dines at a Jazz Age eugenicists to Palo Alto techies, from fields of war to hipster theme restaurant in Beijing, where patrons sit at schoolroom desks and organic wool shops and to all the inspiring, heartbreaking, and sometimes “take” the menu as a multiple-choice test; and learns that the new hot very funny classrooms in between, showing clearly why home ec still matters commodity in Germany is a junker of a car produced during WWII. today. 3.4 million kids are sitting in Home Ec classes all across America this very minute—some indeed baking dubious brownies, but others are deeply In addition to an eye-opening and entertaining understanding of the engaged in solving thorny societal and ecological problems on a community universal experience of nostalgia, readers will gain insight into how to level using science and technology, as well as the skills of cross-cultural harness the benefits of nostalgia for their own well-being. NOSTALGIA awareness and empathy—all taught by the Home Ec teachers out there who is a landmark book for readers fascinated by the best-selling work of still, one hundred and seventeen years later, revere the memory of Ellen Daniel Kahneman, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Gilbert, and Sherry Turkle. Swallow Richards.
Amanda R. Martinez is the previous author of Battle at the End of Eden. Danielle Dreilinger, a 2017-18 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow, has Her articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Scientific worked as a journalist for more than 15 years. American.
SPOKEN WORD OSCAR WARS A Cultural History By Michael Schulman By Joshua Bennett US publisher: HarperCollins (North American rights) US publisher: Knopf / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Gail Winston; To publish: Fall 2021 US editor: Deb Garrison; To publish: Fall 2021 Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Rights sold: Poland (Marginesy) The first book for a general audience that will unspool the human Romania (SC Publica) story of spoken word poetry and the dramas, events, and characters that have defined one of the most vibrant and influential art forms. OSCAR WARS promises to be the definitive book on the Academy Awards, from a devotee and expert who has spent years covering the Anyone who encountered Homer in high school knows that poetry began glitz, glamour, buzz, and drama for The New Yorker magazine. as an oral tradition, that its power was couched not on the page but in the telling. This tradition weaves through many different cultures and periods In an era that has seen Hollywood’s de facto governing body reckon with in history, but its modern American incarnation can be traced precisely to itself and its choices—see the #OscarsSoWhite callouts of recent years, New York’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe ́ of the 1970s, where marginalized poets and Moonlight’s Best Picture coup during the 2016 ceremony—Michael will gathered to share their work aloud. From this impassioned, purpose-built guide readers through the most contentious Oscar races and the most venue, the form dubbed spoken word has penetrated communities and surprising Oscars lore. At once cultural history and character-driven story, networks across the country as an instrument of poetic expression, arts the book will examine the moments, stars, and themes that have cemented education, and political activism. Today, competitive poetry slam events— the awards at the center of our cultural conversation, ensuring that whatever in schools and community centers and on a national and global the context, the Oscars represent more than the Oscars. professional circuit—attract thousands of participants, and videos of spoken word performances rack up millions of views online. Linguistic Michael Schulman is the previous author of Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep. and performance techniques that were first honed in spoken word are A journalist at The New Yorker covering culture and the arts, he has written evident in the hip-hop and rap we hear on the radio, and writers and features, reviews, and over 50 “Talk of the Town” pieces. He is also the artists who got their start at open mic nights have earned the literary theatre editor of Goings on About Town, and an ongoing contributor to the New world’s top honors. Nowhere is poetry more alive than in spoken word, York Times. and its progeny.
Joshua Bennett is a poet, spoken word performer, and Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth. His first collection of poetry, The Sobbing School (Penguin Books, 2016), was the winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series.
FIRST TO FALL THE VORTEX Elijah Lovejoy’s Fight for a Free Press in the Age of A True Story of Climate Disaster, Revenge, and a Liberation Slavery By Scott Carney and Jason Miklian By Ken Ellingwood US publisher: Ecco / HarperCollins (North American rights) US publisher: Pegasus Books (North American rights) US editor: Denise Oswald; To publish: Fall 2021 US editor: Jessica Case; To publish: Fall 2021 Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Its satellite images shocked the hurricane trackers in Miami, nearly Elijah Lovejoy, an impassioned newspaper editor on the edge of 9,000 miles away. Its storm surge killed more than 500,000 people. It slave country in antebellum Illinois, took up his pen to fight against inspired the bestselling album of the decade. And it sparked a slavery. revolution that birthed a new nation.
This monster storm has a name, the Great Bhola Cyclone. Bhola made FIRST TO FALL will paint a vivid picture of the raucous 1830s, when, landfall in the low-lying region of East Pakistan in 1970, during the height of decades before the Civil War, another war was being waged over just how the Cold War. The US was aligned with Pakistan, while the Soviet Union freely Americans could publicly criticize America’s “peculiar institution.” backed India. India smuggled Soviet arms to Bengali rebels, including It was a bloody, chaotic period of innovation and conflict, violent politics, Mohammed Hai, who had survived the storm and was radicalized by its and painful soul-searching over pivotal issues of morality and justice. aftermath. The US sent naval destroyers into the Bay of Bengal and the Readers will relish Ken’s portraits of Lovejoy’s sickly but devoted wife Soviets shadowed them with first strike nuclear submarines. Frustrated with Celia; university president Edward Beecher, brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin the pushback, then-Secretary Henry Kissinger urged a “final showdown.” author Harriet Beecher; clergymen such as F.W. Graves and Thaddeus The world narrowly averted nuclear Armageddon because the capital city of Hurlbut, and merchant Enoch Long, a War of 1812 veteran charged with East Pakistan, Dacca, fell to the rebels—an event that birthed Bangladesh. defending Lovejoy from the mob the night he was killed—as well as the The entire chain reaction began with a storm. In dozens of countries, a storm villainous Usher F. Linder, the Illinois attorney general willing to take like Bhola could send a nation over the edge. With climate change already under-handed tactics to shut down Lovejoy and his newspaper. Ken will fueling increasingly powerful storms increasingly unpredictable places, THE also weave Lovejoy’s story with that of James G. Birney, another outspoken anti-slavery editor in the free state of Ohio. Together, the VORTEX shows the reader that Bhola won’t remain just a lesson from the editors’ struggles will illustrate for readers the tremendous risks they were distant past—it’s a harbinger of our future. willing to take, in free and slave states alike, to exercise and protect their fundamental Constitutional freedoms. Scott Carney is an investigative journalist and anthropologist as well as the author of the New York Times bestselling book What Doesn’t Kill Us.
Ken Ellingwood is an award-winning former correspondent for the Los Jason Miklian, Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Angeles Times and previous author of Hard Line. Oslo, Norway.
UNFORGETTABLE THE KINGDOM OF PREP The True Story of the Memory Thief That Almost Got How the Merchant Prince Created a Fashion Queen and Away Lost the J. Crew Empire
By Lauren Aguirre By Maggie Bullock
US publisher: Pegasus Books (World English rights) US publisher: Dey Street / HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Jessica Case; To publish: Fall 2021 US editor: Jessica Sindler; To publish: Spring 2022
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Edited MS available in Fall 2021
UNFORGETTABLE is an urgent medical narrative and exposé THE KINGDOM OF PREP is the perfect marriage of entertainment, revealing that many opiates and painkillers may not just be luring industry analysis, and cultural commentary. people into soul-destroying dependency, but actually rewiring their brains and sabotaging their long-term memories. THE KINGDOM OF PREP will open with Arthur Cinader, a man from a modestly successful, sort of down-market retailing family, founded J. Crew. UNFORGETTABLE will deliver a gripping and enlightening medical He wasn’t a true prepster—he didn’t come from old money or graduate from mystery showcasing the triumph of human empathy and perseverance in the Ivy league, but the social-climbing Arthur really wished he had. Enter J. the face of monumental institutional skepticism, dithering, and sheer Crew—true prep clothing at a price point regular people could access, but so denial. From the moment Massachusetts-based neurologist Jed Barash perfectly designed and quality-made that the real prepsters would covet it too. sees the unusual MRI scan of a young patient who has succumbed to His mercurial daughter Emily became the head designer and was so genius in sudden anterograde amnesia, the rookie doctor is certain he’s discovered that role that before long, J. Crew was an $800 million retail fashion gorilla in something alarming. But even Barash, has no idea of the revelations in need of a businessperson who could not only handle such a scale, but grow it. store or the mountains he’ll have to climb to uncover them. Enter Mickey Drexler and a young designer named Jenna Lyons. Jenna would UNFORGETTABLE will trace how Barash and his growing team begin eventually become president of the company and achieve real fame as one of to piece together the particular mechanism by which the powerful opioid the very first influencers. At J. Crew’s apex, Anna Wintour, Michelle Obama, fentanyl targets the brain’s finely tuned memory system—and then wipes Beyoncé, and Solange Knowles were all fans and customers. And in the final it clean. It will show how Barash and his colleagues conducted painstaking part, THE KINGDOM OF PREP will show how those trends also research to establish vital links between what previously were thought to portended the biggest shift of all: the death of the mall. The story of J. Crew be two entirely unrelated public health crises: opioid use and dementia, is the story of the retail fashion world and culture over the past four decades, and inspired a new strategy for treating memory loss at a time when the with the most riveting characters and best clothes imaginable. medical establishment must recon with its inability to cure Alzheimer’s— and is in urgent need of fresh ideas. Maggie Bullock is a journalist and former Condé Nast editor who has
written for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Elle, and Vogue. Lauren Aguirre is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and science producer at the PBS Series NOVA.
THE GOLDEN DOOR BLOOD AND INK Jacob Schiff, J.P. Morgan, Albert Ballin, and the Race to An Heiress, A Tabloid War, and the Unsolved Double Save Europe’s Jews Murder that Hooked a Nation
By Steven Ujifusa By Joe Pompeo
US publisher: HarperCollins (North American rights) US publisher: William Morrow / HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Gail Winston; To publish: Spring 2022 US editor: Mauro DiPreta; To publish: Spring 2022
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2021 Edited MS available in Fall 2021
Taking place between 1890 and 1921, THE GOLDEN DOOR tells For readers who love true crime, gorgeously written and researched the story of the mass exodus of Jews out of Eastern Europe and the narrative history, tales of Old New York, and the bizarre underbelly of men who led one of the largest rescue missions in American history. New Jersey. BLOOD AND INK is Boardwalk Empire meets Agatha A propulsive human drama with global ramifications, the plot is Christie meets Serial. tightly organized around the interlocking stories of figures including Jacob Schiff, J.P. Morgan, Albert Ballin, Henry Cabot Lodge, Sofia BLOOD AND INK will bring to cinematic life two fascinating centennials: Weinstein and Anne Morgan. that of the infamous Hall-Mills Murders of September 1922, in which a high- society reverend and his choir girl mistress were brutally slaughtered in New With a cast straight out of Ragtime, THE GOLDEN DOOR will offer an Jersey, and that of the New York Daily News, which was America’s first original, multidimensional look at the American experience while tabloid when it debuted in June of 1919, and went on to become an iconic connecting the dots between banking, industry, politics, immigration, media brand, as well as the most highly circulated American daily newspaper nativism, globalism, and war. An epic history written on an intimate scale, ever launched. The Daily News soon inspired a pair of ferocious tabloid it will appeal to general nonfiction readers who love Citizens of London by rivals, and the bloody competition between them drove the Hall-Mills Lynn Olson, Nothing Like It In The World by Stephen E. Ambrose, and investigation to its apex, dramatically reigniting the case after the police were Triangle by David von Drehle. The audience will also include fans of unable to do so. The Hall-Mills murders reverberate mightily even today: the business narratives such as Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed, The House shocking list of suspects, the bizarre investigation, the electrifying trial and of Morgan by Ron Chernow, and Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw; as well stunning verdict all gave rise to a series of events and stories that influenced as readers of popular Jewish history such as Our Crowd by Stephen how we think about crime as citizens and creators. Writers from F. Scott Birmingham. Fitzgerald to Mary Roberts Rinehart drew inspiration from the case, and the trial itself gave rise to a new genre of fiction: the courtroom drama. Steven Ujifusa is the author of Barons of the Sea, an LA Times bestseller, and A Man and His Ship, chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the Joe Pompeo is the media correspondent for Vanity Fair. He is a graduate of best nonfiction books of 2012. He received his B.A. in History from the Columbia School of Journalism and Rutgers College. Pompeo lives in Harvard College and his Master’s in Historic Preservation from the New Jersey with his family. University of Pennsylvania.
OTHER FRONTS THE RED WIDOW Dwight Eisenhower, Kay Summersby, and the Women of the General’s Inner Circle During World War II By Sarah Horowitz
By Elise Jordan US publisher: Sourcebooks (World English rights) US editor: Anna Michels; To publish: Spring 2022 US publisher: Knopf / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Andrew Miller; To publish: Spring 2022 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2021 THE RED WIDOW introduces readers to Marguerite Steinheil, one of the most remarkable women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth Telling untold stories from history, and uncovering forgotten ones, has centuries. become the literary project of our time. Writers and scholars have dedicated themselves to the recovery of narratives that the historical A society hostess and the wife of an award-winning painter, Marguerite record has ignored, and this act of unearthing has become a powerful “Meg” Steinheil received some of the most famous and powerful figures of means of questioning our cultural memory and the previously accepted Parisian society at her salon, entertaining writers, artists, and politicians alike historical record. Rarer, and perhaps even more illuminating, are the to stimulate a melting pot of creativity. She also won no small amount of stories that were not passively forgotten but rather actively suppressed. renown and notoriety by sleeping with many of them, including the French Such is the case of Kay Summersby, known as the favored aide and driver President Félix Faure—who entered French lore by dying of a stroke at the to Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower during climax (literally) of one of their encounters, clutching Meg's hair so tightly World War II, who has been erased from American history both literally that aides had to come and cut her free of his death grip. and figuratively. Kay, a glamorous former model eighteen years Eisenhower’s junior, was one of the two-star general’s most trusted But Meg had ambitions far beyond becoming one of the most sought-after advisors and closest confidants during the war. She was arguably the bodies in Paris; at her core, she was a woman determined to conquer French person who knew the famously closed-off Eisenhower best—and was high society. She actually achieved her goal, becoming a sort of sexual also, possibly, his lover. But whether or not Ike and Kay had a physical celebrity who had the acumen and intelligence to parlay her "close relations" affair, just the appearance of impropriety made her existence problematic with France's most prominent men into a level of power that few women at to the future president’s image and was enough to have her relegated to the time knew. Over time, Meg influenced the appointments to a variety of the historical margins. Eisenhower’s biographers have waffled on the issue government positions, showed no qualms about blackmailing her opponents, and failed to give Kay her due. With OTHER FRONTS, Elise hopes to and may have even attempted to poison those that got in her way. She was a bring Kay’s story, and those of the other pioneering women in Ike’s orbit real-life femme fatale who left a trail of death and destruction in her wake, during the same period, to a wide range of readers interested in World breaking every rule in the bourgeois book and getting away with it. War II, women’s history, and action-packed narrative non-fiction.
Sarah Horowitz is an associate professor of history and core faculty in Elise Jordan is a former State Department employee and speechwriter Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Washington and Lee University. turned print journalist and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.
GOOD COP THE SISTERHOOD One Year, Four Departments, An Apology, and the Future The Untold Story of the Female Spies Who Tracked Osama of Policing in America Bin Laden and Brought Al-Qaeda to Justice
By Neil Gross By Liza Mundy
US publisher: Metropolitan / Holt (North American rights) US publisher: Crown / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Riva Hocherman; To publish: Fall 2022 US editor: Paul Whitlach; To publish: Fall 2022
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2022 Edited MS available in Spring 2022
GOOD COP will be the result of Neil Gross’s on-the-ground, THE SISTERHOOD will bring to life the intrepid analysts repeatedly meticulous research, a book that asks the critical question: What and fruitlessly warned government officials of an impending major makes a good cop? assault on U.S. soil. Then, after 9/11 shook the country, these brave and dedicated women had no choice but to push forward. Long before Neil Gross was a respected public intellectual, he was a beat cop on the streets of Berkeley, California. Just 21 years old and fresh out In THE SISTERHOOD, Mundy will animate the lives of these unsung of UC Berkeley, Neil wanted to make his hometown streets safer. He heroes, delivering a thrilling narrative that heralds the essential contributions thought he knew what it would take to be the kind of upstanding cop. women have made to national security, intelligence, and espionage work, as And then late one hot summer night, he found himself devastatingly on well as the trials and sacrifices they’ve faced to earn trust and respect in a the wrong end of the good cop equation. That experience changed him traditionally male-dominated field. Written in the vein of Keith O’Brien’s Fly irrevocably, and led him out of law enforcement and back into academia. Girls and Kate Moore’s Radium Girls, showcasing the thrilling storytelling and intellectual rigor found in works such as Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of As a sociologist, Neil Gross kept policing firmly in his sights, but he rarely Wonder Woman and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower. talked about his own time on the job. Then one day, a student challenged Neil with a question: How, exactly, would we know good policing if we saw it? Neil THE SISTERHOOD promises to be a revelatory and empowering realized that not only did nobody have the answer to this critical question, narrative of inspirational collaboration, individual sacrifice, and tireless but nobody was even asking it. How can we not be asking that in this determination that sheds necessary new light on the traumatic events and moment of unrest and change? Neil Gross decided that he would be the reverberations of 9/11 that still haunt our nation today. one to answer this question. To do it, he would return to the streets and face not just his own past as a cop but actually find and profile the individual cops and departments across the US that are doing measurable Liza Mundy is the author of four books, most recently the New York Times good despite the incredibly daunting odds almost every cop faces. bestselling Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. She is a former staff writer for The Washington Post. Neil Gross is the Charles A. Dana Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Colby College in Maine and a visiting scholar at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.
WE DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU ANYMORE A Journey into the Heart, Science, Politics, and Possibilities of Change
By Benoit Denizet-Lewis
US publisher: William Morrow / HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Mauro DiPreta; To publish: Spring 2023
Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2022
Rights sold: Korea (Woongjin Think Big) UK/Commonwealth (Allen Lane / PRH UK)
Benoit Denizet-Lewis investigates how and why we change our behaviors, identities, and beliefs during a time of staggering cultural and demographic upheaval.
WE DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU ANYMORE will begin by transporting readers into the lives of four people actively embarking on journeys to transform their lives, personalities, identities, and brains. Denizet-Lewis will explore the different pathways to change, examining the validity and effectiveness of unexpected radical change, therapeutic change, change facilitated by life coaches, and pharmacological interventions. He will also explore the intersection of personal change, social change, and public policy, exploring how some of our most dearly held (and often mistaken) cultural and political beliefs about sexuality, incarceration, economic mobility, and political persuasion make change possible for some—while keeping it out of reach for many. In the final part of the book, Denizet-Lewis will return to the four characters who have embarked on journeys of transformation and report on the ways in which they’ve succeeded and failed, revealing the insights they’ve learned—and we’ve learned—along the way.
Benoit Denizet-Lewis is a longtime contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a tenured professor at Emerson College
UPCOMING SCIENCE / BUSINESS / CURRENT AFFAIRS
2030 How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything
By Mauro Guillen
US publisher: All Points Books / Macmillan (NA rights) US editor: Pronoy Sarkar; To publish: August 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
Rights sold: Brazil (Alta Books) Italy (Il Saggiatore) Japan (Hayakawa) Korea (Woongjin Think Big) Latin America (Oceano) Romania (Grup Media Litera) Spain (Planeta Spain) Taiwan (BWP)
Mauro Guillen is an expert at assessing economic trends and how they will affect people around the globe. In 2030, he predicts that in just over a decade, the world as we know it will end. Praise for 2030: By the year 2030, a group of intertwined trends will converge creating a megatrends moment of change. Among them: • Are we ready for women to own more wealth than men? This is a “We know a lot about what’s going on with dollars and senses, but we’re question of the economy as a whole—men and women spend, save, and surprisingly uninformed about how social structures are transforming the invest differently. world around us. Mauro Guillen, a brilliant sociologist, is here to change that. • By 2030, bankers and banks will be on their way to oblivion—we will His bold, provocative book illuminates why we’re having fewer babies, the live in a world with more robots than workers, more computers than middle class is stagnating, unemployment is shifting, and new powers are human brains, and more sensors than human eyes. rising.” – Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author • While cities are the largest causes of climate change, they will also create the most viable solutions to it. "Must reading for business and political leaders, city-builders and everyone concerned about what the future will bring." – Richard Florida, author of Mauro F. Guillén holds the Zandman Professorship in International. The Rise of the Creative Class Management. 2030 is his first book for a commercial readership.
BREAK IT UP Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union
By Richard Kreitner
US publisher: Little, Brown (North American rights) US editor: Vanessa Mobley To publish: August 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
From journalist and historian Richard Kreitner, BREAK IT UP is an inspired understanding of "these supposedly united states," arguing that the internal divisions that threaten to tear America apart today date back to the earliest days of our Republic.
The novel and fiery thesis of BREAK IT UP is simple: the United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The thirteen highly autonomous and distinct colonies could barely agree to fight Great Britain together, so a detailed plan for uniting them into a democratic republic was certainly not in the offing in 1776. Kreitner argues that ever since our country's founding, there have been two inextinguishable warring forces in the American mind: the impulse to preserve the Union, and the desire to dissolve it.
With a scholar's command and a journalist's curiosity, Kreitner takes BREAK IT UP shows not only how fruitful it is to understand our past in readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing these terms, but also how necessary. BREAK IT UP will help readers make the power and persistence of disunion movements. Every New England fresh sense of our fractured age. town after Plymouth was a de facto secession from another; George Washington feared independence west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr Richard Kreitner is an editor at The Nation and his essays, reviews, and schemed to set up a western empire from an island in the Ohio River; criticism have appeared in The Nation, The Boston Globe, and The Baffler. John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town's petition for the dissolution of the United States to the Congress floor; and William Lloyd Garrison called the Constitution a "devil's pact." This disunionist impulse found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as BREAK IT UP will show, the seduction of secession has never gone away.
EDITING MANKIND Humanity in the Age of CRISPR and Gene Editing
By Kevin Davies
US publisher: Pegasus (North American rights) US editor: Jessica Case To publish: September 2020
Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2020
Rights sold: China (CITIC)
One of the world's leading experts on genetics unravels one of the most important breakthroughs in modern science and medicine.
If our genes are, to a great extent, destiny, then what would happen if mankind could engineer and alter the very essence of our DNA coding? Millions might be spared the devastating effects of hereditary disease or the challenges of disability. But this power to “play God” also raises major ethical questions and poses threats for potential misuse.
Engrossing and page-turning, EDITING MANKIND takes readers inside the fascinating world of a new gene editing technology called Praise for EDITING MANKIND: CRISPR, a high-powered genetic toolkit that enables scientists to not only engineer but to edit the DNA of any organism down to the individual “The technical aspects of the major developments are excellently mediated building blocks of the genetic code. Davies introduces readers to arguably for general readers… An informative run-through of genetics since Crick and the most profound scientific breakthrough of our time. He tracks the Watson's discovery of DNA in 1953.” – Booklist scientists on the front lines of its research to the patients whose powerful stories bring the narrative movingly to human scale. In so doing, Davies sheds light on the implications that this new technology will have on our “A rollicking good tale about an enduring intellectual monument.” everyday lives and in the lives of generations to come. – American Scientist
Kevin Davies is the founding editor of Nature Genetics and Bio-IT World “Superb. A tantalizing glimpse of the ethical perils and technological and former Editor-in-Chief at Cell Press. He received a Guggenheim possibilities awaiting humanity.” – The Los Angeles Times Fellowship in 2017 and is the author of three books.
BATTLE TESTED GOOD COMPANY Leadership Lessons for Gettysburg By Arthur Blank By Jeff McCausland and Tom Vossler US publisher: William Morrow / HarperCollins (NA rights) US publisher: Post Hill Press (World English rights) US editor: Mauro DiPreta; To publish: September 2020 US editor: Debra Englander; To publish: August 2020 Material available: Proposal available Material available: Edited MS available in Spring 2020 Edited MS available in Spring 2020
Rights sold: Japan (Hayakawa) GOOD COMPANY recounts the last 18 years of Arthur Blank’s— about his life and work after co-founding and leading Home Depot. A brilliant new book on leadership that draws lessons from the Battle of Gettysburg. In 2001, Arthur Blank bought the Atlanta Falcons of the NFL and, through the application of the principles he and Bernie Marcus developed to make BATTLE TESTED will appeal to the hundreds of thousands of readers HD one of the most successful companies in history, he has made the who enjoy the work of leadership gurus like Simon Sinek, as well as the Falcons the center of a sports-based enterprise—which includes Major legions of civil war history buffs and fans of military leadership authors League Soccer’s Atlanta United and Mercedes-Benz Stadium—that is like Michael Abrashoff and Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The closest comp revitalizing the city of Atlanta and improving the lives of its most title is Michael Useem’s highly successful book The Leadership Moment: Nine disadvantaged citizens. True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All. The book will explore the historical context of the battle, then ask readers to make Arthur’s second act has arisen from his conviction that a business whose “choose your own adventure”-style decisions as the battle takes place. primary goal is to do right by all its constituents is bound to succeed. It Then, the authors explain what actually happened, and, in doing so, teach worked at HD, and in Atlanta, he’s showing that good capitalism can readers such things as how to lead with limited knowledge, when and continue the decades-long fight for Civil Rights and deliver equal economic how to delegate, how to instill authority and respect, and how technology opportunity to a long-neglected neighborhood. The revolutionary practices and timing affect leadership. They explore these ideas through stories he has established with his sports businesses are fast becoming the norm for drawn from the contemporary business and political arenas. sports arenas around the country. The ethos that drives Arthur’s entrepreneurship is equally about building positive outcomes through Dr. Jeffrey McCausland is an expert on defense, national security and collaboration as it is about profits; about being a force for direct positive leadership who has taught at Dickinson College, the Army War College, change in the communities where he conducts business, rather than and the US Naval Academy. demanding tax breaks and other incentives from them.
US Army Colonel Tom Vossler (retired) taught military history, Arthur Blank is the co-founder of Home Depot. He is the owner of the strategy, and leadership at the U.S. Army War College and is a former NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta United of Major League Soccer, Mercedes- director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Benz Stadium in Atlanta, the PGA Tour Superstores retail chain and is one PA. of America’s most effective philanthropists.
TOGETHER WE WALK TOWARDS THE FIRE FIRE HALF YOUR STAFF Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, and the Rise of Trump Then Find and Keep the Talent You Really Need
By Rosie Gray By Johnny C. Taylor
US publisher: HarperCollins (North American rights) US publisher: HarperBusiness / HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Jonathan Jao; To publish: October 2020 US editor: Hollis Heimbouch; To publish: December 2020
Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2020 Edited MS available in Fall 2020
In TOGETHER WE WALK TOWARDS THE FIRE, Rosie Gray FIRE HALF YOUR STAFF will instantly stand out—and, does for Breitbart News what Gabriel Sherman did for Fox in The given SHRM’s reputation as the global source of HR expertise—become Loudest Voice in the Room and Brad Stone did for Amazon in The one of the most talked-out business books of next year. It is poised to Everything Store. reinvent the category, to become the No Asshole Rule of In 2016, all roads led to Breitbart: Trump, Bannon, the alt-right, nativist talent management. populism, fake news, anti-globalism, and of course Milo Yiannopoulos. What'll happen in 2017? Steve Bannon and Breitbart News were early, Taylor and his colleagues are convinced that the biggest business challenge key, and consistent amplifiers of Trump's populist message as well as today isn’t technology, innovation, agility or even leadership—it’s finding and ruthlessly effective attackers of Hillary Clinton, and by the time Bannon hiring the best people so companies can thrive in the coming decade of officially joined the campaign team, Breitbart was acting as a Pravda. Steve change and disruption. This book will convince readers that all the traditional Bannon is now the closest advisor to President Trump, and Breitbart ways of bringing great people into their organizations don’t work anymore: News is starting to spearhead the same anti-establishment, anti-globalist companies will have to look in new talent pools and embrace inclusion on an movements in France and Germany. exponentially different level than they have so far, or they will face a growing shortage of qualified, talented workers. As Taylor advises, successful business With access to key characters and first-hand experience of many described leaders will have to be ruthless, cutting out the deadwood, embracing new events, journalist Rosie Gray will take readers deep inside the secretive people and even embracing new ways of working with talent beyond the Breitbart world: its formation under provocateur Andrew Breitbart; its traditional employer-employee relationship. They will have to reinvent maturation under a Goldman Sachs banker cum Biosphere 2 financier themselves—a bracing challenge, but one that is also thrilling and cum Riefenstahl-style documentarian; and its ongoing relationship to empowering. Trump and Bannon while it positions itself at the vanguard of journalism, reporting on and swelling the global tide of populist-nationalism. FIRE HALF YOUR STAFF will offer real solutions to today’s problems and a comprehensive guide to mastering the opportunities of tomorrow. This Rosie Gray has been publishing viral, news-breaking stories about the book will announce news-making research, the result of SHRM’s studies, on Right for the past five years, commands a dedicated following of more talent, hiring, culture, and innovation. than 70,000 Twitter followers, and appeared on many liberal and conservative programs, pod casts, and radio shows.
LET’S FIX WORK FINDING NORMAL Sex, Empathy, and Taboo in the Wireless World By Laurie Ruettimann By Alexa Tsoulis-Reay US publisher: Henry Holt / Macmillan (NA rights) US editor: Libby Burton; To publish: Spring 2021 US publisher: St. Martin’s Press / Macmillan (NA rights) US editor: Tim Bartlett; To publish: Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 LET’S FIX WORK is a kick-ass, motivational book that will help readers everywhere fix their complicated careers once and for all. This smart, original, and provocative book will offer a first-of-its-kind
deep dive into our culture's changing perceptions of human love, The author’s voice in LET’S FIX WORK is hilarious, candid, and truly relationships, and sexual behavior. It will immerse readers in the lives inspirational. The reading experience is like sitting down for coffee with a trusted friend, who knows how bad it feels sometimes to be in your of people whose experiences, attractions, and identities are now situation and can tell you the best way out of it—but who, at the same entering the mainstream consciousness. time, sees through all of your bullshit. Building on the wild success of her "What It's Like" series for New York Laurie Ruettimann is a veteran HR manager who has worked for some magazine—see: “What It's Like to Date a Horse” or “What It's Like to Date very large companies, including Monsanto and Pfizer. In LET’S FIX Your Dad”, both of which spent an entire week as the number one articles WORK, she tells readers, without sparing any detail, how it took a truly on nymag.com—FINDING NORMAL will highlight the author’s terrible situation at her job to teach her how to make “work” work for pioneering work taking readers into rarely studied—and rarely spoken her. about—subcultures.
In LET’S FIX WORK, Laurie shows readers how to put themselves Informed by cutting edge findings of psychologists and social scientists, and first, fix their wellbeing and sort out their finances, so they have options. grounded in exhaustive reporting, this compulsively readable book will She then reveals how to deal with jerks, how to keep learning fresh skills, feature fascinating stories and timeless themes about people who are, by how to create a supportive community within or outside your choice or design, challenging once-immutable definitions of family, organization, and, how to become your own Chief Relationship Officer— relationships, and desire, stories that are likely to push readers to the limits of in other words, how to become your own personal HR department, within empathy. FINDING NORMAL will run the gamut from the curious to the your company, just for you. And if things don’t work out, Laurie ends the shocking, revealing that despite the real differences that distinguish one book by writing about how and when to quit—gracefully. person from another, we are all trying to know and be ourselves, to find our place in this world. Laurie Ruettimann is a former human resources leader turned writer, speaker, and entrepreneur known for her commonsense style and Alexa Tsoulis-Reay is a senior writer at New York Magazine. Alexa holds an straightforward approach to workforce issues. A former HR executive, MA in English from Melbourne University and an MA in Magazine she is the creator of The Cynical Girl and Punk Rock HR websites and the Journalism from New York University. Her writing has also appeared in host of the “Let’s Fix Work” podcast. Glamour, Slate, Vice, Bitch, and Newsweek.
WHEN ECOSYSTEMS COLLIDE FIRST STEPS How to Compete, Collaborate, and Co-exist in the New Age of Disruption By Jeremy DeSilva
By Ron Adner US publisher: HarperCollins (World English rights) US editor: Gail Winston; To publish: Spring 2021 US publisher: MIT Press (World English rights) US editor: Emily Taber; To publish: Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Rights sold: Brazil (Alta Books) China (CITIC) Rights sold: Brazil (Alta Books) Holland (HarperCollins Holland) China (Xiron) Korean (Rok Media) Israel (Matar) Taiwan (CWM) Italy (HarperCollins Italy) Japan (Bunshun) WHEN ECOSYSTEMS COLLIDE probes of the biggest questions in Korea (Rok Media) business today: How can a company remain successful despite Romania (Grup Media Litera) competition from Google, Amazon, and other tech giants? When and why did we begin walking on two legs? In WHEN ECOSYSTEMS COLLIDE, Ron Adner details how companies can mount an effective “ecosystem defense”, showing how In FIRST STEPS, Jeremy DeSilva takes the reader on a journey through TomTom, the navigation company, tripled its share price despite Google Asia and Africa to examine the fossils of our direct ancestors and our destroying its consumer business; how Wayfair, the furniture company, cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovians. He explores how each of us learn fought back when Amazon entered the furniture business; and how to walk as babies, and how we each develop unique, personal styles of Spotify managed to compete successfully against Apple. He also discusses walking. He delves deeply into the science of walking, showing how healthy it why Netflix and Amazon have been so effective at building new is for us and examining how it aids thinking and creativity. Jeremy ends the ecosystems and dominating new businesses—and why Cisco, Intel, Apple book with the original argument that bipedal walking was the reason humans and Google have struggled as they tried to enter new sectors outside their developed the advanced empathy and compassion that allowed us to live so core expertise. successfully in groups—and to conquer the planet.
This book contains new terms that, after publication, will become part of This beautifully written Born to Run of walking will entertain fans of Yuval the business vernacular, as well as a new and far-reaching theory of Noah Harari mega-bestseller Sapiens, or, fans of Neil Shubin or Sarah Blaffer competition. WHEN ECOSYSTEMS COLLIDE will have a similar Hrdy—as well as readers of books on walking, such as Rebecca Solnit’s impact to world-changing books like The Innovator’s Dilemma, Competitive Wanderlust and Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways. Advantage and Blue Ocean Strategy. Jeremy DeSilva is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth Ron Adner is an award-winning professor of strategy at the Tuck School College. He is a paleoanthropologist, specializing in the locomotion of the and the author of The Wide Lens. first apes (hominoids) and early human ancestors (hominins).
BRAIN INFLAMED PROJECT TOTAL RECALL By Steve Ramirez By Dr. Kenneth Bock US publisher: Riverhead Books / PRH (North American rights) US publisher: HarperWave / HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Courtney Young; To publish: Spring 2021 US editor: Julie Will; To publish: Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Rights sold: China (Cheers) Rights sold: UK/Commonwealth (Piatkus/Little, Brown UK) Germany (DTV) Korea (Gimm-young) Concerned parents whose children suffer from anxiety, depression, Holland (Maven) aggression, or OCD will find BRAIN INFLAMED a vital addition Italy (Cortina) to the conversation. Japan (Bungeishunju) Romania (SC Publica) In BRAIN INFLAMED, Dr. Kenneth Bock will provide an authoritative Spain (Paidos) investigation into the broad array of symptoms that lie on the Mood Taiwan (Commonwealth) Dysregulation Spectrum (MDS), the possible biological causes of these UK/Commonwealth (Robinson/Little, Brown UK) symptoms, and a detailed approach to treatment. Divided into three parts, the first part will introduce the reader to the MDS and a thorough PROJECT TOTAL RECALL is a gripping exploration of the new overview of the gut-brain connection and the delicate balance of the frontier of brain science: optogenetics. immune system. The second part will provide a detailed explanation of the biological dysfunctions that can create psychological illness including Memories are the windows to our lived-in realities and are what makes us inflammation, hormonal imbalance, adrenal dysfunction, hypothyroidism who we are. During Steve Ramirez’s first year of graduate school at MIT in and more. And finally, the third part will explore in depth a wide array of 2012, he and his colleague Xu Liu turned on a light (a literal light—that’s the potential treatments, from the very basic (dietary modification, nutritional “opto” in optogenetics) that would birth a new field of neuroscience: supplements, probiotics and herbs) to the more complex options memory manipulation. Now, the stuff of sci-fi is becoming scientific fact (combination antibiotics, CBD and more). every other week: we can shoot light into the brain to modulate neural activity and alleviate Parkinson’s symptoms; we can turn depression-related Dr. Bock will empower parents to ask the key questions crucial to fast- symptoms on and off; and, we can view how thoughts are formed in the tracking their child toward the appropriate treatment they need. By the brain and how they manifest in pathological conditions. end, parents will be fully informed about the possibilities, controversies and treatment options available to them, offering realistic hope to millions PROJECT TOTAL RECALL is an ultimate insider’s account of cutting- of kids and their families seeking direction, answers and peace of mind. edge neuroscience, which has launched a full-scale revolution in the way we treat and classify broken brains. Dr. Kenneth Bock is an internationally known pioneer of integrative medicine, a bestselling author, and in-demand international speaker. Steve Ramirez is an award-winning neuroscientist. He is a Junior Fellow at Harvard University.
THE KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS FROM AROUND THE CORNER TO AROUND THE WORLD By Jing Tsu 31 Lessons I Learned Building Dunkin Donuts
US publisher: Riverhead / PRH (North American rights) By Robert Rosenburg US editor: Courtney Young; To publish: Spring 2021 US publisher: HarperLeadership / HarperCollins (WE rights) Material available: Proposal available US editor: Timothy Burgard; To publish: Spring 2021 Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Material available: Proposal available Rights sold: China (CITIC) Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Holland (Spectrum) Italy (Hoepli) Rights sold: Japan (Hayakawa) Taiwan (Rye Field) Korea (GA Books) UK/Commonwealth (Penguin UK) Russia (Eksmo)
THE KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS follows the bold and Bob tells how he led Dunkin Donuts from a makeshift office above a cunning innovators who adapted the ancient Chinese character- movie theatre, using his financial wizardry and management acumen based script to a 20th-century world defined by the West and its to guide the business through a torrid expansion. alphabet. It will tell the story of how China was able to transform itself from a marginalized country into one of the world’s most FROM AROUND THE CORNER TO AROUND THE powerful and ascendant nations WORLD includes some brilliant ideas about what it is to be a CEO, what it is to be founder, and how to manage a complex business. Robert Rosenberg THE KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS will chronicle the dramatic became CEO of Universal Foods (the precursor to Dunkin Donuts) at the events responsible for China’s unexpected linguistic and geopolitical ripe old age of 25, right out of business school. triumph. How China went from a crumbling empire to a capitalist Bob is unfailingly candid about what worked—and, more importantly—what juggernaut is as breathtaking as the revolution that the Chinese script has didn’t work during his 35-years running the company. Yet it isn’t just a undergone during that same time period, in large part because the one business story. It is filled with the lore of Dunkin Donuts’ donuts, crullers, literally helped underwrite the other. Ingenious linguists, mathematicians, Munchkins, blueberry muffins, and Coolatas—Bob explains how the and poets risked their careers and reputations, and sometimes their lives, company designed and produced each of these beloved products—and, it to tackle profoundly complex technological issues that opened the lines of contains the secrets of Dunkin Donuts’ coffee, the crown jewel of their communication between the East and West and led to a new kind of business. It belongs on the shelf with Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, Howard mutual dependency. Schultz’s Pour Your Heart Into It and Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness.
Jing Tsu is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, a literary scholar and cultural Robert Rosenberg received his MBA from Harvard Business School, and, historian of modern China at Yale University. She was born in Taipei, just weeks after graduating at the age of 25, assumed the position of chief Taiwan, and raised in New Mexico, USA. executive officer of Dunkin’ Donuts.
CHANGING GENDER EVER GREEN Transgender History from the 19th Century until Now How to Save Our Biggest Forests to Cool the Warming World By Susan Stryker By John Reid and Thomas Lovejoy US publisher: Farrar, Straus / Macmillan (NA rights) US editor: Eric Chinski; To publish: Fall 2021 US publisher: W.W. Norton (North American rights) US editor: John Glusman; To publish: Fall 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Material available: Edited MS available in Spring 2021
Rights sold: UK/Commonwealth (Serpent’s Tail) EVER GREEN will be at the front of a new wave of books that move past whether or not to take the threat of climate change seriously and Set to be the definitive narrative of the transgender movement, onto a concrete, actionable response to the question, What can we do? CHANGING GENDER brings the vast process to life of the movement through character-driven storytelling and will ignite a The book will introduce a groundbreaking yet overlooked remedy to global new understanding of gender itself. warming: the protection of Earth’s five largest forests and all that comes with them. These areas, called mega-forests, or intact forests, are huge wooded For many people, the Transgender Movement first came to their attention landscapes—each about as big as 50,000 Major League Baseball diamonds— earlier this year when 16 million viewers tuned in to watch Caitlyn Jenner’s that are relatively untouched by roads, farms, and industry. They’re located in 20/20 interview with Diane Sawyer. Since then it seems as if there has the Amazon and Congo, on the island of New Guinea, and in a vast swath been an explosion of attention to transgender celebrity culture—from the far above North America, Russia, and Europe. In addition to keeping New York Times’ “Transgender Today” profiles and Amazon’s Emmy- massive amounts of carbon out of our atmosphere, preserving mega-forests winning series Transparent to the opening of the first transgender modeling will slow our world’s ongoing species extinction and will maintain a critical agency in Los Angeles. diversity of human cultures. No other proposed climate change solution can promise these results. EVER GREEN is an urgent plea for a major shift in But as Susan writes, this moment didn’t come out of the blue. It is but a focus, away from small-scale solutions and toward a long-term, practical thin veneer that rests atop more than a century of history. CHANGING antidote to the worsening crisis of our warming world. GENDER will weave incisive biographical portraits of activists, artists, doctors, scientists, politicians, lawyers, media-makers and everyday citizens A longtime conservationist and an economist at Nia Tero, John Reid has into the tapestry of a broader narrative of sweeping social transformation. had his writing published in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, By the time readers finish CHANGING GENDER, their view of the Scientific American, and elsewhere. world they already live in will be utterly transformed. Thomas Lovejoy is a pioneering biologist who coined the term Susan Stryker is an Emmy-award winning documentary filmmaker. She “biodiversity” and is credited with founding the field of climate change earned her Ph.D. in US History from University of California-Berkeley. biology. He is a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation and the world’s leading authority on conservation ecology.
THE CAUSES OF BLACKNESS SUPERSIGHT The Bordeaux Royal Academy of Science Manuscripts How Computer Vision Will Transform the Way You Learn, Shop, Work and Live By Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew Curran By David Rose US publisher: Harvard University Press (World English rights) US editor: Sharmila Sen; To publish: Fall 2021 US publisher: BenBella Books (NA rights) US editor: Glenn Yeffeth; To publish: Fall 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2021 In 1739, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the subject of the causes of the “blackness” of human Computer vision doesn’t just have the potential to alter the way beings who originated in sub-Saharan Africa. The challenge, which was individual people interact with the world around them; these super- announced in the internationally distributed Journal des savants, posed the sight technologies hold the power to shape entire industries and following question: “what is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of their degeneration?” The best essay, they workplaces. promised, would receive a prestigious prize. Sixteen essays were ultimately dispatched to the Bordeaux Academy from all over Europe. While the SUPERSIGHT will reveal how scientists emulate the amazing power of the details of what happened next are unclear, no winner of the competition human eye to create groundbreaking computer vision applications such as was ever named. Saved from oblivion, these unpublished manuscripts helmets that help firefighters see through smoke, and magic mirrors that (which are in the process of being translated into English from both the offer personalized clothing recommendations based on the season and French and the Latin) now constitute the greatest “focus group” on race occasion for which you’re dressing, your specific body type, and current data ever assembled during the eighteenth century. When published, these on the latest fashion trends. It will take readers inside the laboratories, documents will be of immense use to a wide variety of scholars and workshops, offices, and playing fields where these emergent technologies are students interested in the Enlightenment, in the history of race, the history being developed and tested even as it shows both the tremendous value— of science and medicine, the history of slavery, in genetics and concepts of and potentially dire consequences—they are bound to unleash. As it explores difference, not to mention their various disciplinary intersections. the amazing tools being developed, implemented, and sold across the country and the world, SUPERSIGHT will also address some of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher worrisome sociological and ethical quandaries raised by this rapid progress. University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and How will we ensure that this valuable personal data isn’t abused by African American Research at Harvard University, and has hosted the marketers or authoritarian governments? Adaptive technologies may PBS shows Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gate Jr. and The African revolutionize the healthcare industry with new tools that can diagnose Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. diseases and quickly analyze body scans—but what will that mean for visual pattern experts like radiologists and dermatologists whose jobs will become Andrew Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities increasingly automated? A thrilling guide for navigating our rapidly changing and Professor of French at Wesleyan University, and author of Diderot and world. the Art of Thinking Freely, and The Anatomy of Blackness. David Rose is a scientist, technology visionary, and serial entrepreneur.
RUNNER’S HIGH THE RISE OF THE MAMMALS How a Culture of Stoned Athletes are Revolutionizing By Stephen L. Brusatte Science, Sports, and the Way We View Marijuana US publisher: William Morrow / HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Peter Hubbard; To publish: Spring 2022 By Josiah Hesse Material available: Edited MS available in Fall 2021 US publisher: Putnam / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Michelle Howry; To publish: Fall 2021 Rights sold: Russia (Alpina)
Material available: Proposal available After the international bestselling success of The Rise and Fall of the Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Dinosaurs, which was named ‘Science Book of the Year’ by the Times, this new book will pick up where Dinosaurs left off, using a similar energetic, Despite the wild popularity of the cannabis fitness trend, it may be hard first-person style to tell the story of mammal evolution and will function as the for some to imagine the positive association between marijuana and bridge between The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and Sapiens. athletics, simply because our cultural understanding of the leafy substance has, for decades, been built upon the myth of the lazy stoner, red-eyed Publishers of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and laid out on a couch somewhere, munching on junk food. However, in Canada (Editions Quebec Amerique) China (United Sky) the face of the growing legalization of cannabis and the associated Brazil (Record) wellness trend, scientists are now investing more and more resources to Bulgaria (Ciela) the study of the synergy between marijuana and fitness, uncovering the Estonia (Aripaev) link between the endocannabinoid system-enhancing and anti- France (Editions Quanto) inflammatory properties of marijuana and the power of the “runner’s Germany (Piper) high.” RUNNER’S HIGH brings readers on a journey through the Holland (Ambo Anthos) secret world of stoned athletes, describes the astounding, cannabis- Hungary (Park Könyvkiadó) inspired physical and mental transformations of previously desperate Italy (UTET) people, and introduces the pioneering scientists paving legal and ethical Japan (Misuzu) roadways for studying the health benefits of this incredibly popular plant. Korea (Woongjin ThinkBig) Poland (ZNAK) From the economics of the 20-billion-dollar CBD market to the inherent Portugal (Contraponto / Bertrand Editora) inequalities in the enforcement of marijuana prohibition; from the mind- Romania (Editura Art) body connection behind the “runner’s high” to the best way to make your Russia (Alpina) own cannabis-infused power bars, Hesse takes this groundbreaking Spain (PRH Spain science out of the lab and onto the trail, court, field, and pitch, Taiwan (Marco Polo) fundamentally changing the way in which we think about exercise, Thai (Bookscape) recovery, and cannabis. Turkey (Koc University Press) UK (Macmillan UK) Josiah Hesse is an investigative journalist who covers breaking marijuana news, the intersection of marijuana and athletics, politics, economics and Stephen L. Brusatte is a paleontologist on the faculty of the School of culture for such publications as Vice, The Guardian, Politico, and Esquire. GeoSciences at the University of Edinburg in Scotland.
THE PRECISION PARADOX The Myth of Certainty, Our Obsession with Measurement, and a Return to Common Sense
By Duff McDonald
US publisher: HarperBusiness / HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Hollis Heimbouch; To publish: Fall 2022
Material available: Proposal available Edited MS available in Spring 2022
A tour through economics, history, and the social sciences that exposes the myth of certainty, argues that society’s quest for precision and obsession with measurement have degraded our decision-making abilities, and offers a new framework for assessing what we value.
Publishers of Duff McDonald’s The Golden Compass
China (Grand China Publishing House) Japan (Diamond Inc) Taiwan (Commonwealth Publishing)
Author of The Firm and The Golden Passport, Duff McDonald is a contributing editor at The New York Observer. He has also written for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, New York magazine, Fortune, and Esquire, among other publications.
UPCOMING FICTION
HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE
By Souvankham Thammavongsa
US publisher: Little, Brown (North American rights) US editor: Jean Garnett To publish: April 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Rights sold: Canada (M&S / PRH Canada) UK / Commonwealth (Bloomsbury)
A young nail tech at the local salon.
A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant.
A bus driver who takes other people's kids to school.
A mother who works nights alongside her daughter harvesting worms.
A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. Praise for HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE: In her stunning debut, O. Henry Prize-winner Souvankham Thammavongsa captures the day-to-day lives of immigrants and refugees “Sharp and elegant…Thammavongsa’s brief stories pack a punch, in a nameless city, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, punctuated by direct prose that’s full of acute observations.” and above all, their pursuit of a place to belong. Charging her spare, – Publishers Weekly unsentimental prose with immense power, Thammavongsa honors characters struggling to find their bearings far from home, or shuttling between languages, cultures, and values. "I love these stories. There's some fierce and steady activity in all of the sentences—something that makes them live and makes them shift a little in Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books. Her meaning when you look at them again and they look back at you (or look stories have won an O. Henry prize and appeared in Harper's, Granta, The beyond you)." – Helen Oyeyemi, author of What is Not Yours is Not Paris Review, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and O. Henry Prize Stories. Yours and Gingerbread
THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT
By Zeyn Joukhadar
US publisher: Touchstone / S&S (North American rights) US editor: Trish Todd; To publish: May 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
A remarkably moving and lyrical novel following three generations of Syrian Americans who are linked by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts.
Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend. The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once- thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Praise for THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT:
Publishers of The Map of Salt and Stars "Zeyn Joukhadar’s new book is a vivid exploration of loss, art, queer and trans communities, and the persistence of history. Often tender, always Arabic (Dar Shafaq Publishing) Macedonia (Matica Makedonska) engrossing, The Thirty Names of Night is a feat." – R.O. Kwon, author of The Brazil (Dublinense) Norway (Font Forlag) Bulgaria (Egmont Bulgaria) Poland (Czarna Owca) Incendiaries China (CITIC) Portugal (Saida de Emergencia) Czech Republic (Dobrovsky) Serbia (Laguna) “Evocative and beautifully written, reading this is like opening a treasure France (Les Escales) Spain (Lumen) trove of memories and images that shimmer both with light and the darkness Germany (Heyne) Sweden (Wahlstrom & Widstrand) of our times. It addresses important issues of migration, belonging, sexuality Holland (Ambo Anthos) Turkey (Hep Kitap) and love.” – Christy Lefteri, author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo Italy (Garzanti) UK (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
ONLY THE RIVER (Previously titled WATER IS TAUGHT BY THIRST)
By Anne Raeff
US publisher: Counterpoint (World English rights) US editor: Dan Smetanka To publish: May 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
From California Book Award silver medalist and Simpson Literary Prize finalist author Anne Raeff, comes a novel of two families set in New York and Nicaragua over several generations as their lives collide in mysterious ways.
Fleeing the ravages of wartime Vienna, Pepa, and her family find safe harbor in the small town of El Castillo, on the banks of the San Juan River in Nicaragua. There her parents seek to eradicate Yellow Fever while Pepa falls under the spell of the jungle and the town’s eccentric inhabitants. But Pepa’s life ― including her relationship with local boy Guillermo ― comes to a halt when her family abruptly moves to New York, leaving the young girl disoriented and heartbroken. As the years pass, Pepa and Guillermo’s lives diverge, as does the fate of Guillermo’s homeland. Nicaragua soon becomes engulfed in revolutionary fervor as the Sandinista movement vies for the nation’s soul. Guillermo’s daughter transforms into an accidental revolutionary. Pepa’s son defies his parents’ wishes and joins the Praise for ONLY THE RIVER: revolution in Nicaragua, only to disappear into the jungle. It will take decades before the fates of these two families converge again, revealing *Longlisted for the 2020 Simpson / Joyce Carol Oates Prize* how love, grief, and passion are intertwined with a nation's destiny. "Engrossing…Raeff’s seamless web artfully depicts the characters’ will to Spanning generations and several wars, ONLY THE RIVER explores survive and to fight for what they believe in. This heartfelt story of separation the way displacement both destroys two families and creates new ones, and confluence will move readers." – Publishers Weekly sparking a revolution that changes their lives in the most unexpected ways. “In this novel, Anne Raeff weaves a multigenerational tale of love and war Anne Raeff’ is the author of The Jungle Around Us, which won the 2015 while at the same time casting a magic spell…The novel feels unique, timely, Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Winter Kept Us Warm, and yet timeless. I couldn’t put it down.” ––Elizabeth Farnsworth, author which was awarded the California Book Award’s Silver Medal in Fiction. of A Train Through Time
YOU EXIST TOO MUCH
By Zaina Arafat
US publisher: Catapult (North American rights) US editor: Jonathan Lee To publish: June 2020
Material available: Final PDF available
Rights sold: UK/Commonwealth (Dialogue Books / Little, Brown UK)
A startling debut novel of desire following the life of a young Palestinian-American woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities.
On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-year-old Palestinian American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.
Told in vignettes that flash between the United States and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine—Zaina Arafat’s Praise for YOU EXIST TOO MUCH: debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an "[A] provocative and seductive debut . . . Novels like these don't exist apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself. But enough." – O, The Oprah Magazine soon her longings explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that "A novel of self-discovery following a Palestinian-American girl as she identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange society she will navigates queerness, love addiction, and a series of tumultuous relationships." start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal – The Millions traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her. "In her uniquely written debut novel, Zaina Arafat tackles the challenges of Zaina Arafat is an Arab-American writer. She holds an M.F.A. in creative being a queer Palestinian American attempting to disentangle identities to writing from Iowa and an M.A. in international affairs from Columbia locate and celebrate the true self." – Ms.
THE DISTANT DEAD
By Heather Young
US publisher: William Morrow / HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Kate Nintzel; To publish: June 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
Rights sold: France (Belfond)
A young boy finds himself at the center of a murder mystery in this timely and twisty thriller from the author of the acclaimed The Lost Girls—a compelling and indelible story set in small town America that examines the burden of guilt, the bitter price of forgiveness, and the debts we owe our dead, both recent and distant.
A body burns in the high desert hills. A young boy walks into a fire station, pale with the shock of a grisly discovery. A middle school teacher worries when her colleague is late for work. By day’s end, when the body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town will begin its reckoning with a brutal and calculated murder.
Adam Merkel left a university professorship to teach middle school math in Lovelock seven months before he died. A quiet man, he connected with only one of his students: Sal Prentiss, a lonely sixth grader who lives on a Jake Sanchez is the volunteer on duty at the fire station when Sal reports remote ranch in the hills with his uncles. The two outcasts developed a finding Adam’s body. Jake loved Sal’s mother from a forlorn distance, and tender, trusting friendship that brought each of them hope in the wake of since her death he’s tried to keep an eye on Sal. He, too, thinks Sal knows tragedy. But it is Sal who finds Adam’s body, charred almost beyond more than he’s telling about the night Adam died, and when Nora shows up recognition, less than two miles from his uncles’ ranch. asking questions, he becomes her ally in her quest for the truth. As Nora and Jake piece together Adam Merkel’s final moments, and Sal Nora Wheaton is the middle school’s social studies teacher. Twelve years struggles with the weight of the secrets he carries, all three must reckon with ago she returned to the hometown she hates to care for her disabled blame and regret, the weight of the past and the promise of the future, and father, a drunk who crashed his car and killed her brother. As she delves the bitter freedom that forgiveness can bring. into Adam’s past for clues to who killed him, she confronts difficult truths about her relationship with her father and draws closer to Sal, who not Heather Young is the previous author of The Lost Girls, which was only holds the key to solving Adam's murder but may offer her a chance nominated for the Edgar Award. at the life she thought she'd lost.
HOME BEFORE DARK
By Riley Sager
US publisher: Dutton /PRH (North American rights) US editor: Maya Ziv To publish: June 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
Rights sold: The Netherlands (Ambo Anthos)
In the latest thriller from New York Times bestseller Riley Sager, a woman returns to the house made famous by her father’s bestselling horror memoir. Is the place really haunted by evil forces, as her father claimed? Or are there more earthbound—and dangerous— secrets hidden within its walls?
What was it like? Living in that house. Maggie Holt is used to such questions.
Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into Baneberry Hall, a rambling Victorian estate in the Vermont woods. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a nonfiction book called House of Horrors. His tale of ghostly happenings became a worldwide phenomenon, rivaling The Amityville Horror in popularity—and skepticism. \ Alternating between Maggie’s uneasy homecoming and chapters from her father’s book, HOME BEFORE DARK is the story of a house with long- Today, Maggie is a restorer of old homes and too young to remember any buried secrets and a woman’s quest to uncover them—even if the truth is far of the events in her father’s book. But she also doesn’t believe a word of more terrifying than any haunting. it. When Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father’s death, she returns to renovate the place to prepare it for sale. But her homecoming is anything but warm. People from the past, chronicled in House of Horrors, Riley Sager is the pseudonym of an author who lives in Princeton, New lurk in the shadows. And locals aren’t thrilled that their small town has Jersey. Riley’s first novel, Final Girls, was a national and international been made infamous thanks to Maggie’s father. Even more unnerving is bestseller that has been published in more than two dozen countries and won Baneberry Hall itself—a place filled with relics from another era that hint the ITW Thriller Award for Best Hardcover Novel. Sager’s previous novels at a history of dark deeds. As Maggie experiences strange occurrences The Last Time I Lied and Lock Every Door were both New York Times straight out of her father’s book, she starts to believe that what he wrote bestsellers. was more fact than fiction.
WANT
By Lynn Steger Strong
US publisher: Henry Holt / Macmillan (North American rights) US editor: Kerry Cullen To publish: July 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
Grappling with motherhood, economic anxiety, rage, and the limits of language, Want is a fiercely personal novel that vibrates with anger, insight, and love.
"Furious, aching and razor sharp, WANT is a beautiful book."— Emma Cline, internationally bestselling author of The Girls
Elizabeth is tired. Years after coming to New York to try to build a life, she has found herself with two kids, a husband, two jobs, a PhD―and now they’re filing for bankruptcy. As she tries to balance her dream and the impossibility of striving toward it while her work and home lives feel poised to fall apart, she wakes at ungodly hours to run miles by the icy river, struggling to quiet her thoughts. When she reaches out to Sasha, her long-lost childhood friend, it feels almost harmless―one of those innocuous ruptures that exist online, in texts. But her timing is uncanny. Sasha is facing a crisis, too, and perhaps after years apart, their shared Praise for WANT: moments of crux can bring them back into each other’s lives. “[E]lectric and nuanced; it feels possessed by a rare, inexplicable urgency.” Strong explores the pressures that make some women, even the most – Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, The Recovering, and “stable” among us, want to run screaming from their own lives. WANT The Gin Closet lives between the work of Sally Rooney and Jenny Offill even as it depicts female friendship with the delicious complexity of novels like Girls on Fire. "A deeply intelligent and sneakily moving novel about having the ground fall A fiercely personal work and one that marks a powerful step forward, away beneath your feet.” – Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation Strong’s new novel vibrates with anger, insight, and love. “It’s not just the story of what it is to be a mother and wife, a daughter and Lynn Steger Strong's is the author of Hold Still and her non-fiction has friend, a citizen and employee―Want is a novel about what it is to be alive been published in Guernica, LARB, Elle.com, Catapult, Lithub, and right now, one that truly captures the urgency of human thought and elsewhere. feeling.” – Rumaan Alam, author of Rich and Pretty
WINTER COUNTS WOUNDED HORSE
By David Heska Wanbli Weiden
US publisher: Ecco / HarperCollins (North American rights) US editor: Zach Wagman; To publish: August 2020; Fall 2022
Material available: Edited MS available
Rights sold: France (Gallmeister)
An addictive and groundbreaking debut thriller set on a Native American reservation.
Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s own nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop. They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he Praise for WINTER COUNTS: must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the 21st century comes at an incredible cost. "A hell of a gripping debut, perfectly plotted…a major new voice in crime fiction, indigenous fiction, and American literature." – Benjamin Percy, WINTER COUNTS is a tour-de-force of crime fiction, a bracingly author of Suicide Woods and The Dark Net honest look at a long-ignored part of American life, and a twisting, turning story that’s as deeply rendered as it is thrilling. "[A] heartfelt page-turner with compelling characters, keen cultural insight, and a climax unlike any I've read before." – Steph Cha, author of Your David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota House Will Pay nation, is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and the PEN/America Writing for Justice Fellowship. He received his MFA in "Weiden writes with impressive authority and insight in this entirely original, Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and his PhD enlightening, cliché-destroying novel." – James A. McLaughlin, author of from the University of Texas at Austin. the Edgar Award-winning Bearskin.
THE GREAT OFFSHORE GROUNDS
By Vanessa Veselka
US publisher: Knopf / PRH (North American rights) US editor: Tim O’Connell; To publish: August 2020
Material available: Edited MS available
Rights sold: Italy (Einaudi) UK (Weidenfeld & Nicolson / Orion)
From the author of the prizewinning indie-success Zazen comes a wildly original novel that subverts a long tradition of family narratives and casts new light on the mythologies that define us.
On the day of their estranged father's wedding, half-sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It's been years since the two have seen each other. Cheyenne is newly back in Seattle, crashing with Livy after a failed marriage and a series of dead ends. Livy works refinishing boats, her resentment against her free-loading sister growing as she tamps down dreams of fishing off the coast of Alaska. But the promise of a shot at financial security brings the two together to claim what's theirs. But instead of money, their father gives them information—a name—that both reveals a stunning family secret and compels them to come to grips with it. In the face of their new reality, the sisters and their adopted brother each set out on journeys that will test their faith in each other, as Praise for THE GREAT OFFSHORE GROUNDS: well as their definitions of freedom. “I immediately fell in love with the phenomenal sisters at the heart of Vanessa Veselka spins a tale with boundless verve and linguistic vitality, a Vanessa Veselka’s supernova of a new novel, THE GREAT OFFSHORE deep interrogation of greed and mythology, and an undeniable tenderness. GROUNDS. Cheyenne and Livy explode the traditional hero’s journey in favor of myth making. This novel is thrilling in its content, daring in heart, THE GREAT OFFSHORE GROUNDS is the first great post- and makes a helix between a novel of ideas and the best damn story of capitalist novel of the 21st century. women who forge their identities on their own terms that I’ve read in years.”
– Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel, Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert Bingham prize for fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Atavist, among others.
WHEN WE WERE YOUNG AND BRAVE THE ROCK EATERS (previously titled THE KINGFISHER PATROL) By Brenda Peynado By Hazel Gaynor US publisher: Penguin / PRH (North American rights) US publisher: William Morrow/ HarperCollins (NA rights) US editor: Margaux Weisman; To publish: March 2021 US editor: Lucia Macro; To publish: October 2020 Material available: Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Material available: Edited MS available in Spring 2020 Threaded with magic, strange happenings, and a deep sense of longing, Rights sold: UK/Commonwealth (Harper UK) the stories here explore what it means to cross boundaries personal, physical, and political. An unforgettable new novel in China during WWII, inspired by true events surrounding the Japanese Army’s internment of teachers In “The Stones of Sorrow Lake” a woman visits her boyfriend’s hometown, and children from a British-run missionary school. Their motto was where each person grows a rock from their body that represents their life’s to "Be Prepared" but nothing could prepare them for war … one great sorrow; in “The Great Escape” a woman hides herself in her apartment until she disappears completely; in “The Dreamers” a teenage girl China, December 1941. Having left an unhappy life in England for a grapples with staying awake when to sleep means she’ll sleep all the sleep of teaching post at a missionary school in northern China, Elspeth Kent is her life at once; and in the collection’s title story, children fly away from now anxious to return home to help the war effort. But as she prepares to parents conflicted about their own ability to take to the sky. Brenda leave China, a terrible twist of fate determines a different path for Elspeth, Peynado’s fabulism illustrates the conflict inherent in being from more than and those in her charge. Ten-year-old Nancy Plummer has always felt safe one place, the absurdity in thinking we can control our destinies. With grace at Chefoo School, protected by her British status. But when Japan declares and a razor-sharp imagination, she shows us that borders are nothing but an war on Britain and America, Japanese forces take control of the school invitation to cross. Quite literally, her work is marvelous. and the security and comforts Nancy and her friends are used to are replaced by privation, uncertainty and fear. Now the enemy, and separated THE ROCK EATERS will find a place beside Carmen Maria Machado’s from their parents, the children look to their teachers - to Miss Kent and Her Body and Other Parties, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black, Karen her new Girl Guide patrol especially - to provide a sense of unity and Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove, or Helen Oyeyemi’s What is Not Yours is safety. Faced with the relentless challenges of oppression, the school Not Yours. Like these strong, intimate voices, Peynado threads her work with community must rely on their courage, faith and friendships as they pray magical realism, fabulism, and science fiction to reveal the uncomfortable for liberation – but worse is to come when they are sent to a distant truths about our lives. internment camp where even greater uncertainty and danger await … Inspired by true events, an unforgettable novel about impossible choices Brenda Peynado is a Dominican-American writer whose stories have and unimaginable hardship, and the life-changing bonds formed between received an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, a Nelson Algren Award from a young girl and her teacher. the Chicago Tribune, a Fulbright grant, and other awards. She currently teaches fiction and screenwriting at the University of Central Florida’s BA and MFA Hazel Gaynor is The New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of programs. The Girl Who Came Home and A Memory of Violets.
ADVICE FOR LADY ADVENTURERS PLACEBO
By Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb By Kelly McClorey
US publisher: William Morrow/ HarperCollins (WE rights) US publisher: Ecco / HarperCollins (North American rights) US editor: Lucia Macro; To publish: April 2021 US editor: Sara Birmingham; To publish: Spring 2021
Material available: Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Material available: Edited MS available in Fall 2020
1939: Feuding twin sisters, Maddie and Clara, are heartbroken over the Kelly McClorey’s PLACEBO tells a story of a young woman’s unusual death of their beloved grandmother, Alice, but a reading of Alice’s will journey through anxiety, isolation, ambition, and grief, even as she tries brings an unexpected surprise: in order to inherit the family home and estate, Maddie and Clara must embark on a journey around the world— to break out of her shell. together. An old book of newspaper clippings about the famous race undertaken by Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland in 1889 will be their guide. Amy Harney has a job as a chambermaid for the summer but on August 25th If the sisters refuse the journey, or if they fail to complete it together, they she will take the exam to become an EMT (third time’s a charm!) and, in so will they lose everything. But what Maddie and Clara don’t yet know are doing, finally move on with her life. She doesn’t mind the focused attention it the unusual circumstances surrounding the deeply personal connection takes to scrub toilets immaculately clean, or to tuck the corners of the sheets between Nellie Bly and their grandmother. just so. In fact, she believes, like her hero Florence Nightingale, cleanliness is next to godliness and that she is providing important health services to the Both in need of the financial security offered by the inheritance, but for rich guests at the members-only yacht club which employs her. But as the very different reasons, the sisters reluctantly agree to accept their date for the EMT exam moves closer, Amy’s anxiety ratchets up in a way that grandmother’s quest. Not only are they ill-prepared to embark on such a is both familiar and troubling. After returning uncomfortably close to the journey, they are also shaken by what awaits them in a troubled Europe on scene of a past crime, Amy begins to “self-placebo” or to administer what is, the brink of war. As the Nazis close borders and families are separated, she hopes, essentially, a sugar pill for her confidence and performance. the sisters encounter a young Jewish boy searching for his mother. Now Despite the placebo treatments, Amy’s profound isolation colors everything: they must decide whether to continue their journey and head east to her job, her ambitions, her complicated inner life, her interactions with secure their inheritance, or abandon it, and bring the child to safety aboard people and even things, an acorn or a lamp. the Queen Mary—his only chance of escape. Can Maddie and Clara put aside their differences and join together as their race around the world Like the work of Jen Beagin, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Sayaka Murata, becomes a race for survival? McClorey explores the shadowy corners of a young woman’s inner world and offers up a darkly comic vision of modern life. PLACEBO captures not just Hazel Gaynor is The New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the creeping anxiety that runs through so much of contemporary existence, The Girl Who Came Home and A Memory of Violets. but the hilarity and heartbreak of ambition and our endless search for connection. Historical fiction author, freelance editor, and teacher, Heather Webb’s novels Rodin’s Lover and Becoming Josephine have sold in six countries and Kelly McClorey is a graduate of the MFA at the University of Montana. received starred reviews. Her works have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and The New York Journal of Books.
BREAD AND FISH IMMEDIATE FAMILY
By Andrew J. Graff By Ashley Nelson Levy
US publisher: Ecco / HarperCollins (North American rights) US publisher: FSG / Macmillan (North American rights) US editor: Helen Atsma; To publish: Spring 2021 US editor: Emily Bell; To publish: Fall 2021
Material available: Edited MS available in Fall 2020 Material available: Edited MS available in Spring 2021
Rights sold: France (Gallmeister) On the eve of her brother’s wedding, Ashley Larsen is still struggling with her Holland (Kok/Boekencentrum) toast. Despite a recent fracture between them, her brother Danny has asked her to give the “best man” speech and she doesn’t know where to begin, how It’s the summer of 1994 in Claypot, Wisconsin, and ten-year-old to put words to their kind of love. Ashley was nine in 1994 when she traveled Fischer Branson’s and Dale Breadwin’s lives are shaped by the two with her parents to Rangsit Babies Home in Thailand to first meet her little fathers they don’t talk about: Fish’s, killed in his last deployment, brother, six years her junior. They grew up together like any other siblings, and Bread’s, passed out at home next to a bottle of whiskey. shared a bucolic childhood in sleepy Petaluma, California. Yet when Ashley holds their history up to the light, it refracts in ways she doesn’t expect. What One night, tired of seeing his best friend bruised and terrorized by his no- follows is a narrative addressed to Danny, an attempt at a full accounting of good dad, Fish takes action. A gunshot rings out, and the two boys flee their years together. The unreliability of memory comes into stark relief the scene, believing themselves murderers. On the run from the law, they against Ashley’s own struggles with infertility, her research on adoption and load their backpacks with Slim Jims and head for the woods, where they trauma, scenes from literature, letters and notes from her family’s history, and find their way onto a raft, in the grand tradition of Huck and Tom before the documents from Danny’s case file. And as the hours till the wedding them. wane, Ashley comes up against an unexpected truth of her own, even as she finally finds words for the things that can't and won't be said aloud. What the boys don’t plan for is Ironsforge gorge—a half-mile drop less than 100 miles downriver—and the four adults who follow them into the IMMEDIATE FAMILY both follows in the footsteps of Jenny Offill, Heidi forest, each one on a journey of his or her own. Sheriff Cal is having Julavitz, and Rachel Cusk, and begins a conversation with the work of writers doubts about a life in law enforcement, while Tiffany, a gas station like Nicole Chung, Celeste Ng, and Sarah Valentine. Levy asks powerful attendant by day and poet by evening, hopes that her relationship with Cal questions about identity and race, motherhood, and the difference between will offer the sense of connection she’s been lacking. Alongside them are speaking about and speaking for, as she brings to life a novel brimming with Fish’s mother, Miranda, and granddad, Teddy, who knows the woods like longing and curiosity, shot through with love. the back of his hand. Together, the adults track the boys through rapids and rainstorms toward the novel’s heart-pounding climax on the edge of Ashley Nelson Levy has published fiction and essays the gorge. BREAD AND FISH tells a story of loss, hope, and adventure in ZYZZYVA, Catapult, The Atlas Review, and Fourteen Hills. She is the that runs like the river itself. recipient of the Bambi Holmes Award for Emerging Writers. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Clein/Lemann Fellow. Andrew J. Graff is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a In 2015, she co-founded Transit Books, an independent publishing house recipient of the Clark Fisher Ansley Prize for Excellence in Writing. with a focus on international literature.
BEND YOU TO REMAIN THE COMMUNITY BOARD
By Tsering Lama By Tara Conklin
US publisher: Bloomsbury (North American rights) US publisher: William Morrow / HarperCollins (World English rights) US editor: Grace McNamee; To publish: Fall 2021 US editor: Kate Nintzel; To publish: Spring 2022
Material available: Edited MS available in Spring 2021 Material available: Edited MS available in Fall 2021
What if survival means leaving behind your land, your family, even In the suburban New England town of Murbridge, things are your gods? disappearing. A stop sign, a garden gnome, a pork tenderloin, a lilac tree dug from the ground. Who’s to blame? What does it mean? The year is 1959 and Mao Tsetung’s Red Army has invaded Tibet. Following the escape of the Dalai Lama, the village oracle leads her entire When Darcy Clipper returns to her hometown, she’s reeling from a series of community, including her two daughters and husband, into exile. On the personal calamities: divorce, job loss, dead cat, bad haircut. She volunteers to mountainous border between Nepal and Tibet, they live in limbo as serve as moderator for the Murbridge community message board, hoping rations dwindle, people grow sick, and rumors swirl of nearby guerilla she’ll find her place once more in the town she knows and loves best. But battles and possible help from the Americans. So begins BEND YOU when a proposal to build a homeless shelter erupts into controversy, long- TO REMAIN, the sixty-year story of a single Tibetan family’s journey simmering divisions are revealed and Darcy realizes that the quaint, nurturing through Nepal and North America. Lhamo and her sister Tenkyi are the place she remembers has changed irrevocably. first generation to have memories of their homeland but must survive in the refugee camps; Lhamo’s daughter Dolma joins her aunt Tenkyi in As Darcy struggles to re-build her life and sense of self, she uses the message Canada while leaving her mother behind. And Samphal is a fatherless boy board—in her own misguided but genuine way—to unite neighbors and whose story is tied deeply to the three women and a statue of a bring back a sense of community and understanding. Along the way she mysterious, unnamed saint that seems to watch over their family. Titled finds a lost friend, grows out her bangs, acquires a menagerie of pets, and after a line from Hamlet, the novel is a meditation of profound discovers who exactly is responsible for the disappearances plaguing the town displacement, parental hauntings and the enduring connections to our of Murbridge. Told through board posts and draft emails Darcy never quite families and pasts, an indictment of colonialism as well as a love story. It is gets around to sending, THE COMMUNITY BOARD is the story of a an homage to women who break social norms, to the beauty in survival, woman learning to live alone and a town learning to live with itself. Funny, and also a critique of Western scholarship on Tibet. It is about the transfer sweet and timely, THE COMMUNITY BOARD will appeal to fans of of stolen antiquities across borders as well as the transfer of refugees and Where’d You Go Bernadette? and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. their stories, following in the footsteps of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. Tara Conklin is a writer and former lawyer whose first novel, The House Girl, was a New York Times bestseller, #1 IndieNext pick, Target book club pick Tsering Lama has earned an MFA from Columbia University. She has and has been translated into 8 languages. Her second novel, The Last received grants and residencies from Tin House, Vermont Studio Center, Romantics, published in February 2019 and was also a New York Times Hedgebrook, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Barbara Deming bestseller. Memorial Fund, among many others.
FOREIGN CO-AGENTS
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