Soho Press Rights List Phone: 212.260.1900 Email: [email protected] Foreign Rights Guide Soho Press Rights List Current and Forthcoming 2013—2014 Foreign Rights Soho Press, Inc. 853 Broadway New York, NY 10003 1 Soho Press Rights List Phone: 212.260.1900 Foreign Rights Guide Email: [email protected] Hot new titles from Soho! F.H. Batacan F.H. Batacan was born in Manila and graduated from the University of the Philippines. She worked in the Philippine intelligence community before turning to broadcast journalism. Smaller and Smaller Circles, her debut novel, won the prestigious Palanca Award (which is known as the "Pulitzer of the Philippines") as well as the Philippine National Book Award. Smaller and Smaller Circles This award-winning literary noir, hailed as the first Filipino crime novel, tells the heartbreaking story of two Catholic priests on the hunt for a serial killer in the Sept notorious dump city of northern Manila 2014 In northeast Manila's Quezon City is a district called Payatas—a 50-acre dump known as "Smokey Mountain" that is home to thousands of people who live off of what they can scavenge there. It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in a city whose law enforcement is World already stretched thin, devoid of forensic resources and rife with corruption. So when the eviscerated bodies of 10-year-old boys begin to appear in the dump heaps, there is no one to seek justice on their behalf. In the rainy summer of 1997, two Jesuit priests take the matter of protecting their flock into their own hands. Father Gus Saenz has been a priest for three decades, but he is also a respected forensic anthropologist, one of the few in the Philippines, and has been tapped by the Director of the National Bureau of Investigations as a backup for police efforts. Together with his protege, Father Jerome Lucero, a psychologist, Saenz dedicated himself to tracking down the monster preying on these impoverished boys. F.H. Batacan Cited as the first Filipino crime novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles is a poetic masterpiece of (cover coming soon!) literary noir, a sensitive depiction of a time and place, and fascinating story about the Catholic Church and its place in its devotees' lives and communities. Early Praise for Smaller and Smaller Circles Winner of the Palanca Prize "It’s a dirty, gritty police procedural with a good-guy detective, who also happens to be a Jesuit priest and a forensic anthropologist . Satisfyingly paced, and crime-thriller gruesome." —Time Out Beijing 2 Soho Press Rights List Phone: 212.260.1900 Foreign Rights Guide Email: [email protected] Heda Margolius Kovaly Heda Margolius Kovaly was a Czech writer and translator. She was born in 1919 in Prague to Jewish parents. In 1944 she and her family were taken to Auschwitz, where her parents were immediately killed but which she managed to survive by getting selected for a work detail. After escaping from a transport to Bergen-Belsen, she was reunited with her husband, who had survived Dachau and become a devout Communist. In 1952, he would be tried for conspiracy and killed in a Czech jail. Kovaly's memoir of her time in Auschwitz and of the early years of Czechoslovak communism, Under a Cruel Star, was first pub- lished in 1973 and has since been published in many languages and many editions. Her crime novel, Innocence, is based in large part on her own experiences in early 1950s Prague. Kovaly died in 2010 at age 91. Innocence Renowned Holocaust memoirist Heda Margolius Kovaly's crime novel of 1950s commu- nist Prague has been rediscovered and is finally available to the world, thirty years after Spring 2015 it was published in the Czech Socialist Republic! In 1985, renowned Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator, and political exile Heda Margolius Kovaly turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by the stories of Raymond Chandler, Kovaly World knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague--her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution, her own persecution at his disgrace--into a gorgeous psychological thriller- cum-detective novel. Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, Innocence follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who Heda Margolius Kovaly work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself in difficult circumstances. As the novel brings this group alive, it tells their various life stories that have brought them to this job, the secrets they share with one another, and the secrets they keep. When the detective trying to solve the first murder is found slain by the cinema, all of their secrets come out into the light. This smart, evocative, and deeply stirring literary crime novel is sure to be a translation phenome- non around the word. Praise for Under a Cruel Star “A tragic story told with aplomb, humor and tenderness . Highly recommended.” —Publishers Weekly “An exceptionally intimate and poignant memoir . Illuminating.” —Library Journal 3 Soho Press Rights List Phone: 212.260.1900 Foreign Rights Guide Email: [email protected] Okey Ndibe Okey Ndibe teaches fiction and African literature at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. He is the author of the novel Arrows of Rain, which has drawn praise from numerous critics and authors, including Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, John Edgar Wideman, Michael Thelwell, and Niyi Osundare. Ndibe also co-edited (with Chenjerai Hove) a book titled Writers, Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa. Ndibe is the founding editor of African Commentary, a magazine published in the US by novelist Chinua Achebe. Foreign Gods, Inc. Ike's plan is fueled by desperation. Despite a degree in economics from a major American college, his strong accent has barred him from the corporate world. Forced to eke out a living as Jan 2014 a cab driver, he is unable to manage the emotional and material needs of a temperamental African American bride and a widowed mother demanding financial support. When he turns to gambling, his mounting losses compound his woes. World And so he travels back to Nigeria to steal the statue, where he has to deal with old friends, family, and a mounting conflict between those in the village who worship the deity, and those who practice Christianity. A meditation on the dreams, promises and frustrations of the immigrant life in America; the nature and impact of religious conflicts; an examination of the ways in which modern culture creates or heightens infatuation with the "exotic," including the desire to own strange objects and hanker after ineffable illusions; and an exploration of the shifting nature of memory, Foreign Gods is a brilliant work of fiction that illuminates our globally interconnected world like no other. “We clearly have a fresh talent at work here. It is quite a while since I sensed creative promise on this level.” —Wole Soyinka, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature "Foreign Gods, Inc. reads like the narrative of a taxi-driving Faust in modern Nigeria and America. With Moliere-like humorous debunking of religious hypocrisy and rancid materialism, it teems with characters and situations that make you laugh in order not to cry." —Ngugi wa Thiong'o, author of Wizard of the Crow "Foreign Gods, Inc. is a blistering exploration of the contemporary African immigrant experience in America. Ndibe tackles tough questions: from the shifting notions of home and identity to the nature of greed. In prose which is fresh and often funny, Ndibe draws the reader into the heartbreaking story of Ike Uzondu's attempt to survive in a world which seems determined to crush him." —Chika Unigwe, author of On Black Sisters Street 4 Soho Press Rights List Phone: 212.260.1900 Email: [email protected] Foreign Rights Guide Frontlist and Forthcoming 5 Soho Press Rights List Phone: 212.260.1900 Foreign Rights Guide Email: [email protected] John Straley John Straley, a criminal investigator for the state of Alaska, lives in Sitka with his son and wife, a marine biologist who studies whales. He is the Shamus Award-winning author of The Curious Eat Themselves and The Woman Who Married a Bear. Cold Storage, Alaska An offbeat, often hilarious crime novel set in the sleepy Alaskan town of Cold Storage from Shamus Award winning author of the Cecil Younger series. Newly reformed and with the dream of opening a bar-slash-church, Clive “The Milkman” McCahon returns to his withering Alaska hometown after a 7-year jail stint for dealing coke. He has a lot to Feb 2014 make up to his younger brother, Miles, who has dutifully been taking care of their ailing mother— and, really, all of Cold Storage. World But Clive doesn’t realize the trouble he’s bringing home. His vengeful former business partner is Germany: hot on his heels, and a stick-in-the-mud State Trooper is dying to bust him for narcotics. Will Clive’s BTB arrival breathe new life into the dying town and its hard-drinking, no-nonsense inhabitants? Or will the trouble he brings along be the last nail in Cold Storage’s coffin? Praise for John Straley "Strong and sobering . with his storyteller's sense of dramatic action [Straley's] in his glory." —The New York Times Book Review "Chandler, Ross Macdonald, James Crumley . Straley proves once again that he is up there with the great ones . His prose is as smooth as a well-tuned cello. He has tremendous feel- ing for the setting: not only the open waters and frosted countryside outside of Sitka and Juneau, but also the somewhat seedy streets of these cities." —Chicago Tribune The Big Both Ways Find out the criminal history of Cold Storage, Alaska .