Latest e-letter from Publishers Weekly has announcement of the following deals:
Fiction by First-Time Novelists:
- Michael Boccacino’s Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling, “a Victorian gothic tale pitched as The Turn of the Screw meets Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell meets Jane Eyre and the love child of Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton, in which a feisty young governess at a dilapidated manor falls in love with her widower employer and discovers a dark alternate world called The Ending, the place for things that cannot die, in which the deceased mother of the two boys under her care has been waiting to pick up where she left off in the ominous House of Darkling . . . ” to Harper Perennial, for publication in July 2012
General/ Other
- Michael Kimball’s Big Ray, “the story of a son coming to terms with the sudden death of his obese father, told through 500 brief entries, moving back and forth between past and present, the father’s death and his life, between an abusive childhood and an adult understanding,” to Bloomsbury
Memoir
- South Carolina governor and tea party favorite Nikki Haley’s Can’t Is Not an Option, covering everything from growing up in rural south Carolina, doing bookkeeping and taxes for her parents in middle school — an early experience of fighting government red tape . . . ” to Sentinel, for publication on January 3, 2012
There were other deal announcements, such as Gaby Rodriguez’s untitled memoir, “about her experience faking a pregnancy for 6 1/2 months as a high school senior to determine the stereotypes of unwed teen mothers, unveiling the results at a student assembly weeks before graduation,” sold to Simon and Schuster Children’s but, alas, the time has come for self to resume the book she is currently reading, Edith Wharton’s (relatively depressing and mirth-less) The House of Mirth (Sample passage, Everyman’s Library edition, p. 68: “Expansive persons found him a little dry, and very young girls thought him sarcastic; but this air of friendly aloofness, as far removed as possible from any assertion of personal advantage, was the quality which piqued Lily’s interest. Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred.”)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
Kanlaon 