McCormick & Williams
Frankfurt 2012
Lit Ag, 6.0, 11N
FICTION
NATALIE BAKOPOULOS (AW)
THE GREEN SHORE. An “Indie Next” and Entertainment Weekly “Must List” pick, this panoramic debut novel illuminates the political and social turbulence of late-1960s Athens through the lives of one middle-class family. When a military coup ushers in a repressive dictatorship, Eleni, a widowed doctor, her poet brother Mihalis, and her three grown children each grapples with the choice between resistance and accommodation, activism and love.
”Bakopoulos takes an event from halfway around the world and places the reader in the midst of the love, the angst, and the turmoil. Lovers of Greek culture and history--and students of its current political upheaval--will find much to discuss in this compelling novel.”--Library Journal
Natalie Bakopoulos received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, where she now teaches. Her work has received a Hopwood Award, an O. Henry Award, and an Arthur and Mary Platsis Prize for Work on the Greek Legacy. She teaches each summer for the Aegean Arts Circle in Andros, Greece, and was recently a fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.
North American—Simon & Schuster/Anjali Singh, June 2012
Subsidiary rights deals: Greece/Patakis, Bulgaria/Ciela, Dutch/Karakter
JOHN BRANDON (AW)
A MILLION HEAVENS. Brandon’s mesmerizing new novel centers on the luckless inhabitants of a small desert town in New Mexico, whose daily struggles are threaded together by their common fascination with a boy who has fallen into a mysterious coma.Brandon’s cast of characters includes a philosophical wolf, a dead teenage musician trapped in a gym-like purgatory, a thirty-something woman desperate to get pregnant, and a mayor in love with a prostitute, and manages to make them all not just credible but singular, sympathetic and even noble.
“John Brandon’s unpretentious, deeply heartfelt voice speaks to, and for, a certain type of reader — one who’s inhaled the gateway drugs of Hogwarts and Katniss, and is ready for more adult pleasures....like Salinger before him and contemporaries including Hannah Tinti, Tony Earley and Mark Haddon, Brandon is an author who expands the tent, delivering capital-letter good stuff to young readers and adults alike.”—New York Times Book Review
John Brandon is the author of ARKANSAS (2008) and CITRUS COUNTY (2010), both published by McSweeney's.He was raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida and received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. He won the John & Renee Grisham Fellowship in Creative Writing and is currently a Visiting Writer at the University of Mississippi.
North American—McSweeney’s/Eli Horowitz, July 2012
Subsidiary rights deals: UK/Little, Brown
KAREN ENGELMANN (AW)
THE STOCKHOLM OCTAVO is the story of Emil Larsson, a self-satisfied bureaucrat, bachelor and card sharp living in Sweden’s capitol city in 1791. When Emil’s friend, the gaming house owner Mrs. Sofia Sparrow, offers to lay his Octavo--a form of cartomancy that reveals the eight people who can change one’s fortune--Emil believes it will lead him into the arms of a rich wife. Instead he finds himself drawn into a more dangerous game - an assassination plot against King Gustav III--and with a chance to change history and save his country.
”Sweden's golden age is spiritedly captured in this finely wrought historical fiction....a swirling, swooping fanfare of a tale, with an immense cast and an exhilaratingly sustained finale.”--The Guardian
Karen Engelmann is a writer and designer. She was born and raised in the American Midwest, then moved to Malmö, Sweden after completing university studies in drawing and design. She now lives just north of New York City.
North American—Ecco Press/Lee Boudreaux, October 2012
Subsidiary rights deals: UK/Two Roads-Hodder, Holland/Orlando, Germany/Hoffman&Campe, Norway/Pantagruel, Italy/Rizzoli, Spain/Roca, Brazil/Rocco, France/Lattes, Czech/Euromedia, Bulgaria/Colibri, Taiwan/Marco Polo, Turkey/Koridor
ALLISON JAMESON (DM)
LITTLE BEAUTY. A lyrical literary novel about a woman named Laura Quinn, whose lonely existence on the remote Irish island of Inis Míol Mór is irrevocably altered when she accepts a housekeeping job on the mainland. Set mostly during the mid-1970s, the story follows Laura, her on-again off-again lover, Martin, and Finn and Audrey Campbell, the young couple who welcome Laura into their home. With no family and few friends, Laura is something of an outcast on the island, but after an unexpected and fateful encounter with Finn, Laura’s life and the lives of those around her become tangled in ways that none of them can foresee.
Alison Jameson is an Irish writer temporarily residing in Portland, OR. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, This Man and Me (Penguin Ireland, 2006), was a best seller in Ireland and was long-listed for the IMPAC Award. Her most recent novel, Under My Skin, was published by Penguin Ireland in 2008.
United Kingdom and Ireland—Doubleday/Cat Cobain—status: final MS; publication April 2013
North American—TBD
OWEN KING (AW)
DOUBLE FEATURE. Owen King’s first novel is a hilarious, cinema-obsessed story of youth and its discontents, starring Sam Dolan, an aspiring filmmaker whose fledgling career takes an unexpectednosedive when his first film—an ambitious college-set drama called “Who We Are”--becomes a punch-line at midnight screenings around the country. Cutting back and forth between Sam’s childhood and his post-college years, the novel deals with Sam’s often futile struggle to escape the shadow of his larger-than-life father, Booth, a B-movie actor with a penchant for prosthetic noses and infidelity.
"Owen King's Double Feature is an ingeniously structured novel about fathers and sons, good art and bad art, success and failure, fight or flight. It manages both to redeem and condemn the overconfidence of youth, and introduces us to a wonderfully, tragically lovable cast of characters. This is a terrific book." –Tom Bissell, author of God Lives in St. Petersburg
Owen King is the author of We’re All in This Together: A Novella and Stories, and co-editor (with John McNally) of the fiction anthology Who Can Save Us Now? He lives in New York with his wife, novelist Kelly Braffet.
North American—Scribner/Brant Rumble—status: MS delivered; publication March 2013
DEBORAH COPAKEN KOGAN (DM)
THE RED BOOK. Four female roommates from Harvard class of ’89 reconvene at their 20th reunion: a recently pink-slipped securities broker, desperate to conceive a child; a college lesbian, married to a male novelist; a former actress turned wife to a famous Hollywood director; and a foreign correspondent whose first husband was killed. The four women bring their families, their successes, their failures, their questions, and their desires to a relationship-changing, score-settling, and completely unforgettable reunion weekend.
“Destined-to-be-a-classic…a sharply funny, clear-eyed examination, in the vein of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, of the power and burden of privilege, the reality of being a modern woman and the lasting bonds of female friendship.” —Vanity Fair
Deborah Copaken Kogan is the author of two works of non-fiction, Hell Is Other Parents and Shutterbabe, her bestselling memoir about her years a war photographer. She has also written a previous novel, Between Here and April.
North American—Hyperion Voice/Jill Schwartzman, April 2012
Subsidiary rights deals: UK/Virago, Holland/Artemis, Spain/Lumen
LEILA MEACHAM(DM)
TUMBLEWEEDS. In her follow-up to New York Times bestseller Roses, Leila Meacham returns to small-town Texas and a multi-generational tale of love and betrayal, secrets and lies. In Kersey, Texas, the kind of Panhandle town that lives and dies by its Friday-night football games, a high school love triangle has unexpected consequences. John and Trey, best friends and football stars, are both in love with sweet, beautiful Cathy. All three seem destined for great things—college, success, happiness—until a tragic accident tears them apart and changes their lives forever..
Leila Meacham is the author of New York Times bestseller Roses (Grand Central, 2010), which has been translated into 23 languages. She lives with her husband in San Antonio, Texas.
World English—Grand Central/Deb Futter, June 2012
Subsidiary rights deals: Holland/De Kern, Spain/Viceversa, Israel/Matar, Russia/Hemiro, Bulgaria/Bard, Czech Rep/Euromedia, Slovak Rep/Ikar
ALIX OHLIN (AW)
INSIDE. Shortlisted for the 2012 Giller Prize, Alix Ohlin’s second novel is a profoundly moving yet unsentimental portrait of three entwined lives—a divorced psychologist, her young female patient, and her ex-husband—that shifts back and forth in time across ten years and various locations: Montreal, Canada; Iqaluit, in the Canadian Arctic; Kigali, Rwanda; New York and Los Angeles. A searing and unflinching examination of love and loss, INSIDE explores the dangers and imperatives of making ourselves responsible to other people.
“Ohlin displays a profound empathy for people at their least rational--and most human.” --Entertainment Weekly
Alix Ohlin is the author of critically acclaimed novel The Missing Person as well as the two collections of stories: Signs and Wonders and Babylon and Other Stories (both Knopf). She was born in Montreal and graduated from Harvard and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.
North American—Gary Fisketjon/Knopf, June 2012
Subsidiary rights deals: UK/Quercus, France/Gallimard, Italy/Garzanti, Holland/Cossee, Germany/C.H. Beck
HANNA PYLVAINEN (AW)
WE SINNERS. Stemming in part from her own unconventional upbringing in the Laestadian faith, Hanna Pylväinen’s debut novel is a nuanced portrait of a troubled yet loving religious family. Each chapter is told from the distinctive point of view of a different Rovaniemi as they grapple in some way with their relationships to their faith, to one another, and to the outside world, both embracing the security of their community and chafing against its restrictions.
“[A] remarkably sensitive family portrayal, a powerful and unforgettable debut.” —*Starred Library Journal
Hanna Pylväinen graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was also a postgraduate Zell Fellow. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony residency and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She is from suburban Detroit.
North American—Holt/Gillian Blake, August 2012
CALLIE WRIGHT (AW)
LOVE ALL. A novel of love, infidelity, and high school tennis set in the idyllic American village of Cooperstown, New York. Told through the voices of three generations of the Obermeyer family, LOVE ALL charts the collapse of a seemingly stable marriage and its effects on the teenage children after their father’s affair is brought to light.
Callie Wright graduated from Yale and received an M.F.A. from the University ofVirginia, where she was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow in Creative Writing.Her short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories and The Southern Review. This is her first novel.
World English—Henry Holt/Sarah Bowlin—Status: Revised MS delivered; publication June 25, 2013
Subsidiary rights deals: Italy/Bollati Boringhieri
NON-FICTION
BLAKE BAILEY (DM)
PHILIP ROTH: THE BIOGRAPHY. From National Book Critics Circle Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Blake Bailey, the definitive and authorized biography of Philip Roth, one of the most celebrated and prolific authors of our time. Roth and Bailey have signed a collaboration agreement that guarantees Bailey unrestricted access to materials including Roth’s complete archives, personal papers, taped interviews, and unpublished writings.Like Blake’s previous biographies, this book will be a nuanced, comprehensive, thoroughly researched yet eminently readable portrait of one of the most important figures in American literature.
Blake Bailey is the author of several books, including the 2009 NBCC and Francis Parkman Prize winner Cheever: A Life, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the year; A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, a finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award; and Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, forthcoming from Knopf in March 2013. Blake’s memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned, will be published by Norton in 2014.
GREGORY BOYLE (DM)
BARKING TO THE CHOIR: Now Entering the Kinship of God. Picking up where the author’s best-selling debut, Tattoos on the Heart, ended, BARKING TO THE CHOIR moves beyond the themes of compassion for and service to others and invites readers to enter into a deeper understanding of kinship, the sacred relationship of being one with another person. Drawing from literature, scripture, and of course Father G’s many humbling, joyous, often funny and always profound experiences working with the homies and homegirls at Homeboy Industries, BARKING TO THE CHOIR will be at once both a celebration of our common, messy humanity and a challenge: to upset the status quo, to move beyond our comfort zone and bridge the divisions between us, to restore to those people on the margins a renewed sense of self- worth, and to recognize ourselves in one another.
A New York Times and Los Angeles Times best seller, Tattoos on the Heart was named one of the Best Books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly and was the PEN USA 2011 Best Creative Nonfiction Book. Tattoos is currently in its 12th printing, with more than 100,000 copies sold and it has been adopted by numerous university, high school, and even city-wide reading programs throughout the nation.
North America (English and Spanish)—Free Press/Alessandra Bastagli—Status: MS due August 2013
TOM CLYNES (DM)
THE BOY WHO PLAYED WITH FUSION. The story of Taylor Wilson’s unlikely (and successful) quest to build his own nuclear fusion reactor at the age of 14. Now 17, Wilson has since won nine Intel Science awards, spoken at TED, and developed lifesaving innovations in medicine and national security. Through Wilson’s story, Clynes will explore the challenges facing gifted children and the burgeoning world of amateur science.
Tom Clynes covers environmental issues, science, and extraordinary personalities for magazines such as National Geographic, Popular Science, Men’s Journaland GQ, and is the author of the book Wild Planet (Visible Ink Press, 1995). Tom’s magazine stories have appeared in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American series of magazine-writing anthologies.
North American—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Eamon Dolan—Status: proposal; MS due November 2013
Subsidiary rights deals: UK/Faber
JOHN DONVAN/CAREN ZUCKER (AHH)
JIGSAWED tells the epic story of the history of autism, from its discovery in the 1930s by a Viennese psychiatrist to the cutting edge present of advocacy and research around the world, an expansion of the authors’ widely read article from The Atlantic on autism’s first patient.
John Donvan is a correspondent on the long-running television program “Nightline.” Caren Zucker is a television producer and mother of an autistic son.