Sold: “The Investigator: Justice and Demons of the Balkan Wars” by Vladimir Dzuro

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In my work as a literary agent, I represent former Prague police detective Vladimir Dzuro, author of THE INVESTIGATOR: JUSTICE AND DEMONS OF THE BALKAN WARS, which I’ve recently sold to Potomac Books*, a division of University of Nebraska Press, for publication in Fall 2019. In the 1990s, while the wars in the former Yugoslavia were still raging, Dzuro began investigating war crimes. Thanks to publishing friend Janice Goldklang of Other Press, who introduced me to the author. His book is a view-from-the-ground narrative account of the brutal conflict fought among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians. It combines insight from his investigations of war crimes cases while the brutal war was still unfolding, and the search for and capture of war criminals after the conflict ended. The book was first published in the Czech Republic by Grada (pictured below). Author Dzuro is now Chief of New York Headquarters Office at the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services.

I’ve long been horrified and grimly fascinated by the Balkan Wars, and in 1995 edited and published a remarkable book titled Sarajevo, Exodus of a City, by Bosnian playwright Dzevad Karahasan. The back cover copy explains that the author “Sketches a cultural portrait of Sarajveo, describing the city plan, its domestic architecture, even its culinary styles—all intertwined with searing descriptions of the siege, and anecdotes about how his life and those of his neighbors were ravaged by war. A Muslim, Karahasan invokes the Sarajevo that was once ‘a microcosm, a center of the world that contained the whole world within itself,’ a ‘new Jerusalem’ where people of different languages, faiths, and cultures lived together harmoniously.” For the author, Sarajevo was a shining city, a second Jerusalem, from an explicitly philosemitic viewpoint. The Village Voice Literary Supplement named it one of their best books of that year. The book’s had a long shelf life, as in 2015, an Indian travel writer named Abhijit Dutta visited postwar Sarajevo and in a beautiful essay on a website called LiveMint closely read Karahasan’s book and used it to gauge what has been lost since the Balkan Wars began in 1991.

Despite the horrors of our calamitous century, and the last one, I derive meaning and purpose from helping authors like Dzevad Karahasan and Vladimir Dzuro contribute to the historical record about the recent war that gave rise to one of the darkest phrases in our modern lexicon, “ethnic cleansing.”

*Earlier this year I sold Potomac Books  Shattered Minds: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets by Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor, which will also be published in 2019.

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Happy to See “Mr & Mrs Hollywood” Back in Print

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In 2003 while Editor-in-Chief of Carroll & Graf Publishers I acquired, edited, and published Kathleen Sharp’s Mr & Mrs Hollywood, a juicy dual biography of Hollywood’s original power couple, Edie and Lew Wasserman. It got great reviews, like the one below*, and I’m very glad to see its back in print in a sleek new revised edition from Blackstone Publishing, the new book imprint of Blackstone Audio.

*”Sharp brings news…alleging that Ronald Reagan colluded with Wasserman to exempt MCA from Screen Actors Guild rules and offering evidence of Wasserman’s ties to he underworld and the White House.”–Hollywood Reporter

 

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Starred PW Review for “The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey”

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The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey: A Pot Thief Mystery
J. Michael Orenduff. Open Road, $14.99 trade paper (300p) ISBN 978-1-5040-4993-1

Orenduff successfully combines humor and homicide in his superb eighth Pot Thief whodunit (after 2016’s The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O’Keeffe). Part-time investigator Hubie Schuze, who unapologetically supports himself by illegally digging up ancient Native American pottery and then selling the artifacts at his Albuquerque store, accepts an adjunct teaching position at the University of New Mexico. Hubie was surprised by the offer, given that he had helped put a former head of the university’s art department in prison, but he soon gets invested in trying to connect with device-addicted millennials. Hubie dodges several bullets, including a sexual harassment claim by a student who offered to sleep with him in exchange for a better grade, but he becomes a murder suspect after one of his students, who was covered in a plaster cast for a 3-D model, is found dead inside it. Fans of campus satires will enjoy how Orenduff skewers academic politics and political correctness in the service of a fair-play plot. (May)

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I licensed the POT THIEF mysteries to Open Road Media in 2013, when there were six books in the series: The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras, The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy, The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier, The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein, The Pot Thief Who Studied Who Studied Billy the Kid, and The Pot Thief Who Studied D.H. Lawrence; in 2017, author J. Michael Orenduff published a seventh, The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O’Keeffe. Now, with the latest entry, The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey, Orenduff’s up to eight titles featuring Albuquerque antiquities dealer Hubie Schuze. If you enjoy light-hearted whodunits with loads of witty repartee among recurring characters, and colorful information on New Mexico’s culinary delights, I recommend the series to you, with the titles available in paperback and in digital editions. Ebook retailer Early Bird Books will be running a special deal for the books on April 23, if you want to buy them then. You can also order them directly from Open Road.

We also got this endorsement for the new book: “The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey is superb, a funny, totally puzzling mystery studded with the kind of delectable arcane knowledge Orenduff always brings to this series. I’ve loved every one of the POT THIEF books and this is the best yet.”—Tim Hallinan, author of Fields Where They Lay, a Junior Bender mystery

 

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Sold: “More Deadly than the Male: The First Ladies of Horror”

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I’m excited to have put together a deal for my author client Graeme Davis to edit and introduce a new anthology, More Deadly than the Male: The First Ladies of Horror, which Pegasus Books will publish in 2019. This follows up Davis’s 2017 anthology for Pegasus, Colonial Horrors: Sleepy Hollow and Beyond.
Details today on publishersmarketplace[dot]com:
<<Graeme Davis’s MORE DEADLY THAN THE MALE: The First Ladies of Horror, a new anthology collecting the best tales of horror by twenty-five female authors—both heralded and lesser-known figures—nearly all of whom published before the 1900s, presenting them to the modern reader with notes on the writers and their stories; included are works by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Mary Austin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Nesbit, and Madame Blavatsky, alongside discoveries like Mary Cholmondely and Charlotte Riddell, to Claiborne Hancock at Pegasus, in a nice deal, for publication in 2019, by Philip Turner at Philip Turner Book Productions (world).>>

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Saying Goodbye to Philip Kerr, a Favorite Novelist, and Hoping for One More Bernie Gunther Novel

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March 26 Update from Publishers Lunch:

Philip Kerr, 62, author of the Bernie Gunther crime novels and many other works of fiction for adults and children, died Friday of cancer. Putnam will publish his newest series novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts, on April 3, and Kerr had finished a draft of the next Gunther novel, Metropolis, slated for publication next year. Kerr’s longtime editor, Marian Wood, said in a statement: “Working with Philip Kerr was the kind of experience all editors hope to have. In the twenty-plus years we worked together I found him responsive, funny, brilliant, and totally committed to his writing and hence, to being edited as long as he thought the editing was serious. He was an amazing human being and I will always miss him. At the moment, there is a huge hole in my life. I suspect it will stay with me as long as he lives in my memory–which means, as long as I live.”
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So deeply saddened by the sudden death at age 62 of the hugely talented novelist Philip Kerr, creator of the outstanding 11-book Bernie Gunther detective series. I’ve read Kerr’s books since the Berlin Noir Trilogy, featuring the Berlin police detective Gunther began appearing in 1989. In 2012 I wrote a blog post “Loving Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther Novels” where I shared this video from his website:

Another time I wrote this about a later Gunther novel, Field Gray:

“Field Gray, a Bernie Gunther novel, features the detective who’s navigated the amoral world of Berlin before, during, and after WWII in seven magnificent books. The latest has especially brilliant plotting, w/the narrative taking Gunther and his memory through all the war years as he endures harsh interrogation from Yanks who arrest him in Cuba in 1954. I find inflections of the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison camps in the book. Kerr is a master. If you’ve never read a Bernie Gunther novel, I urge you to begin the series. March Violets is the first, and I do recommend you read them in order, though I supposed one could also just start with Field Gray.”

I woke this morning to find that a friend who knows how much I enjoy Kerr’s books had tagged me in a Facebook post linking to the brief obituary of Kerr from the Guardian pasted in here; I’m sure there will be many full tributes to come. Kerr wrote other books, as well, including a very good dystopian novel called The Second Angel. In an newsletter emailed to his readers last year, he wrote that there would be a new Bernie Gunther title out in spring 2018, Greeks Bearing Gifts. I see a cover for the US edition is on his website, which as of tonight does not yet mention his passing. I hope he was able to see the printed book before he died. My condolences to his family, and his US editor Marian Wood.

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Update on Carl Rollyson’s “The Last Days of Sylvia Plath”

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Readers of this blog may recall that in January I posted about a new book I’d sold as literary agent, The Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson. That post announced a deal I made for the volume rights with the University Press of Mississippi. Today I’m announcing that the author and I have also sold audio book rights to Blackstone Audio, to be published at the same time as the UPM book.

In 2013, Rollyson published American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, a full biography that chronicled Plath’s whole life, ending though it did even before her 31st birthday; in contrast, the new book will be a concise narrative covering just the last four months leading up to the poet’s suicide in 1963. From the sample material we’ve shared with both publishers, it’s fair to say Rollyon’s new book will incorporate some elements reminiscent of what’s known in newspaper writing as a tick-tock—a time- or date-driven narrative that propels the reader forward in to the daily life of its subject.

The book will also examine the role of Ted Hughes in the end of his estranged wife’s life, and the subject of manic depressive illness. With Rollyson knowing the Plath world well, the narrative will be informed by his knowledge of key source materials, some of which no earlier books will have benefited from. I’m sure it will be engrossing in whatever format readers find it, print, digital, or audio.

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“A rip-snorting new translation of ‘The Three Musketeers'”—Wall St Journal

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I’m delighted to see a superb review in this weekend’s Wall St. Journal of my agency client Lawrence Ellsworth’s new translation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. It appears in the print paper under the headlines “Less than Perfect Heroes,” and to the left in a scanned mock-up of the review  Here are some of the choicest bits:

“A rip-snorting new translation of ‘The Three Musketeers’ by the American Lawrence Ellsworth captures all the excitement and flair of Dumas’s great historical adventure that spawned several sequels and numerous films, TV series and cartoons….

Mr. Ellsworth does a wonderful job of communicating the energy, humor and warmth of Dumas’s work. This was not always the case with the translations of the 1840s and 1850s—still the ones most likely to be found in American bookstores and libraries—which mimic the rather stiff, elevated diction of writers like Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. Mr. Ellsworth’s snappier approach, which included putting back all the racier scenes elided from the Victorian translations, suits Dumas much better.

It also helps to put an end to the lie, persistent in the English-speaking world, that Dumas’s brand of popular fiction does not deserve the same attention as more ‘serious’ works. It was not something that Robert Louis Stevenson, who knew a thing or two about writing romantic adventures, would have ever subscribed to. ‘I do not say there is no character as well-drawn in Shakespeare,’ he wrote of d’Artagnan. ‘I do say there is none that I love so wholly.’”

This first new English-language edition of The Three Musketeers to come out in many years book is published by Pegasus Books, and is listed here on their website, with click-thru options to buy it if you wish. Their handsome hardcover edition—priced well at $26.95 for a volume that’s close to 800 pages—includes an Introduction, Dramatis Personae: Historical Characters, and Notes on the Text assembled by translator Ellsworth, who also selected period illustrations by Maurice Leloir for the title page spread and chapter openers. It is also available in all ebook formats. Ellsworth is the translator of Book II in Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, The Red Sphinx, and editor of the anthology, The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, both from Pegasus Books.

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Sold: “The Last Days of Sylvia Plath,” Important New Book on the Great Female Poet

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Last May I mentioned on this blog that as literary agent I was developing a book project with an author client who would be writing an important new book on Sylvia Plath. I’m happy to announce that that proposed book is now under contract with a publisher. The author and I are very excited about the arrangement we’ve made. The book will be titled The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, and the author is prolific biographer Carl Rollyson. We’ve sold it to the University Press of Mississippi. In a concise narrative, Rollyson will chronicle the last four months of the poet’s life, drawing on hitherto unexamined sources, including the archive of Harriet Rosenstein, a controversial figure who in the 1970s undertook a biography of Plath that she never completed or published. Rollyson’s book will be an imperative study apt to re-shape the way readers view the end of the poet’s tragically abbreviated life. I posted an announcement of the deal earlier today at publishersmarket[dot]com (listing below). The manuscript will be delivered to the publisher in early 2019.

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