Former president George W. Bush is writing a book about decisions, reports the Associated Press. Robert Barnett negotiated world rights with Random House evp and publisher-at-large Steve Rubin, who will publish the tentatively titled DECISION POINTS with Crown in 2010. Instead of telling his life story, Bush “will concentrate on about a dozen personal and presidential choices” such as his choice of Dick Cheney as VP and sending troops to Iraq, his religious faith and his highly criticized response to Hurricane Katrina. “I want people to understand the environment in which I was making decisions. I want people to get […]
New Releases/Forthcoming
Patterson's Latest Collaborator
James Patterson is reaching across the ocean for his latest writing partner, working on a new thriller set primarily in Stockholm with Scandinavian crime writer Liza Marklund, best known for her Annika Bengtzon series. The book will be published in Sweden in 2010 with Marklund’s regular publisher Piratförlaget (of which she is a part owner), but that is the only territory sold so far. Robert Barnett at Williams & Connolly is representing rights for the US and the UK and has “a great deal of interest” from Patterson’s existing publishers in both territories. Linda Michaels, who was the “driving force […]
Partial DFW Novel Emerges
Agent Bonnie Nadell and David Foster Wallace’s widow Karen Green found a partial manuscript of THE PALE KING two months after the writer suicided. This week’s New Yorker carries a brief excerpt, and Little, Brown has what publisher Michael Piestch calls a tentative agreement to publish the work in 2010. “The characters are Internal Revenue Service agents working at an IRS facility in the Midwest. The intense tediousness of their jobs and their attempts to transcend boredom reflect Wallace’s preoccupation with the concept of ‘mindfulness’ — the idea, as he put it in a 2005 commencement speech, that you should […]
Starbucks to Feature Actress's Memoir
Actress Isabel Gillies’s HAPPENS EVERY DAY: An All-Too-True Story, will be the next book featured in 7,000 Starbucks locations across the US. Known for playing Detective Stabler’s wife on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Gillies memoir is about “coming to terms with the collapse of her marriage.’ Starbucks will carry the book as of March 24, Scribner’s publication date. Thus far, after seven titles so far, the “Starbucks effect” remains vague. The coffee chain certainly sells plenty of copies through it own outlets, but that does not always correlate to broader trade sales. Their most successful “discovery” was clearly […]
The Search for 28 New James Patterson Collaborators
James Patterson’s next novel AIRBORNE is an experimental, mostly electronic work. Instead of working with a single co-author, Patterson wrote the first and list chapters, with the other 28 short chapters each written by someone different. The writers were recruited through a contest held by Random House UK and Borders Australia. “Airborne will be released electronically, one chapter at a time, starting on March 20th. Later, a print edition will be published, but only as a prize of sorts for the participants in the competition – it will not be mass produced.”ReadWriteWeb
HMH To Publish Obscure Early Tolkien Novel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish The Legend of of Sigurd and Gudrun, “a thorough reworking in verse of old Norse epics” that predates The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, in May. AP