Deals

LUV! So you think book publishing is all cut and dried and cutthroat? Here’s a big book-world romance that should curl your toes.
Hyperion is celebrating the acquisition this week of two novels by one Cassandra King. And who is she? Well, among other things, she is a woman who met her current husband, the great fictionmeister Pat Conroy, by bravely asking him back in the ’90s to give her a blurb for her first novel, “MAKING WAVES IN ZION”.  The king of such literary gems as “The Prince of Tides” and “The Great Santini” not only gave Cassandra a thumbs-up, he began to woo her, and they ended up married.
So Hyperion loves owning her new work, “THE SUNDAY WIFE”,  which will bow a year from now and concerns a preacher’s wife in a small Florida panhandle town. The Disney company also will bring out the paperback of “Making Waves,” which got this whole sweet romance started. That comes in the summer of 2003.
MENTIONING Pat Conroy, let me state here that when he read his work for our Literacy Partners fund-raiser years ago, Pat became, hands down, the greatest author-performer we ever had. He still holds the championship, and I hope someday he’ll return for one of our springtime reading galas. Conroy could have been a marvelous actor!

THE KITCHEN BOY a novel by Robert Alexander sold for six figures to Jane von Mehren at Viking/Penguin by Marly Rusoff… An elderly Russian living out his days in a suburb of Chicago leaves his granddaughter Kate a legacy: a tape to be played following his death that reveals his true identity. He was the kitchen boy of Nicholas and Alexandra and the last living witness to their brutal murders. Based on extensive historical research, and with a breathtaking surprise ending, THE KITCHEN BOY imaginatively answers the question posed by the recent discovery of the fact of two missing bodies in the Romanov family grave. Russian rights were sold for a record breaking six-figure sum.

A book offering aid and advice to those suffering from such chronic lung diseases as asthma, bronchitis and emphysema has been signed by Gerry Howard for Broadway Books. “LIFE AND BREATH” by Dr. Neil Schachter, writing with Deborah Chase, was a solid six-figure buy from new-fledged agent (and former Doubleday exec) Marly Rusoff.
The book will also offer advice to smokers on how they can help offset the damage done to their lungs by cigarettes. Dr. Schachter is a former president of the American Lung Association of New York.

Hyperion has bought a new novel by Cassandra King, the wife of novelist Pat Conroy, and also taken over paperback publication of one she published six years ago with a small press. The new one is “THE SUNDAY WIFE”, about a preacher’s wife in a small Florida Panhandle town who is faced with a problem because of her friendship with a rich and troubled local woman.
The previous book, published in 1995 by Alabama’s Black Belt Press, was called “Making Waves in Zion”, also with a small-town setting.
Hyperion publisher Ellen Archer negotiated the world English and audio rights deal with agent Marly Rusoff, and executive editor Leslie Wells will be the in-house editor for the new book, which will be published next October. The paperback of “Waves” will appear the following summer.
King has been a college writing teacher, has conducted corporate writing seminars, and worked for an Alabama weekly paper. She met best-selling novelist Conroy when she asked him to write a blurb for her first novel, and they now live together in South Carolina.

A young Freudian analyst, Matthew von Unwerth, has put the Viennese master on the couch in a literary deconstruction called “FREUD’S REQUIEM”,  which Riverhead’s Cindy Spiegel has just preempted for six figures for world rights.
The deal was made by Marly Rusoff, a former senior publicity executive and associate publisher at Doubleday, who is now agenting as an affiliate of the Carlisle & Company agency. It is a first book for von Unwerth, who directs the Brill Library, a center of research in psychoanalysis in Manhattan.
Rusoff explains that the author examines in detail an essay by Freud called “On Transience,” in which he describes a walk with an unidentified poet who is, in fact, Rilke, and notes how Freud reinterpreted everything that was said and done that day; as a result, von Unwerth has come to see psychoanalysis as “a science of mourning,” in which there are still redemptive possibilities.”