Buzz

Novelist and inspirational author Jan Goldstein devoted his podcast “All That Matters” to our deceased founder and president Linda Chester — a beautiful tribute to her spirit and personal mandate to spread compassion and knowledge through books.

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Lovely news: When Children Feel Pain by Rachel Rabkin Peachman and Anna C. Long is a Publishers Weekly Book of the Week.
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We are over the moon about Annalee Newitz’ three starred reviews for The Terraformers. Here is the glowing Publishers Weekly review: “Newitz performs a staggering feat of revolutionary imagination in this hopeful space-opera.”

Kimberly Christman-Campbell, our resident fashion historian and author of The Way We Wed has an article in The Washington Post on First Lady Jill Biden.
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The New York Daily News calls Secrets of the Force by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman “the definitive origin story”!
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Margot Mifflin’s Looking for Miss America is selected for The New York Times “Paperback Row.”
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We’re over the moon and the stars! Amazon Editorial Director names Joyce Maynard’s Count the Ways her “hands-down favorite book of the year thus far” on The View!
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Brava to Elizabeth Brundage whose new novel The Vanishing Point was chosen as a Summer Read on The Today Show by Harlan Coben!
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Joyce Maynard’s new novel Count the Ways is the “hand’s-down favorite book” of Amazon Editorial Director Sarah Gelman. It’s getting the red carpet treatment this month on Amazon and in Joe Louis Plaza next to Madison Square Garden!

Kudos to our oral historians Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman! Their first comprehensive oral history of Star Wars, Secrets of the Force, is excerpted in Esquire:
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Read Joyce Maynard’s fascinating profile in Elle magazine.
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Brava to Elizabeth Brundage’s whose new novel The Vanishing Point is a New York Times Book Review “New and Notable” book!
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Congratulations to Joyce Maynard whose new novel, Count the Ways was chosen by Good Morning America, the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and AARP Magazine as one of the summer’s best books!
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Author of The Case for Space, Robert Zubrin is interviewed in The New Yorker.
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Congratulations to Margot Mifflin whose feminist cultural history, Looking for Miss America, won the Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women’s Studies!
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Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz is reviewed in The New Yorker!
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Bustle choose The Vanishing Point by Elizabeth Brundage as one of the Best New Books of the Year!
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Congratulations to author Martin Cooper, the founding father of the cell phone, whose memoir Cutting the Cord was optioned by producer Dana Brunetti (The Social Network, House of Cards)!
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Author Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society and author of the classic The Case for Mars as well as the recent The Case for Space comments on the successful flight of the helicopter Ingenuity on Mars. This is the first time we’ve flown anything over a celestial body other than Earth.
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The Netflix trailer is out for for Things Heard & Seen based on Elizabeth Brundage’s fabulously spooky novel All Things Cease to Appear.
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Mark Ruffalo keeps marching on! He won the SAG Award for Best Actor in a miniseries for I Know This Much Is True, and gave author Wally Lamb a shout-out for his novel. LCLA represents this book and we are thrilled that Mark singles out Wally, as well as calls attention to mental health issues. Congrats Wally & Mark!
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Annalee Newitz, author of Four Lost Cities, recounts in The New York Times how the Romans’ rebuilding of Pompeii was not unlike
a major infrastructure campaign in contemporary times:
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Terrific interview with client Martin Cooper, considered the “Father of the Cell Phone.” His book Cutting the Cord tells the story about the invention that revolutionized the world.
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Joyce Maynard, whose new novel, COUNT THE WAYS, will debut in June, has a powerful and chilling essay in Vanity Fair:
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Salma Hayek is reading Celia Stahr’s FRIDA IN AMERICA while she nurses her ankle!

Congrats to Elizabeth Brundage for her Starred Booklist review of The Vanishing Point.

It gives nothing away to acknowledge that the famous photographer Rye Adler is presumed dead, though his body hasn’t been found, since the book opens with that startling news as read in the paper by Julian Ladd, who had once been Adler’s fellow student at the famous Brodsky Workshop, where they had been in love with the same young woman, Magda, a fellow student. Julian is obsessively jealous of Rye’s genius but succeeds in marrying Magda when Rye marries Simone, a poet and translator, instead. Time passes, and Magda and Julian’s son, Theo, worried about the deteriorating condition of the world, becomes a heroin addict, dropping out of college and living on the streets. The novel moves smoothly between the points of view of the five principal characters as it shifts between past and present. An ambitious, literary novel, The Vanishing Point is distinguished by its characterizations, its pervasive air of melancholy, and its beautiful style (“The sun steeps like tea in the copper dusk”). Not surprisingly, there is a great deal of thought-provoking attention given to the meaning and aesthetics of photography, and, like great photography, the novel is ultimately a work of memorable art. — Michael Cart

Mark Ruffalo wins the Golden Globe for Best Actor in the TV series adaptation of our book I Know This Much Is True.
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Huzzah to Annalee Newitz on a glowing review of Four Lost Cities in The New York Times
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Brava on Joyce Maynard’s Starred Review from Kirkus Reviews:

Since she was once a homeless orphan, Eleanor’s chaotic, joyous family and farm mean everything to her. And then….

How much pain and loss can one person take? How can you end up evicted from a world you built yourself? How can doing the right thing backfire totally? In her 10th novel, Maynard vividly imagines a scenario that answers these questions with hard-won wisdom, patiently leading her protagonist and her readers through the valley of bitterness and isolation to what lies on the other side. When she is just 16, Eleanor’s alcoholic, self-involved parents are killed in a car crash. At boarding school, she comforts herself by creating picture books about an orphan who travels the world; these sell to a publisher, and by the time she’s a sophomore in college, she has enough money to drop out, drive into the countryside, and buy a farm. “It looked like a house where people who loved each other had lived,” she thinks. If you build it, they will come—right? Nonetheless, several years go by in solitude, and not without additional tragedy. At last, she meets Cam, the handsome, redheaded woodworker who will give her three children they both adore. But even as Eleanor revels in motherhood with every cell of her being, her glue gun, and her pie pan, she knows fate cannot be trusted. “If anything really terrible ever happened to one of our children, I couldn’t survive,” she tells her husband. Could loving her children too much be her downfall? she worries. When an accident that her husband could have prevented changes their lives, she will find out. She will find out how, in your grief, you can drive away the people you love most. And she will find out, slowly, what you can do about that. The novel bites off a lot—a Brett Kavanaugh–inspired storyline, a domestic abuse situation, a trans child, Eleanor’s career—and manages to resolve them all, in some cases a bit hastily.

Maynard creates a world rich and real enough to hold the pain she fills it with.

We’re so excited that Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear will be debuting as a feature film on Netflix on April 30th as “Things Seen and Heard,” starring Amanda Seyfried.
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We’re excited by the news that client Jan Goldstein’s insightful podcast, “All That Matters,” has broken through to the top 10% of podcasts world-wide (per Listen Notes). Jan presents stories that connect us all. Listen on Apple, Spotify or click here.

Good in Bed, our #1 New York Times bestseller by Jennifer Weiner, is being made into film by HBO!

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MGM will be filming a biopic of our book Sammy Davis, Jr., My Father, a stirring memoir by Tracey Davis and Dolores Barclay! 

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So exciting to see a full-page review in the New York Times Book Review review of Margot Mifflin’s entertaining, feminist history of the Miss America Pageant, Looking for Miss America. This is the pinnacle of coverage for any book.

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Congratulations to Marc Bloom for winning Book of the Year for Amazing Racers from the Track and Field Writers of America!

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We’re seriously thrilled that Mark Ruffalo won the Emmy for his portrayal of both Birdsey twins in Wally Lamb’s extraordinary novel-into-series I Know This Much Is True. Mark’s acceptance speech was passionate, compassionate, and aptly political: 

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Congratulations to Daniel H. Wilson, who is developing the script for his short story The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever for Paramount.

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Moving interview with our author Erica Heller and a review of her book One Last Lunch in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

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It’s rare to see a book garner an anniversary edition. The Case For Mars by Robert Zubrin will enjoy a 25-year anniversary edition in early 2020 (Simon & Schuster) with a new foreword by Elon Musk (the original foreword was by Arthur C. Clarke!).

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The agency is delighted to announce that filming has been completed on the adaptation of Laurie Fox’s novel The Lost Girls, a contemporary take on Wendy Darling and her descendants. Livia De Paolis, who will star, also adapted the work for film and directed it. The film will star the great Vanessa Redgrave, her daughter Joely Richardson, Iain Glen (Game of Thrones), Julian Ovenden (Downtown Abbey) and Parker Stevens (Obama in Southside With You).

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Thrilled to see an extensive article— and rave — in The New Yorker based entirely on Margot Mifflin’s Looking for Miss America:

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In their “New Best Books” column, People magazine hails Amy Poeppel’s Musical Chairs as “fiercely funny”!

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We’re thrilled to announce that our fashion historian-in-residence, Kimberly Chrisman Campbell, received a richly deserved NEH Public Scholars grant to write her biography, Mod Man, on instrumental fashion designer Chester Weinberg (1930–1985), a contemporary of Calvin Klein’s and Donna Karan’s (Chester was Calvin Klein’s Jeans) and, sadly, the first prominent American designer acknowledged to have succumbed to AIDS. Chrisman-Campbell’s forthcoming book this December is The Way We Wed from Running Press.

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So confirming to see our science fiction novelist and science journalist/author Annalee Newitz bring home a Hugo Award for the second year in a row for Best Fancast (podcast), along with co-host Charlie Jane Anders:

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Brava to Margot Mifflin whose book Looking for Miss Americawas chosen as one of Publisher’s Weekly’s “Best Summer Reads”!

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Congratulations to Amy Poeppel whose Musical Chairs was chosen as one of Good Morning America’s “Top 25 Books of the Summer”!

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We’re delighted to share early praise for One Last Lunch: A Final Meal with Those Who Meant So Much to Us edited by Erica Heller:

The death of someone near often leaves survivors wanting just one more encounter and a chance to say the unsaid, to tie up loose ends. Heller (Yossarian Slept Here, 2011) contacted friends, spouses, and children of late famous people—Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Julia Child, Paul Newman, and David Bowie among them—and asked them to imagine one last lunch with their friend or loved one. An encounter with Steve Jobs comes in the form of a comic. Norman Mailer’s daughter finds that her father has softened; Kenneth Tynan’s daughter finds him as obtuse and irascible as ever. And one writer gets stood up in his own invented lunch with Oliver Sacks! Heller herself holds court with her own difficult father and does not rewrite their history, even a little. While this book may appeal most to Boomers, imagined lunches with luminaries like the ever-enchanting Prince and the ever-on Robin Williams might just spur Gen Xers and younger “gens” to read on and learn about artistic and literary lights in this special and unique way. A delightful repast.

— Joan Curbow, Booklist

Praise for Margot Mifflin’s Looking For Miss America;

“A sharp and immensely entertaining look at one of our country’s most enduring—and controversial—traditions, LOOKING FOR MISS AMERICA also paints a microcosmic portrait of our past century, in unflinching and irreverent detail. With her gimlet eye and wry wit, Margot Mifflin is the perfect tour-guide on this journey through America’s fundamentals: cheesecake, capitalism, racism, sexism, ambition, and old-school, unabashed glamor. I couldn’t put it down.”

—Karen Abbott, author of New York Times bestseller The Ghosts of Eden Park

Congratulations to the agency’s own Laurie Fox, whose second novel The Lost Girls, an exploration of the Peter Pan story from Wendy and her descendents’ point of view, feature film, starring Emma Thompson and Ellen Burstyn. Read More.

Congratulations on the publication of top fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell’s Worn On This Day: The Clothes That Made History (Running Press). Here’s an article on the book’s entry on Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President’ dress.
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