PW: Hot Deals

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Hot Deals
by John F. Baker -- May 3, 1999

Linda Richman has had a difficult time; at one

point she felt so overwhelmed by all the deaths
and tragedies in her life she didn't venture out
of her apartment for 11 years. Finally, she
learned to laugh about her troubles and, by
extension, teach other afflicted souls -including many of Hollywood's brightest -- to
do the same. So when her agent, Richard Pine
at Arthur Pine Associates, recently brought her
in to see publishers to talk about her book proposal for The
Courage to Laugh, several were anxious to meet her and sign her
book. In the end, it was Warner's Rick Horgan who took the North
American rights, beating out Dell/ Delacorte's Leslie Schnur for
what he called "very major money." There are a lot of selling points
for Richman in addition to what Pine described as her ability to
deliver "a real, true Jewish chicken soup for the soul." Richman is
probably best known to the public at large as the model for the
character played by comic Mike Meyers on Saturday Night Live. (It
doesn't hurt that Meyers is her son-in-law.) According to Horgan,
"The group who met her at Warner were bowled over by the wealth
of stories from her own life and the wry lessons that are implicit in
them." He plans to publish in fall 2000.
NATION OF MANY GODS
Far from being the monotheistic nation it once was, the United
States is now a country of remarkable religious pluralism. That is
the basic thesis of The New Religious America by Harvard
professor Diana Eck, who has chaired the university's Committee
on the Study of Religion for the past decade and whose book has
just been signed by Harper San Francisco executive editor John

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Loudon. Loudon said he had been pursuing Eck for a book suitable
for a trade readership for years, and when her agent, Jill Kneerim
of Boston's Palmer & Dodge, passed on word of the book's
availability, he snapped it up with what he called a "substantive"
preempt. Loudon said that The New Religious America, which
HarperSF will publish as its lead title in spring 2001, will be the
first book to reveal the extraordinary diversity of American
religious life, in which Muslims now outnumber many Protestant
denominations.
12 DEGREES OF KNOWING
A blast from the mystic East is to arrive by way of St. Martin's
Press, whose Michael Denneny has signed a program of no fewer
than 12 installments in a new series being created by followers of
the late guru Osho. The series, Insights for New Ways of Living,
with its first book out this fall and continuing into 2001, will consist
of decks of transformation and continuation cards, as well as an
Osho autobiography and works of wisdom on such matters as
creativity, aging, femininity and death. The deal, described as being
in the six figures, was put together by Jim Fitzgerald, himself an
SMP alumnus who is now agenting at the Carol Mann agency.
SHORT TAKES
Morgan Entrekin at Grove/Atlantic has signed Robert Olen
Butler for a satirical novel titled Desi about a spaceman and set in
the near future. According to Entrekin, the story has "a very big
surprise at the end and could answer once and for all whether there
is intelligent life beyond Earth." The agent is Kim Witherspoon....
Joanna Pulcini at the Linda Chester agency has sold Betty Kelly,
editor-in-chief at Morrow, a novel called Boy Still Missing by a
former colleague of Kelly's at Cosmopolitan, senior books editor
John Searles. It's part of a two-book deal for a strong six figures
and tells the story of a teenage boy involved in an affair with his
father's ex-mistress.... Emily Heckman at Pocket Books won a
heated three-day auction for a true account by ace San Francisco
Chronicle reporter Frank Viviano of the early days of the Mafia in
Sicily, based on the murder there a century ago of his great-greatgrandfather. The deal for Blood Washes Blood, for six figures, was
made by Amy Rennert of the West Coast office of Donnaud &
Rennert.
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