New Tolkien Book

Some favorite Norse myths - Sigurd the Gram-wielding, dragon-slaying Volsung and the Fall of the Niflungs - will be retold by J.R.R. Tolkien in the forthcoming The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (May, 2009). Tolkien wrote the previously unpublished manuscript in Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s. His son, Christopher Tolkien, will provide commentary in the edition by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HarperCollinsUK for the British). Christopher has a good edition, by the way, of the Hervararsaga, the Norse saga that Olof Rudbeck drew a map for in Verelius' 1672 edition - the very map that would eventually lead him on his life-long quest for Atlantis.

Michael Beschloss’ Next Book: Wartime Presidential Leadership

Michael Beschloss' new book - sold at auction to Crown - will tell the two-hundred year story of American wartime presidential leadership (Publishers Weekly). Beschloss, who received an Emmy for his work on the “Decisions that Shook the World” series, now serves as NBC News Presidential Historian. He has been working on the subject since college, when he wrote an undergraduate thesis on Kennedy and Roosevelt, which later became Kennedy and Roosevelt: the Uneasy Alliance (1980).

David McCullough's Next Book: Americans in Paris

A few hours ago, it was announced that David McCullough has sold his next book to Simon & Schuster. The still untitled project will tell the story of Americans in Paris: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Morse, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William L. Shirer, Josephine Baker, to name a few. McCullough’s 1776 has 3 million copies in print, and his John Adams will be broadcast on HBO in the spring of 2008, the same time, incidentally, as my Vienna 1814 will be out. McCullough, at first, had trouble convincing his editor of the merits of writing about the cranky second president. John Adams went on to become the best-selling biography in Simon & Schuster history.

Writer’s Advance Tops Rolling Stone and Prime Minister

When his forthcoming memoir went to auction, Keith Richards won an advance of 7 million. Last month, Tony Blair received 9 million for his autobiography. But the Welshman Ken Follett has bagged an even larger advance for his upcoming trilogy, tentatively entitled The Century, about families caught up in the crises of the first, second and cold wars. The advance, including foreign rights deals, is a reported 50 million dollars. Not bad for a socialist from Cardiff.

Daredevil Motorcyclist Not a Big Jump Actually

What do you do after writing books about Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, Jimmy Carter, Henry Ford, John Kerry, Rosa Parks, Father Michael J. McGivney, Hurricane Katrina, and editing the Ronald Reagan diaries? This was historian Douglas Brinkley’s dilemma. His answer: a biography of the daredevil motorcyclist and seventies icon, Evel Knievel.

Actually this is not a big jump, pardon the pun. You may remember Brinkley shaking up the dry, run-of-the-mill history lecture format in the early 1990s when he took a small class of students on a six-week road trip across America, reading classics of literature and seeing everything from Graceland to Monticello. They met William S. Burroughs, toured Jack London’s place, and stayed with Ken Kesey, who took them on a ride on his legendary psychedelic bus, Further. (See his The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey). Brinkley has also edited the papers of Jack Kerouac, and he is now editing the third volume of the letters of Kentuckian Hunter S. Thompson.

Evel Knievel: Daredevil in Winter was sold on proposal last week. Given the drama surrounding the motorcyclist’s life, Brinkley’s book should attract many readers – and not just children of the seventies who rode red-white-blue bikes and tried to jump everything that did not move.

A Debut Author, A Self-Published Book, and A Seven Figure Deal

Brunonia Barry has sold her first book, the self-published The Lace Reader to William Morrow in a seven-figure deal. It’s a thriller set in 1990s Salem, Massachusetts, her hometown, and deals with the experiences of a heroine, who like her family, can read the future by staring at patterns in lace. It’s a story, according to her website, “about trusting your own intuition, even if the rest of the world thinks you're crazy.” Here’s the Publishers Weekly review that generated the excitement that led to the book deal, and the selling of translation rights now across Europe.

Agent Zigzag

A few weeks ago, Tom Hanks (New Line Cinema) purchased rights to Ben MacIntyre’s new biography of the colorful conman and World War II double agent Eddie Chapman, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal. They edged out Warner Brothers, in a short auction, in a seven-figure deal. Hanks and Gary Goetzman of Playtones will produce.
MacIntyre is author of several popular histories, including The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief, and Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche. Agent Zigzag, published by Harmony Books, draws on many newly declassified MI5 files and hit bookstores in the United States in September.

Finding Atlantis Goes to China

Finding Atlantis – the story of the flamboyant Olof Rudbeck (Sweden’s “Leonardo da Vinci”) and his adventurous hunt for the fabled lost civilization of Atlantis (which he believed he had found in Sweden!) – has been translated into several foreign languages. Thanks to Zhejiang People’s Publishing House, it’s now also out in Chinese.