Jason Mark has reached an agreement with W.W. Norton to publish Remember the Earth: How Our Memories of Nature Can Protect the Planet, an environmental manifesto examining the concept of the “shifting baseline syndrome.” Familiar to scientists but not yet the general public, the shifting baseline syndrome describes the human tendency to forget past ecological circumstances and heedlessly accept new, damaging conditions as normal. Explaining how this amnesia undermines attempts to conserve wildlife, protect nature, and ensure a stable climate, Mark will share simple but powerful memory tools to overcome this nefarious problem in the new book, which was acquired by Matt Weiland, one of the publishing industry’s most respected editors dedicated to environmental topics.
Alison Entrekin’s New Guimarães Rosa Translation Sold in Pair of Auctions
Legendary Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa will be reintroduced to the Anglophone world thanks to the sale of a new English version of his epic 1956 novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands). Alison Entrekin’s groundbreaking translation of this literary masterpiece will be published under the title Vastlands: The Crossing by Simon & Schuster in the United States and Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom, with both houses acquiring the right via auction at a combined six-figure total. Seven years in the making, Entrekin’s translation is the first to capture the unique wordplay and invented language long held to be “untranslatable” in what many believe to be one of the greatest works of Latin American literature, a sweeping saga of honor and revenge hailed as the “Brazilian Ulysses” told in the tradition of chivalric tales and set in that country’s high inland plateaus at the turn of the twentieth century.
Nicole Taylor Sells The Maroon House to Abrams
Nicole Taylor has reached an agreement with Abrams to publish The Maroon House: My Glorious World of Cooking & Entertaining, an inspiring guide to hosting gatherings of family and friends, offering an invigorating approach to orchestrating meals that nourish the soul. A James Beard-nominated author whose Juneteenth cookbook Watermelon and Red Birds became the smash-hit of summer 2022, Taylor’s forthcoming volume will spotlight cooking and entertaining in the modern Black home, demonstrating the intimate and essential connection between culinary experiences and interior design while offering a proud expression of Black joy and a testament to the enduring importance of cultural heritage.
New York Times Spotlights Taking Care Paperback Release
Earlier this month the New York Times Book Review placed Sarah DiGregorio’s Taking Care on its Paperback Row as a recommended new read, applauding how her powerful and comprehensive history and survey of the nursing profession “reminds us that perhaps more than ever before, nursing is politics.” In the time since its original hardcover release, the book has accumulated additional accolades from Vanity Fair (“This probing history of nurses situates the profession as radical, necessary health care — but plagued, too, by structural inequities from sexism to racism”) and the NYT Book Review (“DiGregorio’s storytelling is pitch-perfect … This is a brilliant book, and DiGregorio is a beautiful writer”).
Edward McClelland’s Chorus of the Union Published by Pegasus Books
Edward McClelland’s illuminating new history Chorus of the Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside Their Rivalry to Save the Nation came out today from Pegasus Books. Dubbed “a wise examination of America’s divisive antebellum politics” by Publishers Weekly, it has also been praised by Harvard University professor John Stauffer as “beautifully conceived and deeply researched … a sheer pleasure to read” and by Lincoln scholar Thomas A. Horrocks, who has predicted that “this splendid book will become a classic source for understanding these two complicated men.” It is McClelland’s eighth book, along with a previous look at presidential politics in Young Mr. Obama (Bloomsbury, 2010) and his most recent release Midnight in Vehicle City (Beacon, 2021), about the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936, the most significant labor dispute in American history.
Update, June 26, 2024: In a lengthy review of Chorus of the Union published today, the Wall Street Journal observes that “McClelland vividly brings to life the drama” of the seven pivotal Lincoln-Douglas debates which led up to the 1860 presidential election.
Lynnette Marrero’s A Quick Drink Published by Abrams
Together with co-authors Ivy Mix and Megan Krigbaum, this week Lynnette Marrero served up A Quick Drink: The Speed Rack Guide to Winning Cocktails for Any Mood, an unconventional and highly useful manual for home cocktail-making. This exciting release features more than 100 cocktail recipes from participants in Speed Rack, the global all-women bartending competition founded by Mix and Marrero that has raised over $1,500,000 for breast cancer charities (to which the pair also intends to donate a portion of the book’s royalties). A Quick Drink arrives during the middle of Speed Rack’s Season 12 tour leading up to the national finals at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans on July 21.
David Bockino's Game On Published by University of Nebraska Press
Today marks the release of Game On: How Sports Media Grew Up, Sold Out, and Got Personal with Billions of Fans, the first-ever popular history of sports media, covering the industry’s evolution over the past century, from radio broadcasts of 1920s boxing matches to state propaganda at the Olympic Games in Hitler’s Germany, the rise of the NFL into a business juggernaut, the birth of ESPN, the more recent explosion of content from all corners of the internet, and everything else in between. Author David Bockino brings to this insightful and entertaining book an unmatched expertise as associate professor in charge of Elon University’s Sports Media Lab, demonstrating to readers how sports coverage has morphed from a uniquely unifying force that brought communities together into a hyper-personalized service that caters to individual consumers and fractures fanbases, reflecting a more general social trend that continues to influence the world today and into the future.
Janet Rich Edwards's Novel Canticle Sold to Spiegel & Grau
Spiegel & Grau has acquired Janet Rich Edwards’s debut novel Canticle, a work of historical fiction set in medieval Belgium among the Beguines, a renegade religious order of women who resisted the patriarchy and corruption of the Catholic church of that era. The story follows a misunderstood seventeen-year-old forced to lodge with this group of pious radicals after fleeing her own wedding, initiating a turbulent series of events and ensnaring her in a complex web spun by manipulative religious authorities, forcing her into difficult choices that threaten her relationships and imperil her very life.
Sarah DiGregorio Spotlights Midwives in Longform Feature
In a recent article for Rewire News Group — a national nonprofit media organization dedicated to reporting on reproductive and sexual health, rights, and justice — Sarah DiGregorio examined the controversial firings of several midwives at a Manhattan hospital that mainly serves low-income immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to publishing this illuminating piece, this month DiGregorio continued to generate interest in Taking Care, her cultural history of the nursing profession, through speaking engagements with the Nursing Now Challenge’s Global Book Club and Wichita State University’s College of Health Professions.
Camper English Wraps up Busy January by Envisioning More Flexible Drinking Culture
Camper English capped off “Dry January” with a reflection for MSNBC on the binary between heavy imbibing and rigid abstinence, calling for more inclusive spaces and mixologies to help blend crowds of drinkers and nondrinkers more fluidly. The author of Doctors and Distillers and The Ice Book spent the prior 30 days of 2024 reviewing fellow Straus Literary client Danny Childs’ new book Slow Drinks for The Alcohol Professor, talking to InsideHook about absinthe, and leading several nonalcoholic cocktail and spirits tastings in San Francisco, while looking forward to pouring out more wisdom online and at the bar in the months ahead.
