Moshfegh was the recipient of the Plimpton Prize for her stories in the Paris Review,
and is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford. Lastly, in True North (Knopf, June
2016), Pauls Toutonghi tells the true story of a lost dog’s 111-mile journey, and a
family’s desperate search to find him. Rights have sold in Germany, Italy, and Brazil.
DeFiore and Company
A lead title on DeFiore’s list is photographer and blogger Brandon Stanton’s Humans
of New York: Stories (St. Martin’s, Oct.), a follow-up to his bestselling Humans of New
York. The book has sold in the U.K., Germany, Turkey, and Thailand. The agency
will also be selling an upcoming work by Melissa Broder, the once-anonymous
author behind the popular Twitter account @sosadtoday, in which she expressed her
darkest feelings with humor. She will explore more of the themes she touched on via
social media in So Sad Today (Grand Central, Mar. 2016). In narrative nonfiction there
is Lost Among the Birds (Bloomsbury, May 2016), in which author Neil Hayward is
“unsure about his future and commitment to a girlfriend” but then “finds himself
on a quest for birds and, in the process, discovers how to revamp his outlook on the
world.” A hot novel for DeFiore is Ashes of Fiery Weather (HMH, Mar. 2016) by
Kathleen Donohue, which tells the story of six generations of women in a firefighting family, from a famine-era Ireland to Brooklyn, ending a decade after 9/11.
Lastly there’s Rick Yancey’s YA novel The Last Star (Putnam, May 2016), the closer
to the 5th Wave trilogy.
Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
A top pick for Dijkstra is Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built (Ecco, Apr. 2016) by
Duncan Clark, who worked as a consultant to Chinese e-retail giant Alibaba in its
early years. His book is an insider’s account of how an English teacher built one of the
world’s most valuable companies, rivaling Walmart and Amazon. Another nonfiction
title that Dijkstra is excited about is Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War
Criminals (Yale Univ., May 2016) by Joel Dimsdale, distinguished professor emeritus
and research professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California–
San Diego. The book explores the extreme evil brought to light and examined during
the Nuremburg trials. Rights have been sold in Italy and Taiwan. Rounding out the
agency’s top nonfiction is The Power of Wandering (HarperCollins, Dec. 2016) by
Stephen Prothero, in which the author uses literary references to ancient Greece and
modern songwriters to explore the timeless practice and virtue of
letting oneself wander. On the fiction front is Lisa See’s new
novel The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane (Random, 2016),
which moves from a remote Chinese village to sunny
Pasadena, Calif., and blends contemporary characters
with the history of the mysterious and the lucrative rare-tea trade. Dijkstra is also
touting Kate White’s The
Secrets You Keep (Harper Collins,
June 2016). In White’s
newest novel, a woman suffers
Translation Grant $300,000
Matchmaking
Stephen Prothero (l.)
and Kate White
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Translation Grant $300,000
Matchmaking
