Rock guitarist Lenny Kaye has landed a deal with the HarperCollins imprint, Ecco. He is best known for his work with the of the Patti Smith Group.
According to the press release, Kaye plans to write a book called Lightning Striking. He will detail the career path he has followed “across five decades and a dozen cities where rock and roll exploded onto a national stage.”
Publisher Daniel Halpern acquired the manuscript and secured both North American and translation rights. The Betsy Lerner, Dunow, Carlson and Lerner Literary Agency represented Kaye on this deal.
Daniel Halpern, Publisher and President of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, has earned the 2015 Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction.
The award is given out by The Center for Fiction to either an editor, publisher, or agent that has nurtured and championed fiction writers in the United States. The award honors Maxwell E. Perkins, of Scribner, one of the great American editors who worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway, among others.
Halpern has had a long career supporting fiction, including editing the international literary magazine Antaeus, which he founded in Tangier with Paul Bowles. Halpern will receive the award at the Center’s December 8 Annual Benefit and Awards Dinner in New York.
“It is an honor to be recognized for doing what makes you happiest – for me, publishing fiction by some of the finest writers an editor (and reader) could imagine working with,” he stated of the honor. “But to be recognized by The Center for Fiction – an organization that supports and celebrates the art of fiction in so many important ways – is the true honor.”
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume author Tom Robbins will publish a memoir with HarperCollins’ Ecco imprint.
Tibetan Peach Pie is scheduled for 2014 release. Phoebe Larmore negotiated the world rights deal with Ecco publisher Daniel Halpern. Robbins described his memoir in a statement:
Tibetan Peach Pie isn’t exactly your normal memoir, but from the worn hills of Appalachia to the heights of the best-seller lists; from America’s psychedelic underground to the backstreets of Asia, the savannas of Africa, and the studios of the art world, it does lift the curtain on a succession of highly personal magical mystery peep shows. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise anyone if in both content and style it reads a bit like one of my novels. (Photo via Alexa Robbins)
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Poet laureate Natasha Trethewey has inked a book deal with HarperCollins’ Ecco imprint to publish her as-yet-untitled memoir.
Lippincott Massie McQuilkin agent Rob McQuilkin negotiated the deal with publisher Daniel Halpern in a “very heated auction.” Publication has been set for 2014. Halpern called it “a story that no one is likely to forget.”
Here’s more from the release: “Her book will map the intersections of personal and cultural history, as it navigates the channels and byways of memory and the legacy of race in America. Chronicling her life from early childhood – the daughter of a black mother and a white father, she was born in Gulfport, Mississippi a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia – this deeply felt memoir explores Trethewey’s experience growing up mixed race in the South of the ‘70s and ‘80s, her close relationship with her mother, who was later murdered by her stepfather, a Vietnam veteran, and the repercussions and resonances of these seminal events in her life and work.”
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HarperCollins has acquired the U.S. and Canadian rights to bestselling author Amy Tan‘s (pictured, via) forthcoming novel, The Valley of Amazement.
In the U.S., Ecco publisher Daniel Halpern negotiated with Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency president Sandra Dijkstra. In Canada, Harper Canada publisher Iris Tupholme ironed out a contract with Westwood Creative Artists literary agent John Pearce.
Tan described her book in the release: “A painting called the ‘Valley of Amazement’ is passed along through three generations of women of the same family. Despite vast differences in their upbringing, culture and circumstances, each of the women is drawn to discover the meaning of the painting and the unknown histories of their mothers.”
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