By: Jason Boog,
on 10/10/2013
Alcatraz show runner and screenwriter Dan Pyne has inked a deal for two thrillers with Blue Rider Press.
Victoria Sanders of Victoria Sanders & Associates negotiated the deal with publisher David Rosenthal.
Here’s more about the first novel, coming out in 2015: “50 Mice is a provocative Kafkaesque thriller that asks: What would you do if one morning, you awaken to your quietly midlevel life, certain that something is askew?”
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By: Jason Boog,
on 10/4/2013
Blue Rider Press will publish a novel by Michael Hastings, the great journalist who died in a car accident earlier this year.
The Last Magazine will come out in summer 2014. Andrew Wylie of the Andrew Wylie Agency negotiated the deal with Blue Rider Press publisher David Rosenthal. Here’s more about the book:
The novel, a roman á clef, is set at a national magazine in the early 2000s just as the US is approaching war with Iraq. The main protagonist is a young, wet-behind-the-ears intern named Michael M. Hastings who is eager to do anything to get an assignment. Funny, biting and fast-paced, the novel will appeal to fans of Hastings’ reporting. THE LAST MAGAZINE manuscript was discovered after his death.
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By: Jason Boog,
on 3/12/2012
Jeff Bridges and Zen Peacemakers founder Bernie Glassman have landed a book deal for a book with the tentative title, The Dude and the Zen Master. In part inspired by the actor’s The Big Lebowski character, the book comes out in November.
The book will reveal “dharma talks” between the actor and the spiritual leader (pictured, via)–you can read some of their “Dude Koans” here. It will focus on “the meaning of life, laughter, the movies and trying to do good in a difficult world.” The Schiff Company agent David Schiff (in association with CAA) negotiated the deal with publisher David Rosenthal.
Bridges had this comment in the release: “Making movies and life have a lot in common. When you’re making a movie you’ve got a finite amount of time to do what you’re going to do. It’s a communal art form, collaborative. You work together with other artists to come up with something groovy, something beautiful … On a movie set I do my best to keep my head and heart open. My favorite part of the whole deal is jamming with the other artists, getting to know them, sharing the excitement of what we’re up to, and inspiring each other. That means intimacy. I look for that in life as well. That’s why I hooked up with Bernie, to make the most of this wonderful experience called Life.”
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By: Jason Boog,
on 9/20/2011
Rock legend Neil Young has inked a deal to publish his memoir with Penguin’s Blue Rider Press imprint. Tentatively titled Waging Heavy Peace, publication is set for fall 2012.
Lookout Management manager Elliot Roberts negotiated the deal with Blue Rider publisher David Rosenthal. The publisher launched his new imprint last year.
Young (pictured, in 1970) had this quote in the release: “I felt like writing books fit me like a glove; I started and I just kept going. That’s the way my Daddy used to do it on his old Underwood up in the attic. He said, ‘Just keep writing, you never know what will turn up.’”
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By: Maryann Yin,
on 5/17/2011
Publisher David Rosenthal has named his imprint Blue Rider Press. Rosenthal joined Penguin in November 2010, but his imprint remained unnamed.
He explained the significance of the name to The New York Times: “The Blue Rider name historically represents individuality and quality in the arts. And that same intent will be reflected in the eclectic fiction and nonfiction books Blue Rider Press will publish.”
According to the article, Blue Rider Press will launch its inaugural list with The New New Rules and Goodnight iPad this fall. The imprint also has projects in the works with Valerie Plame Wilson, Delia Ephron, and R. A. Dickey. (via Publishers Weekly)
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This week Mr. Rosenthal is celebrating a happy landing. On Tuesday morning, it was announced that come January he will be running his own boutique imprint at Penguin Group USA, arguably the healthiest of the big New York Book Publishers as well as home to a number of the 56-year-old’s former colleagues. Once he gets going, Mr. Rosenthal—whose roster at Simon & Schuster included Bob Woodward, David McCullough, Bob Dylan and Jim Cramer—will be on charge of a small but full-fledged operation at Penguin Book Publishers, with dedicated publicity and marketing muscle and a list totaling somewhere between 24 and 36 books per year.
Mr. Rosenthal, an executive known for his eclectic tastes and blunt manner, has published a long list of authors in his 25-year career, including Bob Dylan, James Carville, Jeffery Deaver and Bob Woodward.
Many of those writers will be fair game as Mr. Rosenthal begins to acquire books for his own imprint, setting up competition between Penguin and Simon & Schuster.
Over lunch on Tuesday at the Half King in Chelsea, Mr. Rosenthal said Penguin president Susan Petersen Kennedy reached out to him shortly after his firing, and had been “aggressive and enthusiastic” in their talks. He is stoked to go work for her, he said: “People at Penguin don’t bitch about their place of employ nearly as much as people elsewhere. Everybody says, ‘The only person you ever want to work for in publishing anymore is Susan.’”
Initially, Mr. Rosenthal considered another path after he was canned—doing something Web-related, for instance, or becoming a packager, a consultant or “a guru of some kind”—but in the end he resolved to stick with traditional book publishing. It wasn’t a self-evident decision, if only because book sales have been falling so severely in recent years that many in the industry are panicked about the long-term viability of their business.
“He has a lot of people he’s been working with for many, many years,” Susan Petersen Kennedy, the president of Penguin Group USA, said in an interview on Monday. “And perhaps at some point, some of them will join him.”
Mr. Rosenthal’s imprint, which has yet to be named, will publish two to three dozen books each year, a mix of nonfiction and fiction.
“I’m going to make lots of trouble,” Mr. Rosenthal said in an interview. “They’re going to let me go after the kind of — I wouldn’t say quirky — but the peculiar stuff that I sometimes like. What they want very much is for me to be able to indulge my passions, indulge my taste.”
For more than a decade, Penguin has focused on creating imprints that reflect the visions and interests of their book publishers, like Riverhead Books, Portfolio and Penguin Press, an imprint created by Ann Godoff after she was fired from Random House in 2003.
Book Publishers have been under pressure from the recession and a depressed retail environment, making it an unlikely time to expand.
“They’re being contrarian, which I like,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “Everybody seems to be having misgivings about where this whole thing is going. They’re obviously making a bet. They’re expanding, and it’s great to be part of that.”
Before joining Simon & Schuster, Mr. Rosenthal had been the publisher of Villard, a division of Random House Book Publishers; the managing editor of Rolling Stone; the executive editor of New York magazine; and, as Penguin noted in a news release on Monday, an employee in the morgue at the city chief medical examiner’s office.
In June, Mr. Ros
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