POP CULTURE Multi-platinum A&R executive, producer, and manager Jeff Blue's ONE STEP CLOSER, recounting the origin story of Linkin Park, starting with the author signing up his intern's band after their first performance in 1997, replacing the original singer with Chester Bennington, signing to Warner Bros. after 44 label rejections, almost getting dropped, and making and releasing what would become the biggest-selling debut album of the 21st century, to Jacob Hoye at Permuted Press.
HUMOR Author of I SEE YOU MADE AN EFFORT Annabelle Gurwitch's YOU'RE LEAVING WHEN?, chronicling the unexpected opportunities, comedic and otherwise, of midlife in an age of downward mobility in which the generation that once debated over being Rachel, Monica or Pheobe now vie for who gets to be Blanche, Rose, or Dorothy as the realities of home-sharing, boomeranging children, and economic anxiety set in, to Dan Smetanka at Counterpoint.
TELEVISION RIGHTS Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Daniel Golden's THE PRICE OF ADMISSION: HOW AMERICA'S RULING CLASS BUYS ITS WAY INTO ELITE COLLEGES AND WHO GETS LEFT OUTSIDE THE GATES, the 2006 expose revealing how Jared Kushner got into Harvard, updated to include Operation Varsity Blues, to Fremantle, by Joseph Veltre at Gersh Agency, on behalf of LynnJohnston at LynnJohnstonLiterary.
CURRENT AFFAIRS Food journalist, former restaurant critic and cook Corey Mintz's FED UP, pitched as updating "The Omnivore's Dilemma" for a restaurant-obsessed food economy, showing how some restaurants get away with not paying their cooks, why delivery apps are killing small restaurants, and what it means to eat ethically when you don't do the cooking, to Benjamin Adams at Public Affairs, on an exclusive submission.
CURRENT AFFAIRS Assistant director of the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence Dena Nicole Simmons's WHITE RULES FOR BLACK PEOPLE, portraying the impostor syndrome and pressure to conform to white spaces that children of color face and rewriting the rules to achieve equity for all, based on her viral TED Talk and experience moving from her native Bronx to a Connecticut boarding school, attending an Ivy League college and attaining successes that came at the cost of living authentically, to Kara Rota at St. Martins, at auction.
NARRATIVE New Yorker contributor Jennie Erin Smith's THE VALLEY OF FORGETTING, the story of the world's largest cluster of early-onset Alzheimer's patients, from an isolated hillside community near Medellin, Colombia, the result of a genetic mutation that traces back to a single conquistador - and the extraordinary ongoing research there that could lead to a new treatment for the disease, to Cal Morgan at Riverhead, in a pre-empt.
BUSINESS Robotics Design Consultant and Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Carla Diana and Executive Director of Stanford University's Center for Design Research Wendy Ju's THE SOCIAL LIVES OF PRODUCTS, about what the humanization of consumer products means for product designers, product managers, marketers, executives and entrepreneurs, recognizing that as smart objects become more ubiquitous, their personalities will distinguish which we gladly invite into our homes and which we'd rather leave in stores, to Jeff Kehoe at Harvard Business Review Press.
HEALTH Founder and editor of the NYT Well Blog Tara Parker-Pope's untitled book, about the uses of the latest research to cut through the massive confusion over food and diet to show the best way to eat, to Caroline Sutton at Hudson Street Press.
