Foreign Rights to Titles Described Below Are Controlled by DSLA and Its Co-Agents

denise shannon literary agency inc

FRANKFURT 2016

Foreign rights to titles described below are controlled by DSLA and its co-agents.

OSAMA ALOMAR THE TEETH OF THE COMB & OTHER STORIES (New Directions)

“In Alomar’s stories, fantasy never devolves into mere whimsy. His magical imaginative creations are, every one, inspired by his deeply felt philosophical, moral, and political convictions, giving these tales a heartfelt urgency.”—LydiaDavis, on NewYorker.com

Known for his very short fiction, Osama's stories combine both the allegorical and political. Personified animals (snakes, wolves, sheep), natural things (a swamp, a lake, a rainbow, trees), mankind’s creations (trucks, swords, zeroes) are all characters in THE TEETH OF THE COMB. They aspire, they plot, they hope, they destroy, they fail, they love. These wonderful small stories animate new realities and make us see our reality anew. Reading Alomar’s sly moral fables and sharp political allegories, the reader always sits up a little straighter, and a little wiser.

Osama Alomar published three collections of short stories in Arabic: two by a Lebanese publisher and one by a Syrian publisher. He is a winner of the Najlaa Muharam Short Story Contest in Egypt (2007), and his work has appeared on the BBC Arabic Service. He now lives in Chicago where he works as a taxi driver.

Publication date: April 2017

Darcey Bell A SIMPLE FAVOR (Harper)

**Major option deal with Fox 2000 for feature development

(with Jessica Sharzer attached to write script)**

**25 Foreign Rights sold**

**Announced first printing of 100,000 copies**

“Riveting and brilliantly structured, A Simple Favor, is an edge-of-your seat domestic thriller about a missing wife and mother that relies on a rotating cast of unreliable narrators….”— Kimberly McCreight, author of The Outliers

HarperCollins pre-empted and A SIMPLE FAVOR will be a lead title for Spring. Stephanie, a famous mommy blogger, is star-struck and jealous of fashion executive Emily; their sons are in the same class. Ecstatic to befriend Emily and to have a new confidante, Stephanie is shocked when Emily suddenly disappears, leaving her son and husband with no warning. All sorts of twists and turns follow, including betrayals, shocking revelations, and a complicated revenge scheme with the ever-revolving question of who’s duping whom. As we learn, the two characters become the fish and the expert poker player…“You know the fish is going to lose, but not when....” Darcey Bell keeps you wondering until the very end. A feverish and expertly-plotted read,A SIMPLE FAVORwill satisfy literary and commercial readers alike.

Publication Date: March 2017

Foreign rights sold: Pan Macmillan/UK, Bertrand/Portuguese in Brazil, Rizzoli/Italian, Prometheus/Dutch, Vulkan/Serbian, HarperCollins/German, G.E.C Gads Forlag A.S/Danish, Dogan Egmont/Turkish, Hugo & Cie/French, Klidarithmos Publications/Greek, Citic Publishing Group/Chinese (simplified), Świat Książki/Polish, AST License Limited/Russian, Leda Spol/Czech, Gabo Kiado/Hungarian, Hayakawa Shobo/Japanese, Hyeonamsa Publishing/Korean, Penguin Random House/Spanish, Hemiro Limited/Ukrainian, Delight Press/Simplified Chinese (Taiwan), Grup Media Litera/Romanian, Bertrand/Portguese in Portugal, IKAR A.S./Slovak,La Campana/Catalan, andHuy Hoang/Vietnamese

Chanelle Benz THE MAN WHO SHOT OUT MY EYE IS DEAD: STORIES (Ecco)

**One of the Top 10 Literary Fiction Books of Fall 2016

(Publisher’s Weekly)**

“Chanelle Benz steps out on to a new stylistic tightrope. Among themanygifts she uses to arrive at the other end, the moved and transformed reader in tow, are: narrative velocity, true prose strangeness, an exuberant sense of play, and tremendous heart.A riveting new voice in American fiction.”—George Saunders

“Yes to Chanelle Benz and the skill, fluency and panache with which her voices interrogate and elevate narrative.” —Helen Oyeyemi, author of Boy, Snow, Bird and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

In her debut collection, Chanelle Benz draws from imaginative, wide-ranging historical settings, including a dark, McCarthy-esque Old West, a post-apocalyptic future, the eighteenth-century South, modern day Beirut, and 16th century England (in an askew pastiche of Early Modern English told from the perspective of a monk at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries). Her themes are identity, abandonment, violence, broken families, outsiders, the way that bodies are tied to land, and the things we do which can never be undone.

Publication Date: January 2017

Foreign rights sold: Editions du Seuil (Pierre Demarty)/French

Chanelle Benz THE GONE DEAD (Ecco)

THE GONE DEAD, a big, atmospheric debut novel set in the Mississippi Delta, centers on Addison Davis and her return to the town she left to sort out the mysteries in her life and the mysteries of her long-estranged father’s death. Addison was there the night her father died some thirty-years before, but she was four-years-old. It's hard and perhaps almost impossible for her to separate what she remembers from what she's invented. Profoundly alone with only her dog and her gun, Addison struggles to trust her father’s younger brother, the enigmatic but down-on-his-luck Uncle Dee. But over time her initial impressions of her erratic neighbors, her father's bitter ex-girlfriend, and the bumbling scholar of her father's work are overturned. Ultimately, Addison must decide if what she wants is justice, revenge, or closure with the truth she comes to learn.

Delivery Date: November 2016

Foreign rights sold: Editions du Seuil (Pierre Demarty)/French

C.C. Blake PERFECT(on submission)

A debut novel oferotic suspense, PERFECThas a bit of a Dangerous Liaisons plot, with older actor turned Manhattan power player Val Morton pulling the strings by having a charismatic and devilishly handsome underling seduce young Isabel, a wannabe actress who works in a mattress store. Isabel, while not quite as innocent as she first appears, is a willing participant in the subsequent sex games and challenges that Matthew devises. We see Isabel's keen sense of intuition and warbling moral consciousness as she tries to ferret out his motives while reveling in her own sexual power. When the erotic games turn criminal, the two puppets in this sexual theater become embroiled in a power struggle that is larger than either can handle. A great launch to what we expect to be a big career.

Kevin Canty THE UNDERWORLD (Norton)

“A dead-honest encounter with the hearts and minds of working class America, The Underworld by Kevin Canty stands there beside Island by Alistair Maclean and A Manuel for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin and damned near anything you might think of by Raymond Carver.”

— William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky

“The Underworld is a beautifully plotted (in other words page-turner) story visiting the immediate and after effects of a small town disaster. It is also a timely reminder of the tremendously complicated questions communities in the American west face. And faced. And will face. These are superbly drawn people in an impeccably told tale, a perfect storm and novel.”

—Antonya Nelson, author of Female Trouble

THE UNDERWORLD is set in a small struggling working-class town in Idaho dominated by the silver mine around which the town developed. Through multiple points of view, Canty tells the story of a community in the aftermath of a deadly mine disaster.In the vein of

Russell Bank's THE SWEET HEREAFTER, Canty powerfully conjures a whole world in this one. Kevin Canty’s short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Story, Tin

House and GlimmerTrain. He is the author of four previous novels, INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN (1996),NINE BELOW ZERO (1999), WINSLOW IN LOVE (2005), and EVERYTHING (2010).

Publication Date: March 2017

Foreign rights sold: Albin-Michel/French and DeHarmonie/Dutch

Robert Cohen & Jay Parini THE WRITER’S READER: VOCATION, PREPARATION, CREATION (Bloomsbury US)

THE WRITER’S READER is an anthology of literary essays from a roster of some of the finest international writers including Walter Benjamin, Philip Roth, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace, on the subject of fiction writing. This collection of thirty-five essays is provocative, inspirational, often quirky, and unfailingly entertaining.

Publication date: January 2017

(UK rights controlled by Bloomsbury US, rest of the world by DSLA and its coagents)

Aryn Kyle HINTERLAND (Riverhead)

Following Aryn Kyle's bestselling and highly-acclaimed debut novel THE GOD OF ANIMALS, her next novel, HINTERLAND, is the story of a turbulent relationship between a married father and the gifted, troubled, charismatic woman he’s known since college, and how her sudden death—one he feels he could have saved her from—changes the course of his life and that of his family.

Delivery date: February 2017

Foreign rights to THE GOD OF ANIMALS (2007) sold: Rizzoli/Italian, Weidenfeld & Nicolson/English in UK, Nieuw Amsterdam/Dutch, Gallimard/French, Goldmann/German, Ecus/Chinese (complex), Editora Rocco Ltda/Portuguese in Brazil, Shanghai 99/Chinese (simple), Olympia/Czech, Munhakdonge/Korean, Smak Slowa/Polish, Mehta Publishing/Marathi, Ediciones Ámbar/Spanish, and Aletheia/Portuguese in Portugal

Ben Marcus UNTITLED SHORT STORY COLLECTION (Knopf)

Anothershort story collection from one of the most singular and vital writers of his generation featuring stories originally published in The New Yorkerand elsewhere.

Delivery date: November 2016

Foreign rights sold to: Granta/UK

Foreign rights to THE FLAME ALPHABET (2012) sold: Sam & Parkers/Korean, Hoffman and Campe/German, Granta/UK, Leya/Portuguese in Brazil, Editions du Sous-Sol/French, Pelikanen Forlag/Norwegian, Enciclopèdia Catalana SLU/Spanish, Enciclopèdia Catalana SLU/Catalan

William R. Polk UNDERSTANDING IRAN (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; reissued 2016 with new Introduction and Afterword)

“A great guide if you want to understand the country.”

—Fareed Zakaria, bestselling author of The Post-American World

and host of CNN’s GPS

William R. Polkprovidesan informative, readable, short history of a country which is moving quickly toward becoming the dominant power and culture of the Middle East. A former member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, Polk describes a country and a history misunderstood by many in the West. While Iranians chafe under the yolk of their current leaders, they alsohave bitter memories of generations of British, Russian and American espionage, invasion, and dominance. There are important lessons to be learned from the past, and Polk teases them out of a long and rich history and shows that it is not just now, but for decades to come that an understanding of Iran will be essential to the world’s safety and well-being.

Publication date: 2016

Kirstin Valdez Quade NIGHT AT THE FIESTAS: STORIES (Norton)

**Winner of NBCC’s John Leonard Prize**

**NBCC’s 5 Under 35 Winner**

**Best American Short Stories Winner**

**O. Henry Prize Winner**

**2016 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction**

"Kirstin Valdez Quade is a fantastic writer, both stylish and sagacious. The stories here are taut and tense, while at the same time morally complicated, which is to say, they cut sharp and they cut deep.Night at the Fiestasis a book of extraordinary virtuosity."

—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

NIGHT AT THE FIESTAS explores a landscape of contradictions shaped by love and loss, wealth and poverty. Set primarily in northern New Mexico, these ten stories reveal a history marked by conquest and re-conquest, and the way in which the native cultures of the area have been at times both romanticized and denigrated. Morally complicated but unrelentingly hopeful, NIGHT AT THE FIESTAS is defined by its strong and visceral sense of place and by its concerns of tradition and heritage, wealth and poverty, family and coming of age.

Kirstin Valdez Quade, originally from New Mexico, was a Jones Fellow and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at StanfordUniversity. She is Assistant Professor at PrincetonUniversity.

Publication date: February 2015

Kirstin Valdez Quade UNTITLED NOVEL(Norton)

Quade's first novel is an expansion of her much-praised New Yorker story, "The Five Wounds." It opens during Semana Santa (Passion Week) in a small town in northern New Mexico. Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Passion procession, and he is preparing for this role, which he believes will redeem him and transform his life, when his pregnant fourteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up on his doorstep. It is an exploration of the painful complexities of family obligation and is inspired by the work of writers such as Alice Munro and Antonya Nelson. Written in alternating third-person points of view, it is a book about surviving the pressures of personal and cultural history and about the limitations of faith, as the characters discover that their pasts can be a source of both destructive pain and also great sustenance, and that the binds of family are not a birthright but must be constantly made anew.

Delivery date: January 2017

Jess Row THE NEW EARTH(Ecco)

The second novel from the author of YOUR FACE IN MINE, which the LA Times called “flat-out brilliant” and The New York Times said “put [Row] on another level as an artist.” THE NEW EARTH is about a fractured Manhattan family of eccentrics, intellectuals and spiritual seekers who reunite for the wedding of their only living daughter, an immigration lawyer, to an undocumented immigrant from Chiapas. The novel has many strands—from Holocaust art to the Zapatistas, from Buddhist logic to American immigrant law, climate change to the sensibility of northeastern liberals. Like THE CORRECTIONS or Norman Rush’s MORTALS, the author combines narrative drive with a sense of expansive, inclusive curiosity, but the book will also be one that steps outside the single, privileged authorial consciousness that dominates those novels. What he’s hoping to create is a novel that feels balanced between an accretion of old wounds, resentments, and histories and a sense of radically new possibility that lies outside the imagination of this very analytic, intellectual, privileged family—a novel that is intimately connected to its central characters but also aware of what they can’t (or won’t) see, about themselves and about the world.

Delivery date: June 2017

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