Vanessa Manko (left), Susan Minot (center), and Salman Rushdie (right)

Vanessa Manko and Judy Chicurel, two authors featured in a recent issue of Granta, have signed book deals with Penguin. To toast these two authors, the literary magazine threw a party.

The celebration took place at Granta editor John Freeman‘s Manhattan loft on Wednesday night, and brought together a community of writers and editors including: Salman Rushdie, Sean McDonald, Alex Gilvarry, Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam, and Peter Carey, to name a few.

Manko, whose novel was excerpted in Granta 118: Exit Strategies, sold her novel The Un-American to Penguin through her agent Caroline Michel. The title is slated for publication in spring 2014. Manko, who works as Rushdie’s assistant, spent seven years working on the book. In a toast to the author, Rushdie quipped that she’s going to need to speed things up in the future. Over drinks, Manko explained that her background in dance helped inform her writing as she looked for the cadence in her language. continued…

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The not-yet-titled first book is slated for release in 2013. Literary agent Sarah Burnes (from the Gernert Company) negotiated the deal with editor-at-large Jennifer Hunt. Hunt will edit the project.

Bosch (pictured, via) submitted this “secret” statement in the release: “It is a thrill to be working with Jennifer Hunt again as well as with all my new friends at Dial.  As my readers know, I love to eat, especially anything chocolate.  I couldn’t be more excited to embark on this important search for three new cooks.  If bread is the staff of life, then a good cook is…What?  Not cooks, books?  I’m supposed to write three new books?  Oh, no—how distressing!”

continued…

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Which is all well and good, and there certainly is an unfortunate stigma to being published as a young adult writer (even as the market share increases, as does the overall quality) but Doyle’s nose-in-the-air attitude about YA fiction grates after a while. “If TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or THE CATCHER IN THE RYE were published today, they’d almost certainly be young-adult titles,” he says. “But then they wouldn’t become classics, except in the sense that Judy Blume books are classics.” Something tells me this is a case of Doyle speaking without thinking (YA and middle grade classics off the top of my head: THE YEARLING, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES) but then I suspect if a double-blind copy of M.T. Anderson‘s OCTAVIAN NOTHING was pressed into his hands, he wouldn’t recognize it as one of those oh-so-pesky YA books….

UPDATE: Larry Doyle writes in to clarify some of the things in this post, as well as the original article. “I have no disdain for children’s literature, or literature read by young adults. I was wary of the prepackaged marketing of same, as a genre with specific conventions, then sold into a narrow channel of readership. That’s why I brought up MOCKING BIRD and THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. They are
both clearly children’s and young adult books, but both were published as general fiction. As was A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. It was
an adult best-seller and shipped routinely to servicemen.”

As for why KING DORK was included in the piece, Doyle said he brought the book up “as an example of a book that I thought deserved wider recognition but didn’t get it because of the marketing label. The movie will probably change that. I also, for what it’s worth, went out of my way to say that I didn’t think my book was a classic by any measure. I went with Ecco because of Lee, and because Harper-Collins convinced me I could reach a wider audience (including teenagers) by publishing there.”

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