Last month, when Little, Brown gave Reagan Arthur her own imprint, we called her office and asked if she knew what the first titles at Reagan Arthur Books would be. “I have a pretty good idea,” she told us then, “but we’re still finalizing.”
According to the deals listings at Publishers Marketplace, the new imprint kicked into gear yesterday with two acquisitions. There was a new historical novel from Kathleen Kent, the author of The Heretic’s Daughter, and a pre-empt on the U.S. rights to The Rehearsal, a debut novel from 23-year-old Eleanor Catton that was published earlier this year by New Zealand’s Victoria University Press. Arthur is reported to have committed at least $100,000 to publish the book in America, with Granta Books signing up the rights to the rest of the world’s markets. That’ll give Catton some spending money while she finishes up her creative writing degree at Iowa, no doubt…
UPDATE: Little, Brown issued a press release late Friday morning, announcing that Arthur has also signed up a new novel by Sherman Alexie, whose adult fiction had most recently been published at Grove/Atlantic. (Although his National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was published by Little, Brown’s “young readers” division.)