The Night Circus - ANTHEA

Fiction
Contents
J. Courtney Sullivan, Maine 4
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus 6
Ha Jin, Nanjing Requiem 8
Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers 10
Carolina De Robertis, Perla 12
Lincoln Child, The Third Gate 14
Daniel H. Wilson, Amped 16
Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You 18
Margot Berwin, Aromata 20
Non-Fiction
Brian Christian, The Most Human Human 22
Ben Mezrich, Sex on the Moon 24
Joby Warrick, The Triple Agent 26
Hal Vaughan, Sleeping with the Enemy 28
Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat 30
Robert Neuwirth, Stealth of Nations 32
Stuart Isacoff, The Natural History of the Piano 34
Richard Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly 36
Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom 48
Gregory Chaitin, Proving Darwin 40
William Dobson, The Dictator’s Learning Curve 42
Robert Peter Gale and Eric Lax, Radiation:
What it is, What You Need to Know 44
Highlights from the Backlist 46

FICTION

4
June 2011
Knopf
Rights sold:
France: Rue Fromentin
Germany: Zsolnay
Italy: Garzanti
UK: Atlantic
Other rights available
J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN
is the author of the New
York Times best-selling novel
Commencement. Her writing has
appeared in The New York Times
Book Review, the Chicago Tribune,
New York, Elle, Glamour, Allure,
and Men’s Vogue, among others.
Maine
A Novel
J. Courtney Sullivan
***A New York Times Best-seller***
“You don’t want the novel to end in July. You want to stay
with the Kellehers straight through to the end of August,
until the sand cools, the sailboats disappear from their
moorings, and every last secret has been pried up.”
—Lily King, The New York Times Book Review
“I enjoyed every page of this ruthless and tender novel
about the way love can sometimes redeem even the most
contentious families. Like all first-rate comic fiction, Maine
uses humor to examine the truths of the heart, in New
England and far beyond.
—Howard Frank Mosher, The Washington Post
Three generations of women converge on the family beach
house in this wickedly funny, emotionally resonant story
of love and dysfunction from the author of the best-selling
debut novel Commencement.
The Kelleher family has been coming to Maine for sixty years.
Their beachfront cottage, won on a bar-room bet after the
war, is a place where children run in packs, showers are taken
outdoors, and threadbare sweaters are shared on chilly nights.
It is also a place where cocktail hour follows morning mass,
nosy grandchildren snoop in drawers, and ancient grudges
simmer below the surface. As Maggie, Kathleen, and Ann
Marie descend on Alice’s cottage, each woman brings her own
baggage—a secret pregnancy, a terrible crush, and a deeply
held resentment for misdeeds of the past.
By turns uproarious and achingly sad, Maine unveils the sibling
rivalry, alcoholism, social climbing, and Catholic guilt at the
center of one family, along with the abiding, often irrational
love that keeps coming back, every summer, to the family
house and to each other.

EXCERPT FROM “ALICE”
Her husband Daniel won the property in 1945, just after the war ended, in a stupid bet
with a former shipmate named Ned Perkins. Ned was a drunk, even by the standards of
his fellow Navy men. He had grown up in a fishing village in Maine, but now spent his
time squandering his pay in some of Boston’s finest barrooms and underground gambling
clubs, while occasionally attending class at B.C. courtesy of the GI Bill. He made a wager
with Daniel on some basketball game—a fifty dollar bet, which absolutely enraged Alice.
They had been married two years then, and she was pregnant with Kathleen. But Daniel
said the bet was a sure thing, that he never would have made it otherwise. And he won.
Ned didn’t have the money to pay him.
“Surprise, surprise,” Alice said when Daniel came home from work that night, and told
her the news.
He had a wild grin on his face. “You’ll never guess what he gave me instead.”
“A car?” Alice said sarcastically. Their twelve year old Ford Coupe sputtered and pooped
out whenever she started it. By then, they were so accustomed to gas rations that they
mostly walked everywhere anyway, or took the streetcar. But the war was over now, and
another New England winter was coming. Alice had no intention of being one of those
mothers on the train, shushing her screaming baby while others looked on with disapproving
stares.
“Better,” Daniel said.
“Better than a car?” Alice asked, not sure whether to believe him.
“It’s land,” Daniel said gleefully. “A whole big plot of land, right on the water in Maine.”
She was stunned. “You better not be joking, Daniel Kelleher.”
“I kid you not, Mrs. Kelleher,” he said, coming toward her. He pressed his face to her
stomach.
“Daniel!” she said, trying to push him away. She hated when he talked directly to the
baby, already attached.
He ignored her.
“You hear that, jellybean?” he said to her belt. “This time next summer we’ll be making
sandcastles. Daddy just got you your own beach.”
“For a fifty dollar bet?” Alice asked.
“Let’s just say it was the last in a long line of fifty dollar bets that may or may not have
gone unpaid,” he said.
“Daniel! How could you?”
Despite the good news, her blood boiled a bit. Her Aunt Rose had always said never to
trust a man who gambles.
“Honey, don’t worry so much, you married a lucky guy,” he said with a wink.
5

6
September 2011
Doubleday
Rights sold:
Brazil
Bulgaria
China
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Holland
Hungary
Israel
Italy
Japan
Korea
Latvia
Lithuania
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Slovakia
Spain
Spain (Catalan)
Sweden
Taiwan
Turkey
UK
Other rights available
ERIN MORGENSTERN is a
writer and multimedia artist who
describes all her work as being
“fairy tales in one way or another.”
The Night Circus
A Novel
Erin Morgenstern
“The Night Circus made me happy. Playful and intensely
imaginative, Erin Morgenstern has created the circus I have
always longed for and she has populated it with dueling lovestruck
magicians, precocious kittens, hyper-elegant displays
of beauty and complicated clocks. This is a marvelous book.”
—Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife
“Every once in a while you find a novel so magical that
there is no escaping its spell. The Night Circus is one of
these rarities—engrossing, beautifully written and utterly
enchanting. If you choose to read just one novel this year,
this is it.”
—Danielle Trussoni, author of Angelology
“A riveting debut. The Night Circus pulls you into a world as
dark as it is dazzling, fully-realized but still something out of
a dream. You will not want to leave it.”
—Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements
precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.
Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly
unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called
Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.
But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a
duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who
have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose
by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is
a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus
is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and
will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble
headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights
flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as
brush hands.
True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of
everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus
performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as
precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.
Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a
feast for the senses and the heart.

The circus arrives without warning.
EXCERPT FROM “ANTICIPATION”
No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no
mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it
was not.
The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen.
No color at all, save for the neighboring trees and the grass of the surrounding fields.
Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an
elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colorless world. Even what little ground
is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other
circus trick.
But it is not open for business. Not just yet.
Within hours everyone in town has heard about it. By afternoon the news has spread
several towns over. Word of mouth is a more effective method of advertisement than
typeset words and exclamation points on paper pamphlets or posters. It is impressive and
unusual news, the sudden appearance of a mysterious circus. People marvel at the staggering
height of the tallest tents. They stare at the clock that sits just inside the gates
that no one can properly describe.
And the black sign painted in white letters that hangs upon the gates, the one that reads:
Opens at Nightfall
Closes at Dawn
“What kind of circus is only open at night?” people ask. No one has a proper answer, yet
as dusk approaches there is a substantial crowd of spectators gathering outside the gates.
You are amongst them, of course. Your curiosity got the better of you, as curiosity is
wont to do. You stand in the fading light, the scarf around your neck pulled up against the
chilly evening breeze, waiting to see for yourself exactly what kind of circus only opens
once the sun sets.
7

8
October 2011
Pantheon
Rights sold:
China: Jiangsu Fine Arts
Germany: Ullstein
Italy: Neri Pozza
Taiwan: China Times
Other rights available
HA JIN’s previous books include
the internationally best-selling
Waiting, which won the PEN/
Faulkner Award and the National
Book Award; War Trash, which won
the PEN/Faulkner Award; the story
collections Under the Red Flag,
which won the Flannery O’Connor
Award for Short Fiction, and
Ocean of Words, which won the
PEN/Hemingway Award; and three
books of poetry.
Nanjing Requiem
A Novel
Ha Jin
“Since Ha Jin won the National Book Award for Waiting, his
writing keeps opening up like a big, beautiful fan; this book
sounds as far-reaching as anything he has ever written. And
even bolder about looking into last century’s heart of darkness.
Essential where good literature is read.”
—Library Journal
“Jin paints a convincing, harrowing portrait of heroism in the
face of brutality.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Jin continues his scrupulous excavation of buried truths
about Chinese life. . . . eviscerating. . . . Writing with unnerving
austerity, Ha Jin resolutely addresses inexplicable terror
and miraculous resistance.”
—Booklist (starred review)
The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns
to his homeland in a searing new novel that unfurls during
one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century: the
Rape of Nanjing.
In 1937, with the Japanese poised to invade Nanjing, Minnie
Vautrin—an American missionary and the dean of Jinling
Women’s College—decides to remain at the school, convinced
that her American citizenship will help her safeguard the welfare
of the Chinese men and women who work there. She is
painfully mistaken. In the aftermath of the invasion, the school
becomes a refugee camp for more than ten thousand homeless
women and children, and Vautrin must struggle, day after day,
to intercede on behalf of the hapless victims. Even when order
and civility are eventually restored, Vautrin remains deeply
embattled, and she is haunted by the lives she could not save.
With extraordinarily evocative precision, Ha Jin re-creates the
terror, the harrowing deprivations, and the menace of unexpected
violence that defined life in Nanjing during the occupation.
In Minnie Vautrin he has given us an indelible portrait of
a woman whose convictions and bravery prove, in the end, to
be no match for the maelstrom of history.
At once epic and intimate, Nanjing Requiem is historical fiction
at its most resonant.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER FIVE
It was eerily quiet the next morning, and for hours few gunshots were heard. The
cannonade in the east, south, and west had ceased too. We couldn’t help but wonder if
the Japanese had entered Nanjing. That was unlikely, since the Chinese troops were still
holding their positions. As Minnie and I were discussing the influx of the refugees, Old
Liao, our gardener, came and handed Minnie a leaflet. He was her longtime friend, hired
by her from Hefei eighteen years ago when she had come to Jinling to assume its acting
presidency, because she wanted to create a beautiful campus. “I found this on the west
hill this morning,” he said in a husky voice, pointing at the sheet, and smiled as if this
were just a regular day for him. “There’re lots of them in the bushes. A Japanese plane
must’ve dropped them. I don’t know what it’s about but thought you might want to take
a look.”
Minnie skimmed it, then handed it to me. The leaflet bore words from General Matsui,
the commander in chief of the Japanese Central China Expeditionary Forces. He
demanded that the Chinese side capitulate without delay, declaring, “This is the best way
to protect the innocent civilians and the cultural relics in the ancient capital.” So we must
all lay down our weapons and open the city gates to welcome the Imperial Army. The
decree continued: “It is our policy to harshly deal with those who resist and to be kind
and generous to noncombatants and the Chinese soldiers who entertain no hostility to
our invincible force. Therefore, I order you to surrender within twenty-four hours, by 6:00
p.m., December 9. Otherwise, all the horrors of war will be unleashed on you mercilessly.”
There was less than ten hours left before the zero hour. Minnie told Liao, “This is an order
from Iwane Matsui, the top Japanese general.”
“Never heard of him. What he wants?”
“He demands that the Chinese surrender the city to him. What do you think we should
do?”
“Well,” Old Liao scratched the back of his round head, “I don’t know. I hope he’ll leave
people in peace.”
9

10
March 2012
Doubleday
Rights available
HEIDI JULAVITS is the author of
three critically acclaimed novels,
The Uses of Enchantment, The
Effect of Living Backwards, and
The Mineral Palace. Her fiction
has appeared in Harper’s, Esquire,
and The Best American Short
Stories, among other places. She’s
a founding editor of The Believer
magazine and the recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship.
The Vanishers
A Novel
Heidi Julavits
Praise for Heidi Julavits’ The Uses of Enchantment:
“Beautifully executed. . . . the mystery of what happened to
Mary Veal will enthrall the reader to the very last page.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A technical marvel: a novel of ideas that moves with
the speed and inevitability of a freight train. Equal parts
rumination on feminine sexuality and girl-in-peril thriller,
Heidi Julavits’s third novel is entertaining, devastating and as
slippery as a strand of its anti-heroine’s lank hair.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
From the acclaimed novelist and The Believer editor Heidi
Julavits, a wildly imaginative and emotionally intense novel
about mothers, daughters, and the psychic damage women can
inflict on one another.
Is the bond between mother and daughter unbreakable, even
by death?
Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics.
Her mentor, the legendary Madame Ackermann, afflicted
by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple.
Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her
mother’s suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock
horns, and Julia gains power, Madame Ackermann launches
a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a
crippling ailment.
Julia retreats to a faceless job in Manhattan. But others have
noted Julia’s emerging gifts, and soon she’s recruited to track
down an elusive missing person—a controversial artist who
might have a connection to her mother. As Julia sifts through
ghosts and astral clues, everything she thought she knew of
her mother is called into question, and she discovers that her
ability to know the minds of others—including her own—goes
far deeper than she ever imagined.
As powerful and gripping as all of Julavits’s acclaimed novels,
The Vanishers is a stunning meditation on grief, female rivalry,
and the furious power of a daughter’s love.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE
The doctors told me it was all in my head. Because that’s where all the best diseases are.
The story I’m about to tell you could be judged as preposterous. Fine. Judge how you
must. Protect yourself by scare-quoting me as the so-called psychic, the so-called victim
of a psychic attack. Quarantine this account by whatever means you must so that you
can safely hear it. What happened to me could never happen to you.
Tell yourself that. Even though what happened to me happens to people like you all the
time.
To some—to me—what happened was sudden, I was a healthy person and then, a
millisecond later, I was not. It was like being hit by a car except there was no car, just the
crippling aftermath of an accident that nobody witnessed, not even me.
But to others a psychic attack can occur gradually, nearly imperceptibly, a car accident
stretched over a period of months, the damage an accrual of minute bodily failures. You
awake to discover that your eyelashes have collected like metal filings on your pillow,
that contusions have appeared on your skin where you’ve never been touched, that you
smell a stranger on your bed sheets and that stranger is you.
As the weeks progress, you notice other aberrations. An unceasing bout of acid reflux
and an irritable bowel. Gums that bleed when you sip hot tea. Fingernails that snap when
you push your hands through the sleeves of a soft sweater. The ghostly withdrawal of
pigmentation from your cheeks. A rash on your torso. A rash on your hands. A rash on
your scalp that, after your fifth consecutive night of insomnia might seem to convey, via
its code of pustulated convexities beneath your hair, a Braille warning you cannot, with
your peeling fingertips, read.
And so it goes, your body’s slow hurtle along an impact trajectory for which no doctor
can supply a preexisting medical narrative. There is only the leg you can no longer feel,
the searing esophagus that is never absent from your thoughts, it’s as if—this is what
you tell your partner, your coworkers and friends—it’s as if your consciousness has been
imprisoned inside your ribcage.
The face—its frostbit complexion, its vinegar stare—you no longer recognize as yours.
I’m overworked and need to take more vitamins, you’ll tell yourself. Maybe I’m allergic
to wheat, dairy, my new rug. Maybe I’m depressed, you’ll tell yourself, or not enough in
love anymore with my life. You’ll schedule beach vacations or more time at the gym,
but no matter how many times you dunk yourself in oceans or flush the liquid content
of your body through your pores, you cannot elude the suspicion that a cancerous pall
drifts through your anatomy, that it will soon metastisize to your personality, that it is
only a matter of time—maybe a matter of hours—before it breaches the cellular firewall
encircling your soul.
11

12
March 2012
Knopf
UK and Spanish language rights
available
CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS was
raised in England, Switzerland, and
California by Uruguayan parents.
Her fiction, nonfiction, and literary
translations have appeared in
ColorLines, The Virginia Quarterly
Review, and the Indiana Review,
among others. She is the recipient
of a 2008 Hedgebrook Residency
for Women Authoring Change
and the translator of the Chilean
novella Bonsai by Alejandro
Zambra. Her debut novel The
Invisible Mountain, was an international
best seller, translated into
fifteen languages, and was an O,
The Oprah Magazine 2009 Terrific
Read, a San Francisco Chronicle
Best Book of the Year, and the
recipient of the 2010 Rhegium Julii
Debut Prize.
Perla
A Novel
Carolina De Robertis
Praise for Carolina De Robertis’ The Invisible Mountain:
“An incantatory debut. . . . This visionary book beautifully,
bravely breaks open all the old secrets.”
—Elle
“Enchanting, funny and heartbreaking. . . . An extraordinary
first effort whose epic scope and deft handling reverberate
with the deep pull of ancestry and the powerful influence of
one’s country and the sacrifices of reinvention.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A galloping saga. . . . the kind of novel you stay up late to
finish and lie awake thinking about.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Acoming-of-age story, based on a recent shocking chapter
of Argentine history, about a young woman who makes
a devastating discovery about her origins with the help of an
enigmatic houseguest.
Perla grew up a privileged only child in Buenos Aires, with a
cold, polished mother, and a straight-laced naval officer father
whose profession she learned early on not to disclose in a
country still reeling from the human rights abuses perpetrated
by the now deposed military dictatorship. She understands
that her parents were on the wrong side of the war, but her
love for them—especially for her father—is unconditional.
But when Perla wakes up in the middle of the night to find a
naked, sopping wet, maybe-human creature stinking of the
sea crouched on the living room rug, she begins an emotional
journey that will force her to confront the constant, gnawing
unease that she has spent her whole life trying to supress.
Eventually she must make a wrenching decision that will
forever define who she is, and can become. This is a novel
about the imprints left by historical events on the most
intimate parts of the soul, the risks one woman takes to claim
her most authentic self, and the incomparable ferocity of
human love.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE
I’ll tell you all of it, the raw story—it pushes and demands to be told, here, now, with
you so close and the past even closer, breathing at the napes of our necks. Is this a ghost
story or a love story? Is it the tale of how I came to be, or how I came undone? I can’t
tell. There’s so much about what happened that I still can’t completely wrap my head
around, so I don’t store it in my head, but in the rest of me. Some things are impossible
for the mind to hold alone. So listen, if you can, with your whole being.
He arrived on the second of March, 2001, a few minutes after midnight. I was alone. I
heard a low sound from the living room, a kind of scrape, like fingernails on unyielding
floor—then silence. At first I couldn’t move; I wondered whether I had left a window
open, but no, I had not. I picked up the knife from the counter, still flecked with squash,
and walked slowly down the hall toward the living room with the knife leading the way,
thinking that if it came to fighting I’d be ready, I’d stab down to the hilt. I turned the
corner and there he lay, curled up on his side, drenching the rug.
He was naked. Seaweed stuck to his wet skin, which was the color of ashes. He smelled
like fish and copper and rotting apples. Nothing had moved: the sliding glass door to the
back yard was closed and intact, the curtains were unruffled, and there was no damp trail
where he might have walked or crawled. I could not feel my limbs, I was all wire and heat,
the room crackled with danger.
“Get out,” I said.
He didn’t move.
“Get the hell out,” I said, louder this time.
He lifted his head with tremendous effort and opened his eyes. They were wide eyes that
seemed to have no bottom. They stared at me, the eyes of a baby, the eyes of a boa.
In that moment something in my core came apart like a ship losing its mooring, anchor
dismantled, the terror of dark waters on all sides, and I found that I could not turn away.
13

14
June 2012
Doubleday
Rights sold:
Poland: Albatros
Other rights available
LINCOLN CHILD is the New
York Times best-selling author
of Terminal Freeze, Deep Storm,
Death Match, and Utopia, as well
as coauthor, with Douglas Preston,
of numerous New York Times best
sellers, most recently Fever Dream.
The Third Gate
A Novel
Lincoln Child
Praise for Lincoln Child’s Terminal Freeze and Utopia:
“Lincoln Child’s novels are both thrilling and tantalizing.”
—Vince Flynn
“A sensational piece of popular entertainment. If you are
looking for intelligent fun, it doesn’t get much better than
this.”
—The Washington Post
“Few writers do it better than Child.”
—Booklist
Under the direction of famed explorer Porter Stone, an
archaeological team is secretly attempting to locate
the tomb of an ancient pharaoh who was unlike any other
in history. Stone believes he has found the burial chamber of
King Narmer, the near mythical god- king who united upper
and lower Egypt in 3200 B.C., and the archaeologist has reason
to believe that the greatest prize of all—Narmer’s crown—
might be buried with him. No crown of an Egyptian king has
ever been discovered, and Narmer’s is the elusive “double”
crown of the two Egypts, supposedly possessed of awesome
powers.
The dig itself is located in one of the most forbidding places
on earth—the Sudd, a nearly impassable swamp in northern
Sudan. Amid the nightmarish, disorienting tangle of mud
and dead vegetation, a series of harrowing and inexplicable
occurrences are causing people on the expedition to fear a
centuries-old curse. With a monumental discovery in reach,
Professor Jeremy Logan is brought onto the project to
investigate. What he finds will raise new questions . . . and
alarm.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER EIGHT
Rush sat back in the banquette. “Have you heard of the Sudd?”
Logan thought a moment. “It rings a distant bell.”
“People assume that the Nile is just a wide river, snaking its way unimpeded into the heart of
Africa. Nothing could be further from the truth. The early British explorers—the Richard Burtons
and Livingstones—found that out the hard way when they encountered the Sudd. But take a look
at this—it’ll describe the place far more eloquently than I can.” And Rush gestured to a book on
a nearby table.
Logan hadn’t noticed it before and now he picked it up. It was a battered copy of Alan Moorehead’s
The White Nile. It was a history of the exploration of the river; he vaguely remembered leafing
through a copy as a child.
“Page 95,” Rush said.
Logan flipped through the book, found the page, and—as the saloon throbbed around him—began
to read.
There is no more formidable swamp in the world than the Sudd. The Nile loses itself
in a vast sea of papyrus ferns and rotting vegetation, and in that foetid heat there is
a spawning tropical life that can hardly have altered very much since the beginning
of the world: it is as primitive and hostile to man as the Sargasso Sea. The region is
neither land nor water. Year by year the current keeps bringing down more floating
vegetation, and packs it into solid chunks perhaps twenty feet thick and strong enough
for an elephant to walk on. But then this debris breaks away in islands and forms again
in another place, and this is repeated in a thousand indistinguishable patterns and goes
on forever…Here there was not even a present, let alone a past; except on occasional
islands of hard ground no men ever had lived or ever could live in this desolation
of drifting reeds and ooze, even the most savage of men. The lower forms of life
flourished here in mad abundance, but for men the Sudd contained nothing but the
threat of starvation, disease and death.
Logan put the book down. “My God. Such a place really exists?”
“It exists all right. You’ll see it before dark.” Rush shifted in the banquette. “Imagine: a region
thousands of square miles across, not so much swamp as an impenetrable labyrinth of papyrus
reeds and waterlogged trunks. And mud. Mud everywhere, mud more treacherous than quicksand.
The Sudd isn’t deep, often just twenty or thirty feet in places, but in addition to being horribly
honeycombed with braided undergrowth the water is so murky, so full of silt, divers can’t see a foot
beyond their face. The water’s full of alligators by day, the air full of mosquitoes by night. All the
early explorers gave up trying to cross it and eventually went around. It’s situated not far from the
Sudanese border, surrounded by a wide, shallow valley. And every year it spreads. Just a little, but
it spreads. It’s a living thing—that’s why we need such a narrow craft. Trying to traverse the Sudd
is like threading a needle through the bark of a tree. Every day we have a recon plane that charts
the shifting eddies, maps new paths through it. Every day, those routes change.”
“So the vessel acts sort of like an icebreaker,” Logan said. He was thinking of the strange equipment
he’d seen at the bow.
Rush nodded. “The shallow draft helps clear underwater obstructions, and the airscoop on the back
provides the raw power necessary to push through tight spots.”
“You’re right,” Logan said. “It does sound like hell on earth. But why are we…” He stopped. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. That’s where Narmer’s tomb is located.”
15

16
June 2012
Doubleday
Rights available
DANIEL H. WILSON earned a PhD
in robotics from Carnegie Mellon
University. He is the author of
Robopocalypse, How to Survive
a Robot Uprising, Where’s My
Jetpack?, How to Build a Robot
Army, The Mad Scientist Hall of
Fame, and Bro-Jitsu: The Martial Art
of Sibling Smackdown.
Amped
A Novel
Daniel H. Wilson
Praise for Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse:
“It’s terrific page-turning fun.”
—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly
“An ingenious, instantly visual story of war between humans
and robots.”
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“A captivating tale, Robopocalypse will grip your imagination
from the first word to the last, on a wild rip you won’t soon
forget. What a read. . . . unlike anything I’ve read before.”
—Clive Cussler, New York Times best-selling author
The New York Times best-selling author of Robopocalypse
returns with this riveting, imaginative techno-thriller.
Amped is a pulse-pounding epic that explores a pivotal
point in the near future when technology offers “amplified”
superhuman abilities to regular people.
On the day that the Supreme Court passes the first law
intended to restrict the abilities—and rights—of “amplified”
humans, 29 year-old Owen Gray learns that his own medical
implants have been quietly sharpening his intelligence and
altering his perception of reality for years. Owen is catapulted
into a new underclass of implanted citizens, commonly
referred to as “amps.” He also finds himself (based on a past
he never knew) unwittingly at the center of an revolutionary
human rights crusade that is eerily reminiscent of the civil
rights movement.
Amped is a sublimely entertaining and technologically
savvy thriller about the very human ways we interact with
technology, and the ways it changes us. Wilson once again
takes readers to the edge of conceivable science, and raises
the bar on page-turning action.

I always thought I was normal.
EXCERPT FROM “NO SIRENS, NO LIGHTS”
The implant in my head kills seizures. That’s it. No intelligence amplification or prosthetic
memory or anything special—just a run-of-the-mill medical implant. I’m a normal guy.
Normal as anybody. At least, that’s the little speech I practiced for so many years.
Repeated it so many times that I’d even convinced myself.
Until this morning.
Now, I’m starting to realize that I stood right in the middle of the train tracks until it was
too late, until the rails were vibrating under my feet like jackhammers and that great big
steaming black motherfucker of a locomotive was inches away, horn shrieking, barreling
down on me faster than god’s thoughts.
Boom.
I didn’t see Samantha hit the ground. But I heard the sound of it. That blunt impact is
still looping through my brain, ringing like a concussion. It drowned out my numb crawl
back to the window, the sharp questions from the cops, and the concerned looks from
my students in the hallways.
Now, I’m walking fast and aimless through the streets.
The whole city of Pittsburgh is in the middle of a major course correction. Maybe the
nation is, too. Doppler-shifted sirens wail through the streets. A column of dark SUVs
hurtles past me, long antennae see-sawing over potholes. At one point, a tubby, middleaged
guy sprints by, barefoot and panting and with one metal-laced plastic leg. His real
foot hits the sidewalk, then his fake one.
Slap, clink. Slap, clink. Slap, clink.
17

18
July 2012
Pantheon
Rights available
CHARLES YU is the author of
How to Live Safely in a Science
Fictional Universe. He was a
recipient of the National Book
Foundation’s Five Under Thirty
Five Award for his story collection
Third Class Superhero. Yu’s work
has been published in Playboy,
Esquire, The Oxford American,
Harvard Review, Alaska Quarterly
Review, the Mississippi Review,
Mid-American Review, and
elsewhere. He is the recipient of
the Sherwood Anderson Fiction
Award.
Sorry Please Thank You
Stories
Charles Yu
Praise for Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science
Fictional Universe:
“Superb: involving, clever, perky, properly science fiction and
above all funny.”
—The Guardian
“Glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction.
Yu is a superhero of rendering human consciousness and
emotion in the language of engineering and science. A complex,
brainy, genre-hopping joyride of a story, far more than
the sum of its component parts, and smart and tragic enough
to engage all regions of the brain and body.
—The New York Times Book Review
Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science
Fictional Universe, returns with a hilarious, heartbreaking,
inventive, and utterly original collection of short stories.
In Standard Loneliness Package, grief is an outsourced
commodity, in Note to Self, we see a quantum dialogue
expanding across the mulitverse, in Hero Absorbs Major
Damage, a virtual fighter leads his band of virtual warriors,
thieves, and wizards across unknown and deadly computer
generated landscapes, and in First Person Shooter, a zombie
roams a big box store playing video games and sparking
young love: all fairly normal occurrences in the incredible
world of Charles Yu’s Sorry Please Thank You. Here a Yeoman
aboard a starship knows it is his job to perish, simply so
the captain — who is a hopeless drunk — can record that
something happened on the mission. Here grief is outsourced,
designer emotions are created behind closed doors, and final
missives to unrequited lovers are written on bar napkins.
It is an otherworldly, profoundly funny, and completely
contemporary collection that looks through the lens of
science fiction to show us how we live now.

EXCERPT FROM “STANDARD LONELINESS PACKAGE”
Root canal is one fifty, give or take, depending on who’s doing it to you. A migraine is
two hundred.
Not that I get the money. The company gets it. What I get is twelve dollars an hour, plus
reimbursement for painkillers. Not that they work.
I feel pain for money. Other people’s pain. Physical, emotional, you name it.
Pain is an illusion, I know, and so is time, I know, I know. I know. The shift manager
never stops reminding us. Doesn’t help, actually. Doesn’t help when you are on your third
broken leg of the day.
*
I get to work late and already there are nine tickets in my inbox. I close my eyes, take a
deep breath, open the first ticket of the day:
I am at a funeral.
I am feeling grief.
Someone else’s grief.
I am feeling a mixture of things.
Grief, mostly, but I also detect that there is some guilt in there. There usually is.
I hear crying.
I am seeing crying faces. Pretty faces. Crying, pretty, white faces.
Nice clothes.
Our services aren’t cheap. As the shift manager is always reminding us. Need I remind
you? That is his favorite phrase these days. He is always walking up and down the aisle
tilting his head into our cubicles and saying it. Need I remind you, he says, of where we
are on the spectrum? In terms of low-end high-end? We are solidly towards the highishend.
So the faces are usually pretty, the clothes are usually nice. The people are usually
nice, too. Although, I imagine that it’s easy to be nice when you are rich and pretty. Even
when you’re at a funeral.
19

20
October 2012
Pantheon
Rights available
MARGOT BERWIN earned her
MFA from the New School in 2005.
She is the author of Hothouse
Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
and her stories have appeared on
Nerve.com, in the New York Press,
and in the anthology The Future
of Misbehavior. She worked in
advertising for many years in New
York.
Aromata
A Novel
Margot Berwin
Praise for Margot Berwin’s Hothouse Flower:
“The great escapist novel of the summer. A shameless guilty
pleasure of a romp.
—Elle
“Indiana meets Bridget Jones. Berwin delivers a bang-up
debut packed with adventure, betrayal, love and, naturally,
rare plants. There’s magic, romance, greenery and greed
as Lila and Armand venture through the Yucatan. It’s a fun
page-turner—escapist and wonderfully entertaining.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
Margot Berwin, best-selling author of Hothouse Flower,
returns with a new novel of magic, heat, imagination,
and love.
Aromata is the story of Eva, a young woman who is given a
great gift by her grandmother—a scent. Her grandmother
was an aromata, a scent-maker who could design all sorts
of powerful perfumes. Eva soon discovers that her scent has
made her absolutely irresistible—to men, to women, even to
the cats who stay up all night crying to be near her. At first
this new gift is enthralling, as Eva realizes that Gabriel, the
boy she meets in town, is suddenly interested in her. Gabriel
brings Eva with him to New Orleans where he is in medical
school and they make a home together, shutting the windows
to keep her smell inside. But Gabriel is busy with school, and
with only the strange neighbor boy for company, Eva realizes
how lonely this gift can make her. So when Eva meets Michael,
a painter unimpressed with her, she is forced to decide what
love really means, who loves her for her scent, and who loves
her for herself.
From the pine forests and stone houses of upstate New York
to the vine-covered balconies and dank barrooms of New
Orleans, Aromata is a gorgeously atmospheric, evocative story
of romance, voodoo magic, lust, and art.

NON-FICTION

22
March 2011
Doubleday
Rights sold:
Brazil: Companhia das Letras
China: Posts & Telecom Press
Holland: Contact
Japan: Soshisha
Korea: Korea Price Information
Romania: Parallela 45
Russia: AST
UK: Viking
Other rights available
BRIAN CHRISTIAN holds a dual
degree from Brown University in
computer science and philosophy,
and an MFA in poetry. His work
has appeared in both literary and
scientific journals.
The Most Human Human
What Talking with Computers Teaches Us
About What It Means to Be Alive
Brian Christian
“Terrific. . . . one of the rare successful literary offspring of
Gödel, Escher, Bach, where art and science meet an engaged
mind and the friction produces real fire. . . . dense with ideas.
—The New Yorker
“Absorbing. Christian covers a great deal of ground with
admirable clarity but with a lightness of touch.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“The Most Human Human is immensely ambitious and
bold, intellectually provocative, while at the same time
entertaining and witty—a delightful book about how to live
a meaningful, thriving life.
—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dreams
Using his participation in the annual Turing test, which
pits artificial intelligence programs against humans in
a competition to determine if a computer can “think,”
Brian Christian has written an erudite, playful, and profound
examination of what it means to be human.
Embarking on a quest to examine the philosophical, biological
and moral issues raised by the Turing Test, Christian ranges
across a dizzying array of surprising realms: poetry, pick-up
artists, long-distance calls, existentialism, customer service,
chess, and love. His discoveries are a revelation: What Turing
conceived as the test of artificial intelligence ultimately
becomes a means of measuring ourselves. If a computer passes
the Turing test, what then can we say about the essence of
being human?
With fascinating asides and colorful details, The Most Human
Human is an energetic, engrossing tour of the provocative
implications these questions have for our daily life.

EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION
Each year, the artificial intelligence (AI) community convenes for the field’s most
anticipated and controversial annual event—a competition called the Turing test. The
test is named for British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer
science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field’s earliest questions:
can machines think? That is, would it ever be possible to construct a computer so
sophisticated that it could actually be said to be thinking, to be intelligent, to have a
mind? And if indeed there were, someday, such a machine: how would we know?
Alan Turing proposed his test as a way to measure the progress of technology, but it just
as easily presents us a way to measure our own. Oxford philosopher John Lucas says, for
instance, that if we fail to prevent the machines from passing the Turing test, it will be
“not because machines are so intelligent, but because humans, many of them at least,
are so wooden.”
Here’s the thing: beyond its use as a technological benchmark, beyond even the
philosophical, biological, and moral questions it poses, the Turing test is, at bottom,
about the act of communication. I see its deepest questions as practical ones: How do
we connect meaningfully with each other, as meaningfully as possible, within the limits
of language and time? How does empathy work? What is the process by which someone
comes into our life and comes to mean something to us? These, to me, are the test’s
most central questions—the most central questions of being human.
23

24
July 2011
Doubleday
Rights sold:
Brazil: Intrinsica
Germany: FinanzBuch
Holland: Dutch Media
Hungary: Athenaeum 2000
Israel: Kinneret
Italy: Piemme
Poland: W.A.B
Russia: United Press
Spain: Planeta De Agostini
Taiwan: Greater Than Creative
UK: Heinemann
Other rights available
BEN MEZRICH is the New York
Times best-selling author of
The Accidental Billionaires and
Bringing Down the House in addition
to nine other books. The
film 21, starring Kevin Spacey,
was based on Bringing Down the
House. The Social Network, which
won an Oscar for best adaptation,
was based on The Accidental
Billionaires.
Sex on the Moon
The Amazing Story Behind the Most
Audacious Heist in History
Ben Mezrich
Praise for Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires:
“A fascinating story that has the readability of popular
fiction, a ripping story, and great characters. Another winner
from an extremely talented writer.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Mezrich has uncovered another high-stakes, fascinating true
story. Part love story, part madcap caper, part astro-geekery,
the book is one of the summer’s most fun reads.”
—National Public Radio
“Breathless. . . . memorable supporting characters . . .
adventure, sex, romance, a hero who is equal parts Clifford
Irving from The Hoax, Frank Abagnale from Catch Me If You
Can, and George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life.”
—The Boston Globe
Thad Roberts, a fellow in a prestigious NASA program had
an idea—a romantic, albeit crazy, idea. He wanted to give
his girlfriend the moon. Literally.
Thad convinced his girlfriend and another female accomplice,
both NASA interns, to break into an impregnable laboratory
at NASA—past security checkpoints, an electronically locked
door with cipher security codes, and camera-lined hallways—
and help him steal the most precious objects in the world: the
moon rocks.
But what does one do with an item so valuable that it’s
illegal even to own? And was Thad Roberts—undeniably
gifted, picked for one of the most competitive scientific posts
imaginable, a possible astronaut—really what he seemed?
Mezrich has pored over thousands of pages of court records,
FBI transcripts, and NASA documents and has interviewed
most of the participants in the crime to reconstruct this
Ocean’s Eleven–style heist, a madcap story of genius, love, and
duplicity that reads like a Hollywood thrill ride.

EXCERPT FROM THE PROLOGUE
It had to be the strangest getaway in history.
Thad Roberts tried to control his nerves as he stared up through the windshield of the
idling four-wheel drive Jeep. The rain was coming down in violent grey sheets, so fierce
and thick he could barely make out the bright red traffic light hanging just a few feet
in front of him. He had been sitting there for what seemed like forever; a long stretch
of pavement serpentined into the grey mist behind him, winding back past a half dozen
other traffic lights- all of which he’d had to wait through, in exactly the same fashion.
Even worse, between the lights he’d had to keep the Jeep at an agonizing five miles per
hour- a veritable crawl along the desolate, rain-swept streets of the tightly controlled
compound. It was unbelievably hard to drive at five mph, especially when your neurons
were going off like fireworks and your heart felt like it was going to blow right through
your ribcage. But five mph was the mandatory speed limit of the compound—posted
every few yards on signs by the road- and at five mph, once you hit one red light, you
were going to hit them all.
Thad’s fingers whitened against the Jeep’s steering wheel as he watched the red glow,
willing it to change to green. He wanted nothing more than to gun the engine, put his
foot right through the floor, break the speed limit and get the hell out of there. But he
knew that there were cameras everywhere- that the entire getaway was being filmed and
broadcast on more than a dozen security consoles. For this to work, he had to stay calm,
obey the rules. He had to appear as if he belonged.
25

July 2011
Doubleday
Rights sold:
Australia & New Zealand: Scribe
Poland: Znak
Other rights available
JOBY WARRICK covers
intelligence for The Washington
Post, where he has been a reporter
since 1996. He is a winner of the
Pulitzer Prize and has appeared on
CNN, Fox, and PBS.
26
The Triple Agent
The Al-Qaeda Mole who Infiltrated the CIA
Joby Warrick
“Absolutely first-rate, breakthrough reporting.”
—Bob Woodward
“The Triple Agent is a spy thriller like no other. Never has
such a giant intelligence debacle been chronicled this vividly,
this intimately. Riveting and harrowing, laden with deception
and duplicity, it is a remarkable, behind-the-curtain account
of the CIA’s darkest day in Afghanistan.”
—Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald
City
Astunning narrative account of the mysterious Jordanian
who penetrated both the inner circle of al-Qaeda and the
highest reaches of the CIA, with a devastating impact on the
war on terror.
In December 2009, a group of the CIA’s top terrorist hunters
gathered at a secret base in Khost, Afghanistan, to greet a
rising superspy: Humam Khalil al-Balawi, a Jordanian doubleagent
who infiltrated the upper ranks of al-Qaeda. For months,
he had sent shocking revelations from inside the terrorist
network and now promised to help the CIA assassinate Osama
bin Laden’s top deputy. Instead, as he stepped from his car,
he detonated a thirty-pound bomb strapped to his chest,
instantly killing seven CIA operatives, the agency’s worst loss
of life in decades.
In The Triple Agent, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Joby
Warrick takes us deep inside the CIA’s secret war against
al-Qaeda, a war that pits robotic planes and laser-guided missiles
against a cunning enemy intent on unleashing carnage in
American cities. Flitting precariously between the two sides
was Balawi, a young man with extraordinary gifts who managed
to win the confidence of hardened terrorists as well as
veteran spymasters. With his breathtaking accounts from
inside al-Qaeda’s lair, Balawi appeared poised to become
America’s greatest double-agent in half a century—but he was
not at all what he seemed. Combining the powerful momentum
of Black Hawk Down with the institutional insight of Jane
Mayer’s The Dark Side, Warrick takes readers on a harrowing
journey from the slums of Amman to the inner chambers of
the White House in an untold true story of miscalculation,
deception, and revenge.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 13
The Pashtun tribesman known as “al-Qaeda’s tailor” lived in a house near the village of
Datta Khel in North Waziristan, where he made a living making suicide vests. One morning
in mid-December he sat at his antique sewing machine to fill yet another order, this
one very different from the vests he usually made.
The man was celebrated for his ingeniously simple designs that were both reliable and
cheap, two key selling points for a terrorist organization that waged suicide bombings on
an industrial scale. He started with a sturdy cotton vest, often surplus military gear from
the local bazaar, and attached thick straps so it could be secured snugly against the torso.
He added fabric pouches and then stuffed them with packets of white acetone peroxide
powder, an explosive popular in Pakistan’s tribal region because it can be cooked up at
home using common ingredients. Next came the shrapnel layer, which consisted of hundreds
of nails or other bits of metal glued to sheets of thick, adhesive-backed paper or
cloth. Finally, he would insert blasting caps in the powder and attach them to wires that
ran to a small 9-volt battery and a cheap detonator switch. The latter item he sewed into
a separate pouch that closed with a zipper. That, he explained, was to prevent excitable
young martyrs-to-be from blowing themselves up too quickly. An extra second or two
of fumbling with the zipper would remind the bomber to move in closer to his target to
ensure the maximum possible carnage.
On this day, a group of young Pakistani recruits, some of them tapped as future suicide
bombers, gathered to admire the vest-maker as he worked. One of them took photos
with his cell phone as the man reached into his explosives chest and pulled out a surprise:
not the usual bags of powder, but doughy sticks of a far more powerful military explosive
called C4. He kneaded the sticks to flatten them, and began to pack them into a row of
13 fabric pouches he had sewn into the outside of the vest. Next he dipped a paintbrush
into a bucket of industrial adhesive and slathered the white goo over a large square of
sturdy cotton. The man then patiently studded the sheet with metal bits, piece by piece
and row by row, alternating marble-sized steel ball bearings with nails and scrap and,
finally, some shiny twisted pieces that would have been recognizable to any American
who happened to be in the room: children’s jacks.
Among the spectators, there had been lively discussions about the man who would likely
wear the special vest. Most speculation centered on the young foreigner who the recruits
called Abu Leila, using the Arab practice of referring to adult men by the name of their
oldest child and the word “Abu,” or “father of.” But Leila’s father wasn’t nearly so certain.
When he left for Pakistan, Humam al-Balawi imagined himself a mujahideen, a holy warrior,
fighting and maybe even dying in a righteous struggle against the enemies of God.
What he hadn’t pictured for himself was a suicide vest. The one in the tailor’s shop in
Datta Khel was still coming together, row after metal-studded row, but there was still
time. In the coming days, Balawi would try his best to make sure that the vest would end
up belonging to someone else. Anyone but him.
27

28
August 2011
Knopf
Rights sold:
Brazil: Companhia das Letras
Finland: Otava
France: Albin Michel
Germany: Hoffmann & Campe
Holland: Contact
Italy: Sperling & Kupfer
Japan: Bungeishunju
Poland: Czarne & Czerwone
Russia: Corpus
UK: Chatto & Windus
Other rights available
HAL VAUGHAN has been a
newsman, foreign correspondent,
and documentary film producer
working in Europe, the Middle
East, and Southeast Asia since
1957. He served in the U.S.
military in World War II and
Korea and has held various posts
as a U.S. Foreign Service officer.
Vaughan is the author of Doctor
to the Resistance and FDR’s 12
Apostles: The Spies Who Paved
the Way for the Invasion of North
Africa.
Sleeping with the Enemy
Coco Chanel’s Secret War
Hal Vaughan
“A compelling chronicle of Coco Chanel. . . . It’s an astonishing
story . . . gripping . . . provocative . . . riveting history.”
—The Washington Post
“A brilliant portrait . . . wonderfully told, and full of great
characters. It is that rarest of good reads, a biography about a
famous person with a surprise on every page. Nancy Mitford,
I think, would have loved it, and written a wonderful letter to
Evelyn Waugh about it!”
—Michael Korda, The Daily Beast
For more than half a century, Coco Chanel’s life from 1941 to
1954 has been shrouded in vagueness and rumor, mystery and
myth. Neither Chanel nor her many biographers have ever told the
full story of these years.
Now Hal Vaughan, in this explosive narrative—part suspense
thriller, part wartime portrait—fully pieces together the hidden
years of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s life, from the Nazi occupation
of Paris to the aftermath of World War II. Vaughan reveals the
truth of Chanel’s long-whispered collaboration with Hitler’s highranking
officials in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1944. He writes
in detail of her decades-long affair with Baron Hans Günther von
Dincklage, “Spatz” (“sparrow” in English), described in most Chanel
biographies as being an innocuous, English-speaking tennis player,
playboy, and harmless dupe—a loyal German soldier and diplomat
serving his mother country and not a member of the Nazi party.
In Vaughan’s absorbing, meticulously researched book, Dincklage
is revealed to have been a Nazi master spy and German military
intelligence agent who ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and
in Paris and reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels, right hand to Hitler.
The book pieces together how Coco Chanel became a German
intelligence operative; how and why she was enlisted in a number
of spy missions; how she escaped arrest in France after the war,
despite her activities being known to the Gaullist intelligence
network; how she fled to Switzerland for a nine-year exile with
her lover Dincklage. And how, despite the French court’s opening
a case concerning Chanel’s espionage activities during the war,
she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and triumphantly
resurrect and reinvent herself—and rebuild what has become the
iconic House of Chanel.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER SEVEN: “PARIS OCCUPIED—CHANEL A REFUGEE”
At age fifty-seven, Chanel was ready to fall in love again, and in 1940, a great romance
unfolded as Dincklage, now a senior officer of the German occupation forces, stepped
into her life to play the willing cavalier. It would be Chanel’s last great love affair.
For the next few years, Dincklage would manage Chanel’s relations with Nazi officialdom
in Paris and Berlin, and he would be involved in arranging for the German High Command
in Paris to grant Chanel permission to live in rooms on the seventh floor of the Cambon
wing of the Hotel Ritz. It was a convenient location, as the back entrance and exit of
the hotel gave unto the rue Cambon—a few yards from her boutique and the luxurious
apartment she set up at 31, rue Cambon.
For the privileged few, Chanel and her entourage, wartime Paris was really no different
than in peacetime. High society went on much as before: nightclubs and cabarets thrived.
Dincklage dined often at Maxim’s, where German officers and officials nightly enjoyed
the best of French haute cuisine. Chanel and Dincklage were guests at Serge Lifar’s
opera and at his Nazi-sponsored black-tie-and-tails evenings there. Lifar, Cocteau, and
Chanel were frequent guests at candlelight dinners (because of the power shortages)
at the Serts’ apartment at 252, rue de Rivoli. Jojo Sert amused his guests with tales of
British and American spies in Madrid. Sert was a frequent visitor to Madrid. In 1940 he
had arranged to acquire from the Franco government a diplomatic post as the Spanish
ambassador to the Vatican, but based in Paris. The Serts and their friends relished the
array of food shipped to them via the diplomatic pouch from neutral Spain.
Chanel preferred hosting intimate dinners at her apartment on the rue Cambon, where
her treasured objects and her precious Coromandel screens were displayed. Meals were
prepared by her cook and served by her faithful maid Germaine, who had returned to
Paris. On those evening with beau Dincklage, Chanel would sing and play the piano
for her friends. Then, as the guests amused themselves, she and Dincklage would cross
the rue Cambon to the back entrance of the Ritz to her third-floor apartment with its
whitewashed Aubazine-like starkness.
29

30
September 2011
Knopf
Rights sold:
UK: The Bodley Head
Other rights available
PAUL HENDRICKSON’s previous
book, Sons of Mississippi, won the
2003 National Book Critics Circle
Award for nonfiction. Since 1998
he has been on the faculty of the
Creative Writing Program at the
University of Pennsylvania. For
two decades before that he was
a staff writer at The Washington
Post. Among his other books
are Looking for the Light: The
Hidden Life and Art of Marion
Post Wolcott (1992 finalist for
the National Book Critics Circle
Award) and The Living and the
Dead: Robert McNamara and
Five Lives of a Lost War (1996
finalist for the National Book
Award). He has been the recipient
of writing fellowships from
the Guggenheim Foundation,
the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation,
and the Alicia Patterson
Foundation.
Hemingway’s Boat
Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-
1961
Paul Hendrickson
“Admirably absorbing, important, and moving. . . . Acutely
sensitive to his subject’s volatile, ‘gratuitously mean’
personality, Hendrickson offers fascinating details and sheds
new light on Hemingway’s kinder, more generous side.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Splendid. A moving, highly evocative account . . . this
beautifully written, nuanced meditation deserves a wide
audience.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
From a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, a brilliantly
conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key
period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change
the way he is perceived and understood.
Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961—from Hemingway’s
pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his
suicide—Paul Hendrickson traces the writer’s exultations and
despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his
beloved boat, Pilar.
We follow him from Key West to Paris, to New York, Africa,
Cuba, and finally Idaho, as he wrestles with his best angels
and worst demons. Whenever he could, he returned to his
beloved fishing cruiser, to exult in the sea, to fight the biggest
fish he could find, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends
and seduce women, to be with his children. But as he began
to succumb to the diseases of fame, we see that Pilar was also
where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve,
and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished
capacities.
Generally thought of as a great writer and an unappealing
human being, Hemingway emerges here in a far more
benevolent light. Drawing on previously unpublished material,
including interviews with Hemingway’s sons, Hendrickson
shows that for all the writer’s boorishness, depression, and
alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of
remarkable generosity—to struggling writers, to lost souls, to
the dying son of a friend.
Hemingway’s Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping,
an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this
great American writer, published fifty years after his death.

EXCERPT FROM THE PROLOGUE: AMID SO MUCH RUIN, STILL THE BEAUTY
She was sitting up on concrete blocks, like some old and gasping browned-out whale,
maybe a hundred yards from Hemingway’s house, under a kind of gigantic carport with
a corrugated-plastic roof, on what was once his tennis court, just down from the nowdrained
pool where Ava Gardner had reputedly swum nude. Even in her diminished,
dry-docked, parts-plundered state, I knew Pilar would be beautiful, and she was. I knew
she’d be threatened by the elements and the bell-tolls of time, in the same way much
else at the hilltop farm on the outskirts of Havana—La Finca Vigia was its name when
Hemingway lived there—was seriously threatened, and she was. But I didn’t expect to
be so moved.
I walked round and round her. I took rolls and rolls of pictures of her long, low hull, of
her slightly raked mahogany stern, of her nearly vertical bow. When the guards weren’t
looking, I reached over and touched her surface. The wood, marbled with hair-line fissures,
was dusty, porous, dry. It seemed almost scaly. It felt febrile. It was as if Pilar were dying
from thirst. It was as if all she wanted was to get into water. But even if it were possible
to hoist her with a crane off these blocks and to ease her onto a flatbed truck and to take
her away from this steaming hillside and to set her gently into Havana Harbor, would
Hemingway’s boat go down like a stone, boiling and bubbling to the bottom, her insides
having long ago been eaten out by termites and other barely visible critters?
A man who let his own insides get eaten out by the diseases of fame had dreamed new
books on this boat. He’d taught his sons to reel in something that feels like Moby Dick
on this boat. He’d accidentally shot himself in both legs on this boat. He’d fallen drunk
from the flying bridge on this boat. He’d written achy, generous, uplifting, poetic letters
on this boat. He’d propositioned women on this boat. He’d hunted German subs on this
boat. He’d saved guests and family members from shark attack on this boat. He’d acted
like a boor and a bully and an overly competitive jerk on this boat.
She’d been intimately his, and he hers, for twenty-seven years—which were his final
twenty-seven years. She’d lasted through three wives, the Nobel Prize, and all his ruin.
He’d owned her, fished her, worked her, rode her, from the waters of Key West to the
Bahamas to the Dry Tortugas to the north coast and archipelagoes of Cuba. She wasn’t a
figment or a dream or a literary theory or somebody’s psychosexual interpretation—she
was actual.
31

32
October 2011
Pantheon
Rights available
ROBERT NEUWIRTH is the
author of Shadow Cities: A Billion
Squatters, a New Urban World.
He has received a research and
writing grant from the John
D. & Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation, appears nationally and
internationally as a speaker and
on radio, and has written for The
New York Times, The Washington
Post, Dwell, Fortune, The Nation,
and Wired, among many other
publications.
Stealth of Nations
The Global Rise of the Informal Economy
Robert Neuwirth
“Nobody can document this better than the world-traveling
journalist Robert Neuwirth. This is a must-read book.”
—Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology,
Columbia University, and author of A Sociology of
Globalization
“I thought I knew what ‘the economy’ is, but I had no idea
until Neuwirth filled me in.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
“A vibrant picture of a growing sphere of trade that already
employs half the workers of the world.”
—Kirkus
Thousands of Africans head to China each year to buy cell
phones, auto parts, and other products that they will
import to their home countries through a clandestine global
back-channel. Hundreds of Paraguayan merchants smuggle
computers, electronics, and clothing across the border to
Brazil. Dozens of laid-off San Franciscans, working without
any licenses, use Twitter to sell home-cooked foods. Scores of
major multinationals sell products through unregistered kiosks
and street vendors around the world.
When we think of the informal economy, we tend to think of
crime: prostitution, drugs, pirated DVDs. In Stealth of Nations,
Robert Neuwirth opens up this underground realm, explaining
that the worldwide informal economy deals mostly in legal
products and is, in fact, a $10 trillion industry, making it the
second-largest economy in the world, after that of the United
States.
Having penetrated a closed world and persuaded its inhabitants
to open up to him, Neuwirth makes clear that this informal
method of transaction dates back as far as humans have
existed and traded; that it provides essential services and
crucial employment that fill the gaps in formal systems; and
that this unregulated market works like a well-oiled machine
with its own codes and unwritten rules.
Combining a vivid travelogue with a firm grasp of global
economic strategy—along with a healthy dose of irreverence
and skepticism toward the conventional—Neuwirth gives us
an eye-opening account of a world that is always operating
around us, hidden in plain sight.

EXCERPT FROM “GRADE A, PLAN B, MIDDLE C, SYSTEM D, VITAMIN E”
You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street
markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe.
System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The
French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated
people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man (or woman) is a débrouillard(e) is to
tell people how resourceful and ingenious he or she is. The former French colonies have
sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive,
self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without
registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without
paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” Or, sweetened for street
use, “Systeme D.” This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of
improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy.
I like the phrase. It has a carefree lilt and some friendly resonances. At the same time, it
asserts an important truth: what happens on Rua 25 de Março and in all the unregistered
markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of
intelligence, resilience, selforganization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of
well- worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system.
It used to be that System D was small— a handful of market women selling a handful of
shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as
trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, System D is the
economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments
of thirty of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting freemarket
institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world—close to 1.8 billion
people—were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered
nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.
In many countries—particularly in the developing world—System D is growing faster
than any other part of the economy, and it is an increasing force in world trade. What’s
more, after the financial crisis of 2008/2009, System D was revealed to be an important
financial coping mechanism. A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank suggested that people in
the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed
and unregulated—in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust System
D—fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned
and tightly regulated nations. Studies of countries throughout Latin America have shown
that desperate people turned to System D to survive during the most recent financial
crisis.
33

34
November 2011
Knopf
Rights sold:
Italy: EDT
Japan: Kawade Shobo
Russia: Corpus
Other rights available
STUART ISACOFF, pianist and
writer, was the founder of Piano
Today magazine, which he edited
for nearly three decades. A winner
of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award
for excellence in writing about
music, he is a regular contributor
on the arts to The Wall Street
Journal. Isacoff is on the faculty
of the SUNY Purchase College
Conservatory of Music.
The Natural History of the Piano
The Instrument, the Music, the
Musicians—from Mozart to
Modern Jazz and Everything in
Between
Stuart Isacoff
“A dazzling structural juxtaposition from Mozart, Liszt and
Horowitz to Joplin, Tatum and Jerry Lee Lewis, written with
verve and sensitivity. Piano lovers will eat it up.”
—David Dubal, author of The Art of the Piano
“Anybody who cares about the piano—past, present and
future—will find this book irresistible reading. I always learn
so much from Stuart Isacoff and have a good time in the
process.”
—Tim Page
“I loved this book. Isacoff tells the story of the piano through
every conceivable device and viewpoint. And he never forgets
that piano lore includes the highest of high culture as well as
the pop-est of pop. It’s a terrifically enjoyable read.”
—Sara Fishko, WNYC Radio
In this splendidly engrossing and vividly descriptive book,
Stuart Isacoff—performer, critic, teacher—celebrates the
piano, and the composers and performers who have made
it their own. Here is the instrument in all its complexity and
beauty—one of the great accomplishments of the Western
musical tradition.
Isacoff describes the ongoing evolution of the piano and how
its sound gives rise to emotion and individual artistry. He
illuminates the groundbreaking music of Mozart, Beethoven,
and Liszt. He analyzes the breathtaking techniques of Vladimir
Horowitz, Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, and many other
pianists, and he gives musicians including Alfred Brendel and
Murray Perahia the opportunity to discuss their techniques.
Isacoff delineates how classical music influenced jazz as it
progressed from ragtime and stride to Fats Waller, Duke
Ellington, Herbie Hancock, and Cecil Taylor.
With this wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated volume, Isacoff
has given us a must-have for music lovers, pianists, and the
armchair musician.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER TEN: THE MELODISTS
Chopin was, in a sense, a crooner of the piano keys. That’s why he found the operatic
melodies of his friend Vincenzo Bellini, a prime inspiration, along with the music of Mozart
and Bach. In order to produce what Liszt described as Chopin’s “perfection” of sound, he
developed an entirely new technique at the keyboard. Alfred Hipkins, who tuned pianos
for Chopin in London, described how his left hand arpeggios “swelled or diminished like
waves in an ocean of sound.” That nuanced smoothness was achieved through a variety
of unorthodox moves, such as placing his thumb on the black keys, or allowing a single
finger to slide from one key to another (as in the playing of many jazz pianists today).
Composer Stephen Heller said that Chopin’s “slim hands” would “suddenly expand and
cover a third of the keyboard like a serpent opening its mouth to swallow a rabbit whole.”
Chopin’s ease in navigating the keyboard was also assisted by advances in the construction
of the piano, such as Sébastian Érard’s 1808 “repetition action” and his aforementioned
1821 “double escapement.” It was like adding power steering and brakes to an old
model car, making it responsive to the slightest touch. In fact, Chopin found Érard’s pianos
“too insistent”—“You can thump it or bash it, it makes no difference,” he claimed—
and preferred the more natural feeling of the piano built by Pleyel, which he described as
having a “silvery and slightly veiled sonority and lightness of touch.”
Chopin’s rhythmic approach startled contemporaries. Some of his compositions, like
the Polonaises and Mazurkas, had their origins in Polish dance. He had been an avid
and accomplished social dancer back home in Warsaw. But even when performing a
dance rhythm, his sense of time, like his tonal shading, was stunningly fluid. It caused
such consternation among his colleagues that Meyerbeer once became embroiled in an
argument with him over how many beats he was playing in one of his Mazurkas, whose
rhythm is based (like the waltz) on groups of three. According to Wilhelm von Lenz, a
pupil of Chopin, Meyerbeer declared that the music sounded as if it were in a meter of
two, not three. “I had to repeat it while Chopin, pencil in hand, beat time on the piano;
his eyes were blazing,” reported Lenz. But the German composer could not be persuaded.
“Only once have I ever seen Chopin lose his temper,” recalled Lenz, “and it was at that
moment.”
35

36
November 2011
Doubleday
Rights available
RICHARD RHODES is most
recently the author of The Twilight
of the Bombs, the last volume in
the quartet about nuclear history.
The first, Making of the Atomic
Bomb, won the Pulitzer Prize,
a National Book Award, and a
National Book Critics Circle Award.
Hedy’s Folly
The Life and Breakthrough
Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the
Most Beautiful Woman in the
World
Richard Rhodes
Praise for Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb,
winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award:
“A monumental and enthralling history. . . . Alive and
vibrant.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Rich in drama and suspense, The Making of the Atomic
Bomb has remarkable breadth and depth, revealing new
connections, insights, and surprises. The best overview of the
century’s pivotal event.”
—The New York Times Book Review
What do Hedy Lamarr, avant-garde composer George
Antheil, and your cell phone have in common? The
answer is spread-spectrum radio: a revolutionary invention
based on the rapid switching of communications signals among
a spread of different frequencies. Without this technology, we
would not have the digital comforts that we take for granted
today.
Only a writer of Richard Rhodes’s caliber could do justice
to this remarkable story. Unhappily married to a Nazi arms
dealer, Lamarr fled to America at the start of World War II;
she brought with her not only her theatrical talent but also a
gift for technical innovation. An introduction to Antheil at a
Hollywood dinner table culminated in a U.S. patent for a jam-
proof radio guidance system for torpedoes—the unlikely duo’s
gift to the U.S. war effort.
What other book brings together 1920s Paris, player pianos,
Nazi weaponry, and digital wireless into one satisfying whole?
In its juxtaposition of Hollywood glamour with the reality
of a brutal war, Hedy’s Folly is a riveting book about unlikely
amateur inventors collaborating to change the world.

EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION
The 1940s Austrian-American movie star Hedy Lamarr was an inventor. The public relations
department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where Hedy began her American film career, put out
the claim that she was “the most beautiful woman in the world,” and by Western standards
she may have been. It annoyed her deeply, however, that few people saw beyond her beauty
to her intelligence. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she famously and acidly said. “All you have
to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Hedy invented as a hobby. Since she made two or three movies a year, each one taking
about a month to shoot, she had spare time to fill. She didn’t drink and she didn’t like to
party, so she took up inventing. When she was a girl her father, a Viennese banker, had
encouraged her interest in how the world worked, taking walks with her and explaining the
mechanics of the machinery they encountered.
As a young woman, before she emigrated from Austria to the United States, she married
a munitions manufacturer and listened in on the technical discussions he held with his
Austrian and German military clients. She also had a keen sense of the world’s large
and small failings, some of which she decided she could fix. In Hollywood she set up an
inventor’s corner in the drawing room of her house, complete with a drafting table and lamp
and all the necessary drafting tools.
Hedy conceived of her most important invention in 1941, in the dark years between the
German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in
December 1941 that finally impelled the United States to enter the war. She wanted to help
her newly-adopted country (where she was still technically an enemy alien) and saw the
need for a weapon to attack the German submarines that were devastating North Atlantic
shipping. It’s characteristic of her confidence in her inventive gift that she believed she could
devise such a weapon and help change the course of the war.
Her unlikely, but ideal, partner in that work was an avant-garde composer and concert
pianist named George Antheil, at five feet four a “cello-sized man” as Time magazine put
it, a New Jersey native whose father owned a shoe store. Antheil was not, like Hedy, an
amateur inventor, but he was nearly polymathic in his gifts. When Hedy revealed her idea
to him, he immediately saw a way to give it practical form for the purpose of patenting it.
That practical form linked back to Antheil’s most notorious composition, a twenty minute
rhythmic cacophony of grand pianos, electric bells, drums, xylophones, a siren, a gong, an
airplane propeller and sixteen synchronized player pianos called Ballet mécanique, premiered
in Paris in 1926. In his Paris days, before he moved to Hollywood to make a living writing
film scores, Antheil was a good friend of Ernest Hemingway, Igor Stravinsky, the bookseller
Sylvia Beach (the Antheils lived for ten years in a small apartment on the mezzanine of
Beach’s famous Shakespeare & Company bookstore), James Joyce, Ezra Pound and most
of the rest of the fabled crowd of expatriates that helped make Paris a world center of art,
music and literature in the years between the two world wars.
Hedy in Vienna, George in Paris and then the two of them meeting up in Hollywood to
invent a fundamental new wireless technology makes a remarkable story at the center
of Hedy Lamarr’s long and fascinating life. Except in the matter of her beauty, which she
valued least of all, people regularly underestimated her. She deserved better.
37

38
February 2012
Knopf
Rights available
STEPHEN R. PLATT received
his PhD in Chinese history at
Yale. He is also the author
of Provincial Patriots: The
Hunanese and Modern China.
His work has been supported
by the Fulbright program, the
National Endowment for the
Humanities, and the Chiang
Chin-Kuo Foundation.
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom
China, the West, and the Epic Story of the
Taiping Civil War
Stephen R. Platt
“A splendid example of finely calibrated historical narrative.
It is a tragic and powerful story. Brilliant and enlightening.”
—Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom is a spirited narrative history
that recounts the crucial and bloody culmination of
the Taiping rebellion, a conflict that cost some 20 million
lives. With unforgettable yet enigmatic characters like Hong
Xiuquan—the spiritual leader of the Taiping who had a dream
that announced he was the son of God and the brother of
Jesus—Platt’s book shows us up-close the brutal conclusion
to China’s failed revolution.
Before 1860, both Britain and the U.S. regarded the Qing as
hide-bound and uncooperative. British newspaper reporters
sent home widely circulated accounts that demonized the
Qing in the popular imagination and allied the people to
the quasi-Christian Taiping. But just a couple of years later
both countries threw their support behind the Qing out of
concern for the stability in the region. As the revolution wore
on, Taiping leader Hong Regnan’s descent into violence and
madness further distanced would-be allies. Finally, in one
last bloody battle, some 100,000 Taiping were slaughtered
at Nanjing in the autumn of 1864, effectively snuffing out all
opposition to Qing rule for years to come.
By the time the depleted Qing fell in 1911, China had dropped
irremediably behind the West. In this enthralling history, Platt
charts the rise and fall of the movement that once promised
to launch China into the modern world.

EXCERPT FROM THE PROLOGUE: HEAVEN’S CHILDREN
On an early spring morning in 1853 just northwest of Beijing, the sun rises quietly over the
summer palace of Xianfeng, the seventh emperor of the Qing dynasty. The palace sprawls luxuriantly
over eight hundred acres of gardens and ornately constructed buildings, a world within
the world of China, from which Xianfeng—like his royal ancestors—rarely needs to go out. There
are wooded riding trails, lakes, and opera houses. The grandest landscapes of the empire have
been lovingly recreated within the palace compound, in miniature, for the emperor’s pleasure.
At twenty-one, Xianfeng has only been on the throne for three years, but he was born here in
this palace, and all he has ever known in his life has been his preparation to become the Son of
Heaven, and to rule China.
Xianfeng is a Manchu, not Chinese, descended from nomadic outdoorsmen and hunters originally
from north of the Great Wall that the earlier dynasties built to keep out his kind (“barbarians,”
the Chinese once called them). But his family have ruled China for more than two centuries now,
since the collapse of the Ming dynasty under its own weight in 1644, and they govern through a
certain indulgence, acting as stewards of Chinese tradition to maintain the loyalty of the Chinese
scholars who do the real work of management and bureaucracy. As did the dynasties before them,
they hold Confucian examinations to choose officials, recruiting loyal Chinese to administer the
empire in their stead. And by now, after so many years, few question that the Manchus rule by
Heaven’s choice, and that the Manchu emperor is indeed the divine ruler of the Chinese.
Xianfeng’s life is a singularity–as emperor there is a color of fabric he alone can wear, ink he alone
can use, a pronoun whose sole existence in the Chinese language is for him to refer to himself.
And such, in a sense, is the condition of the Manchus more widely in the empire.
There was a time when these Manchus were fierce, and the men would return to their northern
homeland in the summer to practice the muscular arts of horsemanship and archery that made
them proudly superior to the sedentary Chinese. But things changed as they grew accustomed
to their comforts. The emperors are no longer so attentive as they once were, the Manchu men
no longer so concerned with physical discipline, with sharpening their martial skills. And so on
this spring morning in 1853, in the walled city of Nanjing a little over seven hundred miles to
the south of Xianfeng’s palace, as the rebels—chosen by a different heaven—smash through the
outer walls of the city and shout to the civilians to show them the way to the Manchu devils,
as they push through to the inner city, climbing over themselves to scale the wall that encircles
the isolated population within—as they do this, the men who count among the twenty thousand
or so Manchus living inside the garrison do not take up their weapons, but instead only throw
themselves to the ground and beg for pity. The rebels slaughter them like animals, and then their
wives, and all of their daughters and sons.
39

40
May 2012
Pantheon
Rights available
GREGORY CHAITIN is well-known
for his work on metamathematics.
He has published many books on
such topics, including Meta Math!
The Quest for Omega. This is his
first book on biology.
Proving Darwin
Making Biology Mathematical
Gregory Chaitin
Praise for Gregory Chaitin’s Meta Math!:
“A tour de force! Entertaining, enlightening, exhilarating, and
most of all ennobling to the spirit of human enterprise. This
book is destined to stand beside those by Poincaré and Hardy
as a deeply personal account of a lifetime’s odyssey traveling
the worlds of the mind and the soul.”
—John L. Casti, author of Gödel: A Life of Logic
“Captivating. . . . With extraordinary skill and a gentle humor,
Chaitin shares his profound insights.”
—Paul Davies, author of How to Build a Time Machine
“Chaitin skillfully and knowledgeably guides the reader
through some of the foggy badlands where math meets philosophy
and information theory. A fascinating book.”
—John Derbyshire, author of Prime Obsession
an all the sophisticated, intricate and amazing life forms
Cwe see around us have evolved by blind chance as Darwin
claims, or were we deliberately designed? The controversy
rages, but we will never be sure, the author claims, until there
is a mathematical proof that natural selection works, or a proof
that it cannot work.
For this we need a mathematical theory of evolution and
biological creativity, and the author has bravely set out to build
such a theory. Has he succeeded? Perhaps! At least he is trying
hard and there are some encouraging developments. And in this
book he tells the story of how he did it, more precisely, of how
he may have done it.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER FIVE
I think the time is now ripe to combine theoretical computer science with biology and to
begin developing a theoretical mathematical biology.
These two technologies will converge. It is no accident that people talk about computer
viruses and cyber-warfare and about developing an immune system to protect cyberassets.
And what I am saying is that this isn’t just a metaphor. We can take advantage of
this analogy to begin developing a mathematical theory of evolution.
Darwin begins his book On the Origin of Species by taking advantage of the analogy
between artificial selection by animal and plant breeders, the successful efforts of his
wealthy neighbors to breed champion milk producing cows, racehorses and roses, and
natural selection due to Malthusian limitations. I want to utilize the analogy between
the random evolution of natural software, DNA, and the random evolution of artificial
software, computer programs. I call this proposed new field “metabiology,” and it studies
random walks in software space, hill-climbing random walks of increasing fitness.
Random walks are an idea that mathematicians feel comfortable with. There is a
substantial literature on random walks. And I am just proposing a random walk in a richer
space, the space of all possible programs in a given computer programming language,
which is a space that is large enough to model biological creativity.
I start with two observations. Firstly that DNA is presumably what computer scientists
call a “universal programming language,” which means that it is sufficiently powerful to
express any algorithm—in particular evo-devo teaches us to think of DNA as a computer
program. Secondly, at the level of abstraction that I am working in my models, there is
no essential difference between mathematical creativity and biological creativity, and
so I can use mathematical problems for which there are no general methods in order to
challenge my organisms and force them to keep evolving.
Emil Post who is forgotten but whose work was at the level of that of Kurt Gödel and
Alan Turing considered that the whole point of incompleteness and uncomputability was
to show the essential role of creativity in mathematics. The emphasis on formal methods
provoked by the computer temporarily obliterated Post’s insight, but metabiology picks
up the torch of creativity again.
To summarize, the general idea is that we are all random walks in program space! Our
genomes are digital software that has been patched and modified for billions of years
in order to deal with changes in the environment. In fact, I propose thinking of life as
evolving software, and considering biology to be a kind of software archeology. Instead
of La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine (1748), we now have L’Homme software.
41

42
July 2012
Doubleday
Rights sold:
Germany: Karl Blessing
Other rights available
WILLIAM DOBSON has been
an editor at Foreign Affairs and
Newsweek International. Under
his direction, Foreign Policy won
the coveted National Magazine
Award for General Excellence in
2007 and 2009. His articles and
essays have appeared in the New
York Times, the Washington Post,
and the Wall Street Journal, and
he has provided analysis for ABC,
CNN, CBS, and MSNBC, and NPR.
The Dictator’s Learning Curve
Inside the Global Battle for
Democracy
William Dobson
“William Dobson is the rare thinker who combines a gift
for storytelling with a farsighted understanding of how the
world works. . . . He is one of the best new voices writing
about global politics today.”—Fareed Zakaria
In this riveting anatomy of the new face of authoritarianism,
acclaimed journalist William Dobson explains why, despite
the recent “revolutions” in Iran, Egypt, and Tunisa, the world
is actually becoming less free.
Across the world, repression is on the rise. The problem
isn’t that democracy has lost its appeal; rather that the
nature of dictatorships has evolved. Today’s despots and
authoritarians are not frozen–in-time regimes of Burma,
Zimbabwe, and North Korea. They are the ever-morphing
Russia, China, Iran, and Venezeula, far more technologically
sophisticated and savvy, who have replaced more brutal
forms of intimidation with subtle coercion. They run “free”
elections and allow opposition parties. They pepper their
speeches with references to liberty, justice, and democracy,
even human rights. They know they must concede ground in
order to maintain it. To combat them, a growing global army
of democratic advocates, from private millionaires to bloggers
to student groups, are using digital technology to attack the
dictators from within their own regimes. But don’t count the
dictators out.
The Dictator’s Learning Curve reveals a new breed of
dictatorship, wielding new techniques for preserving power,
that threatens democracy at home and abroad.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER SIX: THE PHARAOH
Samira Ibrahim, a sales manager at a cosmetics company in Upper Egypt, traveled for eight
hours to get to Tahrir Square in early 2011. The protests had already started. Although
only 25 years old, she had been attending demonstrations and marches since she was
a girl. Once she arrived in Cairo, she didn’t leave. For days, she camped out among the
crowds. She was there when President Hosni Mubarak stepped down on February 11th,
and for the raucous celebration that followed. But, even after Mubarak was gone and
most people had returned home, Samira stayed. She was among a group of roughly 1,000
demonstrators who believed they must camp out in the square as a reminder to Egypt’s
generals, who had now assumed control of the country, of the promises that remained
unfulfilled. The revolution, in her mind, was incomplete. So, on the afternoon of March
9th, nearly a month after Mubarak fled Cairo, Samira was still there.
The violence began a little after three o’clock. A large group of thugs gathered near the
roundabout in Tahrir. They were shouting at the demonstrators, peaceful protestors
like Samira, yelling, “The people want the square cleared! Evict them from the square!”
These thugs, many of whom carried wooden sticks and metal pipes, began to circle
the roundabout. When they came close to the entrance of the metro station, they
started throwing stones and pavers from the street at the protestors. They charged the
demonstrators’ encampment in the middle of the square, tearing down tents and beating
up those who stood in their way. “We started sending SOS messages over Facebook,
trying to get others to come and help us,” recalls Ahmed Amer, a 24 year-old activist who
was in the square at the time. “Our numbers started to grow and the newcomers were
helping to defend our tents. The thugs attacked us using blades, and we would defend
ourselves with stones.”
When the demonstrators first saw military units arrive, they thought they were coming
to their defense. After all, the Egyptian military had been their liberators during the
revolution. Army officers had kept watch over the square, and when the hour finally
came, the military sided with the people, not Mubarak. It was when the soldiers entered
the square that Samira realized something was wrong. The soldiers were not arresting
the thugs; they were arresting the demonstrators and looking on as the armed attackers
chased people out of the square.
43

44
Summer 2012
Knopf
Rights available
ROBERT PETER GALE received his
MD from the State University of
New York and his PhD from UCLA
in microbiology and immunology.
In addition to his more than
800 academic publications, Gale
has written popular books on
Chernobyl and U.S. nuclear energy
policy. He frequently appears on
television news broadcasts, and
received an Emmy for his work on
a 60 Minutes special report.
ERIC LAX is the author of the
New York Times Notable Book Life
and Death on 10 West, an account
of the UCLA bone marrow
transplantation ward, then headed
by Dr. Gale. He also wrote an
account of the development of
penicillin, The Mold in Dr. Florey’s
Coat which was a Los Angeles
Times Best Book of 2004. His
book Conversations with Woody
Allen was a New York Times
Notable Book and international
best-seller.
Radiation: What it is, What You
Need to Know
Robert Peter Gale and Eric Lax
From Dr. Robert Peter Gale, one of the world’s leading
experts in radiation biology who consulted on the scene in
Chernobyl and Fukushima, and critically acclaimed author Eric
Lax, comes a book that dispels myth, provides facts, and tells
the reader everything he or she needs to know about radiation.
In the aftermath of the Japanese nuclear reactor meltdowns
at Fukushima, worldwide attention to, and unease with, the
danger of nuclear energy and radioactivity has only increased
the existing plethora of misinformation about radiation while
doing nothing to improve our understanding of what radiation
is, how it causes damage, and what exact threats there are. The
public needs precise information: how does radiation affect
the body? What risk does it pose in the food supply chain
and in medical treatment? What are the long-term dangers?
What do we need to worry about, now and in the future? We
must also grasp the benefits of radiation, without which there
would not be life on Earth or cures of some cancers. If visions
of mushroom clouds and Dr. Strangelove did not pop into our
heads whenever we hear about the release of radiation, would
we be able to comprehend it rationally as a vital part of our
lives instead of a danger in every instance?
Radiation will address these questions drawing on Dr. Gale’s
extensive research and experience around the world and cut
through years of popular misrepresentations and widely held,
if inaccurate, beliefs. Eye-opening and timely, it is an essential
primer we all must read.

46
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