Les Bienveillantes in English

[Ya Sam]

The doorstop Les Bienveillantes with a Blicerish main character after a 
savage auctioning has acquired its English language publishers.

In UK

"Chatto & Windus has won the auction for Les Bienveillantes--the 900-page 
novel written in French by American author Jonathan Littell. The Random 
House imprint's publishing director Alison Samuel acquired UK rights from 
agent Andrew Nurnberg for "a significant" sum after she read the book in 
French at Frankfurt. The offer is understood not to have been the highest 
that was made."

http://thebookseller.com/?pid=2&did=21157

And in US

A French Sensation Finds a U.S. Publisher


By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: October 26, 2006
After a languid intercontinental auction that stretched for more than a 
week, the American rights to Jonathan Littell’s novel “Les Bienveillantes,” 
which became a publishing sensation in France, have been sold to 
HarperCollins, the publisher confirmed yesterday.

The British rights went to Chatto & Windus, an imprint of the Random House 
Group in London.

The book had gone up for auction on Oct. 17 amid much speculation about who 
would bid and how much it would fetch, and many publishers anticipated a 
quick resolution.

“This is so deep and thought-provoking a work, we could not have possibly 
made a flash decision,” said Andrew Nurnberg, Mr. Littell’s agent in London, 
who administered the auction.

“Les Bienveillantes,” which translates as “The Kindly Ones,” is a 903-page 
novel written in French by an American author with a defiant Nazi SS officer 
as its hero. It captivated the publishing industry this month at the 
Frankfurt Book Fair, where publishers speculated that the American and 
British rights could fetch as much as $1 million. In the first six weeks 
after it was published in France, 280,000 copies were sold.

Jonathan Burnham, the senior vice president and publisher of HarperCollins, 
declined to disclose what the publisher paid for the book but said it was a 
substantial sum.

Mr. Littell, 38, the son of the spy novelist Robert Littell, was educated at 
Yale but has spent most of his life in France and now lives in Barcelona. He 
has already sold publication rights to the book for Spain, Italy, the 
Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, among other countries. Industry executives 
say the German rights alone fetched $567,000.

The book will be published in spring 2008 in the United States and Britain, 
depending on the speed of the translation.

Mr. Burnham called the book a “masterpiece” but acknowledged that it would 
not be an easy sell. “If there’s a challenge, first of all, it’s a long 
book,” he said. “Secondly, it’s a book that delves into the darkest chapters 
of history and the darkest realms of the human psyche. To pretend that it is 
in any way a conventional novel would be a mistake.”

Alison Samuel, the publishing director of Chatto & Windus, described the 
book as “very, very disturbing, very shocking,” and “important for those 
reasons.”

Bids for the book had to be submitted by Oct. 17, along with what Mr. 
Nurnberg described to publishers as a “love letter,” or a description of 
their feelings about the book, how they interpreted its themes and how they 
would present it to the buying public.

Several publishers offered bids, among them Alfred A. Knopf and Spiegel & 
Grau, an imprint of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group of Random House. 
A number of others considered bidding but then dropped out, including 
Grove/Atlantic and Viking, an imprint of Penguin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/books/26boo.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE! 
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/