Acquisitions
Kapka tangoing
We are stamping our heels to celebrate the acquisition of Kapka Kassabova's Tango: Twelve Minutes of Love.
This dazzling new book is about Kapka's decade-long love affair with the dance. Having hot-footed her way around dancehalls from Auckland to Edinburgh, via Buenos Aires and Berlin, Kapka uses her personal story to open up the hidden world of tango, with its aficionados and desperados, its endless practice and its fleeting passions.
Following on the heels of Kapka’s highly acclaimed memoir about growing up in Communist Bulgaria, Street Without a Name, this new project is the perfect pairing of subject and author and will confirm Kapka as one of the most entertaining, ambitious and nimble writers of her generation. Laura Barber acquired WEL rights (excluding NZ) on proposal from Isobel Dixon at Blake Friedmann for publication in 2012.
Dreaming in Hindi
We are thrilled to have acquired Dreaming in Hindia clever, lucid and funny memoir written by American author Katherine Russell Rich. Tasja Dorkofikis, Associate Publisher of Portobello Books, bought the book from Abner Stein.
The memoir tells of Rich's experience spending a year in Rajasthan in India learning Hindi, having survived a serious illness. The author joined a special language school offering 'total immersion', part of which included living with a local family.
What follows is a year of linguistic adventure and cultural surprises in which Rich gradually sheds her foreignness, to discover a new country and a new way of communicating. Fascinated by the process, she seeks out linguistic experts around the world to understand what goes on in the brain as we pick up a new vocabulary.
It is both a memoir and a unique investigation into the science of language acquisition. Dreaming in Hindi offers an engrossing account of what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.
Dreaming in Hindi was published in July 2009 in the US by Houghton Mifflin. Portobello Books will publish in October 2010.
Nicolas Dickner
We're delighted that we have acquired UK and Commonwealth rights in Nicolas Dickner’s novel Tarmac a sweet, smart and occasionally surreal romantic comedy, featuring two friends who could become lovers – if only one of them hadn’t convinced herself that the end of the world is nigh…
We published Dickner’s debut, Nikolski, a favourite of the Web Mistress', in February 2009.
Esquire magazine has said of Nikolski, 'If you have a taste for the novels of Georges Perec, Thomas Pynchon or Michael Chabon, then you’ll probably go for Nicolas Dickner too … like those other writers 'Dickner achieves a similar suggestive allusiveness to some deep grand design … I suspect we will be hearing more of him in the future.’
