An L.A. plot and a journo

What is it about novels based in Los Angeles and books with journalists as the main characters? Publishers Lunch reports a low six-figure deal for this first novel with both by Maria Lennon, who may or not be the actress of the same name.

Latch, in which a thirty-eight year-old foreign correspondent, pregnant by her cheating surgeon boyfriend, returns home from war-torn Sierra Leone to L.A. where she throws herself into unlikely new friendships with a group of breast-feeding Hollywood wives and sees her past come back to haunt her when her two neatly separated worlds collide.

Some non-fiction book deals worth noting:

Film critic Tom Dewe Matthews' Out of Hollywood, about what happened to the Hollywood exiles, post-McCarthy, who found themselves having to flee America after the McCarthy blacklists. Based on considerable original research from over the last five years. To Faber & Faber.

Time magazine contributor Pamela Paul's Pornified: How Pornography Affects Men, Women, Relationships, and Families. It looks at how the growing pervasiveness and acceptability of pornography is transforming the way men and women experience their relationships and marriages, and how pornography is playing an increasingly prominent role in the lives of children and adolescents. To Times Books.

Chronicle of Higher Education columnist Rachel Toor's The Pig and I, a sharp-tongued memoir about a woman's love affairs with a string of pets and a string of men that asks the question: why is it so easy to love an animal and so hard to love a man. To Hudson Street Press.

While I'm enjoying the terrific final sexless episodes of "Sex and the City" (my vote is for Big, with he and Carrie moving back to NYC...not original I know, but true to the series), I didn't care for the book. Somebody likes Candace Bushnell's stories though. She just sold two more novels to Hyperion and already had one under contract.