New book deals from Publishers Lunch:

Los Angeles Magazine editor R.J. Smith has sold The Great Black Way: Central Avenue and the Legacy of African-American Los Angeles to PublicAffairs at auction. Publishers Lunch describes it as "about a few remarkable years in the 1940s, when an African-American community came together in Los Angeles and found its voice--helping to launch the civil rights movement, rhythm & blues, hip hop, a noir sensibility, and a whole ghetto fabulous way of being in the world."

Also: Television writer Scott Frost's first novel Choose sold to Putnam in a two-book deal. It's said to be about "a woman homicide detective whose daughter is kidnaped, pitted against a cunning and cruel killer, as ultimately the Rose Parade becomes the killer's target and our heroine must make a choice that no mother should ever even have to contemplate." The Village Bride in Beverly Hills by Kavita Daswani is "the story of a naive young Indian bride married off by her parents to a man living in the U.S. she doesn't even know who...morphs from a receptionist into the hottest celebrity gossip columnist in Hollywood." That one goes to Penguin and Harper UK.

Recently out: Even considering that book jacket blurbs are a genre of flattery all its own, David Freeman's It's All True: A Novel of Hollywood comes with a pretty good recommendation on the back. Carolyn See blurbs that his previous novel, A Hollywood Education was "the best book anybody has written about Hollywood, ever."

And: Los Angeles writer Hilary de Vries' first novel So Five Minutes Ago, about a fictional celebrity publicist in L.A., is out from Villard Books.

Coming up: Thursday on "Bookworm" (KCRW, 2:30 p.m.), the guest is Stuart Dybek (I Sailed With Magellan).

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