Columbia has picked up Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies with plans for John Calley to produce a feature film. Some other local sales in this week's Publishers Lunch newsletter:

Steven Ross, chair of the USC History department, will be writing Hollywood Left and Right, "about the mix of fame and politics," for Oxford University Press.

John Soennichsen's Notes From the Bottom of the World: A Death Valley Diary, "equal parts history, adventure story, and memoir about the hottest place on earth," sold to Sasquatch Books.

Kate Benson, 23-year-old former Joyce Carol Oates protegee, sold her first novel Two Harbors to Harcourt. It "takes the narrator from small town Minnesota to the Los Angeles underground on a search for clues and connections surrounding the mother who abandoned her and the mysterious boyfriend who died abruptly."

Also on the book beat, Joseph Mailander blogs on the scene at last weekend's launch party in San Pedro for John Shannon's new Jack Liffey mystery, Terminal Island.

Shannon is connecting with the old neighborhood; he grew up here, formed memories and behaviors on these streets, went to San Pedro High before he flung himself into the larger world. But there was already a large world present in his life, right there in San Pedro, and that's largely what this event and this new novel of Shannon's is about. If you can't go home again, you can at least process it, and see where it gets you....