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Los Angeles author Steve Oney's next book will be on the history, travails and tribulations of National Public Radio. "We’re delighted to have acquired Steve Oney’s exploration of the personalities and conflicts at NPR," says Jonathan Karp, executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster. "This is the rare media story that transcends the industry and speaks to larger cultural issues, and we believe this book will offer valuable insights into the workings of an important and intriguing journalistic organization.” Oney was a National Magazine Award finalist while at Los Angeles magazine. He's the author of “And the Dead Shall Rise,” about the notorious 1915 lynching in Georgia of Leo Frank.
Oney was represented in the deal by Steve Wasserman, the former L.A. Times book editor who is now a literary agent with Kneerim & Williams in New York. Books coming this spring from UCLA history professor Russell Jacoby ("Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present") and Topanga-based longtime political consultant Bill Zimmerman ("Troublemaker: A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties") are also Wasserman's. His client Christopher Hitchens is up for an L.A. Times Book Prize in April for "Hitch-22."
More L.A. author news: Francesca Lia Block has sold "The Elementals," called by Publishers Lunch "a psycho-sexual thriller in which a college girl attempts to solve the disappearance of her childhood friend, only to get drawn into a world that is even more dangerous than she imagined," to St. Martin's.