Scribe’s founder and publisher Henry Rosenbloom has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights in two distinctive memoirs by US authors.
Heartland: a memoir of working hard and being broke in the richest country on earth reveals one woman's experience of working-class poverty. Author Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the perils of having less in a country known for its excess. It’s also the perfect companion to Evicted, Hillbilly Elegy, and Tara Westover's Educated.
Sarah Smarsh has reported on socioeconomic class, politics and public policy for The New Yorker and The Guardian among other outlets, and she is currently a Shorenstein Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Rosenbloom says: ‘This is an extraordinarily vivid, elegiac, and searing account of being a member of the rural working poor, written as late capitalism eats its children. It's clear that Sarah Smarsh is not only an outstanding observer and writer, but a very special person.’
Rights were acquired from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein acting on behalf of Julie Barer at The Book Group. Scribe Australia will publish in October. The Scribe UK edition will publish in November.
Rosenbloom has also acquired Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein, a scathing exploration of Silicon Valley tech culture, depicted from the inside. It follows Pein as he ditches journalism for the tech goldrush, moving to San Francisco at the height of the start-up boom, and plunging into entrepreneur culture, bedding down in an overpriced and fetid geek flatshare, skulking through gimmicky tech conferences and pitching jargon-heavy business ideas to investors. He goes on to interview a cast of outrageous characters, from cyborgs and con artists to teamsters and transhumanists, to jittery hackers and naive upstart programmers whose entire lives are managed by their employers — and who work endlessly and obediently, never thinking to question their place in the system.
In showing us this frantic world, Pein challenges the positive, feel-good self-image that the tech tycoons have crafted, revealing their insidious visions for the future.
Corey Pein is a regular contributor to The Baffler, where he writes a column and hosts the podcast ‘News from Nowhere.’ His work has been praised by publications ranging from Mother Jones to the Times Literary Supplement. Having lived in Brighton, England for several years he is now based in Portland, Oregon.
Rosenbloom describes Live Work Work Work Die as ‘Magnificent and deeply alarming. Reminiscent of the writing of contemporary commentators such as Matt Taibbi, it also evokes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Down and Out in Paris and London. Lively and well-written, it starts as a first-person account of Silicon Valley’s awfulness, and the serfdom it creates and enforces, but it morphs into a forensic and humane deconstruction of the ultra-libertarian and fascist agendas of high-tech leaders and their urgers and acolytes.’
Rights were acquired from Devon Mazzone of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Scribe Australia will publish in September. The UK edition will be published in August.