Mike Fleming

Little, Brown has acquired North American rights to a novel hatched with a concept from Super 8 director JJ Abrams, written by Doug Dorst. The untitled novel will be a lead title in the 2012 list for Mulholland Books. The publisher was mum on the title or the subject matter, but when word  circulated that Abrams was involved in a book, it certainly got the film rights crowd hot and bothered when the book got shopped to publishers recently. Hard to get a handle on what the book’s about, but I’ve heard that will be done in a style similar to Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine series, which was about the relationship between a postcard designer and an illustrator of stamps, and which told a story that was loaded with graphics and required readers to follow the correspondence by reading postcards and letters stuffed in envelopes pasted in the book. Word is Abrams is up to similar cleverness.

Dorst wrote Alive in Necropolis.