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Publishers Lunch brings word that Maria Shriver has sold Just Who Will You Be, "presenting life lessons and reflections on what's important in her life, inspired by a poem she wrote for a graduation speech," to Hyperion for publication in April. Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael D'Antonio will write The O'Malley: The Man Who Broke Brooklyn's Heart, Won L.A.'s Love, and Changed Baseball Forever, based in part on access to never-before-used documents and letters involving the late Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley, for Riverhead. Publication is expected in early 2009. And Angela Robinson, head writer for "The L-Word," will turn her webcast Girltrash! into a graphic novel "featuring the coolest bunch of bad girls ever to hit the mean streets of Los Angeles." June Kim will illustrate and Three Rivers Press will publish.
Honorable mention: Sarah Ellison, the Wall Street Journal's print media reporter, has sold Houghton Mifflin a book that Publishers Lunch says will use "the story of Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the Wall Street Journal (which she covered) as the centerpiece of a cultural portrait of our rapidly transforming media world, the decline of the American newspaper, and the ascension of the new communications moguls." Look for it on 2009.