Neil Gaiman sold three nonfiction books to Senior Vice President Jennifer Brehl at William Morrow; agent Merrilee Heiftez of Writers House handled the deal.
The first book, Monkey and Me: China and the Journey to the West, is inspired by Journey to the West. The latter is a classical Chinese text by 16h century author Wu Cheng’en. Morrow expects to publish it in Autumn 2009, with simultaneous publication coming from HarperCollins in the UK and HarperCollins China.
Following Gaiman’s first trip to China in 2007, he said “I realized that all my preconceptions were simply wrong, and that China was much more interesting, huge, contradictory, and odd than I could have imagined. A place of relentless social change and reinvention that was still directly connected to events and decisions made hundreds and thousands of years ago in a way that’s almost unimaginable in the west.” And he explained his most recent trip “to undertake my own journey to the west—by car and coach and train and foot. I’ve crossed China in the footsteps of a real seventh century monk and a mythical seventh century monk (and monkey, and pig, and reformed cannibal water monster). I’ve been stranded in the middle of nowhere, had a man try to sell me a human elbow outside a ruined temple, and ridden on an open truck through Hong Kong with dragon dancers. I’ve met mummies, crossed deserts, broken a finger halfway down a mountain, encountered tailors and grottoes and mysteries. And eaten some remarkable things. China is a country of contradictions, and it’s filled with stories.”
The second and third books are not yet titled, but will focus on subjects Gaiman has covered on his blog.