A tipster informs us that the author of summertime sleeper hit Water For Elephants has sold her next two books, the first of which, The Ape House, is about "monkeys who live together in a house," to Cindy Spiegel at Spiegel and Grau, for the highly improbable-seeming (but hey, whatever) sum of 5.2 million, making Joshua Foer's 1.2 million deal (a memoir which sold to Ann Godoff yesterday, and yes he's JSF's little bro) look like a bargain. Bookscan has Elephants at a totally respectable but not mindblowing 132,503 — Bookscan, of course, is always sorta wrong — and foreign rights to it sold all over the place. Still, 5.2 million for a follow-up to a book which — well, we'll let this book blogger sum it up: "the plot is non-existent, the characters are superficial, there is too much talk of penises and it is just a completely non-memorable basic quick read." So what we want to know is: really? And, if so, was it because of penises? Tell us.

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