Frankfurt 2014.docx - Lippincott Massie McQuilkin

LIPPINCOTT MASSIE
MCQUILKIN
FRANKFURT 2014
Fiction
Kim Addonizio
THE PALACE OF ILLUSIONS: Stories
"Addonizio’s talents are manifold. The Palace of Illusions is a collection of
many delights, its mirrors reflecting and magnifying the contradictions and
conflicts inherent in human experience.”
– The San Francisco
Chronicle
“Kim Addonizio writes like Lucinda Williams sings, with hard-earned grit and
grace about the heart's longing for love and redemption, the kind that can
only come in the darkest dark when survival no longer even seems likely."
– Andre Dubus III, author of The House of Sand and Fog and Townie
Following the success of her National Book Award finalist poetry
collection, Tell Me, and her writer’s manual The Poet’s Companion,
Kim is releasing her very first collection of short fiction, The Palace
of Illusions. Trafficking, as the title might suggest, in both the
enchantments and the betrayals that fall between the real and the
imaginary, the sensational and the all-too-real, these stories have
appeared in journals ranging from Narrative Magazine to The Fairy
Tale Review, and include the much loved "Ever After," which, after
being anthologized in Kate Bernheimer's anthology My Mother She
Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, was featured
on NPR's "Selected Shorts," and was later tapped for an upcoming CD volume of readings on "Selected
Shorts," Behaving Badly. Delivering all the Addonizio magic that Kim's readers have come to expect, The
Palace of Illusions is a very special sort of publishing event.
U.S. & Canada: Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint (September, 2014)
Kim Addonizio’s many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and Pushcart
Prizes for both poetry and the essay. Her collection Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist. Her latest
books are Lucifer at the Starlite, a finalist for the Poets Prize and the Northern CA Book Award; and Ordinary
Genius. She lives in Oakland, CA.
Robert Bausch
FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE
“As expansive as the country it traverses, Bausch’s majestic odyssey
through the Old West finds rich nuance in a history often
oversimplified… The novel’s patient, searching first-person narration is
finely balanced, with a voice at once straightforward and lyrical, grand
and particular. Bausch’s characters defy facile judgments; each is
sharply distinctive, yet all struggle to find a footing amid the clash of
human difference that is, in Bobby Hale’s words, the ‘most spacious
war of all.’” – Publishers Weekly
“Bausch’s voice is more Mark Twain than Larry McMurtry, and Hale
shows more sympathy for the natives than do many lead characters in
traditional westerns. The novel offers an admirably panoramic view of
the Plains Wars, presenting all sides decently without unduly
glamorizing any individual or group. Bausch is perceptive without being
preachy, and he grants Hale a wide range of emotions while
preserving a recognizable strand of stoic masculinity.” – Booklist
“Bausch captures the immense measure of the American
landscape…Not to be missed by historical fiction fans.” – Library
Journal
A Union veteran several times over, Bobby Hale has repeatedly deserted and re-enlisted under different
names to earn the enlistment bonus. After the civil war, he sets his heart on California, but only makes it as
far as Montana. Now, after shooting the wrong people, he not only has to evade the U.S. Army, but also
the native population. Against the growing conflict of the Great Sioux War, Bobby is travelling across the
harsh landscape to make it back to Eveline, a poker-playing wagon owner who has taught him that he need
not spend his life alone. Within miles of the woman he believes can save him, Hale’s trigger finger lands
him in trouble again, however, changing the course of his journey and setting him on a heart-stopping
adventure across the Great Plains. Across ten years and thousands of hard-won miles, Bobby comes to
understand the wilderness through those he encounters: the pioneers on the wagon trail who follow the
glittering promise of gold; a Crow brave who shows him the meaning of real freedom and strength; and the
militia men, still carrying the scars of the recent war, whose hatred of ‘Injuns’ is even stronger than their
fear.
Far As the Eye Can See is the story of life in a place where every minute is an engagement in a war of
survival, and of how two people, in the midst of such majesty and violence, can manage to find a pathway
to their own humanity.
World English: Bloomsbury (November, 2014)
Identical twin brother of PEN/Malamud Award-winner Richard Bausch, Robert Bausch is the author of six novels and
one collection of short stories. He was a Pulitzer finalist for his first novel, and in 2009 was awarded the John Dos
Passos Medal for Literature.
David Bell
CEMETERY GIRL
“David Bell is a natural storyteller and a superb writer. Mr. Bell understands
the hearts and minds of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people, and his keen
insights add a powerful dimension to his crisp writing.”—Nelson DeMille,
#1 New York Times bestselling author
"Cemetery Girl is more than just an utterly compelling thriller-- and it
certainly is that. David Bell's stellar novel is also a haunting meditation on
the ties that bind parent to child, husband to wife, brother to brother--and
what survives even under the most shattering possible circumstance. An
absolutely riveting, absorbing read not to be missed."—Lisa Unger, New
York Times bestselling author of Darkness, My Old Friend
Four years after Tom and Abby's 12-year-old daughter vanishes,
she is found alive but strangely calm. When the teen refuses to
testify against the man connected to her disappearance, Tom
decides to investigate the traumatizing case on his own. Nothing
can prepare him for what he is about to discover.
World English: New American Library (October, 2011)
Italy: Giunti
France: Editions Actes Sud
Taiwan: Faces
David Bell is an associate professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
He received an MA in creative writing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a Ph.D. in American
Literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. David Bell is the bestselling author of
Cemetery Girl, The Hiding Place, and Never Come Back, and he has been nominated twice for the Pushcart
Prize.
David Bell
THE HIDING PLACE
"David Bell writes spellbinding and gripping thrillers that get under your
skin and refuse to let go." —Linwood Barclay, New York Times and #1
international bestselling author
Twenty-five-years ago, the disappearance of four-year-old
Justin Manning rocked the small town of Dove Point, Ohio. After
his body was found in a shallow grave in the woods two months
later, the repercussions were felt for years.…
Janet Manning has been haunted by the murder since the day
she lost sight of her brother in the park. Now, with the twentyfifth anniversary of Justin’s death looming, a detective and a
newspaper reporter have started to ask questions, opening old
wounds and raising new suspicions. Could the man convicted
of the murder—who spent more than two decades in prison—
really be innocent? Janet’s childhood friend and high school
crush, who was in the park with her that day, has returned to
Dove Point, where he is wrestling with his own conflicted
memories of the events. And a strange man appears at Janet’s door in the middle of the night, claiming to
know the truth. Soon, years of deceit will be swept away, and the truth about what happened to Janet’s
brother will be revealed. And the answers that Janet has sought may be found much closer to home than
she ever could have imagined.
World English: New American Library (2013)
Scott Blackwood
SEE HOW SMALL
"See How Small is superb...this outstanding novel will shadow you for days
and weeks after you've read the final page." – Ben Fountain, author of Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
“Scott Blackwood is a wizard, and in See How Small he puts his skills to
dazzling use as he anatomizes a town and a crime. Best of all is the deep
empathy he brings to his characters, innocent and guilty, wise and confused;
all of them are given the grace of his understanding. A vivid and astonishing
novel.” — Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy
One late autumn evening in a Texas town, two strangers walk into an
ice cream shop shortly before closing time. They bind up the three
teenage girls who are working the counter, set fire to the shop, and
disappear. See How Small tells the stories of the survivors—family,
witnesses, and suspects—who must endure in the wake of atrocity.
Justice remains elusive in their world, human connection tenuous.
Hovering above the aftermath of their deaths are the three girls. They
watch over the town and make occasional visitations, trying to
connect with and prod to life those they left behind. "See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart," they
say. A master of compression and lyrical precision, Scott Blackwood has surpassed himself with this
haunting, beautiful, and enormously powerful new novel.
U.S./Canada: Little Brown (January, 2015)
Italy: Ponte alle Grazie
U.K.: Fourth Estate/HarperCollins
Scott Blackwood is the author of two previous books of fiction, In the Shadow of Our House and We Agreed
to Meet Just Here, and the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award. He's also the author of The Rise and Fall
of Paramount Records, a book of narrative nonfiction. A long-time resident of Austin, Texas, Blackwood
now lives in Chicago and teaches fiction writing in the MFA program at Southern Illinois University.
Nickolas Butler
BENEATH THE BONFIRE: Stories
Young couples gather to participate in an annual “chainsaw
party,” cutting down trees for firewood in anticipation of the
winter. A group of men spend a weekend hunting for
mushrooms in the wilderness where they grew up, and
where some still find themselves trapped. An aging
environmentalist takes out his frustration and anger on a
singular, unsuspecting target. A woman helps another get
revenge against a man whose crime extends far beyond him
to an entire community.
In these ten stories, Nickolas Butler demonstrates his talent
for portraying “a place and its people with such love that
you'll find yourself falling for them, too,”* evoking an
American landscape that will be instantly recognizable to
readers enchanted by his debut, Shotgun Lovesongs.
*Josh Weil, award-winning author of The New Valley and
The Great Glass Sea
U.S./Canada: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s (March, 2015)
U.K.: Picador
Germany: Klett-Cotta
France: Autrement
2012 Iowa MFA Nickolas Butler has contributed to Ploughshares, Narrative, and the Kenyon Review. A
Wisconsin native, he lives with his wife and two children in Wisconsin.
Nickolas Butler
SHOTGUN LOVESONGS
*Winner of the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award
*Winner of The Great Lakes, Great Reads Award
*Winner of Le Prix Page/America (France)
*Finalist for Le Prix du Roman Fnac (France)
“Sparkles in every way. A love letter to the open lonely American
heartland…A must read.” —People (in a boxed, 4-star review)
"Impressively original." —The New York Times
"(Butler) is a consummate storyteller, his killer observations infused
with tenderness, reeling you in with a gentle, fluent style; a rare
sensitivity and a deep understanding of the complicated demands
and rewards of love and friendship." —Sunday Express (UK), in a 5star review
"The kind of book that restores your faith in humanity." —The Toronto
Star
Butler’s debut charts the friendships and rivalries of a group of men in their early thirties just now coming
into their own (or not) as husbands and fathers in the same Wisconsin town they grew up in, just outside
Eau Claire. There is conflict here between longtime buddies, between husbands and wives, that is, frankly,
gut-wrenching, even heartbreaking. But there is also hope, healing, and heroism.
U.S./Canada: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s (March, 2014)
UK: Picador
Denmark: Klim
France: Autrement
Germany: Klett-Cotta
Israel: Yediot
Italy: Marsilio Editori
The Netherlands: Ambo/Anthos
Norway: Pax
Spain: Libros Del Asteroide
Film: Fox Searchlight
Katie Crouch
ABROAD
"Crouch ventures daringly into dark new terrain… with a psychological
grab-your-throat thriller. Crouch gives indelible voice to the murder
victim… [and] the novel… holds you in its ever-tightening grip, with a
heady mix of history, burning secrets and exquisite language." —San
Francisco Chronicle
"From the first page of this cunningly suspenseful, brilliantly imagined
novel, you know where you're headed -- but then again, you don't. With
uncanny psychological precision and a dark, dead-on wit, Katie
Crouch explores how the casual follies of youth all too quickly turn
tragic. That she does so by blending ancient history with a true-crime
story whose twists and turns still claim international headlines makes
it all the more powerful. Prepare to be entertained, terrified, and
haunted." —Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of Three
Junes
Yesterday, Tabitha Deacon was a twenty-year old university
student desperate for a change. A sheltered "good girl" far too
often overlooked by her classmates, just as she always was by
her siblings growing up, she's acted upon this by signing up for a year abroad in Umbria. Tabitha soon finds
herself smitten by the stony romance of the old city her program is located in and by the almost preposterous
charm of the little cottage rental-with-a-view she takes—a charm that proves, all too literally, to die for. For
this ancient city, she comes to learn, possesses a dark underworld. Between a new group of dangerously
glamorous friends, an Italian lover prone to near-violence and a domineering professor who will do anything
for his Etruscan artifacts, Tabitha is led farther and farther into territory well beyond the boundaries of
conventional morality. And as she looks back over her life and the events that have brought it to a gruesome
close, she attempts to answer the question: "How close to death must we get in order to truly live?
U.S.: Sarah Crichton Books/FSG (June, 2014)
Canada: Knopf
Katie Crouch is the bestselling author of Girls in Trucks and Men and Dogs. Her work has appeared in The
New York Observer, Tin House, Slate, and McSweeney’s. She studied writing at Brown and Columbia
Universities and now lives in Bolinas, California.
Julia Fierro
CUTTING TEETH
The debut novel by the founder of the successful Sackett Street Writers’
Workshop presents a highly readable, thought-provoking, and brutally honest
study of the struggles and joys of raising children in ultra-hip, fertility
procedure-savvy, and family-friendly Brooklyn, N.Y... Cutting Teeth sings
with beautiful sentences, masterfully crafted scenes, and a deeply imagined
inner life for each of her characters." – The Boston Globe
"Immediately satisfying and emotionally astute. Fierro's writing is clear and
precise, and in her hands, this ambitious project, told through different voices,
reads as smoothly as a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off." –
Emma Straub, author of Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures
One sweltering late-summer weekend, a group of thirty-something
Brooklyn parents and their children gather at a shabby beach house
on Long Island. A rusted sign welcomes them to “Eden,” but their trip
is a far cry from paradise; for two days, each mommy and daddy will
wrestle with secrets they can no longer ignore against the chaotic
backdrop of five young children and their relentless demands. Nicole,
the playgroup’s host, struggles to contain her obsession with an Internet rumor of impending apocalypse.
Allie, an ambitious artist and lesbian mother of twins, faces her ambivalence toward motherhood for the
first time; while her wife Susanna, pregnant with the couple’s third child, suffers through her eighth month
of all day “morning” sickness and fixates on fleeing Allie’s beloved urban bohemia for a simpler life in the
suburbs. Rip, the sole father in the group, is desperate to retain his stay-at-home-dad status, despite his
wife’s adamant refusal to have another child. Leigh, a blue-blood gone bankrupt, grapples with the
inevitable fallout of a crime she committed, while deep in tense negotiations with Tiffany, her “best mommy
friend”, an avid social climber of blue-collar origin. The focus of their battle is Samten, the kind-hearted
Tibetan nanny whose Buddhist-inspired take lends a grounding perspective to the playgroup’s dramas. As
the weekend unfolds and conflicts intensify, each adult begins to doubt his or her ability to raise a child
successfully in the self-scrutinizing, over-analytical, information-saturated environment of contemporary
parenthood. Changing the playgroup forever, the weekend together in Eden will force painful truths to
surface. It will crack friendships. It will challenge identities. Written in the tradition of Tom Perrotta’s Little
Children and Meg Wolitzer’s The Ten Year Nap, Cutting Teeth is a story about navigating relationships.
U.S./Canada: St. Martin’s Press (May, 2014)
Czech: Domino Publishers
A graduate of The Iowa Writers' Workshop, Julia Fierro is the founder of The Sackett Street Writers'
Workshop. She was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship for her short story “The Girl Who Walked on
Water” and has taught Literature and Creative Writing in the Honors Program at Hofstra University as well
as the University of Iowa.
Roxane Gay
AN UNTAMED STATE
“A fairy tale . . . its complex and fragile moral arrived at through great
pain and high cost. . . . Perhaps Haiti, too, is a beautiful princess, wellversed in the vagaries of men, still searching for a happily ever after.”
—Holly Bass, The New York Times Book Review
“An Untamed State is breathless, artful, disturbing and original. I won’t
ever forget it.” —Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings
“Once you start this book, you will not be able to put it down. An
Untamed State is a novel of hope intermingled with fear, a book about
possibilities mixed with horror and despair. It is written at a pace that
will match your racing heart, and while you find yourself shocked,
amazed, devastated, you also dare to hope for the best, for all
involved.” —Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and
The Dew Breaker
Roxane Gay is a powerful new literary voice whose short
stories and essays have already earned her an enthusiastic
audience. In An Untamed State, she delivers an assured debut
about a woman kidnapped for ransom, her captivity as her father refuses to pay and her husband fights for
her release over thirteen days, and her struggle to come to terms with the ordeal in its aftermath.
Mireille Duval Jameson is living a fairy tale. The strong-willed youngest daughter of one of Haiti’s richest
sons, she has an adoring husband, a precocious infant son, by all appearances a perfect life. The fairy tale
ends one day when Mireille is kidnapped in broad daylight by a gang of heavily armed men, in front of her
father’s Port au Prince estate. Held captive by a man who calls himself The Commander, Mireille waits for
her father to pay her ransom. As it becomes clear her father intends to resist the kidnappers, Mireille must
endure the torments of a man who resents everything she represents.
An Untamed State is a novel of privilege in the face of crushing poverty, and of the lawless anger that
corrupt governments produce. It is the story of a willful woman attempting to find her way back to the person
she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places. An Untamed State
establishes Roxane Gay as a writer of prodigious, arresting talent.
U.S./Canada: Grove/Atlantic (May, 2014)
Germany: Bastei Lubbe
The Netherlands: De Bezige Bij
Sweden: Bonniers
Turkey: Marti Yayinlari
U.K.: Constable & Robinson
Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best
American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford
American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times
Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many
others. She is the co-editor of PANK and the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist,
and Hunger, forthcoming from Harper in 2016.
Brendan Jones
THE ALASKAN LAUNDRY
A moving debut set in a land of exceptional beauty and deep human
need. When Tara Marconi leaves South Philadelphia on a whim to travel
to Alaska for a job in a salmon hatchery, she quickly learns the cardinal
rule on Baranof Island: "Work longer and harder than the person, usually
male, beside you. And you'll do fine." Eager to prove herself, Tara works
her way up at a cannery, studies subsistence with a native Tlingit hunter
and gatherer, and earns a job on a boat crew. One by one, she finds
that all of them want more from her than she is willing to give. As Tara
develops into a strong, work-hardened fisherwoman, she struggles with
how to square her life in Alaska with her growing desire to return to
Philadelphia. Is home something you can build with your own hard work,
or is it something you're born into?
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Spring, 2016)
Wallace Stegner fellow and Philadelphia native Brendan Jones first
traveled to Sitka, Alaska following his freshman year at Columbia University. There he worked on fishing
boats, lived in the woods for a year, and was a reporter for the Daily Sitka Sentinel. In 2003 he earned a
B.A. and M.A. in Modern French and English Literature at Oxford University. He has written and recorded
pieces for National Public Radio, The New York Times, Narrative Magazine, The Huffington Post, and Fine
Woodworking Magazine, among other publications. Brendan has been awarded residencies at the
MacDowell Colony, Fundaçion Valparaiso in Spain, and Ragdale. An excerpt from The Alaskan Laundry
was recently published as a Ploughshares Solo. He now lives in Sitka on a tugboat called the Adak, writing
freelance, carpentering, and fishing commercially.
Kim Young-ha
DIARY OF A MURDERER
*Over 100,000 copies sold in Korea in first six months of release
*English sample translation available
Kim Young-ha brings a new, literary twist to the crime thriller
with his most recent work, Diary of a Murderer, which debuted
atop the Korean bestseller lists, outselling Dan Brown’s Inferno.
A former serial killer suffering from dementia sets his sights on
a new target: a new spree killer targeting young women, his
daughter included. Complicating matters is an old detective
seeking to close the cold cases from the now-retired murderer.
With moments of humor and wit culminating in an unexpected
final twist, Kim presents profound insights on life and death,
time and evil through this masterfully and elaborately crafted
story.
Italy: Metropoli d’Asia
France: Editions Philippe Picquier
Korea: Munhakdongne
Kim Young-ha is a Korean writer—winner of all of Korea’s most prestigious literary prizes—whose works
include Black Flower, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, and Empire of Light. He is a regular op-ed
contributor to The New York Times.
Kim Young-ha
I HEAR YOUR VOICE
“Kim is at the leading edge of a new breed of South Korean writers.” —
Philadelphia City Paper
Kim Young-ha’s I Hear Your Voice explores the stories of two
orphans whose lives intersect with others’ among Seoul’s
unfortunates: con men, runaway teenagers, orphans, male
prostitutes, religious fanatics, and purse snatchers. Echoing the
relationship between Jesus and Judas, the two protagonists Jae
and Dongyu are marked by worship and betrayal, love and
loathing. Jae is born in a bathroom stall at the Seoul Express Bus
Terminal and raised by a flower vendor nicknamed Mama Pig.
Dongyu is mute and cannot communicate with anyone except for
Jae, who can read Dongyu’s thoughts. Their intimate, intertwined
relationship is cut off when Mama Pig meets a man and abandons
Jae. While Jae hides out in an abandoned house, Dongyu betrays
his whereabouts to the authorities resulting in Jae’s placement in
an orphanage. At age sixteen Jae leaves the orphanage and ends
up learning of the most horrifying experiences of teenage runaways
who must prostitute themselves in order to survive. An inspired Jae becomes an icon for the uprooted
teenagers. When Jae runs into his childhood friend Dongyu he looks more like a beggar than a teenager.
Like Jesus Christ returned from the wilderness, he finds poor and lonely teenagers and relays the concise,
urgent message that they need to hear. It is only after Jae's death and fabled ascension that Dongyu is
revealed as Jae's betrayer, and overcome with grief and guilt he takes his own life. Mirroring Christian
scripture and belief, I Hear Your Voice is filled with intense symbolism that resonates with Biblical power.
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Spring, 2016)
France: Editions Philippe Picquier
Korea: Munhakdongne
Lois Leveen
JULIET’S NURSE
“Lois Leveen’s richly detailed, fascinating novel offers a wholly original
and intriguing take on one of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays
through the imagined life of Juliet’s faithful nurse, whose secret loves
and tragedies rival the young lovers’ own.”
—
Jennifer Chiaverini, author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Rival
"Beautifully written…Leveen's intricate storytelling is impressive." —
Library Journal
"Lusty...pushes the classic teenage romance aside to give greater
weight to a mother’s love and losses.” —Kirkus Reviews
An enthralling new telling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—
told from the perspective of Juliet’s nurse. In Verona, a city
ravaged by plague and political rivalries, a mother mourning the
death of her day-old infant enters the household of the powerful
Cappelletti family to become the wet-nurse to their newborn
baby. As she serves her beloved Juliet over the next fourteen
years, the nurse learns the Cappellettis’ darkest secrets. Those
secrets—and the nurse’s deep personal grief—erupt across five momentous days of love and loss that
destroy a daughter, and a family.
By turns sensual, tragic, and comic, Juliet’s Nurse gives voice to one of literature’s most memorable and
distinctive characters, a woman who was both insider and outsider among Verona’s wealthy ruling class.
Exploring the romance and intrigue of interwoven loyalties, rivalries, jealousies, and losses only hinted at
in Shakespeare’s play, this is a never-before-heard tale of the deepest love in Verona—the love between
a grieving woman and the precious child of her heart. In the tradition of Sarah Dunant, Philippa Gregory,
and Geraldine Brooks, Juliet’s Nurse is a rich prequel that reimagines the world’s most cherished tale of
love and loss, suffering and survival.
World English rights: Emily Bestler Books/Atria (September, 2014)
Canada: Random House
A former professor of English literature, Lois Leveen holds an A.B. magna cum laude in History and
Literature from Harvard University, as well as a Ph. D. in English from UCLA. Her first novel, The Secrets
of Mary Bowser (Morrow 2012), was a Target Book Club pick, as well as a Books A Million selection. It was
recently optioned to become a Broadway musical.
Lydia Millet
MAGNIFICENCE
*NBCC Finalist
*2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
"A dazzling prose stylist, Millet elevates her story beyond that tired tale of a
grieving widow struggling to move on, instead exploring grief and love as
though they were animals to be stuffed, burrowing deep and scooping out
the innermost layers." – Publisher’s Weekly (starred and boxed)
"One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation" (Scott
Timberg, Los Angeles Times), Lydia Millet introduces us here to
Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband's death. Suddenly
gifted her great uncle's Pasadena mansion, Susan decides to restore
his extensive collection of preserved animals, tending to "the fur and
feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails." Meanwhile, a
menagerie of uniquely damaged humans-including a cheating
husband and a chorus of eccentric elderly women-joins her in
residence. Millet's "flawlessly beautiful" (Salon) prose creates a
setting both humorous and wondrous as Susan defends her
inheritance from freeloading relatives and explores the mansion's many mysterious spaces. Funny and
heartbreaking, Magnificence is the story of a woman emerging from the sudden dissolution of her family.
Millet's trademark themes-evolution and extinction, children and parenthood, loss and wonder-produce a
rapturous final act to the critically acclaimed cycle of novels that began with How the Dead Dream.
U.S./Canada: W. W. Norton (2012)
France: Cherche Midi
Italy: Indiana Editore
The Netherlands: Karakter
The author of the New York Times Notable Book Ghost Lights and eight other works of fiction, Lydia Millet
has won the PEN-USA Award and been a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Lydia Millet
MERMAIDS IN PARADISE
“I laughed so hard all over town...leave it to Lydia Millet to capsize her
human characters in aquamarine waters and upstage their honeymoon
with mermaids. I am awed to know there's a mind like Millet's out there
— she's a writer without limits, always surprising, always hilarious. ” —
Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
Lydia Millet redefines “comedy of errors” in this genre-bending
satire of a tropical honeymoon hijacked by mermaids,
kidnappers, and mercenaries. A honeymooning couple makes
friends with a marine biologist who discovers genuine mermaids
in a coral reef — and the next night, apparently drowns in her
hotel bathtub. As a resort chain swoops in to corner the market
on mermaids, the newlyweds (opinionated, skeptical narrator
Deb and handsome online gamer Chip, the world’s friendliest
man) join forces with other vacationers — including an ex-Navy
SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ — to
protect the mermaids from the corporate “Venture of Marvels”
that wants to turn their habitat into a theme park. Mermaids in
Paradise is Millet’s funniest book yet, tempering the sharp satire of her early career with the empathy and
emotional power of her more recent, critically acclaimed novels and short stories. An unforgettable,
mesmerizing tale, comic on the surface and deeply solemn at its core.
U.S./Canada: W.W. Norton (November, 2014)
Tom Perrotta
THE LEFTOVERS
*A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
*A USA Today 10 Books We Loved Reading in 2011 Title
*A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book for 2011
*One of NPR’s 10 Best Novels of 2011
“Perrotta has delivered a troubling disquisition on how ordinary people react
to extraordinary and inexplicable events, the power of family to hurt and to
heal, and the unobtrusive ease with which faith can slide into fanaticism."
—Stephen King in
the New York Times Book Review
What if the Rapture happened and you got left behind? Or what if it
wasn’t the Rapture at all, but something murkier, a wave of
mysterious, apparently random disappearances that shattered the
world in a single moment, dividing history into Before and After,
leaving no one unscathed? How would you rebuild your life in the
wake of such a devastating event? This is the question confronting
the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, a formerly comfortable
suburban community that lost over a hundred people in the Sudden Departure. Kevin Garvey, the new
mayor, wants to speed up the healing process, to bring a sense of renewed hope and purpose to his
traumatized neighbors, even as his own family falls apart. His wife, Laurie, has left him to enlist in the Guilty
Remnant, a homegrown cult whose members take a vow of silence but haunt the streets of town as “living
reminders” of God’s judgment. His son, Tom, is gone, too, dropping out of college to follow a sketchy
prophet by the name of Holy Wayne. Only his teenaged daughter, Jill, remains, and she’s definitely not the
sweet A student she used to be. Through the prism of a single family, Perrotta illuminates a familiar America
made strange by grief and apocalyptic anxiety. The Leftovers is a startling, thought-provoking novel about
love, connection, and loss.
U.S.: St. Martin’s Press (2011)
Brazil: Intrínseca
Canada: Random House
France: Fleuve Noir
Germany: Heyne
Hungary: Geopen Kiado.
Czech: Albatros
Bulgaria: IBIS
Catalan: Periscopi
Portugal: Bertrand
Spain: Hidra
Taiwan: Rye Field Publications
Turkey: Siren
U.K.: Fourth Estate
Italy: Edizioni E/O
Estonia: Varrak
Poland: Znak
Film/TV: HBO (series premiered on June 29, 2014 (and
just renewed for a second season in 2015)
Tom Perrotta is the author of six works of fiction, including The Wishbones, Election and Joe College. His
novels Election and Little Children were made into acclaimed and award-winning movies, and the TV series
based on his novel The Leftovers is currently airing on HBO. He lives in Massachusetts.
Tom Perrotta
NINE INCHES: Stories
"The descendant of such chroniclers of small-town America as
Thornton Wilder, John O'Hara, and Willa Cather...Perrotta's language
never announces itself; it recedes into the background, allowing the
characters, with their convincing and contemporary dialogue, to drive
the narrative in a way that sounds organic and true." —New York
Times
"The stories hang together so beautifully, the writing is so stylistically
consistent, and the themes are so closely related, the book comes
across like a novel, or a collection of interlocking stories. It’s as if we’re
wandering through a single community in a particular town, as in
James Joyce’s “Dubliners” or in so many of Ann Beattie’s and
Raymond Carver’s collections. We’re in PerrottaWorld, where the
stories and characters and their concerns all seem to rhyme with one
another." —Boston Globe
Nine Inches is Tom Perrotta’s first short story collection since
Bad Haircut (1994), the book that launched his career. Set in
suburban communities that will feel familiar to readers of Little
Children and Election, these new stories illuminate the lives of a wide variety of troubled and yearning
characters—a concussion-addled high school football player, a pediatrician undone by the death of a
patient, a teacher who makes the mistake of googling herself, a cop with a peculiar fetish, and an elderly
woman drawn to a strange and austere religious sect. Though they take place in the most ordinary of
settings—Little League baseball games, middle school dances, coffee shops, and backyards—the stories
in Nine Inches reveal the mystery and the sadness and the humor lurking just beneath the surface of
everyday life.
U.S.: St. Martin’s Press (October, 2013)
Canada: House of Anansi
Michael Pitre
FIVES AND TWENTY-FIVES
*Barnes & Noble Discover Pick
*Indie Next Pick
*Amazon Best Book of the Month
“An unblinking, razor-edged portrait of the war… Deeply moving.”
— Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“One of the great novels of war, the kind of book that comes along only once
or twice each generation.”
— Joseph Boyden, Giller Prize winning author of Three
Day Road and Through Black Spruce
It’s the rule—always watch your fives and twenty-fives. When a
convoy halts to investigate a possible roadside bomb, stay in the
vehicle and scan five meters in every direction. A bomb inside five
meters cuts through the armor, killing everyone in the truck. Once
clear, get out and sweep twenty-five meters. A bomb inside twenty-five meters kills the dismounted scouts
investigating the road ahead. Lieutenant Donovan leads the road repair platoon, painfully aware of his
shortcomings and isolated by his rank. Doc Pleasant, the medic, joined for opportunity, but finds his pride
undone as he watches friends die. And there’s Kateb, known by his code-name Dodge, an Iraqi interpreter
whose love of American culture—from hip-hop to the dog-eared copy of Huck Finn he carries—is matched
only by his disdain for what Americans are doing to his country. Returning home, they exchange one set of
decisions and repercussions for another, struggling to find a place in a world that no longer knows them. A
debut both transcendent and rooted in the flesh, Fives and Twenty-Fives is a deeply necessary novel.
World English: Bloomsbury
Romania: Editura Rao
France: Le Seuil
Michael Pitre is a graduate of LSU, where, as a double major in history and creative writing, he studied with
Andrei Codrescu and Mark Jude Poirier. He joined the Marines in 2002, deploying twice to Iraq and attaining
the rank of Captain before leaving the service in 2010 to get his MBA at Loyola.
Hannah Pittard
REUNION
“With Reunion, Hannah Pittard proves herself to be an alchemist of the
highest order. In this unique story about the weirdness of family, she
mixes pain and humor together to make something magical. The novel’s
main character, Kate, is complex and difficult and untrustworthy and,
most importantly, utterly winning, one of the most convincing characters
I’ve met in a long time. Reunion slayed me.”
—Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang
"Reunion is uproarious, tender, and riveting, a book about the possibility
of family and the value of hope. By the time I finished it I felt like a part
of the Pulaski family; I didn't want it to end. Beautifully and hilariously
told, it made me fall in love with Hannah Pittard's writing." —Anton
DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls
Five minutes before her flight is set to take off, Kate Pulaski,
failed screenwriter and newly failed wife with scarcely a hundred
dollars to her name, learns that her estranged father has killed
himself. More shocked than saddened by the news, she gives in
to her siblings' request that she join them, along with her many half-siblings and most of her father's five
former wives, in Atlanta, their birthplace, for a final farewell.
Written with huge heart and bracing wit, REUNION takes place over the following four days, as family
secrets are revealed, personal foibles are exposed, and Kate—an inveterate liar looking for a way to come
clean—slowly begins to acknowledge the overwhelming similarities between herself and the man she never
thought she'd claim as an influence, much less a father. Hannah Pittard's "engaging and vigorous" prose
(Chicago Tribune) masterfully illuminates the problems that can divide modern families—and the ties that
prove impossible to break.
U.S./Canada: Grand Central (October, 2014)
Hannah Pittard is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way. She teaches
fiction at the University of Kentucky.
Stephen Schottenfeld
BLUFF CITY PAWN
"Bluff City Pawn is an absorbing, relevant, and literary thriller about
desperation, trust and betrayal, brotherhood, Memphis, and the
highest and lowest ends of consumerism—the secondhand world of
the downtrodden, and the rarified world of collectors of the esoteric.
If you care about class and capitalism in America right now — and
you should — then this is your novel." —Anthony Doerr, author of All
the Light We Cannot See
Huddy Marr, the proprietor of Bluff City Pawn shop in Memphis, is
good at what he does: he knows jewelry, he knows guns and guitars.
But the neighborhood is changing: A blood bank is set to open across
the street from the retail space he leases from his brother Joe, and
Huddy wants to move to a less seedy part of town. A pawn shop
should stay right on the edge of seedy.
When a longtime client dies, his widow calls Huddy to come appraise
his considerable gun collection. If he can buy up the guns, Huddy
knows he can make a killing, possibly change his fortunes for good. But he needs cash up front, and for
that he needs Joe. Soon the restless youngest, Harlan, is also involved—they could use the manpower to
move the haul—and slowly the brothers’ old family dynamics reassert themselves.
There is trouble inherent in these wares. There is trouble inherent in this family. And there is something
inherent to Memphis . . . something that means a change of fortune can’t come easy.
Stephen Schottenfeld’s first novel is a masterful depiction of a city, a business, and a family. It is an
investigation of class and law, ownership and value, loyalty, betrayal, and blood; one that gathers power
and resonates long after it’s done.
World English: Bloomsbury (August, 2014)
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stephen Schottenfeld has received several honors, including
the Michener/Copernicus Society of America grant, a Halls Fiction Fellowship from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, and a tuition scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. His stories have
appeared in The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, New
England Review, The Iowa Review, The Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, and
other journals, and have received special mention in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short
Stories anthologies. He teaches English at the University of Rochester.
David Stewart
THE WILSON DECEPTION
Just 40 days after the Armistice of November 1918 that ended World War I, President Woodrow Wilson
arrives in Paris to join victorious Allied leaders in negotiating a peace that will advance human aspirations
for freedom and self-determination. Major Jamie Fraser of the U.S. Army Medical Corps joins the ecstatic
crowd that greets Wilson in the heart of Paris on the Place de la Concorde. Fraser, the army's expert on
the deadly Spanish influenza, is swiftly drawn into the care of the unexpectedly frail American president.
Fraser is equally surprised to encounter a man he hasn’t seen in 20 years, Speed Cook—an ex-professional
ball player and advocate for Negro rights. Cook, as it turns out, is desperate to free his son Joshua, a U.S.
Army sergeant wrongly convicted of desertion in the last great battle of the Great War.
To win Joshua's freedom, Fraser and Cook re-establish their long-past alliance, then form an unequal
partnership with the young Allen Dulles, a charming American spy who is nephew of the Secretary of State
and close aide to Wilson. Their path leads through the shocking shooting of the crusty French premier,
George's Clemenceau, who survives thanks to timely medical care from Major Fraser. The three Americans
are drawn into the feverish calculations of renegade British Army hero T.E. Lawrence, who relentlessly
schemes to redeem empty Allied promises of Arab independence and a Jewish homeland in Palestine,
even as they skirt the violent May Day riots in Paris. Finally, their efforts reach to the inner sanctum of
President Wilson's dressing room, where Dulles places Joshua Cook as the president's valet to spy on his
own president, and where Fraser tries but fails to treat the maladies that are scrambling Wilson's negotiating
ability. In the midst of the struggle to free Joshua, Fraser's daughter and estranged wife arrive in Paris,
intent on rebuilding the frayed fabric of their family.
To force Dulles and Wilson to do justice for Joshua, the Frasers and Cooks force their way into the final
contest of the war: The fragile German government is refusing to sign the deeply flawed Treaty of
Versailles. Dulles hatches a last-ditch scheme to avoid plunging Europe into a renewed war through the
creation of a new German government. In a bloody face-off at Le Bourget airfield outside Paris, Joshua
Cook himself ensures the success of Dulles' plot. Though the final treaty will bring untold global war and
strife for the next century, all parties sign it and Dulles honors his pledge to secure Wilson's exoneration of
Joshua Cook, leaving Speed Cook and Jamie Fraser with secrets they will never dare reveal.
World English: Kensington
A former attorney, David O. Stewart is the author of The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the
Constitution, which won the Washington Writing Award as Best Book of 2007, Impeached: The Trial of
President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy, and American Emperor, Aaron Burr’s
Challenge to Jefferson’s America. He lives in Maryland and his website is at www.davidostewart.com
Quintan Ana Wikswo
THE HOPE OF FLOATING HAS CARRIED
US THIS FAR
The stories in The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us
This Far are an existentialist, fabulist exploration of
quantum time-space and the castaways who lose
themselves in its unmapped terrain. We follow a
group of elite scientists whose tragic encounters
with love and lust, loss and longing have all but
killed them. To each, the question is posed: when
the human condition and Newtonian physics
become too painfully restrictive, is it possible to find
freedom in another dimension? Have you truly lost
the will to live, or have you simply lost the will to
live as human? Each by each, they choose to
live—but to surrender their human form.
U.S./Canada: Coffee House Press (June 2015)
French, Spanish, and Turkish rights: fish@coffeehousepress.org
Quintan Ana Wikswo is recognized for adventurous, challenging cross-disciplinary projects that integrate
her original literature, visual art, film installations and performance works. Her projects—created using
salvaged military cameras and communications equipment—navigate known, unknown and imagined
worlds, including obscured and hidden sites where crimes against humanity have taken place. For twenty
years, she served as a human rights field worker in genocide aftermath, hate crimes and gender violence
in the Americas and Europe. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Guernica, and Conjunctions, among
other publications.
Nonfiction
Laura Auricchio
THE MARQUIS: Lafayette Reconsidered
“In a sharp and moving biography, Auricchio captures the essence of the
‘French hero of the American Revolution—the Hero of Two Worlds, the
Apostle of Liberty.’” —Kirkus (Starred Review)
“Laura Auricchio has managed to bring the Marquis de Lafayette back to life,
replacing the rather wooden figure of legend with the real man, a hero of two
great revolutions, the American and the French, and man of great complexity
and unfailing courage. An immensely rewarding book.” —Michael Korda,
author of Clouds of Glory
A major biography of the Marquis de Lafayette, French hero of the
American Revolution, who, at age nineteen, volunteered to fight
under George Washington; a biography that looks past the storybook
hero and selfless champion of righteous causes who cast aside
family and fortune to advance the transcendent aims of liberty and
justice commemorated in America’s towns, streets, parks, and
schools named after the French nobleman. Laura Auricchio gives us
a rich portrait of the man, fully revealed, a man driven by dreams of
glory and felled by tragic, human weaknesses.
U.S./Canada: Knopf (October, 2014)
Laura Auricchio is a specialist in eighteenth-century French history and art who received her undergraduate
degree from Harvard and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Auricchio has been the recipient of major
fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and Columbia University. Currently the
Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies at The New School for Public Engagement, she has also
taught at Connecticut College and Princeton University.
Marcia Bartusiak
BLACK HOLE: How an idea abandoned by Newtonians, hated by Einstein, and gambled on by
Hawking became loved
“Bartusiak's new book is thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and full of insights about the nature of the
scientific enterprise. Aficionados of black holes will love this book.”
—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams and The Accidental Universe
For more than half a century, physicists and astronomers engaged in heated dispute over the possibility of
black holes in the universe. The weirdly alien notion of a space-time abyss from which nothing escapes—
not even light—seemed to confound all logic. This engrossing book tells the story of the fierce black hole
debates and the contributions of Einstein and Hawking and other leading thinkers who completely altered
our view of the universe. Renowned science writer Marcia Bartusiak shows how the black hole helped
revive Einstein's greatest achievement, the general theory of relativity, after decades during which it had
been pushed into the shadows. Not until astronomers discovered such surprising new phenomena as
neutron stars and black holes did the once-sedate universe transform into a truly Einsteinian cosmos, filled
with sources of titanic energy that can be understood only in the light of relativity. This book celebrates the
hundredth anniversary of general relativity, uncovers how the black hole really got its name, and recounts
the scientists' frustrating, exhilarating, and at times humorous battles over the acceptance of one of history's
most dazzling ideas.
World English: Yale University Press (April, 2015)
Marcia Bartusiak is Professor of the Practice, Graduate Program in Science Writing, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and the award-winning author of five previous books, including most recently The
Day We Found the Universe. She lives in Sudbury, MA.
Adam Benforado
UNFAIR: How Our Hidden Minds Lead to Injustice
Our nation is founded on the notion that the law is impartial, that legal cases are won or lost on the basis
of evidence, careful reasoning and nuanced argument. But they may, in fact, turn on the temperature of the
courtroom, the camera angle of a defendant's taped confession, or a simple word choice or gesture during
a cross-examination. In Unfair, law professor Adam Benforado shines a light on troubling new research
showing, for example, that people with certain facial features receive longer sentences and that judges are
far more likely to grant parole first thing in the morning. In fact, over the last two decades, psychologists
and neuroscientists have uncovered many cognitive forces that operate beyond our conscious awareness-and Benforado argues that until we address these hidden biases head-on, the social inequality we see
now will only widen, as powerful players and institutions find ways to exploit the weaknesses in our legal
system. Weaving together historical examples, scientific studies, and compelling court cases—from the
border collie put on trial in Kentucky to the five teenagers who falsely confessed in the Central Park Jogger
case—Benforado shows how our judicial processes fail to uphold our values and protect society's weakest
members, convicting the innocent while letting dangerous criminals go free. With clarity and passion, he
lays out the scope of the problem and proposes a wealth of reforms that could prevent injustice and help
us achieve true fairness and equality before the law.
U.S./Canada: Crown (Spring, 2015)
Adam Benforado is an associate professor of law at Drexel University. A graduate of Yale College and
Harvard Law School, he served as a federal appellate law clerk and an attorney at Jenner & Block. He has
published numerous scholarly articles, and his op-eds and essays have appeared in a variety of
publications including the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Legal Times. He lives in
Philadelphia with his wife and daughter.
Jean-Vincent Blanchard
AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: Memories of the French Foreign Legion
Among the most storied military corps ever, the French Foreign Legion summons images of lost outposts
in both East Asia and the Sahara. Jean-Vincent Blanchard’s At the Edge of the World: Memories of the
French Foreign Legion explores the myth of the Legion and the mixture of bravery, romance, and mystery
that enshrouds its conquests and victories. If a supremely able, yet rowdy, corps such as the Legion could
accomplish such glorious feats, Blanchard shows us, it is because it had found, in Maréchal Hubert Lyautey,
a fitting commander whose various eccentricities became the inspiration for multiple films, books, and songs
across Europe and America. Tens of thousands were drawn to the stories celebrating the Legion’s exploits,
stories that spoke not only of valiance but also a certain sense of the romantic, of artful despondency,
impossible love and alcohol abuse. Blanchard draws upon unpublished legionnaires’ memoirs and
Lyautey’s own private papers to weave these stories into a larger picture of what the Legion, and their
colonial encounters, really were—human, conflicted...ambiguous. Blanchard examines, too, how
paradoxically the destructiveness and inherent shortcomings of colonialism were bound by a deep attraction
to the very lands and people it sought to subdue. A study of military charisma and through its narrative, At
the Edge of the World weaves a cultural history of the Legion as a fabled army corps that became the
West’s vector for orientalist fantasies at the turn of the twentieth century.
World English: Walker Books (2015)
Jean-Vincent Blanchard teaches French studies at Swarthmore College. Born in Canada and raised in
Europe, he earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1997. He is a specialist on pre-revolutionary France,
and has published on a broad range of subjects in politics, history, and the arts. His book, ÉMINENCE:
RICHELIEU AND THE RISE OF FRANCE, was published by Walker Books in the U.S. and in France by
Editions Belin.
Michael Chorost
HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS
"Mr. Chorost's curiosity is contagious...Chorost is not only a clear and concise
science writer, but also a visionary." —The New York Times
It starts with a message from space. It's a code, a seemingly inscrutable
collection of images and numbers. How do we translate it? How different
from us could they be? Profoundly so, says Michael Chorost in his new
book, How to Talk to Aliens. Much as Alan Weisman’s The World Without
Us took environmentalism to its limits by imagining the disappearance of
humankind, How to Talk to Aliens takes linguistics and biology to their
outermost limits. It imagines species that have evolved in totally different
ways than humans but are just as smart, in ways that we would struggle
to comprehend. The result is an exploration into alien intelligence—how
it could evolve, and how it might provide a new perspective of intelligence
here on Earth. We get four-legged, four-armed octopoids that moved
onto land and developed a language based on tentacle gestures and skin color changes. We get ants that
communicate with chemicals instead of speech and developed nuclear fusion before taming fire. We get
minds that can hold more thoughts and information in working memory than ours, enabling them to use
syntax that we can laboriously decode but never speak in real time. We get postbiological minds that can
send themselves whole to other stars, using radio, rather than bothering with messages at all. Their
messages are themselves. Will we ever really meet such minds? Who knows. But that’s not the point. The
point is to extrapolate from what is known about intelligence on Earth to plausibly imagine the Other, the
Alien, with all of the thrill and terror that comes from meeting the unknown and perhaps unknowable. And
in measuring ourselves against it, to escape our provincial perspective and know ourselves better. This is
extreme intelligence, a journey that goes as far into the cosmos as possible to bring us back home. How to
Talk to Aliens will be as adventurous as Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future and Physics of the Impossible
yet humanistic as Carl Sagan's Cosmos.
World English: Yale University Press (2016)
How to Talk to Aliens continues Michael Chorost's exploration of communication, which he started in his
PEN/USA award-winning memoir Rebuilt (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), and continued in World Wide Mind, his
narrative about humankind's merger with the Internet (Free Press, 2011). Both books were critically
acclaimed works of science writing. He was called "a visionary" in The New York Times. Michael is a
contributor to Wired, and his writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, New Scientist, and The
Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is a sought-after lecturer on the topics of technology and
communication, and blogs about tech and SETI for Psychology Today.
Meryl Comer
SLOW DANCING WITH A STRANGER:
Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer’s
*National bestseller
“Riveting and necessary.” —New York Times
“An unflinching and intimate account...conveys a sense of passion
and even frustration with a society that [Comer] believes has been
slow to acknowledge the spread of Alzheimer’s disease or make
adequate provisions to tend to its caregivers.” —Washington Post
When Meryl Comer’s husband Harvey Gralnick was
diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease in 1996, she
watched as the man who headed hematology and oncology
research at the National Institutes of Health started to misplace
important documents and forget clinical details that had once
been cataloged encyclopedically in his mind. With harrowing
honesty, she brings readers face to face with this devastating
condition and its effects on its victims and those who care for
them. Detailing the daily realities and overwhelming responsibilities of caregiving, Comer sheds intensive
light on this national health crisis, using her personal experiences—the mistakes and the breakthroughs—
to put a face to a misunderstood disease, while revealing the facts everyone needs to know.
Pragmatic and relentless, Meryl has dedicated herself to fighting Alzheimer’s and raising public awareness.
“Nothing I do is really about me; it’s all about making sure no one ends up like me,” she writes. Deeply
personal and illuminating, Slow Dancing With a Stranger offers insight and guidance for navigating
Alzheimer’s challenges. It is also an urgent call to action for intensive research and a warning that we must
prepare for the future, instead of being controlled by a disease and a healthcare system unable to fight it.
U.S./Canada: HarperOne (September, 2014)
Meryl Comer is an Emmy award-winning reporter, producer, moderator and talk show host with more than
30 years of broadcast journalism experience. She was among the first female broadcasters to specialize
in business news as it relates to public policy, and is President of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation
Alzheimer’s Initiative and organized Rock Stars of Science initiative. Comer has spent the past 16 years as
the at-home caregiver for her husband, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Laverne Cox
DARING TO BE MYSELF
Laverne Cox is one of the stars of Netflix’s most talked-about new
shows, Orange is the New Black. Currently the world's most visible
and admired transgender celebrity—who recently landed the cover
of TIME Magazine—Laverne recounts her story of transformation, a
journey that has roots in the Deep South. The child of a single mother
and grandchild of a sharecropper, Laverne will explore how issues
of race, class, and gender marked her as she made her way to a life
as a working actress in New York.
Laverne's path has been littered with seemingly insurmountable
roadblocks, but readers from all walks of life will draw inspiration
from a woman who finally drew on the courage to step into the
womanhood she always knew in her heart was her destiny and find
professional achievement, self-acceptance, and love.
World: Harlequin (Fall, 2015)
Contact: Reka Rubin, reka_rubin@harlequin.ca
Laverne Cox is a critically acclaimed actress who currently appears in the Netflix original series Orange is
the New Black, playing the groundbreaking role of “Sophia Burset,” an incarcerated African American
transgender woman. Laverne is the first trans woman of color to have a leading role on a mainstream
scripted television show. A renowned speaker, Laverne has taken her empowering message of moving
beyond gender expectations to live more authentically all over the country. Laverne is a prolific essayist
with her work appearing in The Advocate and The Huffington Post. A graduate of Marymount Manhattan
College, Laverne holds a degree in Fine Arts.
Shulem Deen
ALL WHO GO DO NOT RETURN: A Memoir
“All Who Go Do Not Return is a deeply honest and moving
story about a man’s decision to do something both so simple
and so radical – to live in accordance with his own beliefs.
Shulem Deen has written an enormously powerful and
important memoir about faith, doubt and freedom.” —Tova
Mirvis, author of Visible City and The Outside World
"Shulem Deen has a fascinating story to tell, and he tells it with
exquisite sensitivity. All Who Go Do Not Return gives us not
only an insider's glimpse into a shrouded world few outsiders
get to see, but also a movingly told narrative of one man's
struggle toward intellectual integrity. The setting may be the
world of Hasidic Judaism, but the drama and the insights are
universal." —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, the author of 36
Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
Shulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous. As a member of the Skverers, one of
the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knew little about the outside world—only that it was to be
shunned. His marriage at eighteen was arranged, with several children to follow. Deen’s first
transgression—turning on the radio—is small, but his curiosity leads him to the library, and later the Internet.
Soon he begins a feverish inquiry into the tenets of his religious beliefs, until, several years later, his faith
unravels entirely. Now a heretic, he fears being discovered and ostracized from the only world he knows.
His relationship with his family at stake, he is forced into a life of deception, and begins a long struggle to
hold on to those he loves most: his five children. In All Who Go Do Not Return, Deen bravely traces his
harrowing loss of faith, while offering an illuminating look at a highly secretive world that has been written
about by female apostates, but never by a male Hasid privy to its true inner workings.
World: Graywolf (March, 2015)
Contact: Kate Dublinski (dublinski@graywolfpress.org)
A former Skverer Hasid, Shulem Deen is the founding editor of Unpious who began blogging as “Hasidic
Rebel,” one of the very first voices to challenge the ultraorthodox hierarchy from within. His work has
appeared in the The Jewish Daily Forward, Tablet, and Salon. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Roxane Gay
BAD FEMINIST
*A New York Times bestseller
*A regional bestseller
*Indie Next pick
*Amazon Best Book of the Month
“Roxane Gay is the gift that keeps on giving. . . . An entertaining and
thought-provoking essay collection.” —Time Magazine
“Roxane Gay is the brilliant girl-next-door: your best friend and your
sharpest critic. . . . She is by turns provocative, chilling, hilarious; she
is also required reading.” —People
“Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to
be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not
doing it ironically though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.”
In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman
(Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few
years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown).
The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand
herself and our society, but also one of our culture. Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the
ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways
we still need to do better.
U.S./Canada: Harper Perennial (August, 2014)
U.K.: Constable & Robinson
Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best
American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford
American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times
Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many
others. She is the co-editor of PANK and the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist,
and Hunger, forthcoming from Harper in 2016.
Garrett Graff
RAVEN ROCK: The Secret History of the Government's Doomsday Plans to Save Itself—While the
Rest of Us Die
Raven Rock is the first definitive history of the secret multi-billion-dollar government program to prepare for
Armageddon. Aimed at providing so-called "continuity of government" during a national emergency like a
nuclear attack, these secret plans—ranging from bunkers for Congress to plans for how US mail would be
delivered to refugee camps after the cities were destroyed—evolved over the course of the Cold War into
a massive, secret shadow government. (The shadow government even included private corporate CEOs
who held secret presidential appointments to take over industries that would be nationalized by the
president during an emergency.)
From the origins of "continuity of government" in a World War II bunker under London, through the depths
of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to 9/11 and the present day, the machinery was larger than anyone imagined—
including more than 100 hidden bunkers around Washington DC, airborne command posts that were kept
flying 24 hours a day for more than 30 years, and secret naval ships that lurked off the Atlantic Coast. While
much of the system was shut down in the 1990s after the Cold War, it was restarted quickly after 9/11—
and today contains all-new secret bunkers and all-new hidden systems spread around the country.
Using newly declassified documents and interviews with sources who have never spoken publicly, RAVEN
ROCK traces how the government began to contemplate nuclear war, and explains the development of the
"COG" programs from Harry Truman's plan to escape a Soviet attack aboard a special railroad car to the
modern-day plans to whisk Barack Obama off the White House lawn in an emergency. A unique history of
the presidency and US government, Graff's book argues nuclear weapons reshaped the presidency,
providing today's modern imperial trappings, and created the executive precedents and cult of secrecy that
led to the NSA wiretapping scandal with Edward Snowden.
World English: Simon & Schuster
Film/Television: NBC/Paramount Television
Garrett M. Graff is a senior staff writer for POLITICO Magazine, where he writes about technology and
national security. He is the former award-winning editor of Washingtonian magazine, author of the 2011
bestselling history of the FBI, "The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War," and teaches at Georgetown University.
He was a 2014 finalist for the Livingston Award, which honors the best journalists under age 35.
Lacy Johnson
THE OTHER SIDE
*A Barnes & Noble Discover Pick
*A Kirkus Book Destined to Become a Classic
*A BuzzFeed Highly Anticipated Book of 2014
"Ferociously beautiful and courageous, Johnson’s intimate story
sheds light on the perpetuation of violence against women." —Kirkus
(Starred Review)
"Johnson’s matter-of-fact retelling of the horrors that befell her is by
turns poetic and journalistic but harrowing all the way through."
—Library Journal (Starred Review)
"Wow. Just...Wow. The Other Side is the sonic boom of a powerful
story meeting an even more powerful storyteller. It's hard to say
anything about a book that leaves you this breathless. Lacy Johnson
is my new literary hero." —Mat Johnson, author of PYM
Lacy Johnson bangs on the glass doors of a sleepy local police station in the middle of the night. Her feet
are bare; her body is bruised and bloody; U-bolts dangle from her wrists. She has escaped, but not
unscathed. The Other Side is the haunting account of a first passionate and then abusive relationship; the
events leading to Johnson’s kidnapping, rape, and imprisonment; her dramatic escape; and her hard-fought
struggle to recover. At once thrilling, terrifying, harrowing, and hopeful, The Other Side offers more than
just a true crime record. In language both stark and poetic, Johnson weaves together a richly personal
narrative with police and FBI reports, psychological records, and neurological experiments, delivering a raw
and unforgettable story of trauma and transformation.
U.S./Canada: Tin House (July, 2014)
Lacy M. Johnson is the author of Trespasses: A Memoir and is coartistic director of the multimedia project
[the invisible city]. She lives in Houston with her husband and children.
Andrew Lawler
WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE WORLD:
The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization
“A splendid book.” —Kirkus (Starred Review)
“A fascinating journey.” —Brian Fagan, author of The Attacking
Ocean
“Astonishing.” —Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of Cheap: The High
Cost of Discount Culture
“Reads like a detective story.” —Wenonah Hauter, author of
Foodopoly
In Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?, science writer Andrew
Lawler takes us on an adventure from prehistory to the modern
era with a fascinating account of the partnership between human
and chicken (the most successful of all cross-species
relationships). Beginning with the recent discovery in Montana
that the chicken’s unlikely ancestor is T. Rex, this book builds on Lawler’s popular Smithsonian cover article,
“How the Chicken Conquered the World” to track the chicken from its original domestication in the jungles
of Southeast Asia some 10,000 years ago to postwar America, where it became the most engineered of
animals, to the uncertain future of what is now humanity’s single most important source of protein.
In a masterful combination of historical sleuthing and journalistic exploration on four continents, Lawler
reframes the way we feel and think about our most important animal partner—and, by extension, all
domesticated animals, and even nature itself.
Lawler’s narrative reveals the secrets behind the chicken’s transformation from a shy jungle bird into an
animal of astonishing versatility, capable of serving our species’ changing needs. For no other siren has
called humans to rise, shine, and prosper quite like the rooster’s cry.
U.S./Canada: The Free Press (December, 2014)
U.K.: Duckworth
Andrew Lawler is author of more than a thousand newspaper and magazine articles on subjects ranging
from asteroids to zebrafish. He is a contributing writer for Science magazine and a contributing editor for
Archaeology magazine. He has written for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Discover, Columbia
Journalism Review, The New York Times, and several European newspapers, among others. See more at
AndrewLawler.com.
Elizabeth Mitchell
LIBERTY’S TORCH:
The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty
*Amazon Best Book of the Month
“Filled with outlandish characters, fascinating tidbits and old world
adventure, Liberty’s Torch is a rollicking read about one of America’s most
beloved and, until now, misunderstood, icons.”
—Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Liberty’s Torch reveals a statue with a storied past . . . Mitchell uses Liberty
to reveal a pantheon of historic figures, including novelist Victor Hugo,
engineer Gustave Eiffel and newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. The
drama—or “great adventure,” to borrow from the subtitle—runs from the
Pyramids of Egypt to the backrooms of Congress. . . . By explaining
Liberty’s tortured history and resurrecting Bartholdi’s indomitable spirit,
Mitchell has done a great service. This is narrative history, well told. It is
history that connects us to our past and—hopefully—to our future."
—Los Angeles Times
The Statue of Liberty has become one of the most recognizable
monuments in the world: a symbol of freedom and the American Dream. But the story of the creation of the
statue has been obscured by myth. In reality, she was the inspiration of one quixotic French sculptor hungry
for fame and adoration: Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who first showed himself to be a talented sculptor at
the tender age of twenty-one when a statue he created won third prize at the 1855 Paris Exhibition. His
equally prodigious talent for entrepreneurship came to light soon afterwards. Following a trip to Egypt where
he was inspired by the pyramids and the Sphinx, and with France in turmoil following the Franco-Prussian
war, Bartholdi made for America, carrying with him in his mind the idea of a colossal statue of a woman.
With no help coming from the French and American governments, he enlisted the help of a number of
notable men and women of the age, including Joseph Pulitzer, Victor Hugo, Gustave Eiffel, and Emma
Lazarus, and through a variety of money-making schemes and some very modern-seeming fundraising
campaigns, collected almost all of the money required to build the statue himself. Liberty’s Torch is the
story of a forgotten artist and entrepreneur who fought setback after setback to create this wonder of the
modern world.
U.S./Canada: Grove/Atlantic (July, 2014)
Elizabeth Mitchell is an editor, journalist, and author. She is the author of two nonfiction books: Three
Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and Beautiful World of Horse Racing, and W: Revenge of the Bush
Dynasty.
Simon Morrison
BOLSHOI CONFIDENTIAL: Secrets of the Russian Ballet—From the Rule of the Tsars to the Age
of Putin
Ballet is seldom the subject of front-page stories in The New York Times, but events at the Bolshoi Theater
have been just that compelling. Tens of thousands of stories have been published about the acid attack on
Sergei Filin, the artistic director and former prince of Russian ballet, and the subsequent accusations of
sexual impropriety and financial wrongdoing at the highest levels of Russian society. In Bolshoi Confidential,
author Simon Morrison deploys his expert and intimate knowledge of Russian culture—and of ballet in
particular—to reveal both the inside story of the Bolshoi and its recent criminal mayhem as well as the
never-before-told history of the centuries-old Theater itself.
As goes Russia, so goes the Bolshoi. The mystifying events at the ballet affirm that the nation it represents
is a land without causality, where anything can happen, and where reality and fiction blur into each other.
Ultimately, Bolshoi Confidential, a product of persistent investigative journalism and meticulous archival
research, defines the Russian ballet as a crucible of politics and art, high elitist culture and base
commercialism, tradition and innovation, ambition and failure, beauty and misery. (It also solves the crime.)
U.S.: Liveright/Norton (2016)
U.K.: Fourth Estate
Brazil: Editora Record
Canada: Knopf
France: Belfond
Simon Morrison, Professor of Music History at Princeton University, is recognized as a leading expert on
Russian ballet and opera, with incomparable expertise in the culture, society, and politics of the Stalinist
period and the Cold War. He has spent fifteen years conducting archival research in Russia and earned
exclusive access to the closed files of composer Sergei Prokofiev in Moscow. Likewise, he has won unique
access to materials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and worked extensively in Russian federal
archives. Outside of Moscow he has conducted research in archives and libraries in London, New York,
Paris, St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, and Stockholm.
Simon Morrison
LINA AND SERGE: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev
*Winner, Guggenheim Fellowship, 2011-2012
Serge Prokofiev was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant
composers yet is an enigma to historians and his fans. Why did he
leave the West and move to the Soviet Union despite Stalin’s crimes?
Why did his astonishing creativity in the 1930s soon dissolve into a
far less inspiring output in his later years? The answers can finally be
revealed, thanks to Simon Morrison’s unique and unfettered access
to the family’s voluminous papers and his ability to reconstruct the
tragic, riveting life of the composer’s wife, Lina.
Morrison’s portrait of the marriage of Lina and Serge Prokofiev is the
story of a remarkable woman who fought for survival in the face of
unbearable betrayal and despair and of the irresistibly talented but
heartlessly self-absorbed musician she married. Born to a Spanish
father and Russian mother in Madrid at the end of the nineteenth
century and raised in Brooklyn, Lina fell in love with a rising-star
composer—and defied convention to be with him, courting public censure. She devoted her life to Serge
and to art, training to be an operatic soprano and following her brilliant husband to Stalin’s Russia. Just as
Serge found initial acclaim—before becoming constricted by the harsh doctrine of socialist-realist music—
Lina was at first accepted and later scorned, ending her singing career. Serge abandoned her and took up
with another woman. Finally, Lina was arrested and shipped off to the gulag in 1948. She would be held in
captivity for eight awful years. Meanwhile, Serge found himself the tool of an evil regime to which he was
forced to accommodate himself.
The contrast between Lina and Serge is one of strength and perseverance versus utter self-absorption, a
remarkable human drama that draws on the forces of art, sacrifice, and the struggle against oppression.
Readers will never forget the tragic drama of Lina’s life, and never listen to Serge’s music in quite the same
way again.
World English: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (January, 2013)
UK: Harvill Secker
Russia: Centrepolygraph
Anne Nelson
THE CHILDREN’S HOUR:
One Woman's Quest to Save the
Jewish Children of Occupied Paris
She was a devoted wife and mother of
two. She enjoyed a rich social circle
among Paris's elite. She used her
family money to become Rene
Magritte's
leading
patron,
and
eventually, his muse. She could have
survived the Second World War living
in Occupied Paris in relative comfort.
Indeed, many of her friends believed
she was doing just this. But in secret,
Suzanne Spaak was a leading player in the Paris Underground, focusing her efforts on saving the city's
most vulnerable people: Jewish children. She did this by coordinating the many underground movements—
most of them at odds with one another—and motivating them to work together for the common goal of
rescuing Jews, first and foremost their children, from the Nazi regime. Suzanne Spaak's double-life saved
hundreds of children and culminated in a daring midnight rescue of over sixty Jewish children. Years later,
Israel would include her among its list of Righteous Among Nations. Yet history has forgotten her story. The
Children's Hour will revive it. Suzanne Spaak’s world was full of vibrant personalities including Rene
Magritte, Charles Spaak (France's leading screenwriter), and the novelist Colette, and The Children's Hour
will show how Suzanne organized them to support the Underground. Combined with Suzanne's
connections to Soviet, British, and French spies, The Children's Hour will give readers an insider's account
of the Underground's many layers. It is a history no one has told. This book will explore many untouched
themes of World War II. In Suzanne's story, Anne also addresses the under-reported role France played in
the Holocaust—France had long boasted that more Jews survived within their borders than any other
country, but The Children's Hour will examine the effects of Jewish immigration into France, and how the
government targeted non-citizen Jews for deportation. Suzanne Spaak's story reveals as well the key role
women played in the Underground and Resistance. The risks they took and the lives they saved will be
prominently displayed in The Children's Hour, prompting readers to ask themselves: Would I have this
courage? What would I do?
U.S./Canada: Simon & Schuster (Fall, 2016)
France: Laffont
U.K.: Deal Pending
Anne Nelson is the Adjunct Associate Professor Lecturer of International and Public Affairs at Columbia
University. She has written extensively on media, conflict, and human rights. Ms. Nelson was a war
correspondent in Latin America, and reported from Eastern Europe and Asia, with work appearing in the
New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harper's, BBC, CBC, NPR and PBS. Her writing has won six
awards, including the Livingston Award for international reporting. She is the author of, most recently, Red
Orchestra (Random House) and the 2001 play The Guys which was adapted into the 2002 film starring
Sigourney Weaver, among many other publications. Nelson is a graduate of Yale University, a member of
the Council on Foreign Relations, and the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship for work on media
and Nazi Germany.
Janice P. Nimura
DAUGHTERS OF THE SAMURAI:
A Journey from East to West and Back
"At a reform-minded moment, Japan in 1871 dispatched five young girls
to be educated in America. None spoke a word of English. Two would
count among Vassar’s first non-white students; all sailed home with a
shaky grasp of their native language. Patiently, vividly, Janice Nimura
reconstructs their Alice-in-Wonderland adventure: The girls are so exotic
as to qualify as “princesses” on their American arrival. One feels
“enormous” on her return to Japan. A beautifully crafted narrative, subtle,
polished, and poised." —Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Vera, Cleopatra and A Great Improvisation
"Janice Nimura’s Daughters of the Samurai tells the surprising and richly
satisfying story of three young girls chosen to act as cultural
ambassadors for the Japanese nation during its emergence onto the
world stage in the late nineteenth century. Nimura masterfully details
three intertwined lives on two continents while simultaneously introducing
readers to the full sweep of Japanese history of the Meiji period, the halfcentury that forced the ancient Land of the Rising Sun to confront
Western modernity. In Nimura’s skillful telling, Sutematsu, Ome, and
Shige become ambassadors once again, bringing to life an era from
which we can learn important lessons about intercultural understanding,
conflict, and compromise, still vital to our survival in the global 21st
century." —Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters and Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, winner of the
2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography
In 1871, five young girls were sent by the Japanese government to the United States. Their mission: learn
Western ways and return to help nurture a new generation of enlightened men to lead Japan. Raised in
traditional samurai households during the turmoil of civil war, three of these unusual ambassadors—
Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda—grew up as typical American schoolgirls. Upon their
arrival in San Francisco they became celebrities, their travels feted by newspapers across the nation. The
passionate friendships they formed reveal an intimate world of cross-cultural fascination and connection.
Ten years later, they returned to Japan—a land grown foreign to them—determined to revolutionize
women’s education.
Based on in-depth archival research in Japan and in the United States, Daughters of the Samurai is
beautifully, cinematically written, a fascinating lens through which to view an extraordinary historical
moment.
U.S./Canada: W. W. Norton (May, 2015)
An independent scholar and book critic whose reviews have been published in The New York Times, The
Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal, Janice P. Nimura is the American daughter-in-law of a
Japanese family. She lives in New York City.
Robin Rinaldi
THE WILD OATS PROJECT
The project was simple: An attractive, successful magazine
journalist, Robin Rinaldi, would move into a San Francisco
apartment, join a dating site, and get laid. Never mind that she
already owned a beautiful flat a few blocks away, that she was
forty-four, or that she was married to a man she’d been in love
with for eighteen years. What followed—a year of sex,
heartbreak, and unexpected revelation—is the topic of this
riveting memoir, The Wild Oats Project.
An open marriage was never one of Rinaldi’s goals—her priority
as she approached midlife was to start a family. But when her
husband insisted on a vasectomy, she decided that she could
remain married only on her own terms. If I can’t have children,
she told herself, then I’m going to have lovers. During the week
she would live alone, seduce men (and women), attend erotic
workshops, and partake in wall-banging sex. On the weekends,
she would go home and be a wife.
At a time when the bestseller lists are topped by books about eroticism and the shifting roles of women,
this brave memoir explores how our sexuality defines us—and it delivers the missing link: an everywoman’s
account of sex. Combining the strong literary voice of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild with the adventurousness of
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, The Wild Oats Project challenges our sensibilities and evokes the
delicate balance between loving others and staying true to oneself.
World: Sarah Crichton Books/FSG (March, 2015)
Contact: Devon.Mazzone@fsgbooks.com and Amber.Hoover@fsgbooks.com
Canada: Doubleday
France: Le Cherche Midi
Germany: Bertelsmann
The Netherlands: De Bezige Bij
Czech: Beta
U.K.: Hodder
Robin Rinaldi has worked in newspapers and magazines for the past fifteen years. Previously an executive
editor at 7x7, a glossy lifestyle magazine covering San Francisco, she has written an award-winning food
column for Philadelphia Weekly, worked at Rodale’s Organic Style magazine, and contributed stories to
Saveur and O, The Oprah Magazine. She has been interviewed on the “Sex With Emily” podcast/radio
show and writes a weekly relationship advice column on 7x7.com called “TwoSense.” Robin currently lives
in Los Angeles.
Anne-Marie Slaughter
WHY WOMEN STILL CAN’T HAVE IT ALL
In her viral cover story for the July/August 2012 issue of The
Atlantic (which became the most widely read piece in the
history of the magazine’s website, reaching over 900,000
readers in less than a week), Slaughter revealed how
difficult it is to be a woman balancing a high-powered career
with raising a family in contemporary society. An expansion
as well as a continuation of that piece, Why Women Still
Can’t Have It All blends narrative—the stories of women at
the top of their professions, many of whom have never
before spoken publicly on this issue—with reporting and
research on both the data and the myths about work/life
“balance.” Slaughter offers her experience, opinions, and
confident point-of-view to drive home the essential message
of the book: to change the way women work now, and to
change the playing field, we must encourage the most
influential among us to organize, to act, and to deliver
solutions when government can’t. Whether she’s working
out a Charter of Principles for employers, discussing ways to bring about equal rights for part-time
employees or bring men into the conversation, or considering the ways women balance work and family in
nations all over the world, Slaughter’s arguments are sharp, smart, and desperately necessary for women
around the globe.
U.S.: Random House (2015)
Canada: Random House Canada
UK: OneWorld
Australia: Penguin Australia
German: Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Italy: Sperling & Kupfer
Portugal: Temas & Debates
Audio: Random House Audio
Anne-Marie Slaughter is the president and CEO of the New America Foundation and the Bert G. Kerstetter
’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 20092011 she served as the director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, the first
woman to hold that position. Prior to her government service, Dr. Slaughter was the Dean of Princeton’s
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002–2009 and the J. Sinclair Armstrong
Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994-2002. She has
written or edited six books, including A New World Order and The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with
Our Values in a Dangerous World, and is a frequent contributor to a number of publications, including The
Atlantic and Project Syndicate. In 2012, she published “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” in The Atlantic,
which quickly became the most read article in the history of the magazine and helped spark a renewed
national debate on the continued obstacles to genuine full male-female equality. She is married to Professor
Andrew Moravcsik; they live in Princeton with their two sons.
Jacob Soll
THE RECKONING:
Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations
*2011 Recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant
*2009 Guggenheim Fellow
“One longs for a way of reading history that makes some sense of the
financial forces that still seem to bind the world. Happily, this is what
Jacob Soll has achieved in his brilliant, deceptively brief book, The
Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of
Nations....Leaves the reader satisfied with everything except the status
quo.” — The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Wry and lucid...in Soll’s hands, accountability and accountancy
become a way of investigating the rise and fall of nations.” — The
Financial Times
In America, in Europe, even in a newly powerful modern China,
we find ourselves right now facing serious financial crises of
accounting and accountability. Across the globe there seems
little certainty about debt levels or the reliability of private
auditors and public regulators meant to clarify the world of finance. Yet history provides useful lessons for
understanding and coping with our current crisis. 2011 MacArthur "Genius" (for his work studying the origins
of the modern state) and 2009 Guggenheim Fellow Jacob Soll’s The Reckoning examines just where our
mode of mixing politics and accounting comes from and seeks to help us get a historical handle on the big
numbers that rain down upon us every day. It shows how, in the right hands, accounting can be a tool to
build companies, states and empires; while, in the wrong hands, it has contributed to cycles of destruction,
either through the ineptitude of those responsible for accounting, or because cooked account books
constitute such a dangerous tool for abuse and fraud.A complement to titles like Niall Ferguson's bestselling
The Ascent of Money, The Reckoning looks to make some sense of our own massive crisis of financial
circumlocution by looking backwards seven hundred years to the very origins of finance and political
accountability, and then tracing the unfolding story of how states kept accounts and audited themselves
and their institutions, from fourteenth-century Genoa, to the Stock Market Crash of 1929. It is a retelling of
history we may have thought we knew—the rise of accounting, finance, states, banks and modern
economies. But while the basics of what Soll covers here may at first look familiar, many of the details and
interpretations he provides will be new even to seasoned readers of financial history.
World rights: Basic Books (May, 2014)
Portugal: Lua de Papel
Brazil: Record
Japan: Bungei Shunju
UK: Penguin Press
China: CITIC
Contact: Isabelle Bleecker (isabelle.bleecker@perseusbooks.com)
Jacob Soll
FREE MARKET:
The History of a Dream
The term Free Market is not simply a commonplace today; it is a monolithic concept. Whether pro-Free
Market or against, few question the basic meaning of a term that litters the discussion of economics and
politics, from university lectures to stories in the press. But always, when we think of the Free Market, we
do so in the totalizing terms of Milton Friedman, who saw it as the absence of any and all government
activity in economic affairs. Only the Free Market, Friedman said, can distribute wealth to all people. Those
who do not believe in the Free Market, he claimed, do not believe in “freedom itself.” Central to such
certainties is the assumption that there was always such an idea of a Free Market—that somewhere in
history, someone envisioned a world in which all economic actors would do their business with no
interference from the state, thus creating endless wealth.
Free Market: The History of a Dream challenges the monolith. It questions whether, from its first conception
in the eighteenth century, to its application as an economic and political policy in the nineteenth, there was
ever a coherent idea of a Free Market. Rather than a critique of free markets, however, this book embraces
the complexity of the theory while also exploring clearly and systematically the problems and challenges
faced by Free Market theorists and policy makers throughout modern history. Its ultimate goal is to show
just how complex ideas of the Market were and why we largely ignore this history today.
World rights: Basic Books
Jacob Soll is an historian who teaches at the University of Southern California, where he is a professor in
the Department of History. He is a 2011 MacArthur “Genius” and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. His previous
books include Publishing “The Prince” and The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State
Intelligence System.
Frances Stroh
BEER MONEY:
A Story of Privilege and Loss in a Great American Brewing Dynasty
A smart and captivating memoir from an heir to the once-great and now
extinct Stroh's Beer (which also owned household names like Schlitz
and Schaefer and Old Milwaukee [of "It doesn't get any better than this!"
fame]). Elegantly efficient in structure and mercilessly clear-eyed in its
self-appraisal, BEER MONEY is, above all, a great American story.
"Many years would pass," Frances Stroh writes in the book's opening,
“before I would come to see that the Stroh’s Beer story, my family’s story,
and the story of the once great city of Detroit were all bound up together,
our destinies and histories so entwined that in their final days the
brewery, the family, and Detroit all tumbled together, like a long-eroded
cliff falling whole into the inland sea.” BEER MONEY is a book that will
take a place on the shelf beside classics like Rich Cohen's Sweet and
Low and Sean Wilsey's Oh the Glory of it All.
U.S. & Canada: HarperCollins
Frances Stroh was born in Detroit and raised in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She received her B.A. from Duke
University and her M.A. from Chelsea College of Art in London as a Fulbright Scholar. She practiced as an
installation artist, exhibiting in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London before segueing into writing
narrative.
Michael Thomas
THE BROKEN KING
*Winner of the 2009 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Man Gone Down
From the author of the critically acclaimed novel Man Gone Down, one of New York Times Book Review’s
Top Ten Books of 2007, The Broken King is Michael Thomas’s compellingly uninhibited memoir about
fathers and sons, lovers and beloved, trauma and recovery, race and de-racination, success and failure,
and the Boston Red Sox. Through the collective narratives of four generations of men in his family, from
his grandfather to his own two sons, Thomas investigates the many forces that shape our lives, and
illuminates the very nature of the human spirit—both its profound strength and its devastating fragility. It is
a groundbreaking work—darkly skeptical and genuinely optimistic—on the pursuit of wholeness and
redemption, set against the backdrop of the last 140 years in American history; from reconstruction, Jim
Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement to the present day.
World: Grove/Atlantic (2015)
Contact: Amy Hundley (ahundley@groveatlantic.com)
Michael Thomas received his BA from Hunter College and his MFA from Warren Wilson College. He is the
author of Man Gone Down, winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The
New York Times, A Public Space, and the anthology The Book of Dads. He lives in New York.
Caroline Weber
SWAN SONG:
In Search of Proust’s Duchess
Proust drew his famous “duchesse de Guermantes” much as he drew “Marcel” and any number of the other
characters in his In Search of Lost Time: That is, from life. When the young novelist-in-the-making first
ventured into the French beau monde in the early 1890s, the three acknowledged queens of that milieu
were: Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Chevigné (1860-1936); Élisabeth de Caraman-Chimay, Comtesse
Greffulhe (1860-1952); and Madame Geneviève Halévy Bizet-Straus (1845-1926); and their reign lasted,
with some individual ups and downs, through the author’s famous retirement to his cork-lined bedroom in
late 1907—a period coinciding almost exactly with the Belle Époque itself. Because of Proust’s origins—
his father was a bourgeois (if distinguished) surgeon and public-health official, his mother a Jewish (if
assimilated) lady of leisure—he could claim no rights of entry to this explicitly closed milieu. Yet his family
also happened to be affluent and highly cultivated—two qualities that, along with the voguish “decadent”
fiction he devoured in his teens and early twenties, gave him a strong spiritual affinity for the upper-class
cult of the refined, the rarefied, the exquisite. As so, blazing the trail that “Marcel” would one day retread in
Search, he set out to meet these three women, social barriers be damned.
Caroline Weber’s brilliant follow-up to her widely acclaimed Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore
to the Revolution, Swan Song: In Search of Proust’s Duchess tells the story of these grandest of dames
whose identities Proust simultaneously appropriated and effaced, and of the intensely fraught personal
relationships he had with all three of them. A group portrait of four individuals ensnared in the cult of Belle
Époque exquisiteness, the book effectively rewinds the Guermantes tracks of Search and replays it in a
darker key, isolating and amplifying its notes of snobbery, competition, resentment, and disenchantment.
U.S./Canada: Knopf (Fall, 2016)
Young Adult & Middle Grade
Jason Fry
THE JUPITER PIRATES
Written by Star Wars publishing franchise veteran Jason Fry, The
Jupiter Pirates is the story of a family of space privateers who work
together as a crew, ambushing Earth's merchant ships, running afoul
of other pirates, and surviving any number of nail-biting adventures.
Our protagonist is teenager Hersh Hashoone; his crewmates are his
twin sister, Yana, their older brother, Carlo, their mother (the current
captain), Diocletia Hashoone, father, Mavry Malone, and grandfather,
Huff Hashoone, an irascible old-school pirate who, after so many
decades of battle, has got so many mechanized, computerized parts
in him, he's basically cyborg. The twist is that all three kids are
competing to be the next captain, and only one of them can succeed.
The ship, then, amounts to an ultra-competitive school on rocket
blasters -- where the lessons are, quite literally, matters of life and
death, and the learning curve: off the charts...The first in a series that
takes the serious and sensitive Hersh through any number of
adventures, The Jupiter Pirates shines with a brilliance of imagination
and confidence in the telling that truly—and this is backed up by
several very high stakes child and tween test readings!—sets it apart.
U.S./Canada: Harper Children's (December, 2013)
Jason Fry is a freelance writer, editor, and digital consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. He spent thirteen years as
a columnist for The Wall Street Journal Online, and blogs about baseball. As a Star Wars franchise writer, he’s
published a number of Star Wars books and materials.
T.M. Goeglein
COLD FURY
Jason Bourne meets The Sopranos in this breathtaking
adventure. Sara Jane Rispoli is a normal sixteen-year-old
coping with school and a budding romance—until her parents
and brother are kidnapped and she discovers her family is
deeply embedded in the Chicago Outfit (aka the mob). Now on
the run from a masked assassin, rogue cops and her turncoat
uncle, Sara Jane is chased and attacked at every turn, fighting
back with cold fury as she searches for her family. It’s a quest
that takes her through concealed doors and forgotten
speakeasies — a city hiding in plain sight. Though armed with
a .45 and 96k in cash, an old tattered notebook might be her
best defense—hidden in its pages the secret to “ultimate
power.” It’s why she’s being pursued, why her family was taken,
and could be the key to saving all of their lives. Action packed,
with fresh, cinematic writing, Cold Fury is a riveting and
imaginative adventure readers will devour. This is the first book
of the trilogy.
World English: Putnam (July, 2012)
Contact: Helen Boomer helen.boomer@us.penguingroup.com
Germany: Heyne
The Netherlands: Prometheus
France: Milan
T.M. Goeglein
FLICKER & BURN
Sara Jane Rispoli is still searching for her missing family, but instead
of fighting off a turncoat uncle and crooked cops, this time she finds
herself on the run from creepy beings with red, pulsing eyes and pale
white skin chasing her through the streets in ice cream trucks; they
can only be described as Ice Cream Creatures. They're terrifying and
hell bent on killing her, but they're also a link to her family, a clue to
where they might be and who has them. While she battles these new
pursuers, she's also discovering more about her own cold fury and
more about the Chicago Outfit, how the past misdeeds--old murders
and vendettas--might just be connected to her present and the
disappearance of her family. But connecting the dots is tough and
time-consuming and may finally be the undoing of her relationship
with the handsome Max--who's now her boyfriend. But for his own
safety, Sara Jane may have to end this relationship before it even
really starts. Her pursuers who've shown her her mother's amputated
finger and the head of the Chicago Outfit who's just whistled her in
for a sit-down make a romance unthinkable. The only thing that
matters is finding her family and keeping everyone she loves alive.
World English: Putnam (August, 2013)
Contact: Helen Boomer helen.boomer@us.penguingroup.com
The Netherlands: Prometheus
Germany: Heyne
T.M. Goeglein
EMBERS & ASH
Sara Jane Rispoli is on the wrong side of the Russian mob, but
closer to finding her family than ever. And she's willing to do
whatever it takes to finally end this terrible journey even if the
price is her own life.
The very cold fury that has seen her through the worst of her
troubles is now killing her; she knows the cure, but she can't
sacrifice the deadly electricity until she's rescued her family. But
when she finally does rescue them, it's not the happy reunion
she pictured. And the torment doesn't stop there, not even when
she finally discovers Ultimate Power. Only destroying the Outfit
completely can end this terrible nightmare.
Old enemies return to seek vengeance, double-crosses
abound, and even more mysteries are uncovered as we rocket
toward an end no one saw coming.
World English: Putnam (July, 2014)
Contact: Helen Boomer helen.boomer@us.penguingroup.com
Germany: Heyne
T.M. (Ted) Goeglein is a screenwriter and novelist. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two children.
Lish McBride
FIREBUG
"The first in what promises to be another popular series, McBride draws upon
her talent of spinning entertaining and suspenseful tales that are fresh, fun,
and very droll." —Booklist
“Deeply enmeshed with a magical world and its impossible choices before
readers ever meet her, Ava and her wholly believable despair are a
refreshing change from the endless parade of naïve heroines found
elsewhere.” —Kirkus
“McBride’s follow-up to the popular “Hold Me Closer Necromancer” series
maintains her trademark dark humor and engaging, quippy
characters...[R]eaders looking for a fast-paced narrative will undoubtedly be
satisfied with the rollicking plot and its riffs on the classic formula of rebels
on the lam.” —School Library Journal
“This excellent book is a must-have for all libraries, especially where horror,
romance, and urban fantasy fiction are hot. This novel will provide crossover
appeal to both older teens and adults.” —VOYA
Ava is a firebug—she can start fires with her mind. Which would all be well and good if she weren’t caught
in a deadly contract with the Coterie, a magical mafia. She’s one of their main hitmen . . . and she doesn’t
like it one bit. Not least because her boss, Venus, killed Ava’s mother. When Venus asks Ava to kill a family
friend, Ava rebels. She knows very well that you can’t say no to the Coterie and expect to get away with it,
though, so she and her friends hit the road, trying desperately to think of a way out of the mess they find
themselves in. Preferably keeping the murder to a minimum, in Lish McBride's Firebug. Book two of the
series to be published September, 2015.
World English: Holt Books for Young Readers (September, 2014)
Contact: Holly Hunnicutt (holly.hunnicut@macmillan.com)
Lish McBride enjoys reading, having geek-laden conversations about movies, comics and zombies with her
friends, and trying to wear pajamas as much as humanly possible. Currently Lish lives in Seattle with her
family, two cats, and one very put-upon Chihuahua.
Sarah Porter
VASSA IN THE NIGHT
Vassa's working-class Brooklyn neighborhood is no
enchanted kingdom but that doesn't mean there's no magic.
For years the local BY's convenience store has perched
atop a pair of dancing chicken legs. As inviting as BY's
catchy jingle is, the owner Babs's policy of beheading
shoplifters should be bad for business. However, this is not
glitzy Manhattan, and nobody seems to care when locals
don't come back from a milk run.
Lately, the Brooklyn nights seem to last forever, and Vassa
and her sisters' bickering is made worse from months spent
cooped up. When one of her sisters demands that Vassa go
to BY’s for light bulbs, Vassa angrily agrees to what she
suspects is a suicide mission. But Vassa has a bit of luck
hidden in her pocket in the form of Erg, a tough-talking
wooden doll with a bottomless stomach. When Erg's quick
thinking saves Vassa from being framed for shoplifting, old
Babs sentences Vassa to work three night shifts as
punishment. If Vassa makes it through without losing any
money or merchandise, she’ll be free to go, but Babs won't be playing fair. And as she begins to uncover
Babs’s uncanny secrets, Vassa realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than her own survival.
Based on the classic Russian fairy tale "Vasilissa the Beautiful," Vassa in the Night is a darkly funny,
poignant, and wildly imaginative story from Sarah Porter, author of the acclaimed Lost Voices Trilogy.
World English: Tor Teen (Summer, 2015)
Contact: Chris Scheina, christopher.scheina@stmartins.com
Sarah Porter is the author of Lost Voices, Waking Storms, and The Twice Lost. She is also an artist and a
freelance public school teacher. Sarah and her husband live in Brooklyn, New York. Visit Sarah’s Watery
Den online at www.sarahporterbooks.com.
Rob Sharenow
THE GIRL IN THE TORCH
“A story with well-drawn, complex characters, gripping history, and intense emotion.” —School Library Journal (starred
review), on The Berlin Boxing Club
Sarah is an illegal immigrant, but long before that term became popularly known. After her father is killed
in a massacre in Czarist Russia, Sarah and her mother flee to the United States. They are inspired to take
their journey by a postcard of the Statue of Liberty that had been circulating in their village, with Emma
Lazarus’ famous poem printed on the back, welcoming the world’s tired, poor, and huddled masses. While
on their ocean crossing, Sarah’s mother becomes ill and dies before they can enter the new world. Sarah
is to be shipped back to her country to live with her despised uncle. With nothing left to live for, Sarah
decides to jump from the departing ship into the icy waters of the Hudson River. She somehow manages
to swim to the nearest land mass, Liberty Island. It is late and night when she comes ashore and she is
confronted by the magnificent statue of her dreams, as Lazarus described, “Mother of Exiles.” Sarah takes
refuge inside the statue itself, setting up a makeshift bedroom in the crown room. By day, she blends in
with the tourists who come and go and scavenges for their cast away food scraps. By night, she returns to
the statue and plays cat and mouse with the night watchman, a broken-down, drunken, older man named
Maryk who is struggling with demons of his own. One night, Maryk injures himself inside the statue in a
drunken fall. Sarah makes the decision to come to his aid, knowing that, in doing so, she will blowing her
cover. Maryk hears her story and is touched by her plight. Rather than turn her in, he decides to try to help
her. Maryk brings her to his apartment building in Chinatown, owned by an old Chinese matron named
Mrs. Lee. The building houses Chinese immigrants and Mrs. Lee runs with the help of an African-couple,
Smitty and Miss Jean. Over the next few days, Sarah becomes integrated into the life of the building,
working with Mrs. Lee in the kitchen, and starts to feel some semblance of belonging again. Something
about the girl awakens Maryk dead spirit. And despite his how alien and gruff he is, Sarah begins to bond
with him too. One afternoon, Sarah returns to the apartment after doing errands to discover Maryk and Mrs.
Lee are being arrested on suspicion of harboring illegal immigrants for immoral purposes. Sarah must flee
and is driven into a dark odyssey in gaslight Manhattan that pushes her further toward the edge. The Girl
in the Torch examines the illegal immigrant experience through the journey of one brave young girl. As her
life becomes intertwined with Maryk, Mrs. Lee, Smitty, and Miss Jean, the book explores the notion of what
it means to be an American, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
U.S./Canada: Balzer & Bray/HarperCollins (May, 2015)
Robert Sharenow's first novel, My Mother the Cheerleader, was chosen as an ALA Best Book for Young
Adults, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age,
and a VOYA Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers. He is also an Emmy Award-winning television
producer and serves as executive vice president of programming for Lifetime and the Lifetime Movie
Network. He lives in New York.
Irene Skolnick Agency
Peter Cameron
CORAL GLYNN
*Barnes & Noble Best of the Month for January 2012
*February 2012 Lambda Literary Book Club Selection
*Salon Editor’s Pick
*New York Times Book Review Editor’s Pick
“Haunting… With its echoes of Iris Murdoch’s moral fables and
Daphne du Maurier’s lush romances, Coral Glynn is like an
engrossing black-and-white movie for a rainy afternoon—a tale
of clouded hearts, hidden motives and dangerous affections.”
— Mark Doty
In the spring of 1950, Coral Glynn arrives at an isolated mansion
in the English countryside to nurse the elderly Edith Hart, who is
dying of cancer. There, Coral meets Hart House’s odd
inhabitants: Mrs. Prence, the perpetually disgruntled
housekeeper, and Major Clement Hart, her charge’s warravaged son. When a child’s game goes violently awry in the
nearby woods, a great shadow—love, perhaps—descends upon
its residents. Other seemingly random events—a torn dress, a missing ring, a lost letter—propel Coral
and Clement precipitously into the mysterious thicket of marriage. Coral Glynn explores how quickly need
and desire can blossom into love, and just as quickly transform into something less categorical. Cameron’s
brilliant novel examines how we live and love with his unique combination of knowing wit and empathy.
U.S./Canada: Farrar Straus & Giroux (2012)
France: Rivages,
Germany: Knaus.
Italy: Adelphi
Netherlands: Ailantus
Spain: Libros Del Asteroide
Peter Cameron’s previous novels include Someday this Pain Will Be Useful to You, The City of Your Final
Destination, The Weekend, Leap Year and Andorra. His short story collections include One Way or
Another and The Half You Don’t Know. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Subtropics, and The
Paris Review.
Allegra Goodman
ARKADIA
New York Times bestselling author and NBA finalist returns with her strongest book yet, about a young
couple caught up in the creation of a long-awaited video game, one which significantly blurs the boundary
line between reality and the darker aspects of fantasy. Arkadia, creator of the classic game EverWhen (think
Warcraft or Dungeons & Dragons), has been working on a 3-D gaming experience called UnderWorld which
will break new ground in story, detail, dimension, and violence. Millions of gamers world-wide are desperate
to play. In a huge leap forward, even from her own previous successes, Allegra Goodman creates a
latticework of human relationships centering on the love story between Nina, the daughter of the man who
owns Arkadia, and Collin, the chalk artist who becomes a concept artist for UnderWorld. With storytelling
as inventive and surprising as her characters, Goodman's Arkadia will build on her fanbase, and far surpass
it.
U.S./Canada: The Dial Press (2015)
Allegra Goodman is a National Book Award Finalist and the author of Intuition, a New York Times
Bestseller and Notable Book of the Year, as well as The Family Markowitz and Kaaterskill Falls, both New
York Times Notable Books of the Year. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award and the Salon Magazine
award for fiction. Goodman’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, American Scholar, Vogue, Good
Housekeeping, and Slate. She lives with her husband and four children in Cambridge, MA.
Allegra Goodman
THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR
*National Bestseller
"If you're hankering for a feast of love, let yourself fall under the spell of
Allegra Goodman's abundantly delicious tale. You won't leave hungry."
—The New York Times Book Review
Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twentyeight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old
Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy.
Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess
works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while
Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is
fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much.
National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author
Allegra Goodman has written a delicious novel about appetite,
temptation, and holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that
stays.
U.S./Canada: The Dial Press (July, 2010)
U.K.: Atlantic
Norway: Forlaget Press
Italy: Newton Compton
Taiwan: Yuan-Liou
Portugal: Civilizaçao Editora
James Lasdun
GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU HAVE (nonfiction)
" . . . a chilling account of what it is to experience 'verbal terrorism' in
the age of email and the Internet – a riveting memoir of James
Lasdun's nightmare experience of having been stalked for five years
by a deranged former student who is also a virulent anti-Semite. This
must be the most informative, the most insightful, and the most
beautifully written of any account from the victim's perspective of what
has come to be called 'cyberbullying.'" —Joyce Carol Oates
A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give
Me Everything You Have chronicles the author's strange and
harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled
“verbal terrorist,” who began trying, in her words, to “ruin him.”
Hate-mail (much of it violently anti-semitic), online postings and
public accusations of theft and sexual misconduct, have been
her weapons of choice, and, as with more conventional terrorist
weapons, have proved remarkably difficult to combat. James
Lasdun's account, while terrifying, is told with compassion and
humor, and brilliantly succeeds in turning a highly personal
story into a profound meditation on subjects as varied as madness, race, Middle Eastern politics, and the
meaning of honor and reputation in the internet age.
U.S./Canada: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (February, 2013)
UK: Cape
Italy: Bompiani
James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York. He has published two previous
collections of stories, three books of poetry and two novels, The Horned Man and Seven Lies. His
story,“The Siege” was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci for the film Besieged. He co-wrote the screenplay
for the film Sunday (based on another of his stories), which won Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards
at Sundance in 1997. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Bruce Machart
THE WAKE OF FORGIVENESS (fiction)
*Shortlisted for the PEN/USA LiteraryPrize
*Winner of the Reading The West Book Award
*Amazon’s Top 10 Debut Fiction of 2010: #6
*Barnes and Noble Year’s Best List, 2010
*Barnes and Noble Discover Program
*NYTBR Editor’s Choice
“In his richly told novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, Bruce Machart tells a
story of fathers and sons that stretches wide across the Texas landscape,
leaving behind its own beautiful wake of remembrance, inheritance, and the
unbreakable bonds of family.”
– Hannah Tinti, author of
The Good Thief
The Wake of Forgiveness is a tale of family bonds and
unrestrained ambition, firmly rooted in the hardscrabble landscape
of Texas. In 1910, Vaclav Skala, seeking to fill the void left by his
wife’s death during childbirth, has begun to wheedle acres of
power from his neighbors through a series of land-staked horse
races. With Skala’s son Karel in the saddle, these races fall largely
in the Skala family’s favor until the emergence of an unrelenting new rival.Reminiscent of Kent Haruf’s
portrayals of hope amid human heartbreak and Cormac McCarthy’s finely hewn evocations of the
American Southwest, Bruce Machart’s striking and epic debut is as well wrought as it is riveting. It
compels us to consider the inescapable connections between sons and mothers, between landscape
and family, and between remembrance and redemption.
U.S./Canada:Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (October, 2010)
Audio: Recorded Books
Large Print: Thorndike Press
France: Editions Gallmeister
Bruce Machart is the author of the award-winning books, The Wake of Forgiveness and Men in the
Making. His short fiction has appeared in One Story, Zoetrope: All Story, Glimmer Train, and Five Points,
among others. A graduate of the MFA program at The Ohio State University in 1999, he is Assistant
Professor of English at Bridgewater State University. He lives in Hamilton, Massachusetts.
Bruce Machart
MEN IN THE MAKING (fiction)
*November 2011 Indie Next List
*Esquire, 10 Best Books of the Year
“Bruce Machart’s protagonists know work – whether it’s loading
cedar logs into debarking drums or scouring the sludge from a drill
rig’s void tanks -- and they know denial, and self-denial, and
compassion, because they’re mostly good men undone by loss, and
by their own resentments and shortcomings, and it’s moving how
much they continue to hope, even down in their own particular wells
of darkness.
Men in the Making is a stirring and impressive
collection.” —Jim Shepard
From the critically acclaimed author of The Wake of
Forgiveness—“a mesmerizing, mythic saga,” as described
by the New York Times—come ten remarkable stories that
uncover unexpected beauty in the struggles of the modern
American male. Like Richard Russo, Bruce Machart has a
profound knowledge of the male psyche and a gift for
conveying the absurdity and brutality of daily life with humor
and compassion. Whether they find themselves walking the
fertile farmland of south Texas, steering trucks through the suffocating sprawl of Houston, or turning logs
into paper in the mills just west of the Sabine River, the men of these stories seek to prove themselves in a
world that doesn’t always welcome them. Here are men whose furrows are never quite straight and whose
hearts are near to bursting with all the desires they have been told they aren’t supposed to heed.
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (October, 2011)
France: Editions Gallmeister
David Rakoff
LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE; CHERISH, PERISH... (a
novel of rhyming stories)
From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty and
wise novel in verse whose story spans the 20th Century. Through
his books and his radio essays for NPR's "This American Life," David
Rakoff built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest
essayists at work today. Written with humor and sympathy and
tenderness, this intricately woven novel proves him to be the master
of an altogether different art form. Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die;
Cherish, Perish… leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song
of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. The
characters’ lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or
cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early 20thcentury Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an
unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a
vivacious aunt offers her clever nephew a path out of the crushed
dream of post-war Southern California; an office girl endures the
casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from
Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then
later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a
love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction
between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens a man who has lost his way finds a
measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box -- an image of pure and simple joy that unites
the themes of this brilliantly conceived work.
U.S./Canada: Doubleday (July, 2013)
David Rakoff, recipient of the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor, was a regular contributor to GQ,
New York Times Magazine and Public Radio International's This American Life. His writing also appeared
in Outside, Salon, Details, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Wired, New York Magazine, and The New York
Observer, among others. As an actor and director, he worked with Amy and David Sedaris on numerous
productions. David wrote the adaptation for and starred in the 2010 Academy Award Winning short film
"The New Tenants." He lived in New York City. David Rakoff died on August 9th, 2012.
David Rakoff
HALF EMPTY (nonfiction)
*The 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor
*One of Amazon’s Top 100 books of 2010
*National Bestseller
“Rakoff has a self-awareness that could be recreated only by a team of
geneticists working in a lab. The conviction with which he writes is . . .
uplifting.” – Bill Scheft, The New York Times Book Review
The inimitably witty David Rakoff, New York Times bestselling
author of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, defends the
commonsensical notion that you should always assume the
worst, because you’ll never be disappointed. In Half Empty,
Rakoff examines the realities of our sunny, gosh-everyone-canbe-a-star contemporary culture and finds that, pretty much, as a
universal rule, the best is not yet to come, adversity will triumph,
justice will not be served, and all of your dreams will not come
true. The book combines stories from Rakoff’s reporting and
from accounts of his own personal life. Whether he’s lacerating
the musical Rent for its cutesy depiction of AIDS, or dealing with
personal tragedy, his sharp observations and humorist’s flair for the absurd will have you positively reveling
in the power of negativity.
U.S./Canada: Doubleday (September, 2010)
Polly Shulman
THE WELLS BEQUEST (YA fiction)
Two teens harness the power of H. G. Wells’ famous time machine in
this exciting companion to The Grimm Legacy. Leo is working on a
science project when an astounding thing happens—a miniature time
machine appears, carrying a tiny version of him and a beautiful girl. He
soon meets the girl—Jaya, who works as a page at the New York
Circulating Material Repository—a fabulous lending-library of things.
Leo soon learns the Repository is home to a few secret collections
including the Wells Bequest—a collection of objects related to H. G.
Wells, Jules Verne, and other science fiction stories. The two of them
realize they are fated to have an adventure, but have no idea it will
turn deadly when jealous Simon, a former page, demands that they
give him Wells’ time machine, or he will destroy them with his Nikola
Tesla death ray. Leo and Jaya’s only hope is to travel to 1895 and find
Tesla in time to prevent Simon and his family from acquiring it. A race
for time is on! In this grand time-travel adventure, Polly Shulman deftly
blends classic science fiction elements with the contemporary fantasy
world readers fell in love with in The Grimm Legacy, giving readers a
taste of how fascinating science can be.
World Rights (except Germany): Putnam/Nancy Paulsen (June, 2013)
UK: Oxford University Press.
Polly Shulman is the author of The Grimm Legacy and Enthusiasm, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s
Choice. She writes for The New York Times, Discover, Newsday, Salon.com, Slate, Archaeology, and The
Village Voice, among others, and edits news stories about math, fossils, meteors, the weather, and the
planets for Science magazine. She lives in New York.
Polly Shulman
THE GRIMM LEGACY (YA fiction)
*A Smithsonian 2010 Notable Book for Children
*An American Library Association’s Top Ten YA Fiction Books for 2011
*Shortlisted for the German Book Award "Leserpreis die besten
Buecher" 2010
“This modern fantasy has intrigue, adventure, and romance . . .
Shulman’s prose is fast paced, filled with humor, and peopled with
characters who are either true to life or delightfully bizarre. Fans of fairy
tales in general and Grimm stories in particular will delight in the
author’s frequent literary references, and fantasy lovers will feel very
much at home in this tale that pulls out all the stops.”
– School Library Journal (starred)
What if fairy tale magic really existed? Elizabeth has just started
working as a page at the New York Circulating Material
Repository, a lending library of objects-- contemporary and
historical, common and obscure. And secret, too—for in the
repository’s basement lies the Grimm Collection, a room of
magical items straight from the Grimms Brothers’ fairy tales. But
the magic mirrors and seven-league boots and other items are starting to disappear. And before she knows
it, she and her fellow pages—handsome Marc, perfect Anjali and brooding Aaron—are suddenly caught
up in an exciting, but dangerous, adventure!
U.S./Canada: Putnam/Nancy Paulsen (July, 2010)
UK: Oxford University Press
Brazil: Devir
Bulgaria: Ibis
China: Goukr (Simplified Chinese)
France: Bayard
Germany: Droemer Knaur
Spain: Nocturna
Taiwan: Sun Color (Complex Chinese)
Turkey: Alfa Group (Artemis)
Film Rights: DreamWorks Animation
Maiya Williams
MIDDLE-SCHOOL COOL (Middle Grade fiction)
Kaboom Academy, a new and alternative school for middle-grade
kids, is chock-full of innovative methods of instruction and discipline
that are soon to be tested on the middle-school students of
Horsemouth, New Hampshire. Now, meet the class of Journalism 1A.
These group of nine misfits are the staff of The Daily Dynamite,
Kaboom Academy's quarterly newspaper. As their school year kicks
off with a boom, literally, the students of Journalism 1A are about to
discover what really goes on at Kaboom Academy and who's really
in charge of this groundbreaking school for boys and girls who've
fallen out of love with learning.
U.S./Canada: Delacorte (February, 2013)
Maiya Williams was an Editor and Vice President of the Harvard
Lampoon and a writer/producer for TV shows such as Rugrats, The
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Mad TV. She is the author of a time
travel trilogy that includes the critically acclaimed books The Golden
Hour, Hour of the Cobra, and Hour of the Outlaw. She lives with her
husband, three children, two dogs, two guinea pigs and a variety of fish in Pacific Palisades, CA.