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SubSIDIARY RIGHTS LIST
Robert Bausch
"Has all the makings of a good bluegrass song; men in trouble with the law, lonesome women, hard times, tattered dreams... Riveting." - The New York Times
Hereis the vivid, riveting, tragicomic tale of an ex-Confederate soldier as intent on evading authorities (both white and Indian) who would hold him to account for disastrous decisions he's made in the line of duty as he is on reaching a woman who would seem to hold the keys to any future worth looking forward to -- a woman he only hopes is still waiting for him. Bausch’s best work yet, Far As the Eye Can See is kind of what you might get if you asked Cormac McCarthy to improve (greatly) upon the picaresque post-Civil War journey-cum-portrait-of-a-young-nation that was Cold Mountain, only this time taking things way out west, and perhaps doing some serious channeling of Mark Twain into the bargain. It's a thinking person's romp of an historical adventure, calling into question (with zero sanctimony, and nothing even remotely anachronistic in perspective) many sorts of complacency that the foreshortening of history and geography has afforded. Truly a modern classic in the making.
World English: Bloomsbury (Spring, 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. A Pulitzer finalist for his first novel, he won the 2009 John Dos Passos Medal for Literature.
Nickolas Butler
"Nickolas Butler ripped my heart out with rare honesty and good old-fashioned unapologetic love. A book that makes you want to call old friends. A writer who makes you feel more human than you thought possible."
- Matthew Quick, New York Times bestselling author THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
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. Some of these guys never left, still farming the land that's been in their family for generations. Others did leave, went farther afield to make good, with varying degrees of success, as rock star, commodities trader, rodeo stud...and have now come home in hopes of finding what they hope will be real purchase in the world. The result is a shared memory only half-recreated, riddled with culture clashes between people who desperately wish to see themselves as the unified tribe they remember, and yet can't help being confronted with how things have in fact changed. There is conflict here between longtime buddies, between husbands and wives, that is, frankly, gut-wrenching, even heartbreaking. There is also hope, healing, and heroism. It is strong, American stuff, not at all afraid of showing that we can be good, too; not just fallible, compromising, venal.
U.S./Canada: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s (March, 2014) Italy: Marsilio Editori
UK: Picador The Netherlands: Ambo/Anthos
Denmark: Klim Norway: Pax
France: Autrement Spain: Libros Del Asteroide
Germany: Klett-Cotta Film: Fox Searchlight
Israel: Yediot
2012 Iowa MFA Nickolas Butler has contributed to Ploughshares, Narrative, and the Kenyon Review. A Wisconsin native, he lives with his wife and child in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Stephanie Cha
"Stephanie Cha's brilliant debut is as Noir as Old Nick's sense of humor. Compelling from first to last page, she takes on contemporary L.A., sweeping the reader through Chandler's twilight, heart broken city from mansions to faux K-town hostess bars. L.A. Noir at its finest." - Denise Mina
Juniper Song laughs when her friend moves into the Marlowe Apartments. After all, she has always obsessed over noir fiction, and Philip Marlowe has been her literary love. So when her friend asks her to investigate a possible affair between his father and a young paralegal, Juniper (or "Song" as her friends call her) finds an opportunity to play detective. Driving through modern day L.A.’s streets, following leads, tailing suspects - it all appeals to Song’s romantic ideal of the noir hero. But when she’s knocked out while investigating a mysterious car, Song lurches back to the real L.A., and embroiled in a crime she can’t solve on noir expertise alone. What’s more, this isn’t the first time Song stuck her nose in other people’s business. As she fights to discover the truth about her
friend’s family and the young paralegal, Song reveals a story from her past, something dark, damaging, and urging her to see the current mystery through, to rectify the mistakes of her past life. Follow Her Home is a terrifically imagined homage to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and the noir genre which has only grown in popularity. With a wink and a nod, Steph Cha brings the genre back to today’s Los Angeles, replacing Marlowe with a whip-smart woman, who inadvertently becomes a noir first - a feminist hero who will appeal to both readers of the classic Marlowe and Spade stories as well as a new audience. Like the film Brick before it, Follow Her Home is a stunning example of how a new writer can breathe fresh life into a classic genre.
U.S./Canada: Minotaur (April, 2013)
World: InkWell Management
Contact: Alexis Hurley (alexis@inkwellmanagement.com)
Steph Cha is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School. She lives in her native city of Los Angeles, California. This is her first novel.
Jennifer Chiaverini
Jennifer Chiaverini presents a stunning account of the friendship that blossomed between First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and her seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who gained her professional reputation in Washington, D.C. by outfitting the city’s elite. Keckley made history by sewing for Lincoln within the White House. In March 1861, Lincoln chose Keckley from among a number of applicants to be her personal "modiste," responsible not only for creating the First Lady’s gowns, but also for dressing Lincoln in the beautiful attire Keckley had fashioned. The relationship between the two women quickly evolved, as Keckley was drawn into the intimate life of the Lincoln family, supporting Lincoln in the loss of first her son, and then her husband to the assassination that stunned the world. Keckley saved scraps from the dozens of gowns she made for Lincoln, eventually piecing together a tribute known as the Mary Todd Lincoln Quilt. She also saved memories, which she fashioned into a book, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. Upon its publication, Keckley’s memoir created a scandal that compelled Lincoln to sever all ties with her, but in the decades since, Keckley’s story has languished in the archives.
World: Dutton Books (January, 2013)
Italy: Neri Pozza
Contact: Sabila Khan (sabila.khan@us.penguingroup.com)
Jennifer Chiaverini is the author of the New York Times bestselling Elm Creek Quilts series. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, she lives with her family in Madison, Wisconsin.
Katie Crouch
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 (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 San Francisco.
Amber Dermont
"With unflinching wit, Amber Dermont examines the harsh vicissitudes of life, and though the worlds she creates are often unsettling places, her sense of detail always makes for a pleasurable read."
-Marilynne Robonsin, Pulitzer Prize and Orange Prize winning author of Gilead and Home
Jason Prosper grew up in the elite world of Manhattan penthouses, Maine summer estates, old boy prep schools, and exclusive sailing clubs. A smart, athletic teenager, Jason maintains a healthy, humorous disdain for the trappings of affluence, preferring to spend afternoons sailing with Cal, his best friend and boarding-school roommate. When Cal commits suicide during their junior year at Kensington Prep, Jason is devastated by the loss and transfers to Bellingham Academy. There, he meets Aidan, a fellow student with her own troubled past. They embark on a tender, awkward, deeply emotional relationship. When a major hurricane hits the New England coast, the destruction it causes brings with it another upheaval in Jason’s life, forcing him to make sense of a terrible secret that has been buried by the boys he considers his friends. Set against the backdrop of the 1987 stock market collapse, The Starboard Sea is an examination of the abuses of class privilege, the mutability of sexual desire, the thrill and risk of competitive sailing, and the adult cost of teenage recklessness. It is a powerful and provocative novel about a young man finding his moral center, trying to forgive himself, and accepting the gift of love.
U.S./Canada: St. Martin’s Press (February, 2012)
UK: Constable Robinson
Translation: InkWell Management
Contact: Alexis Hurley (alexis@inkwellmanagement.com)
Amber Dermont
"[Dermont] seems to be able to throw down a convincing story set anywhere, spun from any premise. [She] is a deft writer, bullish on her characters, assertive in her descriptions of these specific worlds....As a guide to these stories we can simply rely on Dermont's desirous, tender driver of a narrator." - The New York Times
Damage Control, a new collection of award-winning and honored stories, displays Amber Dermont's remarkable gift for portraying characters at crossroads. In "Lyndon," a daughter visits presidential landmarks following the death of her father. In the title story, "Damage Control," a young man works at an etiquette school while his girlfriend is indicted for embezzlement. A widow rents herself to elderly women and vacations with them as a "professional grandchild" in "Stella at the Winter Palace." And in "The Language of Martyrs" a couple houses a mail order bride on behalf of the husband’s Russian mother. These stories have previously been published in many literary magazines including Zoetrope All-Story, American Short Fiction, and Crazyhorse, and have also been featured in anthologies edited by Jane Smiley and Dave Eggers including The Best American New Voices, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Non-Required Reading. "Stella at the Winter Palace" was selected by Ann Patchett as one of the hundred best stories of 2006. Damage Control includes three previously unpublished pieces.
U.S./Canada: St. Martin’s Press (March, 2013)
Translation: InkWell Management
Contact: Alexis Hurley (alexis@inkwellmanagement.com)
Amber Dermont received her MFA from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she held the prestigious Teaching-Writing Fellowship. She received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. She is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College.
Julia Fierro
"Timely and observant, Julia Fierro’s writing feels like real life. She captures the anxiety of our times with the authority, insight—and humor—of lived experience." - Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Age of Miracles
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’s 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; her wife Susanna suffers through her eighth month of all day "morning" sickness while pregnant with the couple’s third child 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" and avid social climber of blue-collar origin. The focus of Leigh and Tiffany’s 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 their ability to raise children successfully in the self-scrutinizing, over-analytical, information-saturated environment of contemporary parenthood. The weekend together in Eden will change the playgroup forever. It 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 (Spring 2014)
Julia Fierro is the founder of The Sackett Street Writers' Workshop. A graduate of The Iowa Writers' Workshop, she was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship for her short story "The Girl Who Walked on Water." She has taught Literature and Creative Writing in the Honors Program at Hofstra University and at the University of Iowa. Her work has been a finalist for three Glimmer Train fiction awards and Julia was a contributor to Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer (Random House), edited by Bret Anthony Johnston. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two small children.
Roxane Gay
Port au Prince, Haiti. 2008. A happy couple is on their way to the beach with their infant son when, suddenly, armed men surround their car. A woman is torn from her family; a fairy tale is shattered. In Roxane Gay’s debut novel, An Untamed State, Mireille Duval-Jameson, the American-born daughter of a wealthy Haitian family, survives thirteen days at the hands of a brutal captor who calls himself The Commander, while her ruthless father hesitates to pay her ransom. In the aftermath Mireille, devastated by so many betrayals, flees to an unexpected place—the Nebraska farm where her husband grew up. With the help of those who love her most, Mireille will claw her way back to herself and her husband and child the same way she clawed for survival over thirteen terrible days—with fierce strength, stubborn will and just enough faith that she might become whole again.
U.S./Canada: Grove/Atlantic (2014)
Natalie Harnett
It is 1961 and the ground is burning beneath Brigid Howley's feet. The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced eleven-year-old Brigid and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and Black Lung-stricken Gramp. Brigid's mother, the chronically dissatisfied Dolores, renews her long-simmering feud with Gram, while her father Adrian, permanently injured from a mining disaster which claimed his favored younger brother, begins to show deeper wounds that his charming Black Irish demeanor no longer can hide.
Tragedy, though, is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Mollie Maguires. But the weight of this legacy now rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandonded bootleg mine shaft. In the aftermath, decades' old secrets threaten to prove just as dangerous to the Howleys as the burning, hollow ground beneath them. Inspired by real-life events in now-infamous Centralia, Pennsylvania, and the equally devastated town of Carbondale, The Hollow Ground is a powerful debut by Natalie Harnett, whose atmospheric, voice-driven narrative—with its three-dimensional characters and indelible sense of place—brings to mind the classic novel Bastard Out of Carolina and recent hit coming-of-age narratives like Tell the Wolves I’m Home, The Language of Flowers, and The Land of Decoration.
U.S./Canada: Thomas Dunne Books
Since receiving an MFA in Fiction from Columbia, Natalie Harnett has been awarded an Edward Albee Fellowship, a Summer Literary Seminars Fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center Writer’s Grant. She has been a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction, the Mid-List Press First Series Award for the Novel, the Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers, and The Ray Bradbury Short Story Fellowship. Her publications include The Madison Review, The MacGuffin, and The New York Times
Roy Kesey
"Roy Kesey's stories in Any Deadly Thing are perfect, masterful portraits of an international cross-section of wise, broken souls--hopeful, brutal, funny as hell, and heart-crushing, every last one."
- Elizabeth Crane, author of We Only Know So Much
Following the critical success of his debut novel, Pacazo, Roy Kesey now brings us a new gathering of short stories, Any Deadly Thing. These stories first appeared in magazines including McSweeney's, Subtropics, Ninth Letter and American Short Fiction, and have been widely anthologized; among them are winners of a Pushcart Prize special mention, an Honorable Mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Missouri Review's Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize in Fiction. With story locales ranging across the Americas to Europe and Asia, Kesey once again makes the full strange world his stage.
U.S./Canada: Dzanc (April, 2013)
Roy Kesey'is the author of the debut novel Pacazo, the award-winning novella Nothing in the World, and the collection, All Over, which made The L Magazine's recent "Best Books of the Decade" list. His short stories, essays, and translations have appeared in McSweeney's, Subtropics, Ninth Letter and The Kenyon Review, among many others.
Young-ha Kim
"Spare and beautiful, Kim’s novel offers a look at the roots of the little-known tribulations of the Korean diaspora in Mexico." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
*Winner of Korea’s Dong-In Literary Prize
In 1904, as the Russo-Japanese War deepened, Asia was parceled out to rising powers and the Korean empire was annexed by Japan. Facing war and the loss of their nation, more than a thousand Koreans left their homes to seek possibility elsewhere—in unknown Mexico. After a long sea voyage, these emigrants—thieves and royals, priests and soldiers, orphans and entire families—disembark with the promise of land. Soon they discover the truth: they have been sold into indentured servitude. Aboard ship, an orphan, Ijeong, fell in love with the daughter of a noble; separated when the various haciendados claim their laborers, he vows to find her. After years of working in the punishing heat of the henequen fields, the Koreans are caught in the midst of a Mexican revolution. Some flee with Ijeong to Guatemala, where they found a New Korea amid Mayan ruins. A tale of star-crossed love, political turmoil, and the dangers of seeking freedom in a new world, Black Flower is an epic story based on a little-known moment in history. Young-ha Kim is one of the most talented and prolific Korean writers of his generation, with five novels and three collections of short stories, including his acclaimed debut, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself.
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (October, 2012)
France: Philippe Picquier
Germany: Konkursbuch Verlag
Korea: Munhakdonge
Young-ha Kim is one of the most talented and prolific Korean writers of his generation, with five novels and three collections of short stories, including his acclaimed debut, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself.
Nancy Kricorian
"Nancy Kricorian is a gem, her work subtle and nuanced and moving. All the Light There Was brings Nazi-occupied Paris vividly, tragically, and heroically to life."
—Chris Bohjalian, author of The Sandcastle Girls and Midwives
Set amid the Armenian community in newly occupied Paris, All the Light There Was is a lyrical, finely wrought story about family loyalty, secret love, the many faces of oppression—and the many faces of resistance. On the day the Nazis march down the Rue de Belleville, Maral Pegorian is fourteen years old, living with her family, who, along with many other Armenians who survived the genocide in their homeland, have come to Paris to start over. The adults immediately set about gathering food and provisions, bracing for the terror and deprivation they know all too well; but Maral, her brother Missak, and her beloved—devoted, strong-willed Zaven—are spurred to action of another sort, finding secret and not-so-secret ways to resist their oppressors. Only when Zaven flees with his brother Barkev in the middle of the night to avoid conscription does Maral realize that the Occupation is not simply a temporary outrage to be endured. After many fraught months, only one brother returns, and the contours of Maral's world are completely changed. By the novel's end, she is a twenty-one year old widow and mother at the crossroads of love and duty, faced with a decision that will determine the course of the rest of her life.
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March, 2013)
Audio: Audible
Nancy Kricorian is the author of the novels Zabelle and Dreams of Bread and Fire. Kricorian grew up in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, and earned her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. After completing a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at Columbia University, Kricorian taught at Yale, Rutgers, Barnard and Queens Colleges. She subsequently worked for ten years as a literary scout for foreign publishers, and since 2003 has been on the staff of CODEPINK Women for Peace. She lives in New York City.
Ann Leary
"I opened The Good House and was instantly sucked in; I read the whole thing in one sitting and was sorry when it ended. The story is atmospheric, funny, poignant, gritty, and romantic, and Hildy Good is refreshingly candid and lovably flawed."
- Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man
The Good House tells the story of Hildy Good, a lifelong resident of Wendover, Massachusetts, a charming, historic town perched on the rocky coast of Boston’s North Shore. By day, Hildy is a successful real-estate broker, good neighbor, mother, and grandmother. At night, she enjoys drinking alone in her home, because her meddlesome daughters had staged an "intervention for her the year before and she is supposed to be in "recovery." This unique story is told from the point of view of a smart, cynical and often wildly irreverent alcoholic who appears to be in complete denial—about herself, her drinking, even her love for a man she has known all her life: Frank Getchell, the local "fix-it" man. Frank is an eccentric townie who lives like a hermit, but is, in many ways, one of the richest people in town. The Good House includes a scandal, an obsessive love story, some good old-fashioned New England lore (Hildy has a witch ancestress who was hung in nearby Salem and there might be a few ghosts lurking). But most enjoyable is the tender and sometimes tumultuous romance between two people of a certain age: 60-year-old Hildy Good and the unfaltering, and quietly heroic, Frank Getchell.
U.S./Canada: St. Martin’s Press (January, 2013) Germany: Droemer
UK: Atlantic Books Turkey: Marti Yayinlari
Brazil: Companhia Editora Nacional Film: Tribeca Films
Ann Leary has published two previous books, An Innocent, A Broad and Outtakes from a Marriage, as well as short fiction and journalism in Ploughshares among others. She is also the co-host of the weekly NPR radio show Hash Hags. Ms. Leary lives in Roxbury, CT with four dogs, three horses, and her husband, the actor, Denis Leary.
E.J. Levy
*Winner of the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction
"There is nothing theoretical about my love for Love, in Theory, a brilliant debut collection by E. J. Levy. Sad, funny, and always wise, Levy’s stories reveal truths about how we love and lose, trust and betray, with an intelligence that takes my breath away. I’ll be returning to these wonderful stories again and again."
— Cheryl Strayed, best-selling author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
In this funny, brainy, and thoroughly engaging debut collection, an award-winning writer considers contemporary romance through the lens of scholarly theories to illuminate love in the Information Age. In ten captivating and tender stories, E.J. Levy takes readers through the surprisingly erotic terrain of the intellect, offering a smart and modern take on the age-old theme of love—whether between a man and woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or a mother and a child—drawing readers into tales of passion, adultery, and heartbreak. A disheartened English professor’s life changes when she goes rock climbing and falls for an outdoorsman. A gay oncologist attending his sister’s second wedding ponders dark matter in the universe and the ties that bind us. Three psychiatric patients, each convinced that he is Christ, give rise to a love affair in a small Minnesota town. A Brooklyn woman is thrown out of an ashram for choosing earthly love over enlightenment. A lesbian student of film learns theories of dramatic action the hard way—by falling for a married male professor. Incorporating theories from physics to film to philosophy, from Rational Choice to Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, these stories movingly explore the heart and mind—shooting cupid’s arrow towards a target that may never be reached.
U.S./Canada: University of Georgia Press (October, 2012)
E.J. Levy’s essays have appeared in Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Nation, Orion, Salmagundi, Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: 1970 to the Present; her fiction has been published in the Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and North American Review, among other publications. She is currentlye working on a novel.
Alice Loweecey
"Her fresh take on crime fighting is a delight." —Publishers Weekly
The third installment of Alice Loweeceys’ nun-turned-private investigator series, starring the irrepressible Giulia Falcone. As Giulia celebrates her second Christmas since leaving the convent, she’s grateful to be spending it with Frank Driscoll, even if the shift from boss to boyfriend and back again is giving her whiplash. The holiday cheer vanishes when Giulia’s good friends, Anya and Laurel, suffer an unimaginable tragedy: the kidnapping of their adopted baby girl. Two similar kidnappings, both involving same-sex couples, ended badly. The only lead is a secluded, vacation resort for lesbians. Going undercover, Giulia has mere hours to find baby Katie before she becomes a grim statistic. Alice Loweecey is a former nun who went from the convent to playing hookers on stage to accepting her husband's marriage proposal on the second date. She is the author of Force of Habit and Back in the Habit.
World: Midnight Ink, Llewellyn Publishing (February, 2013)
Contact: Oxana Schroeder (oxanas@llewellyn.com)
Alice Loweecey is a former nun who went from the convent to playing hookers on stage to accepting her husband's marriage proposal on the second date. She is the author of Force of Habit and Back in the Habit.
Maaza Mengiste
"All but un-put-downable...Beneath the Lion's Gaze is an extraordinary novel, which tells stories that nobody can want to hear, in such a way that we cannot stop listening."
- Claire Messud, Bookforum
Maaza Mengiste’s haunting debut is the story of a family living through the Communist-backed revolution that threw Ethiopia into one of the most violent and bloody coups in African history. In 1974, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed in a military revolt that would oust a monarchy dating back to the days of King Solomon. No one could have anticipated, however, the violent years that would follow the Emperor’s removal from his throne. Mengiste’s beautiful and powerful novel is about a family who has everything to lose as they discover that their loyalties to each other and to themselves rest on the faintest, thinnest of lines. Hailu, the patriarch of the family and a prominent doctor, tries to stop his youngest son, Dawit, from getting involved in political activities. But when he becomes one of the revolution’s key instruments in keeping a torture victim alive to ensure her return to jail for more questioning, it is he who is thrown into turmoil. Meanwhile, Dawit, headstrong and determined, disobeys his father and joins an underground resistance to combat the Marxist regime. His devotion to his childhood friend, Mickey, is challenged when Mickey rises in the police force ranks as the revolution continues to get bloodier. Hailu’s oldest son, Yonas, finds refuge in prayer, wanting nothing more than to ignore the changes in his country and his family. Alas, prayer will not be enough once Hailu is ordered to report to jail for reasons unknown to the family, and about which Hailu will not speak. This is a novel that questions what it means to live a life that is worth fighting—and dying—for.
U.S./Canada: W.W. Norton (January, 2010) The Netherlands: Ambo/Anthos
Brazil: Record Sweden: Forum
France: Actes Sud UK: Jonathan Cape
Germany: Wunderhorn Audio: Tantor Media
Italy: Neri Pozza
Maaza Mengiste
In 1935, thirty-nine years after Italy’s first attempt to colonize Ethiopia ended in humiliating defeat, Mussolini vows to conquer the country and claim Italy’s "place in the sun". As Italy’s threats turn into an invasion then war, the fearless Ethiopian army, led by the famed warrior Ras Kidane, manages to keep the Italian army at bay for a time, due in no small part to the countless Ethiopian women who joined their men side-by-side on the battle field. Among these female warriors is a peasant girl Hirut, stolen from her family and made Kidane’s slave. Hirut transforms from a slave to a soldier, but at night she remains, still, a girl battling her own private wars with Kidane. But none of them know - or ever imagine—is that in addition to black-shirted soldiers, and hundreds of tanks, Mussolini will use tons of poison gas across the hills of Ethiopia, wiping out villages. The war becomes an easy victory after the use of poison gas. Ettore, the son of a proud Fascist, answered il Duce’s call to create an empire to rival Ceasar’s. In his letters home, he doesn’t mention the ferocious Ethiopian armies, or the talk amongst his camp of who is Italian, who is native; who is Aryan, who is not. He keeps to himself all his questions about what his Catholic baptism means to his Jewish heritage as he begins his life in the new colony. When Mussolini takes a step closer to Hitler and passes laws that ban Jews from jobs, schools and the military a confused, Ettore walks away from it all. But the Ethiopians refuse to concede. Led by Kidane, these guerrilla fighters continue to battle. With them is Minim, Haile Selassie’s unwitting double, who takes his place as the emperor goes into exile in England. This is the Shadow King, a mute peasant who will inspire a struggling nation without a word. Behind the Shadow King, Ethiopia’s men and women fight side by side, reclaiming their land one kilometer at a time. When Mussolini joins the war with Hitler, the Allies pledge aid to Ethiopia and England sends her best, the eccentric, Orde Wingate, to lead an army of Ethiopian and British troops called the Gideon Force. Ethiopia is liberated and the crown is restored to Emperor Haile Selassie as Minim, the Shadow King, watches. Minim has been privy to complaints about Haile Selassie’s rule, his arbitrary system of reward, his absence during the war. Only he understands that the Ethiopia the emperor takes over is not the one that he, the Shadow King, knows to exist.
U.S. rights: W.W. Norton (2014)
Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she was named "New Literary Idol" by New York magazine. She lives in New York.
Holly Menino
"Murder, She Rode is smart, funny and sparklingly alive on every page. I devoured it."
- Spencer Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of A Fistful of Collars
Although Tink Elledge’s days as a rider are behind her, she remains a respected horse trainer and for the first time in her career, she will allow a protégé to ride her prized horse, Exit Laughing, at the
Brandywine Three-Day Event. She’s on her third husband and possibly last horse, and yet Tink, who has found something close to happiness in this marriage, stills needs to prove she has a master’s grasp on the sport. But before the event begins, a truck accident kills a respected horseman and talented colt. And when a young rider disappears, what began as a seemingly freak accident reveals sinister roots - roots that lead directly to Tink and the tightly-knit equestrian community. During the three-day event, horses will follow the order of go and perform with inspiring grace. Their riders will navigate treacherous obstacles. And Tink must unravel a plot that threatens the reputations - and lives - of the very men and women she hopes to defeat on the course.
U.S./Canada: Minotaur (August, 2013)
Translation: InkWell Management
Contact: Alexis Hurley (alexis@inkwellmanagement.com)
Lydia Millet
"Lydia Millet is one of my favorite contemporary American writers."
- Jonathan Lethem
Hal is a mild-mannered if somewhat acerbic middle-aged bureaucrat with a paraplegic daughter, Casey, and a wife, Susan, to whom he’s devoted, but when he comes home early from his work at the IRS one day after a fender bender and feels the first inkling of a suspicion that his wife is sleeping with a younger coworker, Hal’s entrenched routine begins to spin out of control. Both Susan and Casey are preoccupied with the long absence of Susan’s employer, T., who has taken a trip down to the tropics and vanished; on impulse, desperate to get away from his unfaithful wife and a daughter he’s just discovered is making her living through a 1-900 sex line, Hal volunteers to fly to Central America to search for the missing man. What follows are his adventures in the strange land — an encounter with a beautiful yet alienating family of Germans, the surreal descent of a massive military machine, and the surprising discovery of lost things.
U.S./Canada: W.W. Norton (October, 2011) Italy: Indiana Editore
China: People’s Literature
France: Cherche-Midi
Lydia Millet
*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)
Lydia Millet is "one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation" (Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times). This stunning novel introduces 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 (November, 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.
Tom Perrotta
*A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
*A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book for 2011
*A USA Today 10 Books We Loved Reading in 2011 Title
*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
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 (September, 2011) Portugal: Bertrand
Brazil: Intrínseca Spain: Hidra
Canada: Random House Taiwan: Rye Field Publications
France: Fleuve Noir Turkey: Siren
Hungary: Geopen Kiado. UK: Fourth Estate
Italy: Edizioni E/O Film: HBO
Tom Perrotta
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./Canada: St. Martin’s Press (October, 2013)
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. He lives in Massachusetts.
Henriette Lazaridis Power
"The Clover House is a rare treat: a charming, sexy, elegantly written debut about a lost daughter and difficult mother, a family mystery set during wartime, the slipperiness of memory and the challenges of forgiveness."
—Jenna Blum, author of the bestselling Those Who Save Us
A phone call from her estranged mother sends Calliope Notaris Brown from Boston to the Greek city of Patras to sort through an inheritance. She arrives during the abandon of Carnival, when the world is turned upside down and things are not as they seem. Digging through the keepsakes her uncle has left her, Callie stumbles upon clues to the wartime disappearance of the family’s fortune and to the mystery of her mother’s chronic unhappiness. As she pieces together the family secret, Callie’s own life threatens to fall apart: a reckless affair jeopardizes her relationship with her boyfriend and strains her closeness with the cousin whose marriage she envies. The Clover House is told through Callie’s perspective as she is immersed in the disguises and dancing of Carnival, but woven throughout are illuminating flashbacks to her mother Clio's youth in wartime Greece, when the well-to-do family's gracious world comes quite literally under attack.
World English: Ballantine (April, 2013)
Contact: Denise Cronin (dcronin@randomhouse.com)
Greece: Patakis
Henriette Lazaridis Power is a first-generation Greek/American and a Rhodes Scholar. She has published work in The New England Review, Salamander, Camera Obscura, The New York Times online, and The Millions. She is the founding editor of The Drum, a literary magazine publishing short fiction, and essays exclusively in audio form.
James Reich
Varushka Cash was born in the single hospital serving the workers in Chernobyl on the very evening of the famed disaster. It’s now twenty-five years later, and Verushka, still haunted by the events surrounding her birth, is embarking on a mission to destroy the symbols and manifestations of nuclear proliferation—both material and human. Her ultimate goal is the murder of three members of the Winters family, central to the corporation pushing expansion of nuclear power in the United States. As she makes her way toward Winters Corp, her series of increasingly violent acts make her the target of the rendition group The Cross Spikes Club and its leader, Robert Paglia. The final confrontation between Cash and Paglia takes place in Manhattan against the backdrop of panic, evacuation and an actual nuclear accident at the Indian Point nuclear plant at the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. This cerebral, dramatic thriller is a chilling portrait of a modern society in which disaster is ever-present, and violence can seem like the only alternative to destruction.
U.S./Canada: Soft Skull Press (Spring, 2013)
James Reich was born in Stroud, England in 1971, and is a founding member of "literate post-punk" Venus Bogardus. James’ fiction and poetry has appeared in zines and small press publications in the UK and US, and his debut novel, I, Judas, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2011. He lives and teaches in New Mexico.
Lucinda Rosenfeld
"Lucinda Rosenfeld perfectly captures the intricacies of sisterhood in this hilarious and perceptive tale of one family's quest to ‘get along’. . . I absolutely loved this novel!"—Emily Giffin, author of Something Borrowed
In their youth, each of the Hellinger Sisters of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York received their label: "the Perfect One," "the Political One," and, yes, "the Pretty One." Now on the cusp of 40, Imperia ("Perri") is the c.e.o. of a budding home organization empire and mother of three, living in suburbia. Augusta ("Gus"), 36, is a lesbian, a law professor, and a Legal Aid lawyer who defends poor women in the South Bronx. And Olympia ("Pia"), age 38, is the manager of a conceptual art gallery in Chelsea, a frustrated artist herself, and a single mother with a fraught romantic past. But an unexpected series of events, beginning with a freak traffic accident that seriously injures their mother, force the Sisters to reexamine their identities, their upbringing, and their often prickly relationships to one another. The Pretty One is a comic novel that also probes the paradoxical intimacy and distance between sisters—the way they can know so much about each other and, at the same time, understand so little.
World: Little, Brown & Co. (January, 2013)
Contact: Tracy Williams (tracy.williams@hbgusa.com)
Lucinda Rosenfeld is the author of the novels What She Saw..., Why She went Home, and I'm So Happy For You. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Creative Non-Fiction, Slate.com, Glamour, and other magazines. She lives in New York.
Magdy el Shafee
Metro, Egypt’s first graphic novel, was originally published in 2008. It was quickly declared an "offense to public morals" by Egyptian authorities and destroyed by the police. Metro follows one young man in Cairo as he comes face-to-face with the corruption ingrained at every level of Egyptian society. Plagued by debt, Shihab is determined to make a new start with the help of one of his neighbors. However, before he can get Shihab the connections and money he needs, the neighbor is murdered by a group mysteriously referred to as "the Cavalry." Disgusted with the corruption and violence, Shihab decides to take radical action—robbing a bank with his close friend Mustafa. Once at the bank, however, Shihab and Mustafa find themselves beat to the punch by a corrupt politician awaiting a massive, unsecured "loan." Enraged, Shihab threatens the politician, takes the money, and forces him to face the anger of the citizens out on the street. As his journalist friend-turned-lover Dina uncovers the identity of the Cavalry, the city erupts into demonstrations pitting friend-against-friend as hired government forces beat and murder protesters.
World English: Metropolitan Books (May, 2012) German: Edition Moderne
Contact: Devon Mazzone (devon.mazzone@hholt.com) Italy: Editrice Il Sirente
Born in Libya, Magdy El Shafee is a pharmacist and cartoonist. El Shafee is known throughout the Arab world for his innovations in Arabic popular culture. Metro, which was banned in Egypt in 2008 and has thus far been sold in four languages, is El Shafee's first full-length book.
Enid Shomer
"As brilliantly sensual as it is finely psychological, this novel is a tour de force of twenty-first century storytelling."
—Gillian Gill, author of Nightingales
Before she became the nineteenth-century’s heroine, before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert traveled up the Nile at the very same time. In reality, they never met. But in New Yorker contributor and Iowa Fiction Prize-winner Enid Shomer’s The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, they ignite a friendship marked by intelligence, humor, and a ravishing tenderness that alters both their destinies. On the surface, Nightingale and Flaubert would seem to have little in common: She is a highly privileged woman with radical ideas about society and God, naive in the ways of men; he is a notorious womanizer, involved with innumerable prostitutes. But both are at painful crossroads in their lives and burn with unfulfilled ambition, and in Enid Shomer’s deft hands, these two most unlikely soulmates come together to share their darkest torments and fervent hopes. Brimming with adventure and the sparkling sensibilities of the two travelers, this mesmerizing debut novel offers a luminous combination of gorgeous prose and wild imagination, all of it colored by the opulent tapestry of mid-nineteenth century Egypt.
US/Canada: Simon & Schuster (August, 2012)
UK: Simon & Schuster
Serbia: Laguna
Enid Shomer won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for her first collection of stories, Imaginary Men, and the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for her second, Tourist Season. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review.
Amber Sparks
"Sparks’s debut story collection swirls with a Tim Burton-like whimsy... modern fables in which epiphanies replace moral lessons and tales unfold with Grimm-like wickedness." - Publishers Weekly
May We Shed These Human Bodies is a clever, scary, and charming debut collection that peers through vast spaces and skies with the world's most powerful telescope to find humanity: wild and bright and hard as diamonds. Here is humanity building: families reconstruct themselves, mothers fashion babies from two-by-fours and nails, boys make a mother out of leaves and twigs and wishing. Here is humanity tearing down: a wife sets her house on fire in revenge, a young girl plots to kill the ghosts that stalk her, a dying man takes the whole human race with him. Here is humanity transforming: feral children, cannibalistic seniors, animal wives--a whole sideshow's worth of oddballs and freaks.
U.S./Canada: Curbside Splendor (October, 2012)
Amber Sparks's fiction has been featured in various publications, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Gargoyle, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and elimae. She is also a contributor at the lit blogs Big Other and Vouched and lives in Washington, D.C. with a husband and two beasts.
David Stewart
From the author of The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution and A Brilliant Partner: James Madison and the Making of America comes a historical novel based upon the thrilling (and real) deathbed confession of one John Bingham, who prosecuted eight members of John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln. Bingham’s confession sets his physician, Jamie Fraser, on a cross-country journey to prove his theory that Booth planned a coup d’etat to place in the White House one Lafayette Foster of Connecticut and to put General Sherman at the head of the Union armies. But the stakes are high—fatally high—and Fraser’s journey of discovery and justice reveals how far the conspirators will go to protect Bingham’s secret. A story of intrigue, suspense, and murder, David O. Stewart blends historical and fictional characters to deliver an original, lively period novel.
World English: Kensington Books (October, 2013)
Contact: John Scoglamiglio (jscognamiglio@kensingtonbooks.com)
After practicing law for over 25 years, David O. Stewart turned to writing history. His titles include The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, bestselling winner of the 2007 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. David is president of the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Don Waters
"Don Waters shows he’s in the top rank of the new generation of American writers. This beautiful, rambunctious novel takes us on a wild ride across all kinds of borders, yinning and yanging between Mexico and the USA, youth and age, faith and betrayal, legal and outlaw, sober and stoned, and last but by no means least, love and the Void. The writing is gorgeous, the characters ring true on every page, and the story hurtles along with many a hairpin twist and turn. Fasten your seatbelt when you open this book, and hang on."
—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Sid Dulaney, in his mid-thirties, between jobs and short on family and funds, has moved back to Tucson to take care of his beloved grandmother. To hold down the cost of her prescriptions, he reluctantly starts smuggling medications over the border. His picaresque misadventures involve the lovable eccentrics at her retirement village, Mexican gang threats, a voluptuous former babysitter, midnight voicemails from his exasperated ex-girlfriend, and, perplexingly, a giraffe. This first novel by the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award proves Waters is an important new voice in American fiction. A big, rollicking, character-filled novel, Sunland is an entertaining and humane view at life on the margins in America today.
U.S./Canada: University of Nevada Press (September, 2013)
Don Waters won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for his story collection, Desert Gothic. His fiction has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize, Best of the West, and New Stories from the Southwest. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Outside. Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Sunland is his first novel.
J. A. Zobair
"A debut with an original and refreshing premise. A positive portrait of modern Muslim women, prominent in their professions and at large within their communities, written with affection and detail."
—Roopa Farooki, Orange Prize finalist and author of The Flying Man
Muslim bad girl Zainab Mir has just landed a job working for a post-feminist, Republican Senate candidate. Her best friend Amra Abbas is about to make partner at a top Boston law firm. Together they’ve thwarted proposal-slinging aunties, cultural expectations, and the occasional bigot to succeed in their careers. What they didn’t count on? Unlikely men and geopolitical firestorms. When a handsome childhood friend reappears, Amra makes choices that Zainab considers so 1950s—choices that involve the perfect Banarasi silk dress and a four-bedroom house in the suburbs. After hiding her long work hours during their courtship, Amra struggles to balance her demanding job and her unexpectedly traditional new husband.
Zainab has her own problems. She generates controversy in the Muslim community with a strapless magazine spread and friendship with a gay reporter. Her rising profile also inflames neocons like Chase Holland, the talk radio host who attacks her religion publicly but privately falls for her hard.
When the political fallout from a terrorist attempt jeopardizes Zainab’s job, and protests surrounding a woman-led Muslim prayer lead to violence, Amra and Zainab must decide what they’re willing to risk for their principles, their friendship, and love.
World English: Thomas Dunne (Spring, 2013)
Contact: Kerry Nordling (kerry.nordling@stmartins.com)
Jennifer Zobair grew up in Iowa, going on to study at Smith College and Georgetown Law School. She has practiced corporate and immigration law and, as a convert to Islam, has been a strong advocate for Muslim women's rights. She is married to a fellow Georgetown Law graduate who happens to be Pakistani-American. Jennifer lives with her husband and three children outside of Boston. This is her first novel.
Adam Benforado
We are all innocent until proven guilty, and proving that guilt relies, we believe, on the use of objective fact to sway judge and jury. It is this fairness, the ‘blindness’ of justice that establishes the legitimacy of the American legal framework. But how blind and objective is the judgment of these parties? Law professor Adam Benforado applies an exceptional understanding of psychology and cognitive behaviors to reveal that legal cases often turn, not on careful reasoning and nuanced argument, but on unconscious and seemingly insignificant elements in the environment. Beyond the usual and lamentable tropes of lying cops, racist jurors, lazy lawyers, or corrupt judges, Benforado suggests that there is injustice built into our legal structures due to the influence of seemingly trivial factors that we never even thought to consider. Benforado shows that a witness is seen as more trustworthy when the juror is drinking hot coffee instead of ice water, and that a judge is more likely to offer a lower sentence in the morning, just after showering, than in the late, sweaty afternoon. Unfair brings together a sampling of real-life cases and cutting-edge research from psychology, neuroscience, and the emerging field of the mind sciences to provide readers with a heretofore hidden but powerful understanding of why we make the decisions we do and what we can do to make the legal system live up to the ideal of blind justice.
U.S./Canada: Crown (2014)
Adam Benforado’s op-eds, essays, and letters have appeared in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, and Boston Review. He received his J.D. from Harvard Law School, clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., and is currently an assistant professor at the Drexel University Earle Mack School on Law. Unfair is his first book.
Jacques Berlinerblau
"This book brought tears to my secular Jewish eyes, it was so good. Berlinerbau is not just an astonishing secular thinker; he knows how to turn a phrase, and he knows how to keep the pages turning. Now put that down that tefillin and read it!" —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story, among others
How to Be Secular starts from the premise that no single term in the lexicon of politics has endured more abuse of late than "secularism." From Pope Benedict, to Tony Blair, to Newt Gingrich - everyone, it seems, has identified secularism as the greatest credible threat to human souls far and wide. Taking as its starting point the astonishing "return of the sacred" witnessed over the past 50 years, How to be Secular charts the dramatic downfall and fade to near irrelevance of secular movements in an age of organized, focused and forceful "political religions" such as Islamism, American Evangelicalism, traditional Catholicism and ultra-Orthodox Judaism. What can be done to save secularism, the book asks. But even more urgently, what exactly is secularism? Is it simply a theory about the proper relation of religion to government? Or is it a brash statement about the non-existence of God? Arguing that it has traditionally been more of the former than the latter, How to Be Secular undertakes to resurrect secularism by rethinking its most basic precepts. Is Science really the answer? Must secularism always be associated with anti-theism? When and under what circumstances can religious actors play a useful role in public life? Can even non-believers partake of spiritual life? Must atheists and agnostics always isolate themselves from their compatriots? How to Be Secular seeks to reinvigorate a secular movement that has grown old, spiteful and all too irrelevant, politically.
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (September, 2012)
Jacques Berlinerblau holds multiple doctorates, and is Associate Professor and Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His books include Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibility of American Intellectuals, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously, and Thumpin' It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today's Presidential Politics.
Jean-Vincent Blanchard
"In this gripping new biography, Blanchard brings Richelieu to life... and vividly captures the rise to power of a seminal figure who was instrumental in creating France as we know it." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A major new biography of one of history's most powerful and fascinating statesmen. Chief Minister to King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu was the architect of a new France in the 17th century, and the force behind the nation's rise as a European power. One of the first statesmen to understand clearly the necessity of a balance of powers, he was, in the wake of Niccolo Machiavelli, one of the earliest realist politicians. He became, as well, a cultural icon, appearing, for example, as an important character in Alexandre Dumas’ classic The Three Musketeers. Forging a nation-state amidst the swirl of unruly, grasping nobles, widespread corruption, wars of religion, and an ambitious Habsburg empire, Richelieu's hands were full. Serving his fickle monarch, however, and mastering the politics of absolute power provided Richelieu with his greatest challenge and ultimately determined his legacy to France and to all those who practice statecraft today. Jean-Vincent Blanchard's rich and insightful new biography brings Richelieu fully to life—at court, on the battlefield, at times cruel and ruthless, always devoted to creating a lasting central authority vested in the power of monarchy, a power essential to France’s position on the European stage for the next two centuries. Eminence offers a rich portrait of a fascinating man and his era, and gives us a keener understanding of the dark arts of politics.
U.S./Canada: Walker (October, 2011)
France: Belin
Romania: Editura Eikon
Jean-Vincent Blanchard
The French Foreign Legion is one of the most storied military corps ever instituted. A mixture of bravery, romance, and mystery enshrouds its conquests and victories as it secured much of the French Empire’s imperial outposts like Madagascar, Indochina, and North Africa. It is an understatement to say the Legion’s reputation precedes itself. But, Jean-Vincent Blanchard argues in his latest, At the Edge of the World: The French Foreign Legion and the Conquest of Morocco, that the myth of the Legion was firmly cemented during the first decades of the twentieth century while it conquered and guarded the kingdom of Morocco. It was here in the fabled Moroccan city of Fes that General Hubert Lyautey led the Legion in a fight against Berber rebels, until, after securing the city, Lyautey ruled over Morocco like a Roman imperator, and he could only do it with the soldiers of the Foreign Legion. Lyautey’s eccentric if not enigmatic histrionics (he reportedly summoned a feast and poetry recital after two sleepless days while Fes was on the verge of falling into the hands of the Berbers) became the inspiration for the public’s interest in legionnaire stories, spawning multiple films, books, and songs across Europe and America. For Blanchard, Lyautey embodied all the qualities of a true legionnaire, but his story is also that of colonialism and imperial ambition. Blanchard’s goal is to tell the story of what the colonial encounter in Morocco really was—not a grand master plan devised in the ministries in Paris, but as it happened on the terrain, literally at the "edge" of that terrain—showing the conflicted and ambiguous nature of that encounter, and consequently the inherent shortcomings of colonialism itself.
World English: Walker Books (2014)
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.
Thomas Bradbury PhD & Benjamin Karney PhD
Eat less. Move more. The fundamental principles of losing weight have never been clearer yet even now obesity rates are skyrocketing around the world. Somewhere between knowing how to lose weight, really wanting to lose weight, and actually losing weight, people have experienced a disconnect. UCLA professors Thomas Bradbury and Benjamin Karney’s show us precisely where: What’s missing, they explain, is a critical recognition that the way we consume and burn calories is deeply embedded in the relationships we have with other people. And no one affects us more than our intimate partner. Deciding to take action about our weight, then, necessarily means changing the life we share with that person. Because if our partner is not making those decisions with us, the challenges of maintaining healthier behaviors will be even greater. The point is as simple as it is overlooked: for people in close relationships, healthy eating and regular exercise require collaboration and cooperation. Diet and exercise books are written for individuals, as though one’s spouse or partner were not centrally involved. Weight-loss companies and gyms, too, market almost exclusively to individuals. Health and fitness are woven deeply and inextricably into our intimate relationships, but nowhere is this simple, powerful fact reflected in the multi-billion-dollar industry influencing our decisions about our weight. Even when partners are aware that they need to manage their weight as a team, they find themselves unprepared for the challenges involved in communicating effectively about diet and exercise. Bookstore shelves are crammed with volume after volume addressing either the audience seeking answers about their relationships or the audience seeking answers about dieting. The needs of these two audiences overlap substantially, however, and the simple fact is that there is no book currently in print that recognizes this fact and unites their two interests. Written on the strength of 20 years worth of important research, Bradbury and Karney’s Love Me Slender steps into this gap, showing its readers the way to a healthier life alongside their life partner.
U.S./Canada: The Free Press (January, 2014)
Brazil: Record
In addition to managing his program of research at UCLA, Thomas Bradbury is a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel at eHarmony.com and has served as a consultant for Mathematica Policy Research and MDRC on federal Healthy Marriage Initiative projects. Benjamin Karney is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an adjunct behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation.
Rory Carroll
"Rory Carroll's brilliant portrait of Chávez reads like a fast-paced novel of ego run amok, an ego that happens to be attached to a masterful politician, a dynamo of energy and charisma, and a colossus of managerial ineptitude. Comandante is by turns heartbreaking, maddening, absurd, and surreal, a truly epic story of promise squandered and opportunities lost. It's one thing for the general to be lost in his labyrinth, quite another when he drags the entire country with him into the maze." —Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
Veteran journalist and The Guardian’s chief correspondent in the Americas Rory Carroll has covered war zones, survived a kidnapping by the "head cutters" of Iraq, reported on the transition to full democracy in South Africa, but his tragic-comic story of life in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is perhaps the richest chronicle yet of human nature and its relentless capacity to disappoint even the most faithful. Not a simple story of folly in the tropics, Comandante reveals how the charisma of one man and the universal idea of revolution can seduce a nation—and much of the world—while unleashing absurdities worthy of Latin America’s most lyric magical realism. Comandante lifts the story of a particular place and time to a larger stage on which hope collides with ambition and delusion. And with insight, wit, and extraordinary access to the looking glass world of Chavez’s royal court, Rory posits a fundamental question: When does a nation’s descent into black comedy stop being funny?
U.S./Canada: The Penguin Press (January, 2013) Italy: Newton Compton
Brazil: Intrínseca Poland: Znak
China: Electric Power Press Spain: Sexto Piso
Estonia: Kunst World: Canongate
Indonesia: Ufuk Publishing
Contact: Krystelle Bamford (Krystelle.Bamford@canongate.co.uk)
Born in Dublin, Rory Carroll joined The Guardian in 1997, where he has served as a foreign correspondent in South Africa, Iraq, and Venezuela.
Meryl Comer
An Emmy-award winning journalist and producer, Meryl presents a highly personal and political manifesto that takes its lead from the great activists of past decades in both HIV/AIDS and cancer, for whom the personal is political on the battlefield of healthcare. For Alzheimer’s is an epidemic: Every 69 seconds someone in the world is diagnosed with this progressive, fatal disease. Part memoir, part call-to-arms, Slow Dancing with A Stranger is sure to change the conversation around one of the most serious health issues facing the world today. Profiled on the PBS NewsHour, ABC’s Nightline, in GQ’s "Rock Stars of Science" and in HBO’s Alzheimer’s Project, Meryl is a powerhouse who will reveal the challenges of care-giving, how to prepare for the future if you receive a diagnosis, and the latest science behind Alzheimer’s research and the race for more effective therapies.
U.S./Canada: HarperOne (September, 2013)
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.
Alon Confino
A World Without Jews offers an entirely original if not harrowing idea of what animated Nazi Germany to perpetrate its genocide. Guggenheim Fellow Alon Confino reveals that in order to establish the Third Reich, Hitler had to create a new European order. In order to do so, Jewish civilization had to be shattered--right down to shared Biblical Judeo-Christian origins. This destruction is, according to Confino, the Nazi Genesis: the foundational act of the new Nazi civilization. In eradicating the classic Judeo-Christian order, the Nazis hoped to seize control of that one resource that no money, power or imperial expansion can secure: the legitimacy and authority that comes with historical pedigree, its roots and origins. Accordingly, and horrifyingly, Confino tells us how Germans imagined Nazism as the progressive liberation of European and Christian history from Jewish roots, by showcasing the diaries, letters, and photographs of Jews and Germans alike who witnessed the Nazi genesis as perpetrators or victims in the streets of Germany, in the occupied territories, and in the killing fields.
World English: Yale University Press (2014)
Contact: Anne Bihan (anne.bihan@yaleup.co.uk)
Alon Confino grew up in Jerusalem and was educated at Tel Aviv University and UC Berkeley. A World Without Jews was awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship; he is currently at work on a project about the 1948 war in Palestine and Israel. Confino has lived since 1993 in Charlottesville, Virginia with long stints in Rome, Tel Aviv, London, and Florence.
Rebecca Dana
"Rebecca Dana's story is a lot like New York City -- bustling and busy, packed with Jews and jobs, faith and friendship, accident and ambition. With Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde, Dana joins the ranks of women who have come to New York, forged identities on their own and alongside improbable allies and lived to tell the tale with wit and grace."
- Rebecca Traister, author of Big Girls Don't Cry
The ultimate fish-out-of-water tale . A child who never quite fit in, Rebecca Dana worshipped at the altar of Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, dreaming of one day ditching Pittsburgh and moving to New York, her Jerusalem. After graduating from college, she made her way to the city to begin her destiny. For a time, life turned out exactly as she’d planned: glamorous parties; beautiful people; the perfect job, apartment, and man. But when it all came crashing down, she found herself catapulted into another world. She moves into Brooklyn’s enormous Lubavitch community, and lives with Cosmo, a thirty-year-old Russian rabbi who practices jujitsu on the side. While Cosmo, disenchanted with Orthodoxy, flirts with leaving the community, Rebecca faces the fact that her religion—the books, magazines, TV shows, and movies that made New York seem like salvation—has also failed her. As she shuttles between the world of religious extremism and the world of secular excess, Rebecca goes on a search for meaning. Trenchantly observant, entertaining as hell, a mix of Shalom Auslander and The Odd Couple, Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde is a thought-provoking coming-of-age story for the twenty-first century.
World rights: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (Winter, 2013)
Contact: Thomas Dussel (Thomas.Dussel@us.penguingroup.com)
Rebecca Dana is a former senior correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Before joining The Daily Beast, she was a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal and The New York Observer. She lives in Manhattan with her husband.
Shulem Deen
When 23-yeard old Shulem Deen first began posting entries for Hasidic Rebel from the kitchen of his family’s apartment in 2003, the young father of five (whose work has since gone on to appear in the New York Daily News, The Jewish Daily Forward, Brooklyn Rail,Nerve.com, Tablet, and TribeVibe, among other publications) hoped only for the occasional reader. Little did he know that overnight, his modest output would draw thousands of curious readers. Never before had they encountered such an authentic voice from within the Hasidic world, allowing a glimpse of a way of life that seemed by turns bizarre and unsettling, mysterious and captivating. But despite his growing readership, Deen realized he had a larger story to tell that resists the confines of mere blog-posting, a story as fascinating as it is often painful, and always illuminating... Shaygetz is the first comprehensive, first-person account of what it really means to live and breathe the pious life of Hasidism, only to reject its principles, undergoing the brutally painful process of extrication from a world so self-contained that many of its adult members cannot properly communicate with the outside world, due to linguistic and cultural barriers. Drawing on twenty formative years of his life within the community, Shaygetz presents a highly accessible yet entirely authentic look at the Hasidic way of life, taking the reader into the inner life of a young man through his years of schooling, his maturing attachment to his community, the arranged marriage he enters into after a brief 10-minute meeting with his prospective bride, the birth of his children and the establishment of his home within the community, all the way through to his re-evaluation and ultimate rejection of the principles underlying this exacting way of life, and the often brutally painful emotional fallout this engendered.
World rights: Graywolf (Spring, 2013)
Contact: Kate Dublinski (dublinski@graywolfpress.org)
Shulem Deen is the founding editor of Unpious.com, a journal for voices on the Hasidic fringe. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
William Dobson
"Intelligent and absorbing... The Dictator’s Learning Curve is agile and light on its feet, but among its salient points is that pro-democracy movements need to be more than that. Happy thoughts and hippie clothes are not enough... .Mr. Dobson’s book, with luck, will find its way into the hands of people who aspire to be free. They’ll find optimism here, but hard realities as well." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Dictators are making a comeback. And they are far more sophisticated, savvy, and nimble today than the West has given them credit for being. For a handful of authoritarian regimes, the challenge posed by democracy’s advance led to experimentation, creativity, and cunning. These autocrats have successfully honed new techniques, methods, and formulas for preserving power, refashioning dictatorship for the modern age. But if dictators have become more nimble, so have those who threaten their rule. Across the globe, there is a struggle being fought to determine the balance of power between dictatorships and democracies. It is no longer a static, two-sided conflict between the world’s most powerful democracy and dictatorship, circa the Cold War. Instead, the contest has fractured in a thousand directions, with new rapidly modernizing regimes squaring off against a rag-tag army of dissidents, philanthropists, students, ideologues, bloggers, lawyers, environmentalists, and millionaires. The Dictator’s Learning Curve will tell the story of the hidden, unconventional war between 21st century authoritarians and the brave people who are targeting their tyranny. Traveling across China, Russia, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, and many places in between, it introduces readers to the dictators and how these modern day despots are constantly honing new strategies to oppress their people and preserve their power. And it brings to life the stories of the men and women in the trenches, who dedicate themselves to combating tyrants around the globe. The Dictator’s Learning Curve will be the first book to reveal the dramatic, behind-the-headlines struggle between these warring camps, as the future of democracy and dictatorship hangs in the balance.
World: Doubleday (June, 2012) UK: Harvill Secker
Brazil: Edipro Japan: Business-Sha
Germany: Blessing Verlag Romania: Litera
Complex Chinese: Rive Gauche
Contact: Carol Janeway (cjaneway@randomhouse.com)
William J. Dobson is the Politics & Foreign Affairs editor for Slate. Previously, he served as the Managing Editor of Foreign Policy magazine. Mr. Dobson holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and a Masters degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University.
Melissa Fiorenza and Laura Serino
Did you know that spritzing vodka on your clothes can kill musty odors? That airline tickets are the cheapest on Tuesdays? And that exboyfriendjewelry.com is a reputable place to peddle old baubles from your ex? These are just a few of the 1,000 bite-sized pieces of wisdom that fill the pages of the fun, friendly, and practical Twentysomething Girl. As anyone who has survived their twenties knows, it can be both an exciting and chaotic time as one makes the transition from college co-ed to young professional. This go-to guide covers categories including everything from finance and fashion to careers and entertaining, with quick tips that will aid any twentysomething girl in mastering the balance between work and play. The authors, veteran magazine editors and current freelance writers, have tapped every applicable outlet—professionals, print publications, web resources, celebrities, and real twentysomethings—to fashion the most indispensable book for the twentysomething girl. Whether it’s nabbing that dream job, finding time for Mr. Right, or managing your wardrobe budget, this guide reveals the secrets to keeping your sanity while having it all!
World Rights: Arcade Publishing (March 2013)
Melissa Fiorenza’s work has been seen in publications such as Cosmo, Health, Green Business Quarterly, and Time Out New YorkShe is currently an associate creative director for a social media and marketing company.
Laura Serino has held editorial positions at Parents Magazine, Quick & Simple, and Family Circle. Currently, Serino works as a copywriter at L. L. Bean and founded the style blog Fore Front Fashion.
Chris Hayes
*New York Times Bestseller
"This is the Next Big Thing that we have been waiting for. ... Hayes is a brilliant pundit and interlocutor, but he’s an even better reporter. This is the fully reported, detailed, true story of a 21st century America beyond the reach of authority. It’s new, and true, and beautifully told -- Hayes is the young left’s most erudite and urgent interpreter. We should all be reading him now, because when we read him later, we’ll want to admit that he warned us. Brilliant book." --Rachel Maddow
In Twilight of the Elites, Nation magazine’s editor-at-large and MSNBC host Chris Hayes analyzes two trends of the last ten years—growing inequality and the series of public and private fiscal failures that span Enron to the meltdown on Wall Street—and argues that they share an unlikely genesis—the decline of that most American ideal, meritocracy. In just ten years, the basic social consensus on accountability and equity has been thoroughly destroyed, leaving the balkanized, toxic postmodern political conversation we now have. In the absence of the trust in our institutions that once grounded our public debates, the system has failed. It is this fundamental but poorly understood failure that has, Hayes argues, become the driving force of American life. In a braided narrative that looks into the past and future, Hayes traces the strange and destructive path on which America finds itself. He argues, in the first serious work of political autopsy of the Obama years, that the key to moving forward is for elites and citizens alike to define a new system of accountability for our national cultural, political, and religious institutions.
U.S./Canada: Crown (June, 2012)
China: Shanghai Translation
Audio: Random House Audio
The host of MSNBC’s Up w/ Chris Hayes, Christopher Hayes is Editor at Large of The Nation. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, and The Guardian.
Andrew Kaufman
Considered by many critics the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is also one of the most feared. And at 1500 pages, 365 chapters, or 566,000 words, it’s no wonder why. Still, new editions keep appearing. For three years the novel has been one of the top 50 bestsellers in Amazon’s world literature category, and its third bestselling book about war. In July 2009 Newsweek put War and Peace at the top of its list of 100 great novels, just ahead of Orwell’s 1984, which came in second, and Joyce’s Ulysses, third. A 2007 edition of the AARP Bulletin, read by millions, included the novel in their list of the top four books everybody should read by the age of fifty. And a New York Times survey from 2009 identified War and Peace as the world classic you’re most likely to find people reading on their subway commute to work. What might all those Newsweek devotees, senior citizens, and harried commuters see in a book about the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800’s? A mirror of our times. War and Peace is many things. It's a love story, a family saga, a war novel. But at its core it is a book about people trying to find their footing in a ruptured world. It is a novel about human beings attempting to create a meaningful life for themselves in a country torn apart by war, social change, and spiritual confusion. The world, Tolstoy tells us, is a mysterious place where things aren’t always what they seem, today’s tragedy often paving the way to tomorrow’s triumph. In Give War and Peace A Chance, University of Virginia assistant professor Andrew Kaufman’s combines biography, history, literary appreciation, and human interest with self-help to help reframe readers’ very understanding of what it means to be alive in troubled times and to survive them. Throughout, the book employs the same light sort of tone and user-friendly topical structure as Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life to appeal to general readers while also satisfying a more scholarly audience. The ideal companion to War and Peace, this book will also be enjoyable to those who have never read a word of Tolstoy, and will certainly make that masterpiece more approachable, relevant, and fun.
U.S./Canada: Free Press (April, 2013)
Russian literature and culture scholar and author Dr. Andrew D. Kaufman has spent the last 15 years bringing alive the Russian classics to Americans young and old. Known as a passionate, down-to-earth and inspirational speaker and workshop facilitator, he was a featured Tolstoy expert for Oprah's Book Club in 2004 and co-wrote the Reader’s Guide to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich for the National Endowment for the Arts’ "Big Read" program. An innovative, award-winning teacher of Russian language, literature, and culture, Dr. Kaufman holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University and currently lectures at the University of Virginia.
Charles King
The cultural history of the interim years between the World Wars of the twentieth century has long been dominated by the mystique of Paris as it teemed with artists, expats, and other dilettantes. But Paris was not the only city to thrive in the wake of war. In Midnight at the Pera Palace: Istanbul and the Age of Exile, Georgetown professor Charles King (Odessa: Genius and Death in the City of Dreams) resurrects the forgotten city of Istanbul to claim its rightful place alongside the great cultural capitals of the world. In the wake of the First World War, Istanbul welcomed waves of European exiles as it modernized as the Turkish Republic and brushed off the dust of its predecessor, the universal empire of the House of Osman. In the new fervor Istanbul became a city of outcasts and displacement, as it was literally the end of the line for most Europeans who arrived via the Orient Express. At the center of it all was Pera Palace, a grand hotel that housed famous guests like Agatha Christie and Greta Garbo, and served as a meeting place for the various intellectuals and political activists that sought refuge in the city. All the while, a different vision of Turkey is unveiled: a country not just of minarets and dervishes, but a nation of crowded boulevards and jazz bands, of "Miss Istanbul" contests and communist agitators—the old capital of a new republic built on an old empire, and a place that, then as today, was struggling to shape its own brand of modernity.
World rights: W. W. Norton (2014)
Contact: Elisabeth Kerr (ekerr@wwnorton.com)
Charles King is Professor of International Affairs and Government and Ion Ratiu Professor of Romanian Studies at Georgetown University. A native of the Ozark hill country, King studied history and politics at the University of Arkansas and Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. In addition to several books, he is the author of numerous articles and essays in Foreign Affairs, The Times Literary Supplement, and leading academic journals. He lectures widely on eastern Europe, social violence, and ethnic politics, and has worked with broadcast media including CNN, National Public Radio, the BBC, the History Channel, and MTV.
Blair Koenig
From posting photos of baby’s first poo, to mommies declaring their child the most beautiful kid in the world (while giving a sly dig to the "ugly" baby recently seen at the grocery store), and even criticizing the parenting skills of fellow Facebook "friends," STFU, Parents collects the most bizarre, hilarious, and horrifying examples of oversharing on the web. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll cringe at detailed descriptions of baby’s first blowout, but one thing’s for sure: you’ll never look at parenting the same again. Blair Koenig is a Brooklyn-based writer and humorist. In 2009, she created the blog STFU, Parents which is now an entertainment destination for thousands of daily readers. Her blog has been featured in The Huffington Post, MSNBC, The Guardian, Salon, Slate, Glamour, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Atlantic Wire, BUST Magazine and many more outlets. The blog has been called "a breath of sanity in a sea of braggadocio and TMI," and Blair is regularly told that she's performing an important public service.
World: Perigee (April 2013)
Blair Koenig is a Brooklyn-based writer and humorist. In 2009, she created the blog STFU, Parents which is now an entertainment destination for thousands of daily readers. Her blog has been featured in The Huffington Post, MSNBC, The Guardian, Salon, Slate, Glamour, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Atlantic Wire, BUST Magazine and many more outlets. The blog has been called "a breath of sanity in a sea of braggadocio and TMI," and Blair is regularly told that she's performing an important public service.
Andrew Lawler
Why Did the Chicken Cross the World: How Humans and a Bird Forged History’s Most Successful Partnership expands the author's front-page feature for Smithsonian magazine (June 2012), and reveals that throughout history, no other animal partnered with humans better than the chicken. Not the dog, not the pig, not the horse. Where humans thrived, so did the chicken; where the chicken thrived, so did humans. No other animal can claim such a contribution. Nor can any animal claim such a varied influence on human history. Ancient Polynesian explorers used roosters to communicate boat-to-boat as they settled the Pacific. Cockfighting remains the oldest and most controversial spectator sport. From Mesopotamia to Ancient Rome, Greece, and Victorian England, chickens radically reshaped the ways humans eat, play, and pray. By the 1900s, American housewives earned financial freedom by raising hens, and today, countless vaccines are grown inside chicken eggs, its meat powers economic booms from China the Central America, and scientists continue to discover the bird's secrets (it's a direct descendant of Tyrannosaurus Rex). Why Did the Chicken Cross the World tells this fascinating history while exploring this overlooked bird's importance in our contemporary lives.
U.S./Canada: The Free Press (Fall, 2014)
Andrew Lawler is an award-winning freelance writer who has covered Washington politics, Middle East archaeology, and the American space program for Smithsonian, National Geographic, Discover, Columbia Journalism Review and a host of other magazines. He reported from Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban and Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, traveled extensively on assignment in Iran and Central Asia, and followed the impact of the Arab Spring on Egypt. His stories have appeared in Best of American Science and Nature Writing.
Jonathan Lyons
With the "first Drudgery" of creating the new American settlements now well and truly past, Benjamin Franklin announced in 1743, it was high time that "Virtuosi or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies" begin meaningful collaboration to improve the lot of humankind. Here, in the new world, Franklin and his future collaborators in what was later to emerge as The American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia, for Promoting Useful Knowledge, were giving voice to one of the most cherished notions of the Enlightenment. At its core, this idea is a disarmingly simple one - that the value of learning and knowledge is directly proportional to its practical import or utility. Yet, this same idea has left a profound mark on American society and culture and on the very idea of America itself - and through it, on the world as a whole. Its echoes can be detected in the Declaration of Independence and other acts of the Founding Fathers; in the humming and hissing of the early steam engines that once captivated the agrarian idealist Thomas Jefferson; in the emergence of grassroots democratic institutions and the Great Awakening, with its emphasis on experiential religion; and in the rise of the nation’s industrial and technological might throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book, with Benjamin Franklin at its heart, traces the birth of practical societies in the new world and, how, along the way, this quest for useful knowledge has shaped America’s social, economic, cultural, and political institutions.
World: Bloomsbury (2014)
Author and journalist Jonathan Lyons has spent his professional and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West. After more than twenty years as an editor and foreign correspondent for Reuters, much of it in the Islamic world, he is now affiliated with the Global Terrorism Research Centre and is completing his doctorate in sociology of religion, both at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He lives in Washington, DC.
Susan Mattern
The written output of the physician known simply as Galen comprises an astonishing one-eighth of all surviving classical Greek literature; and from the later Roman Empire through the Renaissance, medical education would be based primarily on his works. Yet for many, Galen has been reduced to a handsome classical bust atop the typical doctor’s office bookcase—an arcane, disembodied corpus of ideas long since rendered obsolete by the advent of germ theory and modern physiology. In the process, we've lost sight of the extent to which his intellectual legacy, the very foundation of western medicine, was grounded in his practice—in what he observed, experienced, dared, performed and accomplished. In Physician of Rome, Susan Mattern, professor at the University of Georgia, seeks to address this rather big gap in our memory and understanding. Intended to reach not only core markets including students of classical literature or the history of medicine, but general readers of popular history as well, the book carefully positions Galen in his time and environment, bringing the classical world to gritty, pungent life. The character of Rome, in particular, plays a role in this biography second only to that of the physician himself. Brawls, wrestling injuries, impromptu debates, bloody dissections or vivisections of animals, random encounters with rivals or patients: In Galen we have an eyewitness to all of these features of Ancient Roman life, for he was a highly visible public figure, quite typical of Rome's intense, competitive environment, with most of his rivalries played out in the open air, in the streets, and in the city's crowded fora and baths. Here, truly, is the very first trade biography of the father of medicine.
U.S/Canada: Oxford University Press (2014)
UK: Oxford University Press (Spring, 2014)
Susan Mattern received her PhD in Ancient History from Yale University in 1995. She is currently Professor of History at the University of Georgia. Her first book, Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate, was published by the University of California Press in 1999 and was a selection of the History Book Club. Raised in California, she is an avid rock climber, salsa dancer and yoga instructor, and now lives in Athens, Georgia with her two children.
Allison Moore and Nancy Woodruff
Maui Police Department rookie Allison Moore quickly made a name for herself around the precinct after a succession of impressive victories for the MPD’s narcotics division. A self-professed adrenaline junkie, Alli relished taking down the sleazy underbelly infesting the paradise surrounding her, but after an unhealthy affair with her married beat partner, Ikaika, which resulted in a devastating abortion, Alli’s thrill-seeking nature got the better of her. Subsumed by feelings of guilt, shame, and vulnerability, Allie’s desperation for solace led her to try a tiny amount of crystal meth ("ice") confiscated from a local teenager. Instantly, she is hooked. What proceeds is a tragic spiral of lies and deceit that entwines Moore, her family, and her friends. Fearful her addiction will soon be discovered, she feigns illness and retreats to a suburban Seattle netherworld hell—resorting to prostitution, theft, and ultimately is forced into an abusive drug ring. As Alli sinks deeper and deeper into despair, her hope of returning to her normal life is all but lost, until the very same people whom she deceived rally to her save her from self-destruction. Moore’s story of addiction, betrayal, and redemption is a work of unflinching nonfiction told with a novelist’s beautiful language, and honest, harrowing detail.
U.S./Canada: Touchstone (Spring, 2014)
Allison Moore was once labelled a "habitual offender" by the State of Pennsylvania for receiving seven convictions for theft, fraud and forgery. Having reformed her life, she now works as an author and motivational speaker for women in prison. Now further motivated by a son in prison on drug charges, Allison has become a powerful voice for change.
Born and raised in Chicago, Nancy Woodruff received her MFA from Columbia University, where she won the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award. She taught writing at Columbia University and SUNY/Purchase before moving to London in 1997, where she taught for eight years at Richmond, the American International University. She currently teaches at NYU and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, sons, and daughter.
Simon Morrison
*Winner, Guggenheim Fellowship, 2011-2012
On the night of February 20, 1948, Lina Prokofiev received an unexpected telephone call at her Moscow apartment. She was lured outside, muscled into a waiting car by Soviet police, and taken into custody. After a brutal interrogation and show trial, she was sentenced to twenty years in the Gulag, of which she served eight. Lina assumed that her estranged husband, the eminent composer Sergey Prokofiev, had also been arrested. He had not. Lina, an American, had grown up in New York City, which is where she first met Prokofiev, a dazzlingly impudent musician of prodigious talent. Together they lived an eclectic international life out of a riot of suitcases, breezing through the Jazz Age in Europe and America before relocating to Moscow in 1936. Lina witnessed the breathtaking transformation of Russia into the Soviet Union; the arrests, exiles, and murders of Stalin’s Great Terror; the siege of Moscow in World War II; and diplomatic maneuvers by the USSR and the West during the Cold War. She defected in 1974 and lived to see the crumbling of Communism and fall of the Berlin Wall. Her biography reads like a novel, yet no novelist could plausibly invent such a tale, and this book deals only facts—not only about her, but also about her century and its turning of utopian dreams into totalitarian nightmares. Lina’s life speaks to tragedy on a personal level as well as a global scale. That it does so without hyperbole or ideological axe-grinding is testament to its grounding in reality. This biography is based on Lina’s intimate journals, voluminous letters to Prokofiev and their two sons, her arrest file, official interrogation reports, and other bombshell documents in the possession of the family or sealed in the Moscow archives, but to which Morrison has been granted exclusive, unfettered access.
World English: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (January, 2013)
UK: Harvill Secker
Russia: Centrepolygraph
Simon Morrison is Professor of Music History at Princeton, specializing in Russian music. He is the author most recently of The People's Artist (Oxford, 2009).
Janice P. Nimura
In December of 1871, soon after the collapse of the samurai state and the opening of Japan to the west, five small girls were sent abroad to learn how to become cosmopolitan western women. As young as six, these girls would spend ten years studying in America in the homes of progressive intellectuals. Three would stay the full term, and of those two would attend Vassar, one becoming valedictorian. In 1882, now young women, these wholly Americanized girls returned to Tokyo, fired with enthusiasm to revolutionize the education of women inJapan. But while the 1870s had been a decade of breathtaking social and political change inJapan, the Land of the Rising Sun wasn’t ready for three young bluestockings, elegantly attired in western clothing, in the habit of sitting on chairs and eating with forks, speaking their mother tongue with halting difficulty, and reading it not at all. They were told to get married. One did, and for love, settling into relative obscurity. Another married the minister of war, a widower eighteen years her senior, and used her elite social status to promote change from within. And one remained stubbornly single, founding one of the most prestigious women’s colleges in Japan. The three little girls who grew up in America became women with the odd ability to see their native Japan through foreign eyes, at once insiders and perpetual outsiders. Though they were "home," they felt homesick for the rest of their lives. Their stories are largely forgotten, but the challenges they faced are startlingly modern: cultural alienation, the choice between work and family, the tension between tradition and innovation, and the struggle to overturn fixed ideas about what a woman should be.
U.S./Canada: W. W. Norton (2014)
Robin Rinaldi
The project was simple: An attractive, successful, strong-minded magazine journalist, Robin would move into her new San Francisco apartment, join a dating site, and get laid. Never mind that she already owned a beautiful flat just a few blocks away, never mind that she was forty-two, and never mind, most of all, that she was already married to the man of her dreams. What followed -- a year of wild sex, brutal heartbreak, and unexpected revelation -- is the topic of Robin Rinaldi's incredibly brave memoir, The Wild Oats Project. An open marriage had never been Robin's dream -- her dream was to be a mother. So when her husband of 16 years insisted on a vasectomy, Robin decided that she, too, could only be married on her own terms. If I can't be a mother, she told herself, then I'll be a slut. She struck a deal: During the week, she would live independently, seduce new men (and women), attend erotic workshops, and have the kind of wall-banging sex her husband could never provide. On the weekends, she would go home and be his wife. At 42, Robin gave herself permission to learn not only what she wanted, but what she wanted to give.
World: Sarah Crichton Books/FSG (2014)
Contact: Devon.Mazzone@fsgbooks.com and Amber.Hoover@fsgbooks.com
Canada: Doubleday
France: Le Cherche Midi
Germany: Bertelsmann
The Netherlands: De Bezige Bij
UK: Hodder
Robin Rinaldi has worked in newspapers and magazines for the past fifteen years. She has been an executive editor at 7x7, a glossy lifestyle magazine covering San Francisco, wrote an award-winning food column for Philadelphia Weekly, and 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.
Elizabeth Scarboro
"Elizabeth Scarboro shows us what those fortunate enough to find the deepest love will do for each other. Her memoir is a moving story that will shine its warm light for anyone navigating the rough country of illness with a partner."
—Julie Metz, New York Times bestselling author of Perfection
As a teenager, Elizabeth Scarboro imagined an adventurous future for herself in which she lived all over the world, and settling down was out of the question. But then she fell in love with Stephen: brilliant, infuriating, living with cystic fibrosis. With Stephen’s life expectancy hovering around thirty, Scarboro embraced another sort of adventure - simultaneously joyous and heartrending - choosing to stay with Stephen and live an entire marriage in the ten years they had. A memoir in the tradition of Gail Caldwell’s Let's Take the Long Way Home and Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name, Scarboro’s story, told in intimate prose, reveals the ephemerality of her tender marriage. My Foreign Cities is a modern Love Story, a portrait of a young couple approaching mortality with reckless abandon, gleefully outrunning it for as long as they can.
U.S./Canada: W.W. Norton/Liveright (March, 2013)
Elizabeth Scarboro is the author of two children’s novels and winner of the Olga and Paul Menn Foundation Prize for fiction. She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two children.
Anne-Marie Slaughter
In her viral cover story for the July/August 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—nay, impossible— it is to be a woman balancing a high-powered career with raising a family in contemporary American society. Though she was helped along at every step by a supportive, involved husband, she found during her tenure as the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under Hillary Clinton that both American culture and the structure of the American working world place entirely different expectations on working women and working men that make a desirable work-life balance unfeasible. Reader response to her revelations was tremendous and immediate: working women from Soledad O’Brien to Diane Rehm have expressed solidarity, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people who have shared it on Facebook and shared their stories in comments at The Atlantic and other places where Anne-Marie sparked articles and responses, like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Why Women Still Can’t Have It All is an expansion and a continuation of the cover story, blending narrative—the stories of women at the top of their professions, many of whom have not spoken publically on this issue before—with reporting and research on both the data and the myths about work/life "balance." Anne-Marie 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—on our own—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 considering the ways women balance work and family in nations all over the world, Anne-Marie’s arguments are sharp, smart, and desperately necessary for women around the globe. Anne-Marie is the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She served as the Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State from 2009-2011, was the Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002-2009, and has written or edited six books and over a hundred articles in both mainstream and new media.
US: Random House (2014) German: Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Canada: Random House Canada Italy: Sperling & Kupfer
UK: OneWorld Portugal: Temas & Debates
Australia: Penguin Australia Audio: Random House Audio
Anne-Marie is the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She served as the Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State from 2009-2011, was the Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002-2009.
Jacob Soll
*Receipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant
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 today about debt levels or the reliability of private auditors and public regulators meant to clarify the world of finance. Few seem curious about the origins of our crisis beyond the obvious example of the events leading up to the Great Depression. Yet history surely provides other useful lessons for understanding and coping with our current crisis. Newly minted 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 crucially revelatory details and interpretations he provides will be new even to seasoned readers of financial history.
World rights: Basic Books (2013) Portugal: Lua de Papel
Brazil: Record Japan: Bungei Shunju
UK: Penguin Press
Contact: Isabelle Bleecker (isabelle.bleecker@perseusbooks.com)
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.
Debora Spar
For women of Debora Spar’s generation, those born in or after the 1960s, feminism was no longer supposed to matter: women were becoming represented in boardrooms and corner offices, and so surely true equality was just around the corner. According to Spar, however, the inequalities facing women are still there; they’re just more subtle than they were in the past. In this part-memoir, part-cultural survey, Spar argues that the challenge for today's women lies in simultaneously redefining both work patterns and women's expectations if they are ever to achieve both equality and equanimity. She tracks the key stages of a woman's life—from childhood to adolescence, bodies, dating and sex, marriage, contraception, motherhood, careers, and aging—blending memoir with feminist theory and contemporary story-telling to take a new look at feminism through the perspective of a woman who had previously spurned all thoughts of it. Most provocatively, it pushes for a feminism based on the explicit presumption that women are biologically different than men and that biology, if not quite destiny, is nevertheless one of those details in life that cannot—and should not—be overlooked.
U.S./Canada: Sarah Crichton Books/FSG (2013)
Debora Spar is the president of Barnard College. A political scientist by training, her research focuses on issues of international political economy, examining how rules are established in new or emerging markets and how firms and governments together shape the evolving global economy. Spar is the author of numerous books, including most recently Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Invention, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet and The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception. Spar's articles have appeared in such diverse publications as The New England Journal of Medicine, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Times.
Alison Stanger
There is something definitively American about whistle blowing; from the American Revolution onward, it has been central to the philosophy of justice and equality borne into our collective identity. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Leaks: The Untold Story of Whistle Blowing in America is author and scholar Alison Stanger’s (One Nation Under Contract) chronicle of the history of the brave individuals who fought for accountability and to reveal the secrets powerful interests wanted to remain concealed. Although the history of whistle blowing is uniquely connected with America, Stanger argues that whistleblowers are often overlooked and forgotten as their progressive ideas are legislated into normalcy. Moreover, Stanger, in narrating the various pivot points of tense but necessary truth-telling in our history, asks why whistleblowers pay so dearly after they jump ship and expose corruption or abuse; if they’re essential to the success of our transparent and democratic system, why do we treat them so poorly? And why are so many whistleblowers, certainly in the contemporary age, women? Ultimately, in revealing the stories of whistleblowers—some we know, some we’ve never heard of—the reasons behind their choices, the methods they used to pursue positive change and the personal sacrifices their acts entailed, Stanger asserts that if these men and women, from the Founding to today, can be better understood and appreciated (even protected), this call to action is America’s comparative advantage in a dangerous world. If whistleblowers and the truth they reveal are the life-blood of our democracy, and the Internet its bellows, then the odds are stacked in America’s favor, provided we resist the temptation of excessive secrecy.
World English: Yale University Press (2013)
Contact: Anne Bihan (anne.bihan@yaleup.co.uk)
Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics and Chair of the Political Science Department at Middlebury College. The author of several books, Stanger has published op-eds in the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, and Washington Post, and in 2010 testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, and the Congressional Oversight Panel. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Stanger holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and an AM in Regional Studies-Soviet Union from Harvard University, a graduate diploma in Economics from the London School of Economics, and a BS in Actuarial Science/Mathematics from Ball State University.
Michael Thomas
*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 (October, 2013)
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.
Natasha Trethewey
For nearly a decade now, Pulitzer Prize-winner and U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey has circled a subject she's always known she must one day tackle, and almost certainly in a way that takes her beyond the particular challenges and rewards of poetry that are by now so familiar to her: The murder of her mother by her stepfather Joel has been the seminal event in Natasha's life, a grief in the wake of horror that she will never put to rest. And yet if, at this midpoint of her life -- just six years older than the forty her mother reached before she was shot dead, on the eve of her forty-first birthday -- if she is to find a way to understand what happened, let alone forgive the man responsible, she must once and for all confront this rather brutal story head on.The memoir Natasha is currently at work on tells three stories: First, that of her mother, who left a marriage to a white man (Natasha's father) illegal in the State of Mississippi at the time in order to get her MS in Social Work in Atlanta, ultimately rising to become the number two in Georgia's Department of Health and Human Services; second, that of the returned Vietnam veteran her mother met while working at a bar in Underground Atlanta as a single mother to put herself through school -- a troubled man who would go on to abuse her emotionally and physically, in the end shooting her dead after she appeared to have broken free from him; and finally Natasha herself, a woman who all her life has walked a complicated, even painful, line between the worlds of black America and white; and for whom tragedy became, in the absence of more conventional scenarios of mutual familial regard and support, the unlikeliest of anchors in a life that would see her achieve things no one could have foreseen.
U.S. & Canada to Ecco (Fall, 2014)
UK: Bloomsbury
Natasha Trethewey is the 2012 Poet Laureate of the United States, as well as Poet Laureate of the state of Mississippi. Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University, she is the author of Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), and Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She has been the recipient of various honors including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Grolier, Cave Canem, and Pushcart poetry prizes. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2003.
Jim Walsh
Dr. Jim Walsh, an MIT and Harvard international security expert and one of the few Americans to have traveled to North Korea to discuss their nuclear program with Korean officials at the highest levels, examines how most of our assumptions regarding North Korean are dangerously wrong—and what we need to do to prepare ourselves for the coming regime change as Kim Jong Il fades from power. Contrary to popular belief, Walsh argues that North Korea’s actions are, in fact, entirely logical, with the ultimate goal of a normalized relationship with the United States, and that North Korea’s touchy relationships with not only the U.S., but China, Japan, and of course South Korea, will predict how the regime change will play out. In the current climate, the stakes could not be higher, and, in six succinct up-to-the minute detailed chapters, Walsh offers a number of policy options for how America and the world should proceed, in order to avoid a disastrous mishandling of this misunderstood country
World: Yale University Press (Fall, 2014)
Contact: Anne Bihan (anne.bihan@yaleup.co.uk)
Dr. Jim Walsh is an expert in international security and a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program (SSP).
Caroline Weber
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: 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); andMadame 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. And so, blazing the trail that "Marcel" would one day retread in the 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, 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 track of the Search and replays it in a darker key, isolating and amplifying its notes of snobbery, competition, resentment, and disenchantment.
U.S./Canada: Knopf (2014)
Caroline Weber, a professor of French literature at Barnard College, received her Ph.D. in French literature from Yale University. Most recently, she published Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution (Henry Holt, 2006/Picador, 2007). A study of the political impact of Marie-Antoinette’s controversial clothing choices, Queen of Fashion made the LA Times best-seller list and was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by Washington Post Book World and Borders Books and Music.
Kate Bernheimer, Illustrated by Chris Sheban
When a wonderful new book arrives at the library, at first it is loved by all, checked out constantly, and rarely spends a night on the library shelf. But over time it grows old and worn, and the children lose interest in its story. The book is sent to the library's basement where the other faded books live. How it eventually finds an honored place on a little girl's bookshelf—and in her heart—makes for an unforgettable story sure to enchant anyone who has ever cherished a book. Kate Bernheimer and Chris Sheban have teamed up to create a picture book that promises to be loved every bit as much as the lonely book itself.
World Rights: Schwartz & Wade/Random House (April 2012)
Catalonia: Editorial Juventud
Japan: Iwasaki Shoten
Spain: Editorial Juventud
Contact: Jocelyn Lange jlange@randomhouse.com
Kate Bernheimer, Illustrated by Nicoletta Ceccoli
*2008 Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book of the Year
"Young fans of fantasy will be spell-bound." - Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Once there was a girl who lived in a castle. The castle was inside a museum. When children visited, they’d press against the glass globe in which the castle sat, to glimpse the tiny girl. But when they went home, the girl was lonely. Then one day, she had an idea! What if you hung a picture of yourself inside the castle inside the museum, inside this book? Then you’d able to keep the girl company. Reminiscent of "The Lady of Shalot," here is an original fairy tale that feels like a dream-haunting, beautiful, and completely unforgettable.
World Rights: Schwartz & Wade/Random House (2008)
Contact: Jocelyn Lange jlange@randomhouse.com
Greece: Modern Times
Italy: Edizioni Arka
Romania: Nemira
Kate Bernheime is the founder and editor of the Fairy Tales Review; author of the The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold, The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, as well as the her story collection Horse, Flower, Bird. She edited the World Fantasy Award winning collection of short stories, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales. She lives in Arizona.
Katie Crouch
"Katie Crouch’s The Magnolia League is mysterious, magical, and alluring. Crouch’s voice is both humorous and intense, lending itself well to the novel’s darker undercurrents and its richly southern flavor. Part My Fair Lady, part The Stepford Wives, with a dash of Mean Girls for good measure, I was drawn in from the very first page and eagerly a sequel." - Laurie Stolarz, author of the Blue is for Nightmares series
An unlikely Southern debutante discovers voodoo secrets and scandal hidden beneath Savannah society's perfectly glossed veneer in this exciting young adult debut from Katie Crouch, bestselling author of Girls in Trucks. After the death of her free-spirited hippie mother, 16-year-old Alexandria Lee is forced to move from Northern California to Savannah, Georgia to live with her wealthy and matriarchal grandmother, Mrs. Dorothy Lawson Lee. By birth, Alex is a rightful if at first resistent member of The Magnolia League, Savannah's longstanding debutante society, but she soon discovers that something sinister lies beneath the League member's ostensibly perfect lives. The Mags, as Alex's younger friends call the League members, have actually made a pact with a legendary Voodoo master: In exchange for long lasting beauty, wealth, and power, the women of the Magnolia League can never leave Savannah—and neither can their daughters.
U.S./Canada: Poppy/Little Brown Books for Young Readers (May, 2011)
Audio: Brilliance
Germany: Hanser
Spain: Rosell
Katie Crouch & Grady Hendrix
"In the second installment of the Magnolia League series, the stakes are higher, the drama more palpable and the hoodoo even hairier... Harrowing... Though lighter on the romance, this creepy, cliffhanging thrill ride will still delight Magnolia League fans and leave them desperate for the next episode." - Kirkus
Book two of the Magnolia League series finds our heroine, Alexandria Lee, studying under her grandmother in order to be deemed "suitable" to assume her role as head of the Magnolia League. However, Alex is only trying to learn the Voodoo codes in order to free her mother, Louisa, from her prison in the "haint blue" room of Miss Lee's mansion. Unfortunately, Magnolia sisters Hayes and Madison are unaware of her real intentions. And when Alex changes her image to "Bristol Palin at mega-church," throwing over Thaddeus to spend more time with her grandmother and the boys she recommends, the MG's can only assume that the once refreshingly independent Alex is selling out. What they don't know is that another power-hungry Magnolia has put their new friend's life in grave danger. In fact, Alex herself only becomes aware of this after two mysterious attempts on her life. Soon she realizes she has just one chance to save herself and liberate her mother at last: putting herself under the protection of Sina—by far the least trustworthy of the voodoo-proficient Buzzard family. Moreover, she 's got to do this all while feigning allegiance to Miss Lee as a mysterious and charming new boy, Chad, shows up at the River School with an uncanny level of understanding of all of their lives. Intentionally or not, he soon has all of the MGs working against each other. And,when real tragedy strikes, the bonds of the League are tested. Will Hayes, Madison and Alex be able to unite in order to save not only Alex's mother, but themselves as well?
U.S./Canada: Poppy/Little Brown Books for Young Readers (May, 2012)
Germany: Hanser
Katie Crouch was raised in Charleston, South Carolina. She studied writing at Brown and Columbia Universities and now lives in San Francisco, but she returns home to Charleston often.
Grady Hendrix is a film programmer and writer living in New York City. For five years he was a regular film critic for the New York Sun and has written for Slate, The Village Voice, and Playboy, among others.
Jason Fry
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 (January, 2014)
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
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
France: Milan
Germany: Heyne
The Netherlands: Prometheus
TM Goeglein
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 (July, 2012)
Contact: Helen Boomer helen.boomer@us.penguingroup.com
Germany: Heyne
The Netherlands: Prometheus
T.M. (Ted) Goeglein is a screenwriter and novelist. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two children.
Jesse Karp
"[A] fascinating premise...a great many intriguing, original, and thought provoking ideas at play here."
- Booklist
Set in the very near future, a wounded New York struggles with the aftermath of a power plant explosion that plunged the city into fourteen days of violence and darkness. An enormous bug-like dome is hastily constructed to keep toxic gases from escaping the site. "Big Black," as it is soon christened by the media, casts a gloomy pall over the city, serving as a bleak daily reminder of the tragedy. Bruised and battered, seventeen-year-old Mal returns to the Brooklyn home of his foster parents one night to discover that his older brother Tommy has vanished after leaving a strange message on his phone. Mal launches a search for his estranged brother that leads to a forbidding, apparently vacant Manhattan skyscraper, and once inside, makes a careless mistake that reveals hidden cracks in the surface of the world we know. Meanwhile, Laura, a sweet college-bound high school senior is shaken from her quiet suburban life when her parents inexplicably abandon her, following which two agents from Homeland Security armed with a hypodermic needle show up at her Long Island home. Soon the two teenagers are thrown together with a cynical and bitter high school teacher named Mike, and Jon, a covert agent for a shadowy cooperative. These strangers share little in common, save for one terrifying fact: someone or something has wiped them from the memories of every single person the four have ever known. Only by working together can Mal and Laura hope to reclaim a past that was stolen from them—and start a future no one can take away.
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Books (March, 2011)
Jesse Karp
Book two of the series that began with Those That Wake finds Mal kidnapped by the Old Man, a legendary figure who controls the fate of fortunes and nations. On his order, Mal is sent to find the infamous Jon Remak, whose mind control powers the Old Man covets. With the help of Rose, a young woman swept up in a battle larger than she can possibly imagine, Mal finds Remak and they hatch a plan to topple the Old Man. However, the plan backfires and Mal is nearly killed, saved only by Remak’s strange power and his ultimate sacrifice. Mal and Rose escape the clutches of the Old Man, but not before he learns the secret of Remak’s power. Laura, meanwhile, is being hounded by the arrogant boy genius Aaron Argaven, who thinks that Laura can lead him to the Librarian, a figure he blames for the death of his father. She agrees to help him, if he will help her recover a life she believes was lost to her. They find the Librarian, who reveals that the source of both their troubles is the Old Man. Coming together, Mal, Laura, Rose and Aaron must overcome their differences to confront the Old Man and prevent him from sweeping the entire world under his control.
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Books (February, 2013)
Jesse Karp is a school librarian at LREI in Greenwich Village and is the author of Graphic Novels in Your School Library. He lives New York City with his wife and two daughters.
Lish McBride
"This is a scary funny book or a funny scary book. In either case, it is a great book. I love it."
- Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sam Corvus LaCroix, a sweet but aimless drop-out, spends his days flipping burgers in Seattle. The job bores Sam, but at least he's surrounded by his crew: Ramon, his best friend and fellow skateboarding enthusiast; Brooke, a mouthy high school senior; and Frank, a new employee desperately in need of an infusion of self-confidence. An unfortunate flying potato incident brings Sam to the attention of the evil Douglas, a local necromancer who makes a nice living raising dead celebrities and politicians for cash. When Douglas discovers that Sam possesses latent necromancy powers (news to the teenager) he gives Sam seven days to join forces with him—or else. With its fast-paced narrative, appealing humor, and a world populated by memorable creatures, McBride's debut novel recalls early Christopher Moore.
World English: Holt Books for Young Readers (October, 2010) Indonesia : Serambi
Contact: Holly Hunnicutt (holly.hunnicut@macmillan.com) Thailand: Muse
Australia: Penguin
France: La Martinière
Lish McBride
With the defeat of the evil necromancer Douglas behind him, Sam LaCroix is getting used to his new life. Ok, so he hadn't exactly planned on being a powerful necromancer with a seat on the local magical council and a capricious werewolf sort-of-girlfriend, but things are going fine, right? Well...not really. He's pretty tired of getting beat up by everyone and their mother, for one thing, and he can’t help but feel that his new house hates him. His best friend is a were-bear, and while Sam realizes that he himself has a lot of power at his fingertips, he's not exactly sure how to use it. Which, he has to admit, is a bit disconcerting. But when someone close to Sam turns up dead, he decides it's time for him to step up and take control. His attempts to do so just bring up more questions, though, the most important of which is more than a little alarming: Is Douglas really dead?
World English: Holt Books for Young Readers (September, 2012)
Contact: Holly Hunnicutt (holly.hunnicut@macmillan.com)
Lish McBride
Home-schooled outcast Ava possess the firebug gene (someone who can start fires with her mind). When her mother is murdered by a vampire hit squad, she is given a stark choice: kill evil creatures for the Coterie, a mafia-style group run by the ageless Venus, or her caretaker Charlie gets whacked. It's an alienating life for the seventeen-year old, whose only connection to a normal high school experience is her casual boyfriend, town golden boy Cody James. So far Ava has toed the line, but then Venus asks her to take on a job that Ava must refuse. No one says no to Venus and lives, so Venus unleashes a nasty and brutal revenge campaign that sends Ava and her bff Lock on the run. Time is running out for Ava as she enlists some unexpected allies to win back every last thing that Ava holds dear - Charlie, Cody and, ultimately, her freedom.
World English: Holt Books for Young Readers (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.
Lydia Millet
"Lydia Millet knows the sea like a selkie. The Fires Beneath the Sea smells of salt and tastes of mist, and that beauty speaks as strongly as its story of peril and hope for the future of our fragile world."
—Kathe Koja, author of Talk
Cara's mother has disappeared. Her father isn't talking about it. Her big brother Max is hiding behind his iPod, and her genius little brother Jackson is busy studying the creatures he collects from the beach. But when a watery specter begins to haunt the family's Cape Cod home, Cara and her brothers realize that their scientist mother may not be who they thought she was—and that the world has much stranger, much older inhabitants than they had imagined. With help from Cara's best friend Hayley, the three embark on a quest that will lead them from the Cape's hidden, ancient places to a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea. They're soon on the front lines of an ancient battle between good and evil, with the terrifying "pouring man" close on their heels. Packed with memorable characters and thrilling imagery, Lydia Millet weaves a page-turning adventure even as she brings the seaside world of Cape Cod to magical life. The first in a series of books about the Sykes children, The Fires Beneath the Sea is a rip-cracking middle-grade novel that will make perfect beach reading—for readers of any age.
World Rights: Big Mouth House/Small Beer Press (May, 2011)
Contact: Whitney Lee (wlee@fieldingagency.com)
Turkish rights to: Ithaki
A Junior Library Guild Pick
Lydia Millet
*A Junior Library Guild Pick
Cara's mother is still missing. When her brother Jax texts her from "smart kid's boot camp" in Boston, Cara and her two best friends go to the rescue. But the camp is a front for Cara's mother's organization who are fighting against a force who wants to make the planet over in its own image, which will leave no space for anything else, animal, insect, or human.
World Rights: Big Mouth House/Small Beer Press (September, 2012)
Contact: Whitney Lee (wlee@fieldingagency.com)
Lydia Millet is the author of several novels including the forthcoming, Magnificence. The Shimmers in the Night is the second book in the Dissenters series.
Sarah Porter
"A beautifully written and heartbreaking story about a lost soul struggling to forgive the people she loved who wronged her, and ultimately to forgive herself."
—Jennifer Echols, author of Going Too Far
Fourteen-year-old Luce has had a tough life, but she reaches the depths of despair when she is assaulted and left on the cliffs outside of a grim, gray Alaskan fishing village. She expects to die when she tumbles into the icy waves below, but instead undergoes an astonishing transformation and becomes a mermaid. A tribe of mermaids finds Luce and welcomes her in—all of them, like her, lost girls who surrendered their humanity in the darkest moments of their lives. Luce is thrilled with her new life until she discovers the catch: the mermaids feel an uncontrollable desire to drown seafarers, using their enchanted voices to lure ships into the rocks. Luce possesses an extraordinary singing talent, which makes her important to the tribe—she may even have a shot at becoming their queen. However her struggle to retain her humanity puts her at odds with her new friends. Will Luce be pressured into committing mass murder? The first book in a trilogy, Lost Voices is a captivating and wildly original tale about finding a voice, the healing power of friendship, and the strength it takes to forgive.
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s (July, 2011)
UK: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Taiwan: Owl Publishing
Sarah Porter
"Sarah Porter’s mermaid world is dazzlingly imagined and richly, hauntingly told. Waking Storms is as enchanting—and dark, and lush, and tragic, and gorgeous—as the mermaids' song."
—Carolyn Turgeon, author of Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale
After parting ways with her troubled mermaid tribe, Luce just wants to live peacefully on her own. But her tranquility doesn’t last long: she receives news that the tribe is on the verge of collapse and desperately needs her leadership. Anais, their cruel queen, wants Luce dead. Dorian, the boy Luce broke mermaid law to save, is determined to make her pay for her part in the murder of his family. And while the mermaids cling to the idea that humans never suspect their existence, there are suddenly ominous signs to the contrary. But when Luce and Dorian meet, they start to wonder if love can overpower the hatred they know they should feel for each other. Luce’s new friendship with an ancient renegade mermaid gives her hope that her kind might someday change their murderous ways. But how can Luce fulfill her rightful role as queen of the mermaids without sacrificing her forbidden romance with Dorian? Full of miraculous reunions and heart-pounding rescues, this haunting second installment in the Lost Voices Trilogy finds Luce eager to attempt reconciliation with humans—as long as war doesn’t break out first.
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s (July, 2012)
UK: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Taiwan: Owl Publishing
Sarah Porter
The thrilling conclusion to the Lost Voices Trilogy. Mermaids have been sinking ships and drowning humans for centuries, and now the government is determined to put an end to the mermaid problem—by slaughtering all of them. Luce, a mermaid with exceptionally threatening abilities, becomes their number-one target, hunted as she flees down the coast toward San Francisco. There she finds hundreds of mermaids living in exile under the docks of the bay. These are the Twice Lost: once-human girls lost first when a trauma turned them into mermaids, and lost a second time when they broke mermaid law and were rejected by their tribes. Luce is stunned when they elect her as their leader. But she won’t be their queen. She’ll be their general. And they will become the Twice Lost Army—because this is war.
U.S./Canada: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s (July, 2013)
UK: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Taiwan: Owl Publishing
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.
Rob Sharenow
*2012 Sydney Taylor Book Award winner
"Sharenow delivers a masterful historical novel."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Fourteen-year-old Karl Stern has never thought of himself a Jew. But to the bullies at his school in Nazi-era Berlin, it doesn’t matter that Karl has never set foot in a synagogue, or that his family doesn’t practice religion. Demoralized by relentless bullying for a heritage he’s never accepted as his own, Karl longs to prove his worth to everyone around him. Help comes in the form of Max Schmeling, champion boxer and German national hero. Max makes a deal with Karl’s art-dealer father to provide boxing lessons in exchange for a painting. A skilled cartoonist, Karl never had any interest in boxing but now he sees it as the perfect chance to reinvent himself. And as Max becomes the mentor Karl never had, soon Karl finds both his strength and his art flourishing. But when Nazi violence against Jews in Berlin escalates, Karl must take on a new role: protector of his family. Karl longs to ask his new mentor for help, but Max himself has become a symbol of German pride, forced to associate with those who despise Karl most. With little guidance and less hope, can Karl balance his dream of boxing greatness with his obligation to keep his family out of harm’s way?
World: Balzer & Bray/HarperTeen (April, 2011)
Contact: Alpha Wong (alpha.wong@harpercollins.com)
Brazil: Editora Rocco
Italy: Piemme
A Junior Library Guild Pick
Rob Sharenow
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 (2014)
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.
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