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Ph: 212-840-5760; Fax: 212-840-5776
www.brandthochman.com
For more rights information, contact Marianne Merola
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FICTION
Adrienne Celt, THE DAUGHTERS, Liveright/W.W. Norton, August 2015
www.adriennecelt.com
In this virtuosic debut, a world-class soprano seeks to reclaim her voice from the
curse that winds through her family tree. Since the difficult birth of her daughter,
which collided tragically with the death of her beloved grandmother, renowned opera
sensation Lulu can’t bring herself to sing a note. Haunted by a curse that traces back
through the women in her family, she fears that the loss of her remarkable talent and the
birth of her daughter are somehow inexplicably connected. As Lulu tentatively embraces
motherhood she sifts through the stories she’s inherited, about her elusive, jazz-singer
mother and the nearly-mythic matriarch, her great-grandmother Greta. Each tale is steeped in the family’s folkloric
Polish tradition and haunted by the rusalka—a spirit that inspired Dvorak’s classic opera. Merging elements from
BEL CANTO and AMY AND ISABELLE, THE DAUGHTERS reveals through four generations the sensuous but
precise physicality of both music and motherhood, and—most mysterious and seductive of all—the resonant
ancestral lore that binds each mother to the one that came before. AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 O Magazine’s “10 Titles to Pick Up Now” in August 2015 issue
 Bustle 17 Best Books of Summer pick
 First serial excerpt in Electric Literature
  “Celt's family saga—steeped in folklore and vibrating with music—is as much about the power of
storytelling as the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters… A haunting novel with real
emotional depth, Celt's psychologically nuanced debut continues to resonate long after the last page has
been turned.” – Kirkus
 “Short story and comics creator Celt interweaves themes of music, motherhood, and myth in her lyrical
debut novel… The novel’s luminous prose, subtle structure, and rich contrast between present-day Chicago
and Old World folklore help craft a resonant meditation on the way our stories at once shape and sabotage
our lives.” – Publishers Weekly
 “One of the many pleasures of THE DAUGHTERS is the dizzying surfeit of female characters, their stories
entangled and entwined with each other, and the novel's blood and backbone… Here is one you should not
miss, a gratifying feast in lush, lyrical, and full-throated form.” – NPR Books
 “Celt’s writing is lyric, and she paces the novel with careful placement of slow-but-foreboding scenes and
sweeping, operatic ones… The final notes of THE DAUGHTERS might surprise you, but in the end it's the
journey through song and myth, the cost of motherhood and the price of passion, that will resonate long
after the last page.” – Denver Post
 “Adrienne Celt’s stunning debut novel, like its narrator, sings. There is so much to applaud in THE
DAUGHTERS—its love song to the world of opera, its masterful retelling of ancient Polish fables, and,
above all, its examination of the complexity of modern love, in all its varieties.” – Julie Fierro, author of
CUTTING TEETH
 “A lush song of a book that understands the intertwined beauty and fear of motherhood and daughterhood,
and the music a good story makes.” – Caitlin Horrocks, author of THIS IS NOT YOUR CITY
Lenore Myka, KING OF THE GYPSIES, BkMk Press of the University of MissouriKansas City, September 30, 2015
www.lenoremyka.com
Set against the deteriorating landscape of post-communist Romania, KING OF THE
GYPSIES recounts the struggles of individuals to transcend the limitations of history,
ethnicity, and culture. Inspired by the author’s experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in
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Romania and linked by recurring characters and geography, KING OF THE GYPSIES is a transporting story
collection that examines the ill-effects our ballooning global community has on everyday lives. Myka’s short fiction
was named one of the 100 Distinguished Stories of 2008 by THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. AGENT:
UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 Winner of the 2014 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction
 “Beautifully realized stories of dislocation, yearning and exploration. Lenore Myka has a way of unfolding
cultures and characters in mid-flight, flushing Romania or complicated friendships or the mysteries of
people's inner lives quickly and skillfully to the surface. A rich and vibrant debut.” – Dominic Smith,
author of BRIGHT AND DISTANT SHORES
 “Heralds the debut of an extraordinary writer. With compassion, insight, breadth of knowledge, black
humor, and an exquisite use of language, Myka crosses from Romania to the United States and back again,
telling tales of characters cruelly haunted by having lived under totalitarian rule. Each story is brimming
with wisdom about the human condition; this is an author I would trust and follow anywhere.” – Marnie
Mueller, author of THE CLIMATE OF THE COUNTRY
Michael Golding, A POET OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD, Picador, October 6, 2015
www.michaelgoldingwriter.com
In the tradition of SIDDHARTHA by Hermann Hesse comes a new spiritual novel
that is a stunning feat of storytelling and imagination. A POET OF THE INVISIBLE
WORLD follows a boy named Nouri, born in thirteenth-century Persia, with four ears
instead of two. Orphaned as an infant, he’s taken into a Sufi order, where he meets an
assortment of dervishes and is placed upon a path toward spiritual awakening. As he
stumbles from one painful experience to the next, he grows into manhood. Each trial he
endures shatters another obstacle within—and leads Nouri on toward transcendence. By
the author of SIMPLE PRAYERS. AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
  “Golding provides a fascinating primer on the ascetic ideals of Sufism while glorifying our physical
natures, elegantly describe Nouri’s sexual awakening and the love he feels for his young protégée, Ryka.
This mesmerizing novel is a gift to anyone looking for a transcendent reading experience.” – Library
Journal
 “Taut storytelling and vivid characterization… An astute portrayal of human frailties and the redeeming
power of words and love.” – Booklist
 “In this stunningly vivid novel, Michael Golding has created a world that's anything but invisible. With
grace and magic reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), A POET OF THE
INVISIBLE WORLD is an ecstatic, enlightened whirlwind of profound contemplation and resplendent
beauty, grounded by the certainty of its richly saturated landscape, enthralling story and lyrical voice. I was
utterly enchanted!”– Ruth Ozeki
 “During the time I was reading this mysterious, enchanting novel, I found myself picking it up with
increasing urgency, driven by a kind of yearning at once spiritual and literary. Deftly wrapping
transcendence in experience, enlightenment in pain, and the sacred in the earthly, Michael Golding has
given us a story for the ages.”– John Burnham Schwartz, author of RESERVATION ROAD and THE
COMMONER
Kirk Lynn, RULES FOR WEREWOLVES, Melville House, October 13, 2015
www.kirkkirkkirk.com
Playwright and Michener Center MFA Kirk Lynn’s inventive debut told entirely through
dialogue about a pack of misfits who “live off the land” in the suburbs, squatting in houses
and shoplifting beer at the local Speedy Stop, and questing after knowledge of their most
wild selves. Add to this mix a pair of runaway brothers who dream of making a life in the
woods. At its heart, the book follows a community of punks (are they werewolves?) who
seek a life in a wilderness which, by definition, has no room for them, and who find a
freedom for which they may not be entirely prepared. In the tradition of Colson Whitehead's ZONE ONE and Toby
Barlow's SHARP TEETH. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 “Funny, dark, weird and addictive… A unique, engaging way to tell a story and a fresh way of looking at
American culture, youth and class.” – LitHub, The Great Booksellers Fall Preview
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“Lynn’s compelling debut novel is a parable about loneliness, violence, and modern malaise. It is one of
the first post-recession, post–housing crisis American novels of truly alienated youth and suburban fear.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Lynn is strongest when he illuminates the urge to break free from convention in the face of threats… An
offbeat glimpse into how resistance to conformity breeds its own kind of conformity.” – Kirkus
“You get caught up with these people. You take sides. And then Kirk Lynn confounds your expectations at
every turn.” – Greil Marcus, author of THE HISTORY OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL IN TEN SONGS
“Novels are supposed to give you pleasure. So many don’t. But RULES FOR WEREWOLVES does, in a
big-time way. This is a brilliant first novel by the playwright Kirk Lynn and it soars. It’s quirky, innovative,
hilarious and menacing. Every chapter has a nice little crunch to it and a bit of astonishment. How he pulled
this off I have no idea; it’s a true high-wire act.” – James Magnuson, author of FAMOUS WRITERS I
HAVE KNOWN
“Lynn has mastered a violent and soulful form—the pack narrative, in which the moral compass is easy to
lose and shared dreams drift into brutality. This fully immersive novel dazzled me. Read. Read. Read!”
– Elizabeth McKenzie, author of STOP THAT GIRL and THE PORTABLE VEBLEN
“Kirk Lynn has a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and a sixth sense for finding the exact point at which
absurdity mutates into heartbreak—or vice versa. RULES FOR WEREWOLVES is a dark, delirious,
innovative riot of a novel; a grand blast of chaos across the front lawns of America, and a truly outstanding
debut.” – Justin Taylor, author of FLINGS and THE GOSPEL OF ANARCHY
Virginia Pye, DREAMS OF THE RED PHOENIX, Unbridled, October 13, 2015
www.virginiapye.com
Taking her own grandmother's life as inspiration, Virginia Pye, author of the
critically-acclaimed debut novel RIVER OF DUST (Unbridled, 2013), has written a
stunning new novel of Americans in China on the cusp of World War II. During the
dangerous summer of 1937, a newly widowed American missionary finds herself and her
teenage son caught up in the midst of a Japanese invasion of North China and the
simultaneous rise of Communism. Meanwhile a charismatic Red Army officer requests her
help and seems to have shared some surprising secret about her husband. Shirley must manage her grief even as she
navigates between her desire to help the idealistic Chinese Reds fight the Japanese by serving as a nurse and the
need to save both herself and her son by escaping the war-ravaged country before it’s too late. AGENT:
TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 “There’s a comparison to Ballard’s EMPIRE OF THE SUN, but this unflinching look at a brutal era in a
faraway place shares truth in its own way.” – Kirkus
 “Gripping, convincing, and heartbreaking, DREAMS OF THE RED PHOENIX is powerfully evocative of
the complexities of life in 1930's China. A real page-turner and thought-provoker—wonderful.” – Gish Jen
James Morrow, REALITY BY OTHER MEANS: The Best Short Fiction of James
Morrow, Wesleyan University Press, November 3, 2015
www.jamesmorrow.info
Join the Abominable Snowman as, determined to transcend his cannibalistic past, he
studies Tibetan Buddhism under the Dalai Lama. Pace the walls of Ilium with fair Helen
as she tries to convince both sides to abandon their absurd Trojan War. Visit the nursery of
Zenobia Garber, born to a Pennsylvania farm couple who accept her for the uncanny little
biosphere she is. Scramble aboard the raft built by the passengers and crew of the sinking
Titanic—and don’t be surprised when the vessel transmutes into a world even more
astonishing than the original Ship of Dreams. REALITY BY OTHER MEANS offers readers the most celebrated
results from James Morrow’s thirty-five-year career designing fictive thought experiments. Anchored by seven
previously uncollected stories, this omnibus ranges from social satire to theological hijinks, steampunk escapades to
philosophical antics. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 “No matter where―or when―he sets his stories, Morrow's a clean stylist with an accurate grip on the
diction, the character, and the metabolic rate of the narrator. Intelligent and funny, this is the best kind of
mind candy.” – Kit Reed, author of THE STORY UNTIL NOW
 “In these angrily compassionate tales, Morrow ventriloquizes Dante and Swift in writing as cutting as
freshly strung barbed wire. Each posits an astonishing otherness that debunks a menacing human folly
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while also eliciting gasps or guffaws of outraged delight.” – Michael Bishop, author of A FUNERAL FOR
THE EYES OF FIRE
“Here’s undeniable proof that James Morrow is our Jonathan Swift―a funnier, more fantastical Swift.
Morrow can be brainy and absurd, hilarious and profound, scatological and philosophical―all on the same
page. After you stop laughing, you keep thinking, and that’s when you realize you’re in the hands of a
master. No one else sounds like him, and no one else has sharper satirical knives.” – Daryl Gregory, author
of AFTERPARTY
“James Morrow, a master of the reductio ad absurdum, is a thoughtful satirist whose sharp but never
gratuitous wit takes aim at serious issues in beautifully crafted prose that is always a pleasure to read.”
– Pamela Sargent, author of THE SHORE WOMEN
Shann Ray AMERICAN COPPER, Unbridled, November 3, 2015
www.shannray.com
An early 20th-century love triangle among a copper baron's daughter, a bull rider,
and a Cheyenne team roper. Evelynne Lowry, the daughter of a copper baron, comes of
age in early 20th century Montana. The lives of horses dovetail with the lives of people.
And Evelynne’s own quest for womanhood becomes inextricably intertwined with the
future of two men who face nearly insurmountable losses—a lonely bull rider named Zion
from the Montana highline, and a Cheyenne team roper named William Black Kettle, the
descendant of peace chiefs. An epic that runs from the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to
the ore and industry of the 1930s, AMERICAN COPPER is a poignant elegy to horses, cowboys, the stubbornness
of racism, and the entanglements of modern humanity when faced with a culpability that lies dormant in the ashes of
great harm. Set against the wide plains and soaring mountainscapes of Montana, this is the American West reenvisioned, imbued with unconditional violence, but also love. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 An Indie Next Pick
 Shann Ray's debut collection of stories, AMERICAN MASCULINE (Graywolf, 2011), won the
American Book Award, the High Plains Book Award, and the Bakeless Prize from the Bread Loaf
Writers' Conference. Sherman Alexie called it "tough, poetic, and beautiful" and Dave Eggers said
Ray's work is "lyrical, prophetic, and brutal, yet ultimately hopeful."
  “A gripping epic of the Montana frontier…., Ray fuses tragedy into rebirth, covering a timeline of nearly
four decades in a narrative as natural, pure, and clear as water flowing from a snow-covered peak. Devotees
of the genre will find Ray's lyric, often poetic saga to be equal to McCarthy's Border Trilogy and Harrison's
Legends of the Fall. “ – Kirkus
 “AMERICAN COPPER is an important book for anyone interested in Montana history and the
relationships among the peoples of the early Northwest Territory. Evelynne, Zion and William Black Kettle
reflect the fierce, independent, determined entanglements that were The West. These three names will be
remembered long after finishing the book.” – LitHub, The Great Booksellers Fall Preview
 “In AMERICAN COPPER, Shann Ray harnesses his formidable sensibilities as both poet and short-form
fiction writer to create a balance between the intimate and the epic….. Ray’s range of characterizations
reminds us that despite its mythic tropes, the West has been a place of mind-boggling identities and all-toohuman tragedies for a very long time. I was reminded as much of the tribal folklore of James Willard
Schultz as the fearless genre-bending of Dorothy M. Johnson, and the pitch-perfect naturalism of James
Welch. No small feat.” – Malcolm Brooks, author of PAINTED HORSES
 “Some books devour their readers; other books are written to be devoured. With an emotional heart as
enormous as the Montana mountains, Shann Ray's AMERICAN COPPER is that rare book that does both.
In one breath you'll marvel at Ray's poetic lyricism, with the next you'll grunt at his toughness. And in
between you'll turn the pages impulsively. With AMERICAN COPPER, Ray announces himself as one of
the finest writers working today.” – Peter Geye, author of THE LIGHTHOUSE ROAD
 “AMERICAN COPPER is a spacious and stirring book that arcs itself across the dark skies of the West.
Centered on Evelynne Lowry, privileged daughter of an insatiable copper king, the novel divines the
deepest sources of American tragedy—the implacability of wealth, the heartlessness of colonialism, the
rage of racial injustice. Shann Ray’s beautiful prose blends the lyrical yearning of James Welch with the
historic sweep of Philipp Meyer to create an epic tale anchored in bitter loss and annealed by powerful
love.” – Alyson Hagy, author of BOLETO
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“This grave, unusual novel unfolds with a beautiful evenhandedness, balancing the outer world and the
inner life, Cheyenne and white experiences of early 20th-century Montana. Ray’s feel for the heart and soul
of Montana and its people—all its people—graces every page.” – Andrea Barrett, author of ARCHANGEL
“An expansive and luminous tale of the American West told through crystalline prose. AMERICAN
COPPER ushers Shann Ray into the company of Montana's finest writers. It's a read as compelling as
Harrison's masterwork LEGENDS OF THE FALL and Kittredge's WILLOW FIELD. Heartbreaking and
heart pounding and not to be missed.” – Debra Magpie Earling, author of PERMA RED
Michael Cunningham, A WILD SWAN AND OTHER TALES, FSG, November
10, 2015
www.michaelcunninghamwriter.com
Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed, reimagined
by Michael Cunningham, one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation and the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE HOURS, and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko
Shimizu (www.yukoart.com). Rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this
perverse, or this true. The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store,
buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed
little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure
a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother's basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow
for a handful of magic beans. IN A WILD SWAN AND OTHER TALES, the people and the talismans of lands far,
far away—the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder—are transformed by
Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION. PUB: AUDIO.
 First serial excerpt in The New Yorker
 “Elegant, sardonic… Cunningham’s tales enlarge rather than reduce the haunting mystery of their
originals… At once dark and delightful.” – Publishers Weekly
 Foreign rights licensed to Fourth Estate (UK), Prometheus (Holland), Bompiani (Italy), Luchterhand
(Germany), Editions Belfond (France), Gradiva (Portugal), Arhipelag (Serbia), Gummerus
(Finland), Corpus (Russia)
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Also by Michael Cunningham: THE SNOW QUEEN, FSG, May 2014, Picador pb May
2015
The latest novel from the brilliant mind of Michael Cunningham, author of the
Pulitzer-Prize winning novel THE HOURS, A HOME AT THE END OF THE
WORLD, BY NIGHTFALL and other bestselling works of fiction. AGENT: UK,
TRANSLATION. PUB: AUDIO.
 “Arguably Mr. Cunningham’s most original and emotionally piercing book to
date. It’s a novel that does not rely heavily on literary allusions and echoes for its power —
a story that showcases the author’s strengths as a writer and few of his liabilities, while creating a potent
portrait of two brothers and their urgent midlife yearning to find some sense of purpose and belonging.”
– Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Foreign rights licensed to Fourth Estate (UK), Prometheus (Holland), Editions Belfond (France),
Gradiva (Portugal), Corpus (Russia), Bompiani (Italy), Luchterhand (Germany), Lumen/RHM
(world Spanish), Euromedia (Czech Republic), Polirom (Romania), Gummerus (Finland), Keter
(Israel), Lind (Sweden), Rebis (Poland), Gyldendal (Denmark), Bertrand Brasil (Brazil),
Intense/Focus (Bulgaria), Van Lang (Vietnam), Arhipelag (Serbia)
Ed Tarkington, ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART, Algonquin, January 5,
2016
In the spirit of Willie Morris, Tom Franklin, and Wiley Cash, this spellbinding debut
draws you into a small-town American Gothic story of family fealty, scandal, and
murder. Eight-year-old Rocky worships his older brother Paul—sixteen and full of rebel
cool, smoking cigarettes, driving around in his Nova blasting Neil Young—until the day
Paul, in an act of vengeance against their father, picks Rocky up from school and nearly
leaves him for dead in the woods. Paul then runs off with his beautiful, fragile girlfriend,
never to be heard from again. Seven years later Rocky is a teenager himself. Although he’s
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never forgotten the abandonment of his boyhood hero, he’s now getting over it, with the help of the wealthy
neighbors’ daughter, ten years his senior, who has taken him as her lover. But the affair sets off a sequence of events
that bring ruin to both families. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 A 2016 Winter/Spring Indies Introduce Pick by the American Booksellers Association
 “A rich, moody, moving novel about growing up and growing old before your time. Tarkington's people are
rakes, rascals, irascible losers, femme fatales, rich buffoons, dunderheads, beautiful loons, and one very
cool dude, all balanced by the voice of a narrator you come to love as much as he loves his doomed older
brother. On top of all that, it's a very fun, deeply satisfying, page-turner of a book.” – Brad Watson, author
of THE HEAVEN OF MERCURY and ALIENS IN THE PRIME OF THEIR LIVES
 “A wonderful, beauty-haunted piece of work. Tarkington’s voice in his hard-to-put-down debut novel has a
timeless feel to its cadences, the same bittersweet music we hear in the storytelling of the best of our
Southern writers who remind us how hard the world can be for dreamers.” – Bob Shacochis, author of THE
WOMAN WHO LOST HER SOUL
 “Ed Tarkington’s first novel manages an expert narrative feat—it is somehow both ruminative and
remarkably suspenseful. A novel of family and love and class, of beautiful youth and terrible consequences.
And of heartbreak, of course, as the title makes plain and life makes inescapable. Readers will be born
along on the strength and clarity of Tarkington’s prose, the twists and pivots of his plot. ONLY LOVE
CAN BREAK THE HEART is a truly auspicious debut.” – Michael Knight, author of THE TYPIST
 “I’m speechless. I don’t remember the last debut novel that kept me turning pages enthralled. ONLY
LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART is part THE GRADUATE, part southern gothic dysfunctional
family, part EDISTO, part THE MOVIEGOER. It’s all Ed Tarkington, though. Funny, desperate, sad,
tender, suspenseful, intelligent, insightful, and full of nothing but heart, heart, heart.” – George Singleton,
author of BETWEEN WRECKS
 “Tarkington’s debut novel is an elegant bildungsroman that lays open the strange and dangerous world of
old-money and new-money Virginians, and those who exist between these worlds and who are often
trapped between them. The plot turns along family strife, naked desire, and sometimes violent treachery,
but at its core ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART is a love story that just might break your heart,
too.” – Matt Bondurant, author of THE NIGHT SWIMMER
Joan Aiken, THE PEOPLE IN THE CASTLE: Selected Strange Stories, Small
Beer Press, January 12, 2016
www.joanaiken.com
Here is the whisper in the night, the dog whose loyalty outlasted death, the creak
upstairs, that half-remembered ghost story that won't let you sleep, the sound that raises
gooseflesh, the wish you'd checked the lock on the door before dark fell. Here are tales
of suspense and the supernatural that will chill, amuse, and exhilarate. Features a new
introduction by the late author's daughter, Lizza Aiken. Best known for THE WOLVES
OF WILLOUGHBY CHASE, Joan Aiken (1924–2004) wrote over a hundred books and
won the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards. After her first husband's death, she supported her family by
copyediting at Argosy magazine and an advertising agency before turning to fiction. She went on to write for Vogue,
Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Argosy, Women's Own, and many others. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
Praise for Joan Aiken's stories:
 "Wildly inventive, darkly lyrical, and always surprising . . . should be cherished." – Publishers Weekly
 "Darkly whimsical stories. . . . Aiken writes with surpassing spirit and alertness, her elegant restraint and
dry wit never fail to leave their mark." – Kirkus
 "Aiken's pastoral meadows and circus chaos, gothic grotesques and quirky romances . . . have a dream-like
quality executed with a brevity and wit that is a testament to her skill as a story-teller." – California
Literary Review
 "Fantasy is combined with magic, myth and adventure to form weird, wonderful and immersive tales."
– For Book's Sake
Elizabeth McKenzie, THE PORTABLE VEBLEN, Penguin Press, January 19,
2016
www.stopthatgirl.com
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An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a
brilliant New Yorker contributor. THE PORTABLE VEBLEN is a dazzlingly original novel that’s as big-hearted
as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old
(antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, THE PORTABLE
VEBLEN is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming
Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they
weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress,
to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel. Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein
Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction.
Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father,
Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul—the product of
good hippies who were bad parents—finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of
a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma—an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with
the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity. As Paul is swept up
by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in
their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else. Throughout, Elizabeth
McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that
squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, THE PORTABLE VEBLEN is at once an
honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience. Elizabeth McKenzie is the
author of two previous works of fiction (Random House). A portion of this novel appeared in The Atlantic Monthly
in 2011. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION. PUB: AUDIO.
 A Publishers Marketplace Buzz Book
 “THE PORTABLE VEBLEN is the squirreliest novel I ever read. I enjoyed it completely.” – Ursula K.
Le Guin
 “Man oh man, do I love this book! I have never read anything like it. I can't believe how funny it is given
that we're dealing at times with pharmaceutical fraud, irreparable brain injury, and comatose veterans.
(Family dysfunction, on the other hand, is always funny.) The prose is beautiful and surprising and filled
with an electric energy. Audacious, imaginative, and totally wonderful: The whole books zips and zings.”
– Karen Joy Fowler, PEN/Faulkner-winning author of WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE
OURSELVES
 “THE PORTABLE VEBLEN is an authentically strange—and genuinely funny—depiction of how the
dysfunctions of childhood stubbornly follow us into adulthood.” – Teddy Wayne, author of THE LOVE
SONG OF JONNY VALENTINE and KAPITOIL
 “Wildly entertaining and extremely funny and overflowing with piercing emotional truths. This inventive
and audacious novel gives us an irresistible portrait of a highly intelligent and sensitive young woman
trying to navigate the kaleidoscopic freakscape we call modern America. With casual aplomb, Elizabeth
McKenzie tosses off sentences that will delight and bowl you over with their stinging insight and hilarious
truth-telling. An elegy for our dying empire, full of wisdom and finely-tuned grace notes about the secrets
of the human heart.” – Gabe Hudson, author of DEAR MR. PRESIDENT
 “Only Elizabeth McKenzie could make a novel—a great novel—with such weird and wonderful
ingredients. THE PORTABLE VEBLEN gives us squirrels, love, family dysfunction, sex, marriage,
medical science, and something called the Pneumatic Turbo Skull Punch, all swirled into a funny, beautiful,
heartbreaking story. THE PORTABLE VEBLEN is about all of these things but mostly it’s about that most
important of subjects: what it is to be human.” – Christian Kiefer, author of THE ANIMALS
 “A clever morality tale set against the verdant paradise of Palo Alto. McKenzie’s story of an ambitious
young neurologist and the seductions of the darker side of the medical economy is both incisive and
hilarious.” – Abraham Verghese, author of CUTTING FOR STONE
 “A deeply observed universe where heroines are named for economists and the high stakes of capitalism
are set to collide with the chatter of small wild animals. In a work both humorous and wrenching,
everything casts multiple shadows while McKenzie tracks the distance between individuals, measuring the
wildly human hope that love, might in the end, conquer all.” – Samantha Hunt, author of THE
INVENTION OF EVERYTHING and MR. SPLITFOOT
 “In scalpel-sharp prose, THE PORTABLE VEBLEN's gleefully perverse narrator seduces us with the story
of a charming young woman soon to wed a handsome doctor. But strange shadows flicker just off the page
and then begin to bleed into the story of the romance. The ethics of parenting, the disasters of war,
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corporate greed, the essential meanings of translation and invention, and the sacrifices of self to wedlock:
these are some of the themes that surface in this extraordinary book. Oh, and also—what really is the soul
of a squirrel? I was knocked out, giddily so, by THE PORTABLE VEBLEN.” – Nelly Reifler, author of
ELECT H. MOUSE STATE JUDGE and SEE THROUGH
“THE PORTABLE VEBLEN is a funny, modern love story, but also the story of everything that comes
before love, its dark prerequisites and murky prequels. A wonderfully insane novel with talking squirrels
and lunatic parents and comedic plot twists, populated by some of the most real, fully written characters
I've met on any page. Don't miss it.” – Lydia Netzer, author of HOW TO TELL TOLEDO FROM THE
NIGHT SKY
Foreign rights licensed to Fourth Estate (UK)
Heather Gudenkauf, MISSING PIECES, Mira/Harlequin, February 2, 2016
www.heathergudenkauf.com
New York Times bestselling author Heather Gudenkauf returns with a chilling page-turner
about a woman chasing clues into a decades-old mystery that could have shattering
repercussions. Sarah Quinlan's husband, Jack, has been haunted for decades by the untimely
death of his mother when he was just a teenager, her body found in the cellar of their family
farm, the circumstances a mystery. The case rocked the small farm town of Penny Gate, Iowa,
where Jack was raised, and for years Jack avoided returning home. But when his beloved aunt
Julia is in an accident, Jack and Sarah are forced to confront the past that they have long evaded.
Upon arriving in Penny Gate, Sarah and Jack are welcomed by the family Jack left behind all
those years ago—barely a trace of the wounds that had once devastated them all. But as facts about Julia's accident
begin to surface, Sarah realizes that nothing about the Quinlans is what it seems. Caught in a flurry of unanswered
questions, Sarah dives deep into the puzzling rabbit hole of Jack's past. But the farther in she climbs, the harder it is
for her to get out. And soon she is faced with a deadly truth she may not be prepared for. By the author of New York
Times and USA Today bestselling novels THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE, THESE THINGS HIDDEN, ONE
BREATH AWAY and LITTLE MERCIES. AGENT: TRANSLATION, AUDIO. PUB: UK.
 “Heather Gudenkauf has the unique ability of being able to turn familiar settings and situations into edgeof-your-seat nightmares—to take us on a trip back home where nothing is as it seems, the very landscape of
small town life feels ominous, and family secrets can be deadly. MISSING PIECES is an emotional
roller coaster of suspense that will keep you guessing until the final page is turned.” – Jennifer
MacMahon
 “MISSING PIECES is an action-packed thriller complete with buried family secrets, lies and betrayal, and
one woman's dauntless mission to discover the truth about the man she believes she's married to. Heather
Gudenkauf shows her finesse as an author with a cast of suspicious characters, surprising revelations, and
an ending that blew my mind. Gudenkauf's best book yet!” – Mary Kubica
Morgan Callan Rogers, WRITTEN ON MY HEART, Plume, February 2, 2016
www.morgancallanrogers.com
The sequel to Morgan Callan Roger’s bestselling debut novel RED RUBY HEART IN A
COLD BLUE SEA. The marriage of Florine Gilham and Bud Warner is a joyful cause for
celebration down on The Point, the Maine fishing village where they grew up. Yet even as the
newlyweds begin their lives together, Florine is drawn back into the memory of her mother, Carlie,
who vanished when Florine was twelve. As unexpected clues regarding her fate begin to surface,
Florine and Bud face the challenges of trying to solve an old mystery while building a new
marriage and raising a family. WRITTEN ON MY HEART will delight readers who love funny, feisty, poignant
characters and the nooks and crannies of the beautiful, unforgettable Maine coast. Published initially in Germany as
EISBLAUE SEE, ENDLOSER HIMMEL by mareverlag in July 2014, where Rogers’ first novel, RED RUBY
HEART IN A COLD BLUE SEA, was a bestseller. AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 Foreign rights licensed to mareverlag (Germany)
Matthew Griffin, HIDE, Bloomsbury, February 16, 2016
www.matthewgriffinwriter.com
Set in a declining textile town in North Carolina, HIDE is the love story of Wendell
Wilson, a taxidermist, and Frank Clifton, a veteran of World War II. They meet after the
war, in a time when such love holds real danger. But, severing nearly all ties with the rest
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of the world, they carve out a home for themselves on the outskirts of town and for decades the routine of selfreliant domesticity -- Wendell's cooking, Frank's care for a yard no one sees, and the vicarious drama of courtroom
TV -- seems to protect them. But when Wendell finds Frank lying motionless outside at the age of eighty-three, their
carefully crafted life together begins to unravel. As Frank's physical strength deteriorates and his memory dissolves,
Wendell struggles in vain to keep him healthy and to hold onto the man he once knew until, faced with giving care
beyond his capacity, he must come to terms with the consequences of half a century in seclusion, the sacrifices they
made for each other, and the different lives they might have lived -- and most especially the impending, inexorable
loss of the one they had. Impossibly tender, gently funny, and gorgeously rendered, HIDE is a singularly powerful
debut. AGENT: TRANSL., AUDIO. PUB: UK.
 A 2016 Winter/Spring Indies Introduce Pick by the American Booksellers Association
 “Reading Matt Griffin’s HIDE, I kept saying to myself ‘at last!’: a novel that follows the trajectory of a
marriage (in fact if not in name) between two men over the course of decades, and does so with grit, humor,
and compassion! HIDE is a welcome and important work.” – David Leavitt
 “Tough but compassionate and beautifully observed, Matthew Griffin’s debut novel is an unflinching look
at the cost of isolation in an intolerant society and a moving story about the persistence of love.” – Maggie
Shipstead, author of SEATING ARRANGEMENT and ASTONISH ME
Andromeda Romano-Lax, BEHAVE, Soho Press, February 23, 2016
www.aromanolax.com
A novel of passion and ambition based on the life of one of the most controversial
scientists—and mothers—of the 20th century. In 1920, when she graduated from
Vassar College with her degree in psychology, Rosalie Rayner took a coveted position at
the Johns Hopkins research lab to assist the charismatic John B. Watson, the man who
pioneered behaviorist psychology. Together, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner conducted
experiments on hundreds of babies to prove behaviorist principles of nurture over nature.
They also embarked on a scandalous affair that cost them both their jobs. The Watsons’
parenting book, PSYCHOLOGICAL CARE OF INFANT AND CHILD, which emphasized emotional detachment,
sold millions of copies and affected the upbringings of generations of American children—but Rosalie, now a
mother herself, had to confront its tenets personally. With BEHAVE, Andromeda Romano-Lax offers a fictional
biography of Rosalie Rayner Watson, a woman whose lab work is now widely repudiated but who in her time was at
the cutting edge of parenting psychology. This novel is in turns moving and horrifying, a thought-provoking and
page-turning read about the meaning of motherhood. By the author of THE SPANISH BOW and THE DETOUR.
AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
Monica Wood, THE ONE-IN-A-MILLION BOY, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 5, 2016
www.monicawood.com
The feel-good story of a sweet, strange 11-year-old boy and Ona Vitkus, the 104 (yes, 104)year-old widow, who form a friendship when he shows up at her house to earn a Boy Scout
badge by doing her yard work. Their short time together has far-reaching and even recordbreaking effects on Ona’s life and that of the boy’s parents giving some very unlikely people
a redemptive second chance at life. When his son suddenly dies, absentee father Quinn agrees
to the request of his twice-ex-wife and truest friend Belle that he complete the requirements for
their son's one unfinished Boy Scout badge. For seven Saturdays, Quinn is obliged to do yard work for Ona Vitkus,
a 104-year-old Lithuanian immigrant, who reveals to Quinn that his son had persuaded her to try for the Guinness
record of Oldest Licensed Driver. Quinn soon learns that this is the least of Ona's secrets. A reluctant confidante, but
aching with remorse over his failure as a family man, Quinn finds himself in a complex relationship that opens an
unexpected road toward his own personal redemption. By the author of the novels ANY BITTER THING, MY
ONLY STORY, and SECRET LANGUAGE and the memoir WHEN WE WERE THE KENNEDYS. AGENT: UK,
TRANSLATION. PUB: AUDIO.
 Foreign rights licensed to Sperling (Italy), Karakter (Holland), Keter (Israel), Headline (UK),
Ullstein (Germany), Geulnurim (Korea)
Dominic Smith, THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, Sarah Crichton/FSG,
April 5, 2016
www.dominicsmith.net
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This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters
so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the reading's done. In his earlier, award-winning
novels, Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. Now, in THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA
DE VOS, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape
by a female Dutch painter of the golden age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated art
historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth. In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild
of St. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to
de Vos is known to remain—a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the bed of a wealthy
descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York,
agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her. Because now, half a century later, she's
curating an exhibit of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive. As the three threads intersect,
THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS mesmerizes while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life,
showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present. By the author of THE MERCURY VISIONS OF LOUIS
DAGUERRE. PUB: UK (EXCEPT ANZ), TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 “THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS is a story told in layers of light. From afar, this novel is so
beautiful, the prose so clear and vivid, that it seems effortless; on closer examination, one sees the rich
thematic palette Dominic Smith has used. This is a novel of love and longing, of authenticity and ethical
shadows, and most compelling, of art as alchemy, the way that it can turn grief into profound beauty.”
– Lauren Groff, author of FATES AND FURIES and the New York Times-bestselling ARCADIA
 “As this story of art, beauty, deception, and the harshest kinds of loss ranged over continents and centuries,
I was completely transfixed by the sense of unfolding revelation. THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE
VOS is, quite simply, one of the best novels I have ever read, and as close to perfect as any book I'm likely
to encounter in my reading life. One of those rare books I'll return to again and again in the coming years.”
– Ben Fountain, author of BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK, a National Book Award finalist
Lachlan Smith, PANTHER’S PREY, Mysterious Press/Grove-Atlantic, April 5, 2016
www.leomaxwellmysteries.com
Lachlan Smith won great critical acclaim for the first novel in his Leo Maxwell series, BEAR IS BROKEN (2013),
which won the Shamus Award for best first P.I. novel and was a Kirkus Reviews best book of the year. William
Bernhardt called it “one of the best debuts I've read in years.” The story continues in LION PLAYS ROUGH
(2014) and FOX IS FRAMED (April 2015). Now, comes the utterly suspenseful fourth installment PANTHER’S
PREY. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
Praise for the Leo Maxwell series:
  “Smith’s powerful legal thriller debut, the first in a series, grabs the reader by the throat and doesn’t let
go… Assured prose and taut plotting add up to a winner.” – Publishers Weekly
  “San Francisco's gritty streets and neighboring redwood forests add to the appeal, and the addictive
characters and the quirky, sideways look at the system close the deal on a terrific debut.” – Booklist
 “The final showdown is hair-raising… Sensitive, ingenious and suspenseful. A series is promised and very
welcome indeed.” – Kirkus
Dave Madden, IF YOU NEED ME I’LL BE OVER THERE, University of Indiana
Press/Break Away Books, May 19, 2016
www.davemadden.org
After the Plains queered him, Dave Madden decided to return the favor. This outstanding
collection of short stories tells the tale of a different kind of difference―one not set in the
glittering lights of New York or Los Angeles, but in the grand and wide American
Midwest. For Madden’s characters, their queerness is part of the environment, like the
soil, the sky, and the supermarket: an HIV-positive chemist uses football to connect with
his brothers; a 17-year-old girl tussles with a cartoon cobra to avoid thinking about the
mother who abandoned her; and a hotel concierge starts attending Mass even though his partner was molested by a
priest. In seeking out the ordinary struggles of extraordinary people trying to figure out their place within families
and communities, Madden masterfully explores what it means to be an outsider always looking in. AGENT:
TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 “While jaggedly comical and charming, Dave Madden’s fiction is a sharp reflection of our darker moods, a
rich skewering of domestic life, of workplace perversities, of misguided therapy. These portraits of
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families, lovers, and friends are smart, moving, and funny.” – Timothy Schaffert, author of THE SWAN
GONDOLA
“This is a fiction debut brimming with wisdom and wit where characters are forced into the periphery of
their own lives and struggle to overcome the impediments they pose to their own happiness. Dave Madden
renders these characters with the fond and exacting accuracy of a mathematician plying a notoriously
unsolvable problem. These are people who might have given in to desperation were it not so impractical
and who live with a moving fastidiousness of spirit in an effort to overcome ‘the chasms and imbalances
we create.’” – Kellie Wells, author of FAT GIRL, TERRESTRIAL
“A wry, deliciously smart sensibility presides over the magnificently multi-tentacled IF YOU NEED ME
I’LL BE OVER THERE. The title story alone is worth the price of admission, delivering the book to a
place of exquisite, wondrous tenderness. Dave Madden is a protean talent and his story collection is a
treasure trove.” – Maud Casey, author of THE MAN WHO WALKED AWAY
“Dave Madden has again given us a wonder of a book. These charismatic stories, as funny as they are sad,
are attuned to the possibility of disorder beneath every human aspiration.” – Paul Lisicky, author of THE
NARROW DOOR
“These unforgettable, beautifully crafted stories are narrated in a voice that is among the very best of this
generation of young writers. Madden is a brave, canny, bold writer who walks unafraid into lives that are
marginalized, damaged, ridden by grief and loss and sometimes held up by only a thread of reality.
Anything is possible in a Madden story, which move effortlessly between worlds where people misstep into
tragic loss and end up in a circus act, or maybe even in love.” – Jonis Agee, author of THE RIVER WIFE
Hannah Gersen, HOME FIELD, William Morrow, July 27, 2016
www.hannahgersen.com
Friday Night Lights meets My So-Called Life. The Millions staff writer Hannah Gersen’s debut novel, COUNT IT
ALL JOY, follows heartbroken Dean, a small-town high school football coach whose long-depressed wife, Nicole,
has just committed suicide. Dean is a hero in their Maryland town up until Nicole’s traumatic death—he brought
state championships to their small community, reorganized the high school athletic program, and married Nicole,
who was from one of the town’s most beloved families. Nicole’s suicide forces Dean to reassess his relationship
with the community, the school, his three children, and even his marriage. When Dean’s eleven-year old son, who
originally discovered his mother hanging from a rope swing during their vacation at a family farm, starts
withdrawing at school and from the family, Dean finds himself faced with a father’s worst nightmare: a runaway
son. Told in alternating chapters of Dean, who is in the midst of a new relationship that still feels like an affair, and
his aloof, rebellious nineteen-year old stepdaughter, Stephanie, COUNT IT ALL JOY is a story not only about a
fractured family learning how to become whole after a tragedy, but also about the power of forgiveness and moving
on. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
Craig Johnson, Walt Longmire series, Viking
LONGMIRE #12: UNTITLED, May 2016
www.craigallenjohnson.com
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Sheriff Walt Longmire had already rounded up a sizeable posse of devoted readers when the A&E television series
Longmire sent the Wyoming lawman’s popularity skyrocketing. Now, with five consecutive New York Times
bestsellers to his name and Longmire reaching an average of 5.4 million viewers per episode, Craig Johnson has
officially joined the ranks of bestseller-list regulars like C.J. Box and Tony Hillerman. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION.
PUB: AUDIO
 #11: DRY BONES debuts at #5 on The New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list; #8 on the
ebook list; and #7 on the combined list with a 51,000-copy first printing
 New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Denver Post, Los Angeles Times bestsellers
 Over 1.3 million Walt Longmire books sold in the US
 A bestselling, award-winning series in France with over 200,000 copies in the series sold
 Longmire, the television series adapted from Craig Johnson’s novels starring Robert Taylor, Lou
Diamond Phillips, and Katee Sackhoff premiered on A&E in June 2012 and airs its fourth season on
Netflix in September 2015
Reviews for the Walt Longmire series:
 “Top-notch…Johnson’s hero only gets better—both at solving cases and at hooking readers—with age.”
– Publishers Weekly
 “Once more, you can count on Longmire for action both physical and cerebral, a bit of humor and romance,
and a mighty good mystery.” – Kirkus
 “Since its inception, the best-selling series has continued to grow globally in popularity and is now a hit on
cable TV…. The story moves at a brisk pace, with room for some good-natured humor and plenty of
gorgeous Wyoming scenery. But the real stars of the series are Walt and his supporting cast…[they] are
like old friends whom you look forward to spending time with. Inevitably, once the story is finished,
readers will find themselves already looking forward to Walt's next visit.” – CNN
 “Johnson employs his trademark humor, many literary allusions, a cast readers can't help but love and
Johnson's obvious love of the land he's writing about. Readers will experience the West in all its grandeur
while Walt battles the evils trying to encroach upon his beloved county. Blending the literary novel with
the western and the mystery, Craig Johnson continues to deliver exceptional reads. He's not just staying on
the bull for eight seconds, Johnson's winning the whole rodeo.” – Jen’s Book Thoughts
 Foreign rights in the series licensed to Editions Gallmeister (France), Yilan Culture (China), Siruela
(world Spanish), Orion/Murder Room (UK), Edizioni EO (Italy), Harf (Turkey)

Rita Mae Brown, #25 TALL TAIL: A Mrs. Murphy Mystery, Bantam, May 2016
www.ritamaebrown.com
Rita Mae Brown and her feline co-author Sneaky Pie Brown return with an all-new
mystery featuring Mary Minor “Harry” Haristeen, crime-solving cats Mrs. Murphy and
Pewter, and ever-faithful Tee Tucker the corgi. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 The 25th title in the bestselling series “coauthored” with Sneaky Pie
Brown, the author’s cat
 Nearly 5 million copies in the series in print
 “As feline collaborators go, you couldn’t ask for better than Sneaky Pie
Brown.” – New York Times Book Review
Foreign rights in the series licensed to Ullstein (Germany), Hayakawa (Japan), Motto (Czech and
Slovak)
Caroline Leavitt, CRUEL BEAUTIFUL WORLD, Algonquin, Spring 2016
www.carolineleavitt.com
The 11th novel by New York Times-bestselling author Caroline Leavitt. Set against the backdrop of the early 1970s,
at the moment when the peace and love moment began to falter against the specter of the Charles Manson murders
and Altamont, CRUEL BEAUTIFUL WORLD asks: When does love become threatening to your own self or to
others? How do we really learn to love? And what do we owe the ones we love? The novel centers around an
unsolved crime: the murder of a 16-year-old girl, who runs away with her 30-year-old high school teacher to a 1970s
back-to-the-land paradise, only to find herself isolated and controlled. An exploration of dangerous love, CRUEL
BEAUTIFUL WORLD also examines first love from the vantage point of a young man haunted by the loss of his
wife; an 80-year-old widow who falls in love for the first time; and a young woman determined to find her sister’s
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killer, even as she struggles to accept her own culpability and find love, forgiveness and herself in the shadow of the
murder. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
Lynn Stegner, FOR ALL THE OBVIOUS REASONS: Stories, Arcade/Skyhorse, June
7, 2016
www.lynnstegner.com
Lynn Stegner’s superb collection of nine, remarkably distinct tales of passion, clear-eyed
wisdom, and honesty honed to a cutting edge. These are stories the reader can’t shake: A
woman living a marital shadow-life realizes that her long compensating heart has begun to
ominously decompensate. An affluent New Yorker becomes a hoarder to escape a future he
cannot bear to take up. A baby dies in a miasma of sibling resentments and from that, the
secrets of culpability unravel. A construction worker and a bereaved young neighbor together find a way to be in a
broken world. And in the beautifully moving narrative that closes the volume, a story about the depth of goodness
and duty, and of the profound love they both define and prevent. From the wild rivers of British Columbia to the
cement jungle of Manhattan, Stegner pulls us from our own worlds into her own. With luminous particulars and in
richly orchestrated language, these stories sound the vibrant, sometimes anguished music that composes human
lives. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
Simone Zelitch, JUDENSTAAT, Tor/St. Martin’s Press, June 21, 2016
www.simonezelitch.com
An alternate history thriller about a woman stalking her husband’s assassin in the Jewish homeland carved out of
Germany in 1948. The novel considers: What if a Jewish state were a direct answer to the Holocaust? What if the
Soviet Union “gave” the Jews Saxony? What does it mean to base a national history on cataclysmic loss? The
widow is piecing together a history of her country for a 40th anniversary documentary, and Judenstaat is changing
from a socialist republic to a neoliberal center for banking and “free trade.” A wall protects the country from
German fascists. The year is 1988. That wall is about to fall. Owing a debt to Phillip K. Dick and George Orwell,
JUDENSTAAT considers how history gets rewritten to suit the needs of the present and how we face the ghosts of
the past. AGENT: TRANSLATION, AUDIO. PUB: UK.
Flynn Berry, UNDER THE HARROW, Penguin Books, June 2016
Michener Center for Writers and Yaddo fellow Flynn Berry’s debut literary suspense novel set in the idyllic village
of Marlow, England about two sisters, one of whom is found brutally murdered, and the incident in their past that
may hold the key to solving the case. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
Jules Feiffer, COUSIN JOSEPH, W.W. Norton, July 2016
The prequel to the New York Times-bestselling graphic novel KILL MY MOTHER, tells the story of Sam Hannigan,
father to Annie, husband to Elsie, and supposedly the only honest cop in Bay City, who lost his life in the line of
duty. Everyone in KILL MY MOTHER thinks they know the real story of what happened to Sam but they’re all
wrong, and COUSIN JOSEPH reveals the true story behind his murder. As Laura Lippman writes on the front page
of the New York Times Book Review, KILL MY MOTHER is “a story about stories, the myths we have to create in
order to keep putting one foot in front of the other,” and COUSIN JOSEPH promises to continue with that theme,
plumbing the noir-genre and examining the seedy side of the Hollywood dream factory and its connection to antiSemitism and the violent right and left-wing politics of the 1930s-era. If KILL MY MOTHER was a canny
deconstruction of the femme fatale figure, COUSIN JOSEPH is his take on Jewish-American identity and history.
COUSIN JOSEPH is classic Feiffer -- funny, subversive and full of twists and turns. PUB: UK, TRANSL., AUDIO.
Anne Korkeakivi, SHINING SEA, Little, Brown, August, 2016
www.annekorkeakivi.com
From the author of AN UNEXPECTED GUEST (Little, Brown, 2012), comes a novel,
spanning several generations that draws us into the complicated world of a family in
Southern California after the sudden death of the father. Beginning with 43 year-old Michael
Gannon’s fatal heart attack, SHINING SEA draws us into the turbulent lives of his widow and
offspring in the wake of their loss. Brilliantly described and utterly alive on the page, the Gannon
clan find themselves charting paths they never anticipated, for decades to come. Korkeakivi
transports the reader through the years: from WWII to the present, from California to Woodstock’s
heyday, from London’s gritty nightlife in the eighties to the seas of the Inner Hebrides, from Arizona to
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Massachusetts. Epic, tender, and beautifully rendered, SHINING SEA is a family story—about the ripple effects of
war, about the passing down of memory, and about the power of the American ideal of heroism to lead us astray but,
also, keep us afloat. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
Jessica Anya Blau, THE TROUBLE WITH LEXIE, HarperCollins, Summer 2016
www.jessicaanyablau.com
Thirty-three year old Lexie James, who grew up so poor she often drank a Coke for dinner, finds herself thrust into
the world of great privilege and even greater finances when she takes a job as the school counselor at The Ruxton
Academy, one of the most exclusive private boarding schools in the U.S. She’s engaged to the sweet and wholesome
Peter and together they live a happy, simple life. But when Lexie falls in love with Ruxton’s largest donor, Daniel
Waite, whose son is the fourth generation of Waites to attend Ruxton, her real troubles begin. Lexie breaks her
engagement to Peter, moves out of her house, and takes up residence at the Ruxton Academy. Things truly spin out
of control when Lexie discovers that Daniel hasn’t been entirely honest with her. In fact, he’s full of lies and deceit
and Lexie, who can barely see straight or understand what is happening to her, wakes up one morning to find herself
naked in bed with Daniel’s son, Ruxton Senior, Ethan Waite. As she scrambles to protect herself from public
humiliation and even jail, Lexie discovers that her phone has been erased and her computer has been confiscated,
leaving her without a trail of proof. Readers will be holding their breath until they see that, indeed, Lexie does figure
a way out of all that has befallen her. Told with precise and unflinching insight into the elite world of America’s top
boarding schools, Blau weaves a wildly-disturbing, provocative and true-to-life story. By the author of THE
SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES, DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME, and THE WONDER BREAD
SUMMER. AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 “Why can’t I ever find novels like this? The last time I can remember feeling quite as buoyed by a work of
fiction, and as charmed by a writer, was when I discovered Charles Portis.” – Nick Hornby on THE
WONDER BREAD SUMMER
Constance Leisure, AMOUR PROVENCE, Simon & Schuster, Summer 2016
In a wine village in the south of France, a teenager is seduced by his schoolmate’s mother and they suffer different
and enduring consequences. A young Arab from Morocco learns that life in the country of Liberté and Egalité can
be just as confining as in her own country. A spirited old woman who spends her days traversing beloved mountain
trails is committed to an old-age home by her grasping daughter, and spends her days and nights haunted by longsuppressed memories of the Second World War. These and other characters live lives that overlap and intertwine in
two small villages over many decades, from the Nazi occupation to the present. The novel is a portrait of lives
deeply lived, rooted in the soil of Provence, against the backdrop of a region and a nation gripped by change. PUB:
UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
Ann Hood, THE BOOK THAT MATTERS MOST, W.W. Norton, Summer 2016
www.annhood.us
An enthralling novel about loss, secrets, friendship and the healing power of love and literature by one of our
most celebrated novelists, the bestselling author of THE KNITTING CIRCLE. When Ava’s twenty-five year
marriage falls apart, and her two grown children are pursuing their own lives outside of the country, Ava hits rock
bottom and joins a book group, not only for her love of reading but out of sheer desperation for companionship. The
group’s mission throughout the year is for each member to present the book that matters most to them allowing Ava
to rediscover a mysterious book from her childhood—one that helped her through the traumas of the untimely deaths
of her sister and mother. Alternating with Ava’s story, is that of her troubled daughter Maggie, who in Paris
descends into a destructive relationship with an older man. Ava’s mission to find the book and its enigmatic author
takes her on a quest that unravels the secrets of her past and offers her and Maggie the chance to remake their lives.
THE BOOK THAT MATTERS MOST is the story of how books can save us, how stories can be the conduit into
our pasts and the door into our futures. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION. PUB: AUDIO.
Rita Mae Brown, CAKE WALK, a new novel in the SIX OF ONE series, Ballantine/Bantam, October 2016
www.ritamaebrown.com
Continues the beloved Six of One series. Perched right on the Mason-Dixon line, tiny Runnymede, Maryland, is ripe
with a history almost as colorful as the women who live there – including Louise and Julia, the boldly eccentric
Hunsenmeir sisters, who spend their whole lives in Runnymede, cheerfully quibbling about everything from men to
child-rearing to how to drive a car. Sparkling with a perfect combination of sisterhood and sass, the Six of One
books show a richly textured Southern canvas—Rita Mae Brown “at her winning, fondest best” (Kirkus). Rita Mae
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hasn’t traveled back to Runnymede in many years, and this new one will be sure to win over the hearts of readers
old and new. Titles in this series include SIX OF ONE (1978), BINGO (1988), and LOOSE LIPS (1999). AGENT:
UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
Praise for the Six of One series:
 “Brown has some of the same effervescent yet secure trust in her local characters that Eudora Welty feels
for hers… When history nicks them, they slap right back.” – Kirkus
 “Beams with Brown’s fondness for her characters and her delight in the oddness of the world of
Runnymede.” – Boston Herald
Sonya Chung, THE LOVED ONES, Relegation Books, Fall 2016
www.sonyachung.com
The Millions writer and founding editor of Bloom, Sonya Chung’s THE LOVED ONES is the story of an unlikely
and unconventional intimacy between Charles, an African-American man, and Hannah, a young Korean-American
girl. After a catastrophic day at the beach in the summer of 1984 when Hannah is babysitting Charles’s children,
their connection is born from extreme and irrevocable tragedy and persists over many years, deepening in meaning
for both of them. The storyline moves from urban Washington, D.C to rural Korea to the streets of Paris, and, as in
her first novel, LONG FOR THIS WORLD (Scribner, 2010), the author fluidly weaves together time periods, global
settings, and intense personal relationships. At the heart of the novel are questions about family and the primacy of
sensuality in the human experience. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
Nathan Hill, THE NIX, Knopf, Fall 2016
www.nathanhill.net
THE NIX is Nathan Hill’s ambitious, bittersweet, wholly inventive debut that transports the reader through
one family’s experience over generations and disparate geographies, and through cultural moments such as
World War II Norway, the Chicago Riots of 1968, the Gulf War, Occupy Wall Street, and the virtual tundra
of the Wintersaber Glaciers in the multi-player online gaming world of “Elfquest.” Samuel AndersonAndreson’s mother left his family when he was a boy. So it is a surprise when she re-enters his life some twenty
years later, having made headlines for hurling stones at a conservative presidential candidate at a rally. Stalled as a
writer who peaked early, he spends his days playing video games and teaching literature poorly. Under pressure
from his publisher to deliver on a ten-year-old book contract, Samuel sets out instead to write the story of his
mother’s life—a plan that will capitalize on her fame, and give him the satisfaction of portraying her publicly in the
worst possible way. Instead, as he researches her story and excavates through family history, he finds answers that
force him to reevaluate all that he thought he knew about his mother, and himself. A moving and often funny novel
of mothers and sons, of teen-age love triangles, of the Midwestern suburbs, and Choose Your Own Adventure
stories, THE NIX is a book of wide narrative sweep that reaches all the way to Hammerfest Norway, the
northernmost city on the planet, where we meet the titular Nix of Norse mythology. THE NIX also uses a single
reoccurring photograph to unravel the mystery of Samuel’s mother’s past. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 Foreign rights licensed to Picador (UK), De Bezige Bij (Holland), Brombergs (Sweden), Piper
(Germany), Lindhardt & Ringhof (Denmark), Editions Gallimard (France), Rizzoli (Italy) Kinneret
(Israel), Salamandra (world Spanish), Salamandra (Catalan), youngdotcom (Korea), Libri
(Hungary), Gummerus (Finland), Gyldendal Norsk (Norway)
Jane Alison, NINE ISLAND, Catapult, Fall 2016
www.janealison.com
A fractured, voice-driven nonfiction novel about a woman in a glass tower in Miami Beach puzzling out the
problems of loneliness and erotic love as she translates Ovid’s stories of sex. A central narrative about her sexual
past and present, as well as the comic goings-on in her faded-glamour condo, is broken by brief ruminations on the
origins of erotic love and modern re-imaginings of Ovid. The tone is wry, and Miami Beach—especially the
Venetian Islands—with all of its steamy silliness and impossibly beautiful flora and fauna, plays a big role. It is in
this lush backdrop that our heroine ponders her retirement from love, even as she is befriended by a woman in the
building who is making far more grave decisions. The author has published three previous novels (with FSG and
Harcourt) including THE LOVE-ARTIST; a memoir (HMH) called THE SISTERS ANTIPODES; and, most
recently, CHANGE ME, translations of Ovid (Oxford). She directs the creative writing program at UVA. AGENT:
UK, TRANSLATION. PUB: AUDIO.
 “Magic… Brilliant.” – Lauren Groff
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
“A soul in free fall, full of the giddy wit of the emotionally starving, the unfulfilled desire of being in love
with love, and weirdly sexy conversations about ancient literature.” – David Shields
Martin Hyatt, BEAUTIFUL GRAVITY, Antibookclub, 2016
www.martinhyatt.com
BEAUTIFUL GRAVITY is a story about working class lives and broken dreams in the American South,
written with noteworthy compassion and the kind of extraordinary sensitivity that saves forgotten lives from
vanishing. Set in a small town of peaceful nothingness deep in the Louisiana bayou, BEAUTIFUL GRAVITY is
about four characters. The loner 36 year-old narrator Boz feels “the more of a man I become the more of a boy I
actually am.” Boz is stuck: “Those who’ve ever been trapped somewhere understand what it’s like to stay stuck.”
There’s nothing holding him in Noxington but bad memories, exclusion, and death. Boz’s only extant friend from
his 20’s is the anorexic daughter of a Pentecostal preacher. Meg has been in and out of mental institutions. Into their
broken lives via a red sports car comes a beautiful city-burnished couple: Kyle, a former athlete, and Catty, a oneshot faded Nashville star. All four proceed to fall in and out of love with one another. Out of this delicately
conveyed emotional turbulence Boz’s beautiful gravity emerges. And his future, for once, becomes clear. Hyatt’s
first novel A SCARECROW’S BIBLE (Suspect Thoughts Press) was the winner of the 2007 Edmund White Debut
Fiction Award; a finalist for the 2006 Violet Quill Award, the 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction,
and the 2007 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Men's Fiction; an alternate featured selection of the
Doubleday/Insight Out Book Club; and an Honor Book in Literature for the 2007 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara
Gittings Literature Award. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 “This is a narrator I would follow anywhere. Very much alive with moments of true idiosyncratic beauty.”
– Michael Cunningham
 “Martin Hyatt knows about love and fear, despair and redemption, joy and guilt, and he tells the truth. He
writes like an angel, albeit a sad one.” – Abigail Thomas, author of A THREE DOG LIFE
 “This is very gratifying to read… Vivid and compelling work.” – Darcey Steinke, author of JESUS SAVES
 “Superb and evocative work.” – Jennifer Levin, author of THE SEA OF LIGHT and WATER DANCES
 “What Martin Hyatt puts on the page is touching, compelling, and refreshingly different.” – Lisa Randall,
author of WARPED PASSAGES and KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR
Laura Pritchett, THE BLUE HOUR, Counterpoint, 2016
www.laurapritchett.com
Thirteen people hunkered down in an isolated community high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains find their paths
twisting and colliding during the course of one blizzard and its aftermath. We enter the world of Blue Moon
Mountain, where the residents charge into the landscape of red-hot lust, passion, obligation, and loss, and are forced
to direct an honest look at themselves and the lengths they’ll go to protect one another. Violence and sex, the hard
edge of yearning, and the long road of desire, and the unexpected paths of mourning and lust collide in this
collection of stories. By the author of the critically acclaimed novel STARS GO BLUE (Counterpoint, 2014),
finalist for the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award, Colorado Book Award, WILLA Award and High
Plains Book Award. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION. PUB: AUDIO.
Carlos Fuentes, FEDERICO EN SU BALCON, Alfaguara (Spanish language
publication), November 2012; Dalkey Archive Press, 2016
In his latest (and last—Fuentes died in 2012) magnum opus, the acclaimed Mexican
writer takes on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Fuentes gives the author of
THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA a second chance in the setting of a contemporary
Berlin. In the novel God says, “You can live a second time,” and brings Nietzsche back
to life, sits him on the balcony, and they start a dialogue. This dialogue is the novel itself.
Nietzsche appears on a balcony, as in the famed Edvard Munch portrait, in twenty-first
century Berlin—perhaps punished by God for the line about Him being dead or perhaps
in evidence of Nietzche’s idea of Eternal Return. Meanwhile, events unfold during the heady days before, and in the
frightening aftermath of, a modern-day revolution in an unnamed country. The revolution harkens back to historical
revolutions, including the French, Mexican, Cuban, English Revolutions, and those of 1848. Its three central
characters are revolutionaries: Saul, the soul of the revolution, Dan, its practical conciliator, and Aaron, the moral
purist. The narrative recounts the political upheaval by concentrating on these characters and on the important
people in their lives. In inter-chapters, Nietzsche, on the balcony, partakes in thoughtful, and occasionally funny,
16
metafictional dialogues with the Author on the book's action and on its significance. Fuentes has previously written
some formally daring books and some profound books: this one is both. AGENT: TRANSLATION (EXCEPT SPANISH,
PORTUGUESE, AND GERMAN), AUDIO. PUB: UK.
 Foreign rights licensed to Editora Rocco (Brazil), Il Saggiatore (Italy), Editions Gallimard (France),
Can Yayinlari (Turkey), Swiat Ksiazki (Poland)
David James Poissant, CLASS, ORDER, FAMILY, S&S, 2016
www.davidjamespoissant.com
The much-anticipated debut novel by the author of the acclaimed story collection, THE HEAVEN OF ANIMALS.
An ornithologist, a physicist, a pharmaceuticals rep, a painter, an elementary school teacher, and a man who can't
hold down a job: these are the Starlings. Brought together for a last week at the family lake house now for sale, three
couples witness a tragedy and soon question that which they've long called happiness. CLASS, ORDER, FAMILY
is an unflinching look at marriages both open and closed, work in the 21st century, and the not-so-nuclear American
family. AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
Also by David James Poissant:
THE HEAVEN OF ANIMALS, S&S, March 4, 2014; pb March, 2015
In each of the stories in this remarkable collection, David James Poissant delivers a moving
portrayal of a relationship in turmoil. His gritty, all-too-real characters stand on the precipice
of their lives, chased there by trouble of their own making, and face a singular choice: do they
jump, or turn away? Poissant's invented worlds shine with honesty and dark complexity, but
also a profound compassion. Fresh, smart, lively—and often wickedly funny—the stories in
THE HEAVEN OF ANIMALS are breathtakingly original and compulsively readable.
AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 One of ten debuts longlisted for the 2015 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize
 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award Finalist for First Fiction
 Winner of the 2015 GLCA New Writers Award
 Winner of the Florida Book Awards’ Silver Medal for Fiction
 An Amazon 2014 “Best Book of the Year”
 Tweed’s Magazine’s Best Short Story Collection of 2014
 One of the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s 9 Best Books of 2014
 One of The Millions’ “Most Anticipated” Books of 2014
 A Washington Post “Out Now” Pick
 A New York Post “Must-Read” Selection
  "Unsparing yet warmly empathetic stories...akin to both Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver in
humane spirit and technical mastery." – Kirkus
  “We care about and sympathize with Poissant’s characters, even the most conflicted and difficult ones.
The pieces vary greatly in length, style, and subject matter…Poissant is an excellent writer, and though
much of the material is depressing, the brief and beautiful moments of human connection shine through in
every story.” – Library Journal
 “An extraordinary debut from Florida author David James Poissant—a Venn diagram of the miraculous
and the absurd. Like Flannery O'Connor, Poissant's stories are marked by violence, humor, and grace; like
Carver and Diaz, Poissant writes scenes soaked in kerosene and seconds from combustion. In these pages
you'll find charming reprobates and self-deluded hustlers, young lovers, alligators and dead dogs, fathers
and sons, nudists who know that "cold is a state of mind," star-nosed moles that exhume the glow of a
buried baby, all the warped love of family, the batshit hilarity of the South, and the ‘geometry’ of loss.”
– Karen Russell, author of SWAMPLANDIA!
 Foreign rights licensed to Albin Michel (France), Edhasa Argentina (Spanish/LA), Enne &Enne
(Italy)
Kristen Iskandrian, MOTHER, MOTHERER, MOTHEREST, Twelve, Jan/Feb 2017
Reminiscent of Karen Russell and Jenny Offill, Kristen Iskandrian’s debut novel is a coming-of-age story that
follows Agnes, a college student in the mid-1990s, who is running out of people she can count on. Agnes is caught
between the broken home she leaves behind and the (be)wilderness of life on campus—booze, boys, and extreme,
vision-inducing loneliness. What she needs most of all is her mother, who disappears seemingly once and for all
after leaving Agnes at school. She also misses her brother, who left the family permanently and tragically a few
17
years prior. As Agnes navigates new relationships and difficulties, she writes funny, dark letters to her mother, both
in an effort to conjure a closeness they never had and to attempt to translate her experiences. When she finds out she
is pregnant, Agnes begins to contend with what it means to be a mother and, in some ways, what it means to be your
own mother. The end of the world as she knows it is also, she learns, the beginning of a new one. AGENT:
TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 “Agnes is one of the most unforgettable protagonists I’ve read in recent years—as if a Dickens heroine was
reimagined by a literary girl gang made up of Deb Olin Unferth, Katherine Dunn and Lydia Davis.”
– Porochista Khakpour, author of THE LAST ILLUSION
 “An utterly thrilling voice, and MOTHER, MOTHERER, MOTHEREST will slay you with its inventive,
spiky, and heartrending investigation into the dark mysteries of family life—and the quest for a private
identity within it. A smart, gorgeous, and singular debut.” – Laura van den Berg, author of FIND ME
NON-FICTION
Carlos Fuentes, PANTALLAS DE PLATA (SILVER SCREENS), Alfaguara,
Revised edition, Fall 2015
Carlos Fuentes's book-length love letter to the Hollywood cinema and stars of the
1930s and 1940s that he all but completed before his death in 2012 and had earlier
subtitled “a cinematographic novel.” Far from being an academic book of film
criticism or an exhaustive reference tome, SILVER SCREENS is a personal journey
with Carlos Fuentes through the movies of his life, which spanned nearly the entire
history of the medium. As Fuentes tells it, he was almost born in a movie house in
Panama, on November 11, 1928, during a screening his parents attended of King
Vidor's silent film of La Bohème, which augured his triple life-long passion for literature, opera and cinema. Life
and movies—biography and cinematography—are fused and confused in memory. SILVER SCREENS is a
cinematic memoir narrated in a complicit tone by a master storyteller in which Fuentes invites the reader to
daydream with him at the movies, and also a brief history of cinema told, at times, like a novel. Carlos Fuentes
wrote brilliantly and extensively about cinema throughout his life—he devoted thousands of pages alone to the films
of his friend, Luis Buñuel—and his other writing was inarguably influenced by cinema. SILVER SCREENS is a
parting gift from Carlos Fuentes, not just to cinephiles, but to anyone curious about the stars and stories of the silver
screen. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION (EXCEPT SPANISH, PORTUGUESE, AND GERMAN), AUDIO.
 Revised edition to be published with a new introduction by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Academy
Award-winning writer and director of 2014’s Birdman and 2015’s The Revenant
 English language first serial excerpt in Film Quarterly
Also by Carlos Fuentes: LA GRAN NOVELA LATINOAMERICANA (THE
GREAT LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL), Dalkey Archive Press, February 12, 2016
(originally published in Spanish by Alfaguara, October 2011)
One of the late Carlos Fuentes's final projects, this compendium of his criticism traces
the evolution of the Latin American novel from the discovery of America to the present
day. Combining historical perspective with personal and often opinionated
interpretation, Fuentes gives us a tour from Machado de Assis to Borges and beyond. A
landmark analysis, as well as a scintillating and often wry commentary on a great
author's peers and influences, this book is as much a contribution to Latin American
literature as it is a chronicle of that literature's greatest achievements. AGENT: TRANSLATION (EXCEPT SPANISH,
PORTUGUESE, AND GERMAN), AUDIO. PUB: UK.
Janet Sternburg, WHITE MATTER: A Memoir of Family and Medicine, Hawthorne
Books, September 15, 2015
www.janetsternburg.com
WHITE MATTER is the story of a close-knit Bostonian Jewish working-class family of
five sisters and one brother and the impact they and their next generation endured due to
the popularization of lobotomy during the 20th century. When Janet Sternburg’s
grandfather abandoned his family, and her uncle, Bennie, became increasing mentally ill,
Sternburg’s mother and aunts had to bind together and make crucial decisions for the
18
family’s survival. Two of the toughest familial decisions they made were to have Bennie undergo a lobotomy to
treat his schizophrenia and later to have youngest sister, Francie, undergo the same procedure to treat severe
depression. Both heartrending decisions were largely a result of misinformation disseminated that popularized and
legitimized lobotomy. Woven into Sternburg’s story are notable figures that influenced the family as well as the
entire medical field. The phrase “prefrontal lobotomy” was common currency growing up in Janet Sternburg’s
family and in WHITE MATTER she details this scientific discovery that disconnects the brain’s white matter,
leaving a person without feelings, and its undeserved legitimization and impact on her family. By the late 1970s, the
surgical practice was almost completely out of favor, but its effects left patients and their families with complicated
legacies as well as a stain on American medical history. Every generation has to make its own medical choices
based on knowledge that will inevitably come to seem inadequate in the future. AGENT (FOR PUB): TRANSLATION.
PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 One of Publishers Weekly’s Big Indie Books of Fall 2015
 “In this haunting memoir…Sternburg's writing is incisive, and she deeply explores the boundaries that were
unjustly crossed by family members in the name of love… [A] memorable story. A vivid and melancholy
exploration into the mental illnesses that affected one woman's family and the radical and damaging
operations performed to counteract these ailments.” – Kirkus
 “Much more than a memoir, WHITE MATTER examines mental health at a macro-level and the medical
legacy people leave behind for their own families to deal with—or not.” – 24700, The CalArts Blog
 “A unique book. The writing is beautiful, the observations refined, the subject gripping.” – Antonio
Damasio, author of DESCARTES’ ERROR and SELF COMES TO MIND
 “A stunning achievement, attempting nothing less than to understand the impossible. Sternburg is a master
at creating the perfect structuring metaphor through which to tell her family’s history and by which to
illuminate a particularly dark time in our nation’s history. The work of WHITE MATTER is to find
resolution to the dilemma of lives gone awry, despite the best of intentions. Ultimately the book’s wisdom
is its graceful depiction of wholeness within loss, the strength Sternburg found to escape her past, and then
to return with questions only she could ask. Her answers matter to all of us.” – Ladette Randolph, author of
LEAVING THE PINK HOUSE and editor-in-chief of Ploughshares
 “Janet Sternburg’s WHITE MATTER—which intertwines the story of two lobotomized relatives, the
history of lobotomy itself, and the author’s own coming of age/ coming to writing—demonstrates that
sometimes telling it slant needs to give way to telling it straight. As Sternburg grapples thoroughly with her
unnerving subject, her antennae admirably stay out for that which makes us human, how we serve and fail
each other, what enables both love and grace.” – Maggie Nelson, author of THE ART OF CRUELTY
Elizabeth Benedict (editor), ME, MY HAIR, AND I: 27 Women Untangle Our
Obsession with Hair, Algonquin, September 29, 2015
www.elizabethbenedict.com
These twenty-seven “hair pieces” offer up reflections and revelations about family, race,
religion, ritual, culture, motherhood, politics, celebrity, what goes on in African American
kitchens and at Hindu Bengali weddings, alongside stories about the influence of Jackie
Kennedy, Lena Horne, Farrah Fawcett, and the Grateful Dead. Layered into these essays
you’ll find surprises, insights, hilarity, and the resonance of common experience. Marita
Golden writes about her grief over what so many African American women still endure to
obtain “good hair.” Patricia Volk itemizes her seventeen hair care products, each with a price tag. Myla Goldberg
tells of how ill equipped she was to tend the hair of her adopted biracial daughter. And Suleika Jaouad describes the
ravages of chemotherapy and the empowerment of shaving designs onto her head. These writers know that a
woman’s hair is her glory, her nemesis, her history, and her self-esteem. They know, too, that many things in life
matter more than hair, but few bring as much pleasure as a really great hairdo. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 Featured in Vanity Fair’s “Hot Type”
 First serial excerpts in Harper’s Bazaar, Real Simple, Vogue.com, The New Republic, and more
 “Splendid… By turns wry, tender, pointed, and laugh-out-loud funny, the selections take us along on the
contributors’ tangled, complicated, and thoroughly engaging journeys… These talented women make it
clear that hair is a distinct, if sometimes exasperating, marker of identity and meaning.” – Publishers
Weekly
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


“We wear our hair every day, and this collection demonstrates—with great clarity and insight—the
complexities of what that means for women of all backgrounds. An important conversation and worthy of
note.” – School Library Journal
“Benedict has gathered such wonderful writers to examine the allure, magic, curse, thrills, seductions, and
sorrows of hair. Written with tender sensitivity and wild wit, these essays may start with the external, but
they go deep into the lives of the writers, into what appearance means, and into how they see themselves
and their place in the world.” – Luanne Rice, author of THE LEMON ORCHARD
“This is the book I wish I’d had when I let my hair go gray and when my husband and I made the pact that
if he stopped talking about hockey, I’d stop talking about my hair. Now with these wonderful, affirming,
and insightful essays, I understand that there’s merely a hair’s breadth between my hair and myself. This
brilliant collection that takes us from Samson and Delilah to silver foxes is a terrific read for those of us
who obsess about our hair. Or those who live with those of us who do. A collection that’s, dare I say, a cut
above the rest.” – Mary Morris, author of THE JAZZ PALACE
Susan Cheever, DRINKING IN AMERICA: Our Secret History, Twelve/Grand
Central, October 13, 2015
www.susancheever.com
Best-selling author and historian Susan Cheever chronicles the many stages to our national
love affair with booze, taking a long, thoughtful look at the way alcohol has permeated and
affected our nation's history from the drunkenness of George Washington to the current
effect of alcohol abuse American health care. Drinking is a cherished American custom—a
way to celebrate and a way to grieve and a way to take the edge off. But where is the line
between a good time and a whirlwind of destruction, between a few glasses of wine and the kind of alcoholism that
leads to violence of the body and of the soul? Both a lively history and unflinching cultural investigation,
DRINKING IN AMERICA unveils our torrid affair with alcohol, asking: When are we going to wake up and smell
the whiskey? PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 “A distinguished biographer and cultural historian offers a fascinating look at the place and function of
alcohol throughout American history… As implicated as she is in the history of drinking in America,
Cheever does not condemn it. Instead, she offers a colorful portrait of a society that, like her own family,
has been indelibly shaped by its drinking habits. An intelligently argued study of our country's ‘passionate
connection to drinking.’” – Kirkus
 “I can't stop raving (soberly!) about Susan Cheever's new book. It is both enlightening and frightening. A
brilliant and important addition to our understanding of what goes wrong and what can continue to go
wrong in a world dominated by the most deadly legal liquid ever invented.” – Judy Collins
 “Susan Cheever offers a humane but unsentimental view of our nation's inebriated past in DRINKING IN
AMERICA. To excuse the pun, it's an addictive read full of wit and verve, revealing the deep influence of
alcohol on many of our country's most significant moments, from the landing at Plymouth Harbour, to the
Kennedy Assassination and Watergate. This is terrific social history but not as it's usually told, and all the
better for it.” – Amanda Foreman, author of GEORGIANA: Duchess of Devonshire (winner of the
Whitbread) and A WORLD ON FIRE: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War
Greil Marcus, THREE SONGS, THREE SINGERS, THREE NATIONS, Harvard
University Press, October 7, 2015
www.greilmarcus.net
In three songs that seem to be written by no one, Marcus shows, we discover not
only three different ways of talking about the United States but three different
nations within its formal boundaries. Drawn from Marcus’s 2013 Massey Lectures
at Harvard, this new work by the acclaimed pop culture journalist, Greil Marcus, delves
into three episodes in the history of American commonplace song: Bascom Lamar
Lunsford’s 1928 “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” Geeshie Wiley’s 1930 “Last
Kind Words Blues,” and Bob Dylan’s 1964 “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” How each of
these songs manages to convey the uncanny sense that it was written by no one illuminates different aspects of
the commonplace song tradition. Some songs truly did come together over time without an identifiable author.
Others draw melodies and motifs from obscure sources but, in the hands of a particular artist, take a final,
indelible shape. And, as in the case of Dylan’s “Hollis Brown,” there are songs that were written by a single
20
author but that communicate as anonymous productions, as if they were folk songs passed down over many
generations. AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 “Greil Marcus remains pop’s most visionary writer, following the thread that flows like the ghostly
Mississippi beneath America’s musical traditions. He’s always essential reading.” – Bruce Springsteen
 “A beautiful and hypnotic treatise about how songs journey from origin to ether, from nowhere to
everywhere, from a single voice to a common one. As always, Marcus writes with an exhilarating
musicality that posits the reader inside the notes, directly upon the sonic road itself, at once both visceral
and transcendent.” – Carrie Brownstein
 Foreign rights licensed to Henan University Press (Mainland China)
Greil Marcus, REAL LIFE ROCK: The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986-2014,
Yale University Press, October 27, 2015
www.greilmarcus.net
The Washington Post hails Greil Marcus as “our greatest cultural critic.” Writing in the
London Review of Books, D. D. Guttenplan calls him “probably the most astute critic of
American popular culture since Edmund Wilson.” For nearly thirty years, he has written a
remarkable column that has migrated from the Village Voice to Artforum, Salon, City
Pages, Interview, and The Believer and currently appears in the Barnes & Noble Review. It
has been a laboratory where Marcus has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an
enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements, teasing out from the welter
of everyday objects what amounts to a de facto theory of cultural transmission. Published to complement the
paperback edition of THE HISTORY OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL IN TEN SONGS, REAL LIFE ROCK reveals the critic
in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, astute, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud.
The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance. AGENT: TRANSLATION.
PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 Foreign rights licensed to Henan University Press (Mainland China)
Diane Roberts, TRIBAL: College Football and the Secret Heart of America, Harper,
October 27, 2015
Part introspective soul searching, part cultural analysis, TRIBAL tackles the controversies
plaguing college athletics, tracing the dubious historical underpinnings of Americans’
most popular sport, offering a visceral and often funny analysis of its tribal thrills and deep
contradictions. Florida State’s football team is always in the headlines, producing Heisman
Trophy candidates, winning championships, and, at the same time, dealing with federal
investigations into corruption and rape. Same as many big time collegiate sports programs.
Seems no matter how the team transgresses off the field, if they excel on the field,
everyone forgives them. Contributor to NPR and The Oxford American and conflicted Seminole Diane Roberts
looks at the problems plaguing her campus in Tallahassee (where she is a Faulkner scholar), examining them within
the context of college football itself and its significance in American life, and explores how the game shapes our
culture. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION. PUB: AUDIO.
 “Covers with telling wit the history of dramatic and often violent rivalries (among fans as well as players).”
– Booklist
 “In Diane Roberts’ deft hands, football is never just a game: it's a mirror of American attitudes toward
gender, class, and especially race. Roberts is a brilliant cultural critic and a dream of a writer, and TRIBAL
is not only timely. It's necessary reading.” – Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning DEVIL IN
THE GROVE
 “Diane Roberts is a wonder. She’s a surpassingly insightful writer and is as funny as a stand-up comic. Her
book, TRIBAL, on college football and far more, is a sui generis masterpiece.” – Robert Olen Butler,
author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A GOOD SCENT FROM A COLD MOUNTAIN
 “TRIBAL is a lover’s quarrel with college football so raucous, so entertainingly appalled, and so wise that
it goes down as easily as a shot of bourbon from a smuggled flask on a Saturday afternoon in the fall.”
– Will Blythe, author of TO HATE LIKE THIS IS TO BE HAPPY FOREVER
 “Diane Roberts is irresistible, the Molly Ivins of Florida, and TRIBAL is as essential to understanding the
dynamics of American culture. TRIBAL isn't just a good book, it's a great one—and hilarious to boot.”
– Bob Shacochis, author of THE WOMAN WHO LOST HER SOUL
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Joseph Skibell, MY FATHER’S GUITAR AND OTHER IMAGINARY THINGS,
Algonquin, October 27, 2015
www.josephskibell.com
Did Joseph Skibell’s father trick him when he offered his beautiful guitar and then
delivered a not-so-beautiful one? Can it be that the telemarketer calling at dinnertime is a
thoughtful, sensitive person also looking for a Utopian world? Can a father have any
control over his teenage daughter’s sex life? Can a son have control over his father’s
expectations? The award-winning writer ponders these and other bewildering questions in
his first nonfiction book. A collection of true stories in which the author, a dreamer,
reflects on the things that happen to him because of his recurring confusion between what is real and what he has
imagined, misremembered, or perhaps, wished were so. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 “Colorful and endearing, the book will appeal to readers who appreciate Augusten Burroughs-style, reallife anecdotal ponderings focused on familial ties and how life's eternal cycle of enchantment and
disillusionment somehow sustains us. A memoir/essay collection of consistently heartfelt and enlightening
morsels of humanity.” – Kirkus
 “Like a literary Louis C.K.—Skibell is not shy about exposing the foibles of the man he has become, or his
clumsy pursuits of happiness.” – Bret Wood, writer/director
 “The voice is so beguiling, the tone so sweet and hilarious, you quickly realize that you are in the hands of
a master… Mr. I. B. Singer, meet Mr. Twain. This is a book to be prized in the way readers prize the work
of Charles Portis.” – James Magnuson, author of FAMOUS WRITERS I HAVE KNOWN
 “These wise and humane offerings aren’t stories; they’re musical notes, from a master composer. And they
swirl and swell and come together and echo one another to create a concerto of love and sadness and
warmth and humor that will linger in your memory long after reading, as the best music always does.”
– Jeremy Dauber, author of THE WORLDS OF SHOLEM ALEICHEM
Ann Hood (editor), KNITTING PEARLS: Writers Writing about Knitting, W.W.
Norton, November 9, 2015
www.annhood.us
The rhythm, ritual, and pleasure of knitting are celebrated in this new collection for
lovers of both knitting and literature. In KNITTING PEARLS, two dozen writers write
about the transformative and healing powers of knitting. Lily King remembers the year her
family lived in Italy and a knitted hat that helped her daughter adjust to her new home.
Laura Lippman explores how converting to Judaism changed not only Christmas but also
her mother’s gift of a knitted stocking. Jodi Picoult remembers her grandmother and how through knitting she felt
that everlasting love. And Bill Roorbach remembers his freshman year in college when knitting soothed his broken
heart and helped him fall in love again. Other contributors include Steve Almond, Ann Leary, Christina Baker Kline,
Lee Woodruff, and knitting rock stars Jared Flood of Brooklyn Tweed and the Yarn Whisperer, Clara Parks. This is
a second collection of poignant essays about the transformative power of knitting, following KNITTING YARNS
(W.W. Norton, 2013). AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO
 Publishers Weekly Top Ten Lifestyle Book for Fall 2015
 “Novelist and knitting enthusiast Hood’s charming follow-up to KNITTING YARNS: Writers on Knitting
will make even the most reluctant knitter look anew at those skeins of yarn. Each of the 12 writers included
in the collection provides particular insight into the needlecraft, along with reflections on how knitting is
related to inner life.” – Publishers Weekly
Robert D. Kaplan, IN EUROPE’S SHADOW: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey through Romania
and Beyond, Random House, February 9, 2016
www.robertdkaplan.com
From the New York Times bestselling author Robert D. Kaplan, named one of the world’s Top 100 Global
Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, comes a riveting journey through one of Europe’s pivotal frontier
countries—and a potent examination of the forces that will determine Europe’s fate in the postmodern age.
Robert Kaplan first visited Romania in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist and the country was a bleak
Communist backwater. It was one of the darkest corners of Europe during the Cold War, but few Westerners were
paying attention. What ensued was a lifelong obsession with a critical, often overlooked country—a country that,
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today, is key to understanding the current threat that Russia poses to Europe. IN EUROPE’S SHADOW is a vivid
blend of memoir, travelogue, journalism, and history, a masterly work thirty years in the making—the story of a
journalist coming of age, and a country struggling to do the same. Through the lens of one country, Kaplan
examines larger questions of geography, imperialism, the role of fate in international relations, the Cold War, the
Holocaust, and more. IN EUROPE’S SHADOW is the story of an ideological and geographic frontier—and the
book you must read in order to truly understand the crisis with Russia, and within Europe itself.
AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 “A masterly work of important history, analysis and prophecy about the ancient and modern rise of
Romania as a roundabout between Russia and Europe. I learned something new on every page. Kaplan is a
master.” – Tom Brokaw
 “A tour de force of cultural and political travel writing, in which Romania's complex past and uncertain
present become vivid and newly urgent.” – Colin Thubron, author of SHADOW OF THE SILK ROAD and
coeditor of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s posthumous memoir THE BROKEN ROAD
 “Robert D. Kaplan has the remarkable ability to see over the geopolitical horizon, and he now turns his
attention to Europe's marchlands—the former ‘Greater Romania’ lying between the Balkans and a
resurgent Russia. In a triple journey through books, landscapes, and histories, he tackles the meaning of
geography, the influence of intellectuals, and the daffiness—and power—of nationalism. A timely,
insightful, and deeply honest book.” – Charles King, professor of international affairs, Georgetown
University, and author of MIDNIGHT AT THE PERA PALACE: The Birth of Modern Istanbul
 “For an appreciation of contemporary Romanian attitudes Robert Kaplan’s book has no equal. As an
outsider yet within, the author offers an analysis of Romania which combines erudition and authority. His
sparkling, suggestive reflections, drawing upon history and landscape, capture the DNA of the country and
its inhabitants.” – Dennis Deletant, Visiting Rațiu Professor of Romanian Studies, Georgetown University,
and emeritus professor, University College London
 “A moving book—an illuminating and compassionate guide through the labyrinth of Romania's immensely
convoluted and often traumatic past. In spite of the many dark, distressing moments that no one should
ignore, the book conveys a sense of hope, promise and continuous renewal.” – Vladimir Tismaneanu,
professor of politics, University of Maryland, and author of THE DEVIL IN HISTORY: Communism,
Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century
 “Kaplan illuminates the extraordinary journey of the people of Romania, as well as millions of other East
Europeans, from the tragic Soviet despotism of the decades after the Second World War, to their more
hopeful and democratic future as members of NATO and the European Union in our own time. Kaplan's
unique ability to weave together complex histories, religion, memory, and political thought is nearly
unmatched in our country today.” – Nicholas Burns, professor, Harvard Kennedy School, and former
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs
 “Kaplan has been a great favorite of mine for years. He is a very thoughtful and insight-driven historian
who writes clear and compelling prose, but what I like most about him is his political sophistication, very
much in evidence in IN EUROPE’S SHADOW. This book makes you look up and think about what’s on
the page—a true pleasure for the reader.” – Alan Furst, New York Times bestselling author
 Foreign rights licensed to Het Spectrum (Holland), Czarne (Poland), Humanitas (Romania), Social
Sciences Academic Press (Mainland China), Marco Polo Press (Taiwan)
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Also by Robert D. Kaplan:
Robert D. Kaplan, ASIA’S CAULDRON: The South China Sea and the End of a
Stable Pacific, Random House, March 2014, pb January 2015
A penetrating look at the volatile region that will dominate the future of geopolitical
conflict. Kaplan offers up a vivid snapshot of the nations surrounding the South China
Sea, the conflicts brewing in the region at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and their
implications for global peace and stability. At a time when every day’s news seems to
contain some new story—large or small—that directly relates to conflicts over the South
China Sea, ASIA’S CAULDRON is an indispensable guide to a corner of the globe that
will affect all of our lives for years to come. AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
A Financial Times Best Book of 2014
Debuts at #6 on Washington Post hardcover non-fiction bestseller list
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Foreign rights licensed to Het Spectrum (Holland), Grand China (Mainland China), Rye Field
(Taiwan), Kodansha (Japan), ThaiHa (Vietnam), Geulhangari (Korea), Litera (Romania)
Robert D. Kaplan, THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY: What the Map Tells Us
about Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate, Random House, 2012, pb 2013
The author mixes his expert on-the-ground reporting with an examination of the works of
the classical geographers in order to give us a serious and often surprising reappraisal of
the various movements of people and nations that so dominate the current news. We see
that physical facts of the ground have great effect on the tides of international relations—
more so than is generally accepted. It is a book to open the mind. AGENT: TRANSLATION.
PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 #10 on New York Times hardcover non-fiction bestseller list
Foreign rights licensed to Het Spectrum (Holland), Grand China Publishing House (Mainland
China), Litera (Romania), Bourdon (Czech Republic), RBA (world Spanish), Izvori (Croatia),
Toucan (France), Campus (Brazil), Colibri (Russia), Mizibooks (Korea), Alam Al-Marifah (Saudi
Arabia), Asahi Shimbun (Japan), Bili Iletisim (Turkey), Rye Field (Taiwan), Alpha Books (Vietnam),
Maleni (Greece)
Joseph Skibell, SIX MEMOS FROM THE LAST MILLENIUM: A Novelist Reads the Talmud, University of
Texas Press, April 2016
www.josephskibell.com
A thief-turned-saint, killed by an insult. A rabbi burning down his world in order to save it. A man who lost his
sanity while trying to fathom the origin of the universe. A beautiful woman battling her brother’s and her husband’s
egos to preserve their family. Stories such as these enliven the pages of the Talmud, the great repository of ancient
wisdom that is one of the sacred texts of the Jewish people. IN SIX MEMOS FROM THE LAST MILLENNIUM,
award-winning novelist Joseph Skibell reads some of the Talmud’s tales with a storyteller’s insight, concentrating
on the lives of the legendary rabbis depicted in its pages to uncover the wisdom they can still impart to our modern
age. He unifies strands of stories that are scattered throughout the Talmud into coherent narratives or “memos,”
which he then analyzes and interprets from his perspective as a novelist. In Skibell’s imaginative and personal
readings, this sacred literature frequently defies our conventional notions of piety. Sometimes wild, rude, and even
bawdy, these memos from the last millennium pursue a livable transcendence, a way of fusing the mundane hours of
earthly life with a cosmic sense of holiness and wonder. AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 “Creative, learned and playful, SIX MEMOS FROM THE LAST MILLENNIUM illuminates Talmudic
tales and personalities with clarity and wisdom.” – Rabbi David Wolpe, Temple Sinai, author of DAVID:
The Divided Heart
 “In SIX MEMOS, a master storyteller, who has authored extraordinary works of fiction, applies his storytelling skills to tales from the Talmud, unpacking them with rare sensitivity and artistry. We learn with
Skibell to pay close attention to what is said and what is unsaid. Written with color and wit, this book is an
exercise in the pleasures of reading.” – Jacob L. Wright, professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at
Emory University, author of DAVID, KING OF ISRAEL, IN BIBLICAL MEMORY
Hugh Howard, ARCHITECTURE’S ODD COUPLE: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson, Bloomsbury,
May 24, 2016
A vibrant dual portrait that chronicles the lives and volatile relationship of the two most iconic figures in
American architecture. In architectural terms, the American Century can be largely summed up with two names:
Frank Lloyd Wright with his romantic Prairie Style and Philip Johnson with his spare postmodernist experiments.
Differing radically in their views on architecture, they shared a restless creativity, enormous charisma, and an
outspokenness that made each man irresistible to the media. Often publicly at odds, they were the 20th century’s
flint and steel; their repeated encounters consistently set off sparks. Yet as acclaimed historian Hugh Howard shows,
their rivalry was also a fruitful artistic conversation, one that yielded new directions for both men. It was not despite
but rather because of their contentious—and not always admiring—relationship that they were able to influence so
powerfully their times. In ARCHITECTURE'S ODD COUPLE, Howard deftly traces the historical threads
connecting the two men and offers readers a distinct perspective on the era they so enlivened with their designs.
Featuring many of the structures that defined modern space—from Fallingwater to the Guggenheim, from the Glass
House to the Seagram Tower—this book presents an arresting portrait of modern architecture's odd couple, and how
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they shaped the American landscape by shaping each other. Hugh Howard's numerous books include MR. AND
MRS. MADISON'S WAR: America's First Couple and the War of 1812; THE PAINTER'S CHAIR: George
Washington and the Making of American Art; and the classic HOUSES OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS. AGENT:
TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
Holly Bellebuono SOULFUL APOTHECARY: An Herbalist’s Guide to Making Nourishing Foods & Drinks
in the Kitchen, Roost Books, Spring 2016
www.vineyardherbs.com
With easy-to-follow recipes for salads, teas, honeys, jams, yogurts, and more, Holly shares delicious ways to eat and
drink medicinal herbs for long-term health. AGENT: AUDIO. PUB: UK, TRANSLATION.
Robert Cowley, THE KILLING SEASON: The First Battle of Ypres, Random House, Fall 2016
A narrative account of four of the most important months in human history, the late summer and fall of 1914 on the
Western Front of France and Belgium. It was an interval as dramatic as it was deadly and wild. The book details, in
a way that has rarely been attempted before, the so-called “Race to the Sea,” and how, inevitably, all roads
converged in Flanders at the once-thriving cloth trade center, Ypres, a quaint backwater yearning to attract tourists.
Tourists Ypres did attract, and by the hundreds of thousands, but they were hardly the sort Flanders sought. Instead
they represented the four armies of Germany, France, England, and Belgium, engaged in a month-long melee that
would extend from French Flanders to the North Sea, fifty-odd miles of fire. The First Battle of Ypres denied
Germany a realistic hope of victory in the war, and that is its ultimate importance. But many of the events detailed in
these pages have been so overlooked as to be almost unknown. THE KILLING SEASON is the product of more
than thirty years of travel, research, and writing. AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION. PUB: AUDIO.
Terry Tempest Williams, UNTITLED ON THE NATIONAL PARKS, Sarah Crichton Books/FSG, 2016
www.coyoteclan.com
A personal meditation on the U.S. National Parks to be published in 2016, the 100 th anniversary of the establishment
of the National Park Service. AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
NEW IN PAPERBACK
Alexandra Zapruder, SALVAGED PAGES 2 nd edition, Yale University Press, August
25, 2015
www.alexandrazapruder.com
This stirring collection of diaries written by young people, aged twelve to twenty-two years,
during the Holocaust has been fully revised and updated. Some of the writers were
refugees, others were in hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos,
and nearly all perished before liberation. This seminal National Jewish Book Award winner
preserves the impressions, emotions, and eyewitness reportage of young people whose
accounts of daily events and often unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our
understanding of life during the Holocaust. The second paperback edition includes a new preface by Alexandra
Zapruder examining the book’s history and impact. Simultaneously, an enhanced e-book incorporates a wealth of
new content in a variety of media, including photographs of the writers and their families, images of the original
diaries, artwork made by the writers, historical documents, glossary terms, maps, survivor testimony (some available
for the first time), and video of the author teaching key passages. In addition, an in-depth, interdisciplinary
curriculum in history, literature, and writing developed by the author and a team of teachers, working in cooperation
with the educational organization Facing History and Ourselves, is now available to support use of the book in
middle- and high-school classrooms. AGENT: TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
 Foreign rights licensed to Querido (Holland)
Greil Marcus, THE HISTORY OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL IN TEN SONGS, Yale
University Press, September 2014, pb September 15, 2015
www.greilmarcus.net
One of our finest critics gives us an altogether original history of rock ’n’ roll. AGENT:
TRANSLATION. PUB: UK, AUDIO.
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An NPR Best Book of 2014
A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2014
A Financial Times Best Book of 2014
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2014
“Greil Marcus writes about music as if his life depended on it. Maybe it does, and as you read THE
HISTORY OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL IN TEN SONGS, it may feel like yours does, too… Marcus’ historical
moments have the intensities of a great song, coming together in ways that are both satisfying and
appetizing… [A] potent, inspiring book.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Foreign rights licensed to Henan University Press (China), Contra Ediciones (world Spanish), Il
Saggiatore (Italy), Reclam (Germany), Galaade (France)
Also by Greil Marcus:
Greil Marcus, MYSTERY TRAIN: IMAGES OF AMERICA IN ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
MUSIC: Sixth Revised Edition, Plume, April, 2015
In 1975, Greil Marcus’s MYSTERY TRAIN changed the way readers thought about rock
’n’ roll and continues to be sought out today by music fans and anyone interested in pop
culture. In this latest edition, Marcus provides an extensively updated and rewritten Note
and Discographies section, exploring the recordings’ evolution and continuing impact.
AGENT: UK, TRANSLATION, AUDIO.
 Listed 26th on TIME’s list of All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books
“The book I wish I could read again for the first time—and the book, I’ve long felt, I most wish I had
written… MYSTERY TRAIN changed a lot of things for me. Most basically, it plugged me into a
lifetime’s worth of listening. Because of it, I erased ‘English lit’ as my college major and inked in
‘American lit.’ It remains the book I can’t help measuring critical writing against… I plan to give a
copy of Mr. Marcus’s book to each of my children when they leave for college. It speaks intimately to
a part of the cultural heritage that, in my haphazard way, I’ve tried to give them.” – Dwight Garner,
New York Times, 2015
“Perhaps the finest book ever written about pop music.” – Alan Light, New York Times Book Review, 2005
“Gets as close to the heart and soul of America and American music as the best of rock 'n' roll.” – Bruce
Springsteen
Foreign rights licensed to Contradediciones (world Spanish), Allia (French), Faber & Faber (UK),
Henan University Press (Mainland China)
Timothy W. Ryback, HITLER’S FIRST VICTIMS: The Quest for Justice, Knopf,
Oct. 2014; Vintage, pb reprint October 13, 2015
How the nightmare of the Holocaust began and how it could have been stopped.
The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked
everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts
would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal.
Timothy W. Ryback’s gripping and poignant historical narrative focuses on the first four
victims of the Holocaust at the Dachau state detention center for political prisoners in
1933 and the investigation that followed, as the local prosecutor, Josef Hartinger, sought
to expose these earliest cases of state-condoned atrocity. HITLER’S FIRST VICTIMS exposes the chaos and
fragility of the Nazis’ early grip on power and dramatically suggests how different history could have been had other
Germans followed Hartinger’s example of personal courage in that time of collective human failure. [Approx. 40
illustrations]. American-born German scholar Timothy Ryback is the author of the acclaimed HITLER’S PRIVATE
LIBRARY: The Books That Shaped the Man (Knopf, 2010); THE LAST SURVIVOR: Legacies of Dachau
(Pantheon, 1999); and essays published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. AGENT: TRANSL. PUB: UK,
AUDIO.
 “Ryback…here examines an early but enormously significant episode in the evolution of the Nazi program
of genocide….An important addition to Holocaust collections.” – Booklist
 “The great strength of Ryback’s book is that, although the story of the Third Reich is now almost mindnumbingly familiar, his single-minded focus on Hartinger’s investigation of Dachau gives it the feel and
pace of a courtroom thriller…[T]his superbly researched and tautly written little book is a chilling reminder
26
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that, from small crimes, far bigger ones can grow. It is also a moving tribute to the courage of a decent man
who, motivated by his basic faith in law and order, tried to stand up and say ‘No’.” – Daily Mail
“Timothy W. Ryback’s gripping account of one man’s fight against Nazi atrocities holds important lessons
for us... Our challenge today is to act on Ryback’s historical insights before new rounds of mass atrocities
unfold.” – Kenneth Roth, executive director, Human Rights Watch
“A significant addition to the Holocaust canon… The author's research is prodigious and his accumulation
of new details make the reader feel as if he is observing the first spreading of the Nazi plague through a
microscope. Ryback brings to life a story so painful that you want to put it down—but you can't! It's brutal
history come alive in your hands.” – Robert Littell, author of THE AMATEUR
“Finely researched and deeply disturbing.” – Alan Riding, author of AND THE SHOW WENT ON
“An extraordinary, gripping, and edifying story told extraordinarily well.” – Richard Bernstein, author of
DICTATORSHIP OF VIRTUE
“Startling and important.” – Raymond Bonner, author of ANATOMY OF INJUSTICE
Foreign rights licensed to Bodley Head (UK, via Publisher), Companhia das Letras (Brazil), Hollands
Diep (Holland), Jacaranda (Portugal), Arnoldo Mondadori (Italy). Editions des Equateurs (France),
Alianza (world Spanish)
Praise for HITLER’S PRIVATE LIBRARY by Timothy W. Ryback:
 Best of 2008 Pick by The Washington Post
 A Best Book of 2009 by The Financial Times
 Featured selection by The History Book Club, The Military Book Club, and
The Quality Paperback Book Club
 “Ryback has provided a tantalizing glimpse into Hitler’s creepy little selfimprovement program.” - New York Times Sunday Book Review
 “Elegantly written, meticulously researched, fascinating…thought-provoking …
Ryback has produced a valuable short addition to attempts to understand this strange
man whose impact on the world was so baleful.” – Ian Kershaw, author of HITLER, 1899-1936: HUBRIS,
and HITLER, 1936-1945: NEMESIS, reviewing for The New York Sun
Foreign rights licensed to Bodley Head (UK via pub), Mondadori (Italy), Balans (Holland), Cherche
Midi (France), Destino (world Spanish), Editora Schwarcz (Brazil), Bungeishunju (Japan), Matichon
(Thailand), Nasevojsko (Czech Republic), NNK (Serbia), Swiat Ksiazki (Poland), Litera (Romania),
Natur & Kultur (Sweden), Fackeltraeger (Germany), Patakis (Greece), China Times (Taiwan), Gold
Wall Press (Mainland China), Livraria Civilizacao (Portugal), Riva (Bulgaria), Geulhangari (Korea)
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