Archives de l’auteur : WebmasterBenisti

WORK NIGHTS d’Erica Peplin

A wry, warm, and irresistible debut following a young queer woman who finds herself in a love triangle with an unobtainable intern and a quick-tempered musician, set between the sterile office of a newspaper and the intoxicating night scene of New York City, and pitched as Sally Rooney meets The Devil Wears Prada.

WORK NIGHTS
by Erica Peplin
Gallery, June 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

It’s 2015 and Jane Grabowski, a self-described “dumpy dyke,” is living in Bushwick and working in advertising at the nation’s most storied newspaper. By day, she is reluctantly dragged into a glamorous, precarious, and changing industry, and into the lives of a motley crew of office workers, who alternately horrify and delight her. By night, she goes out with the cool and flighty Madeline Navarro, an ostensibly straight, staggeringly pretty Guatemalan intern with an expensive lifestyle. Despite many signs to the contrary, it feels like Madeline might be the one—except her visa is about to run out.

Also, Jane keeps running into Addy, a temperamental, deeply moral, slightly uncool singer-songwriter. Something shifts, and Jane finds herself spiraling, terrifyingly, towards love. But Madeline’s feelings are shifting too, and it feels truly impossible—and maybe unnecessary—to choose. As small betrayals pile up, alongside the soulless dramas of work, Jane finds herself stuck and desperately unhappy. She’s determined to grow up, quit her job, and change her life. But the comforts of the known, and the thrill of the chase, keep pulling her back, until all her unmade decisions collide.

Wry, tender, and acutely attuned to the spiky intimacies of love, work, and friendship, Work Nights delves deep into the existential conundrums of finding your way in a cold, capitalist world—a world that is also occasionally alight with beauty and strangeness. It joins the small but growing cannon of novels examining the casualties of modern offices, from Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End to Halle Butler’s The New Me and Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different, and writers like Kristen Arnett, Rachel Khong, Elif Batuman, and Sally Rooney, whose smart, offbeat protagonists are alert to the delusions of the world around them, though not always to their own.

Erica Peplin is a writer from Detroit, Michigan, now based in Brooklyn. Her short stories and essays have appeared in n+1, Joyland, The Millions, McSweeney’s, Autostraddle, The Brooklyn Rail, The Village Voice, Cosmonauts Avenue, Another Gaze, and Hobart. From 2015-16, she worked in the advertising department of the New York Times. Since then, she’s worked as a shipping clerk, a high school custodian, and a restaurant server.

UNTITLED ON TAYLOR SWIFT de Stephanie Burt

A leading literary and pop culture critic looks at Taylor Swift at the height of her success.

UNTITLED ON TAYLOR SWIFT
by Stephanie Burt
Basic Books, TBD
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

Based on her forthcoming course at Harvard University, the announcement of which received major media coverage from around the world, UNTITLED ON TAYLOR SWIFT will be the first serious work of cultural criticism about Taylor Swift as an artist and creator, touching on girlhood, fame, privilege, costume, economics, song and stagecraft, and the author’s own transition to womanhood. In the vein of Sarah Smarsh’s She Come By It Natural, on Dolly Parton, or Touré’s I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon, Burt’s book will be an appreciation and analysis of one of the most influential pop stars of a generation.

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with nine published books, including Close Calls with Nonsense (Graywolf Press, 2009) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent poetry collection is We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022). Her culture writing has appeared in many venues including The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Nation, the London Review of Books and TLS. She is a Guggenheim award winner and the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.

END OF AUGUST de Paige Dinneny

Aurora Taylor has never had so much to lose.

END OF AUGUST
by Paige Dinneny
Alcove Press, February 2025

It’s almost summer in 1979, and 15-year-old Aurora Taylor is a week shy of finishing her first full year at the same school. She’s desperate to see it through, because every end to her single mother’s chaotic romantic relationships results in a disruptive and sudden move. So many moves that Aurora needs more than two hands to count all the towns she’s lived in and the friendships she never got a chance to make.

So when her mother Laine shows up at school with the car loaded, Aurora thinks her latest fling finally put a nail in this town’s coffin. Instead, it’s her grandpa Jay’s death calling them back to the town Laine’s been running from since Aurora’s conception, when Laine was just fifteen and Aurora’s Gran was the town drunk.

Between her mother and Gran’s explosive relationship, and the whiskey Gran’s returned to to drown her sorrows, Aurora gives their visit to the little blue house in Monroe, Illinois a week, tops. But when Laine begins an intense affair with the married mailman, everything changes. For the first time in her 15 years, Aurora has time to fall in love too—but this time with the town. It’s not unlike most of the small towns in Indiana Aurora has lived in, suffocating summer heat included, but this one has streets and people and places she is given a chance to know and love. It has a girl Aurora can call her best friend. A Gran who loves Aurora even as she fights for control over her own worst nature for the third time in her life. And a picture-perfect pastor’s son who sees Aurora as more than “Laine’s daughter.” It’s everything Aurora never thought she would have to lose. It’s everything she would never let herself dream about.

But each time the illicit lovebirds slip into the back bedroom, Aurora sees her chances at happiness slipping away. Laine won’t just burn a bridge this time, she’ll light the town on fire, burning Gran’s hope, Aurora’s future, and her own chance at redemption to the ground with it.

Paige Dinneny earned her MFA from Cal State Long Beach and writes primarily about the relationships between mothers and daughters. She was born and raised in Southern California, but now resides in Franklin, Tennessee with her sister and two cats. She briefly taught academically, but much prefers interacting with people as a retail store manager.

NOTES ON A DROWNING d’Anna Sharpe

A novel that goes to the heart of a political scandal involving misogyny, international corruption, and abuse of power.

NOTES ON A DROWNING
by Anna Sharpe
Orion, TBC 2024
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Alex is a solicitor trying to keep afloat in a struggling London legal aid practice. When she takes on a new case for a Moldovan woman whose younger sister’s body was found in the Thames, Alex assumes Natalia’s story will be the usual sadly predictable tale of addiction and poverty.

On the other side of the river, Kat has secured her dream job: special adviser to the charismatic new Home Secretary, introducing her to a seductive new world of power, elitism and influence.

But when the girl’s inquest is speedily shut down, and Kat begins to query why immigration cases have been quashed, both Alex and Kat suspect that they have stumbled upon high level corruption. Might it link to the disappearance of Alex’s sister twelve years before?

Anna Sharpe is the pseudonym of Anna Mazzola. She’s the award-winning author of three historical thrillers plus one ghost novel. Her debut novel, The Unseeing, won an Edgar Allan Poe award in the US. Her third novel, The Clockwork Girl, set in 18th century Paris, reached number 11 in the Sunday Times Chart.

REMEMBER, REMEMBER d’Elle Machray

Gunpowder, treason and a plot to destroy the British Empire…

REMEMBER, REMEMBER
by Elle Machray
HarperNorth, February 2024
(via Mushens Entertainment)

1770. Delphine lives in the shadows of London: a secret, vibrant world of smugglers, courtesans and small rebellions. Four years ago, she escaped enslavement at great personal cost. Now, she must help her brother Vincent do the same.

While Britain’s highest court fails to administer justice for Vincent, little rebellions are no longer enough. What’s needed is a big, explosive plot – one that will strike at the heart of the transatlantic slave trade. But can one Black woman, one fuse and one match bring down an Empire?

An incendiary alternative history, REMEMBER, REMEMBER is a gripping story of conscience, conspiracy, queer identity and courage in the face of injustice.

Elle Machray (she/they) lives in Edinburgh and studied Politics at the University of Leeds. Elle started writing in lockdown and was selected to join the inaugural cohort of the HarperCollins Author Academy in 2021. In the moments between working and writing, Elle practices karate and explores the beauty of Scotland with their dog, Bruce.