Archives de catégorie : Literary

TOO SOON de Betty Shamieh

For readers of Pachinko and Queenie, a funny, sexy, and heart-wrenching literary debut that explores exile, ambition, and hope across three generations of Palestinian American women.

TOO SOON
by Betty Shamieh
Avid Reader Press, January 2025
(via Writers House)

Arabella gets an unexpected chance at love when she’s thrust into a conflict and history she’s tried to avoid all her life.
Zoya is playing matchmaker for her last unmarried granddaughter—introducing Arabella to the very eligible grandson of an old flame and stirring up buried family history.
Naya is keeping a secret from her family that will change all their lives.

Thirty-five-year-old Arabella, a New York theatre director whose dating and career prospects are drying up, is offered an opportunity to direct a risqué cross-dressing interpretation of a Shakespeare classic (that might garner international attention) in the West Bank. Her grandmother, Zoya, plots to make a match between her and Aziz, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. Arabella agrees to meet Aziz since her growing feelings for Yoav, a celebrated Israeli American theatre designer, seem destined for disaster.

Arabella and Aziz’s instant connection reminds Zoya of the passion she once felt for Aziz’s grandfather, a man she desired desperately, even after her father arranged another husband for her. In turn, Zoya would later marry off her youngest daughter, Naya, who aspired to date the Jackson 5 and wasn’t ready to be a wife or mother to Arabella at sixteen. Now that Naya’s children are grown and she’s arrived at an abrupt midlife crossroads, it’s time to settle old scores…

With biting hilarity, Too Soon introduces us to a trio of bold and unforgettable voices. This dramatic saga follows one family’s epic journey from fleeing war-torn Jaffa in 1948, chasing the American Dream in Detroit and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, hustling in the New York theatre scene post-9/11, and daring to stage a show in Palestine in 2012. Upon learning one of them is living on borrowed time, three women fight to live, make art, and love on their own terms. Too Soon joins the stories that seek to illuminate our shared history and ask, how can we set ourselves free?

Read the profile of Betty Shamieh from The Atlantic, written by Gal Beckerman.

Betty Shamieh is a Palestinian American writer and the author of fifteen plays. She is currently the Mellon Playwright-in-Residence at the Classical Theatre of Harlem, where her comedy, Malvolio, a sequel to Twelfth Night had its world premiere in July 2023 to wide critical acclaim, including as a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Her dramedy Roar, which was also a New York Times Critic’s Pick, premiered off-Broadway in a sold-out extended run. Betty is the founding artistic director of The Semitic Root, an artistic collective that supports innovative theatre co-created by Arab and Jewish Americans, which presented her plays Chocolate in Heat and The Strangest. Selected as a Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford and a Clifton Visiting Artist at Harvard, Shamieh was named a UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue. A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, she has been awarded a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowship in Playwriting. Her works have been translated into seven languages and are widely produced internationally, including at the EU Capital of Culture Festival.

SO FAR GONE de Jess Walter

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins—and in the wild, propulsive spirit of Charles Portis’ True Grit—comes a hilarious and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.

SO FAR GONE
by Jess Walter
Harper, June 2025

A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter’s family, Rhys Kinnick snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law. Horrified by what he’d done, by the state of the country and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, off the grid and with no one around—except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now, seven years later, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no phone, no computer, and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a madcap journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. SO FAR GONE is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and ultimately moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

Jess Walter is the author of seven previous novels, including the bestsellers, The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins, the National Book Award Finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction, collected in The Angel of Rome and We Live in Water, has won the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize and appeared three times in The Best American Short Stories. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

NYPMH de Sofia Montrone

NYMPH pairs Call Me by Your Name with the precise, elevated prose of Elena Ferrante. Sofia Montrone’s debut revels in the exuberant highs and awkward lows of girlhood, set to the backdrop of rural Lombardy.

NYPMH
by Sofia Montrone
Avid Reader Press, publication date TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Leo spends her mornings tidying the rooms of her Nonna Tina’s timeworn Italian agriturismo, carefully accumulating the curious leftbehind detritus from guests—a pearl earring, a lock of hair. At night, she gathers the stories that flow from her father’s lips—liquor-spun tales of Odysseus and the Trojans in secret battle. When an accident rips the gentle membrane of Leo’s childhood, she is left vulnerable to the pains and pleasures of growing up.

Years later, in a sultry summer not unlike the many that came before, the agriturismo is the only thing that remains the same. Nonna Tina has grown older, Leo’s brother Max is intractable and mercurial, and the curiosity Leo so loved to feed as a child has turned into something more confusing. When she meets Dolores, an American girl, she can’t help but gather all the experiences first love promises, while shedding parts of the past she no longer fits into.

Sofia Montrone is as an adjunct assistant professor in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program, served as Editor-in-Chief of The Columbia Review and the Director of Columbia Artist/Teachers.

DISCIPLINE de Larissa Pham

As slim and combustible as a match, NBCC finalist Larissa Pham’s debut novel DISCIPLINE is an astonishment.

DISCIPLINE: A Novel
by Larissa Pham
Random House, Spring 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Christine is a writer on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, Christine is seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers and past lovers and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he’s read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. What she discovers is both terrifying, and beautiful.

Opening in a seemingly Cuskian mode, DISCIPLINE soon reveals itself to be a delicately explosive high-wire act more in the vein of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies. With a fierce aesthetic eye and elegant, charged prose (as Christine remarks at one point: “I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in a line but as in an arrow pulled back. But I don’t know which one of us holds the bow, and which one of us faces the arrow”), Pham’s novel is a taut triumph about art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

Larissa Pham is the author of the essay collection Pop Song (Catapult, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Nation, the NYTBR, Bookforum, Aperture, Art in America and elsewhere. Her essays and short fiction have been anthologized in Kink (edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, Simon and Schuster, 2021), Wanting: Women Writing on Desire (Catapult, 2023), and Critical Hits, an anthology of writing on video games (Graywolf, 2024). She holds an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Previously, she worked at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, where she focused on messaging and education around the systemic underpinnings of bias-motivated and intimate partner violence, and received training on disability justice and vicarious trauma. She paints occasionally, and currently teaches at the New School’s MFA in creative writing. DISCIPLINE is her first novel.

NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED de Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Structured as a handful of confessional-style podcast episodes that are by turns suspenseful, outrageous, heart-breaking and poignant, Yu-Mei Balasingamchow’s NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED is that rare novel where an unmistakably literary voice keeps you on the very edge of your seat.

NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED
by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
Tiny Reparations Books/PRH, publication date TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Ophir isn’t her real name, but she likes it fine for now, and if she’s going to get through this story—the real story of her last 12 years on the run—she’s going to do it on her own terms. This is what our narrator promises as she sets out to broadcast (with the help of a mysterious friend, from an undisclosed location) her tumultuous life as a fugitive, forever estranged from her home and family in Singapore, where it all began. Entrancing her listeners with a tale that transports us from Thailand to Tokyo, and from London to America’s Midwest, it is Ophir’s loneliness and longing for connection that eventually jeopardizes her hard-won freedom.

Like R.F. Kuang’s YELLOWFACE and Susie Yang’s WHITE IVY, NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED is a stylish, fast-paced story that tests the limits of our ability to empathize with a morally dubious narrator, while also interrogating the idea of a performed self, and what makes an authentic voice. And like Angie Cruz’s HOW NOT TO DROWN IN A GLASS OF WATER, this is a confession that recounts and reframes the complicated paths we take to build a life and a home. Ultimately, it’s an immigrant story… but not the one you expect.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow was born and raised in Singapore but now lives in Boston, where she teaches writing workshops (Grub Street) and was for several years a bookseller at Papercuts JP. NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED was written with the support of the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Yu-Mei has previously attended Sewanee (on scholarship), Tin House, and Bread Loaf to workshop her short fiction. Her short stories have won prizes (the Mississippi Review Fiction prize) and special mentions (The Pushcart Prize, Sewanee Review fiction prize, and the Commonwealth Prize in the UK). She received her MFA from Boston University, and this is her debut novel.