Archives de catégorie : Literary

CLEAR WATER de Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

An atmospheric and mesmerizing literary thriller that follows a woman’s return to her small town, and the secrets of its haunted past. For fans of Liz Moore and Samantha Schweblin.

CLEAR WATER
by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes
Flatiron Books, November 2026

Alma Figueroa, recently furloughed from her job as a paralegal and still trying to find her footing after a divorce, is driving home one night when a girl dressed in white appears out of nowhere. Afraid that the girl is injured, Alma takes her to the hospital. The girl is unharmed, but won’t speak and has no identification. Alma is determined to help her, but then the girl disappears without a trace. She is not the only girl in white to be seen. Reports come in of girls appearing in the snow, in the woods, and in the middle of roads. And while none of their faces match the photos on the missing persons posters scattered all over town, evidence of neglect echoes in their unwavering silence.

As Alma starts to investigate, she soon uncovers something larger, something the town has been actively ignoring, that just might connect back to her sister Kayla’s death when they were in high school. When another girl from town goes missing, Alma must figure out what the girls in white are trying to tell her before it is too late.

Clear Water unfolds over three timelines, moving between the present-day appearance of the girls in white, Alma’s return to the small town several years earlier, and the teenage years in which her sister Kayla gets pulled into addiction. With a haunting quality, a literary feel, and elements of mystery and noir, this lush and lyrical book is a poignant story about sisters, secrets, grief, and what it means when the people in authority continue to overlook the most vulnerable in their community.

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maryland and author of Are We Ever Our Own: Stories (winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, 2022) and The Sleeping World (Touchstone, 2016). She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Millay Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and was a Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf.

THE END OF ROMANCE de Lily Meyer

A big-hearted, wise, unceasingly buoyant novel about a woman who, after escaping a bruising marriage, theorizes that happiness is possible solely with the eradication of all romance—only to find a love that could change her life forever.

THE END OF ROMANCE
by Lily Meyer
Viking, February 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Sylvie Broder was taught early to embrace joy. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors whose greatest priority was enjoying the life they’d snatched back from Hitler, Sylvie believes in the tenacious pursuit of pleasure—yet, somehow, finds herself trapped in a suffocating, emotionally abusive marriage. With enormous fortitude, Sylvie frees herself and turns to graduate school, where she develops a new philosophy: Straight women will find true liberation and happiness only once romance is eradicated.

Now, Sylvie prides herself in separating sex from tenderness—having fun with men, but never committing to one. Then she meets Robbie and Abie, and finds her philosophy sorely tested. A warm and gentle man, Robbie treats Sylvie with patience and enormous kindness, offering her comfort she hasn’t had since childhood. Abie is passionate and dynamic, a man who challenges Sylvie, and with whom she finds herself constantly disarmed. With both men, she feels a deep desire that looks, worryingly, a lot like love.

Cleverly constructed, delightfully funny, and beautifully written, THE END OF ROMANCE is an anti-romance romance novel that charts its fallible heroine’s tumultuous journey to love and happiness with erudition and deep feeling—a story for anyone who, despite their very best efforts, has fallen in love, and wondered why.

Lily Meyer is a translator, a critic, and the author of the novel Short War. She is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her stories and translations can be found in The Dial, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals, and her essays and criticism appear in outlets including Bookforum, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review.

LOCALS de Jared Jackson

In the vein of Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, Bryan Washington’s Lot, and Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez, this debut, in the form of a strongly linked story collection, brings to brash and tender life a cast of young, working-class characters navigating love, grief, survival, and the pursuit of something more in Hartford, Connecticut in the aughts.

LOCALS
by Jared Jackson
Viking, Spring 2027
(via The Gernert Company)

Mikey becomes a man too early when he begs for emotional scraps from his uncle’s girlfriend. Collin reveals his cowardice when he fails to show up for Bebo, an outsider far braver than Collin will ever be. Enis, a refugee on the local baseball team along with Collin, Bebo, and Mikey, wants more than he can ever get from his neighborhood or his girlfriend. Minnie wants redemption. Suit Man wants a warm place to sleep. Ms. Ana wants a daughter. And Andrews wants his white fraternity brothers to accept him despite being a “local,” while all his cousin Ant wants is for Andrews to remember he already has a family—that Hartford has always been his family.

Vibrating with vivid imagery and characters whose voices alternate between aching frankness and exhilarating swagger, the interlocking pieces of this book tumble one into another like so many expertly laid dominoes. The result is a striking vision for reclamation—of faith in city, and faith in self. Jackson is a generational talent descended from a distinct literary tradition (encompassing everything from Joyce’s Dubliners to Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love; Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street to Barrett’s Young Skins) but blazing a thrilling path all his own.

Jared Jackson is a proud Hartford native and writer, editor, educator, and arts administrator currently living in New York. He has been awarded residencies, fellowships, and grants from MacDowell, Yaddo, Baldwin for the Arts, Tin House, and several others. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, n+1, and VQR, and was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2023 (guest edited by Min Jin Lee). He received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where he was a chair’s fellow, creative writing teaching fellow, and an adjunct assistant professor. Jackson is the director of programs and partnerships at Poets & Writers, Inc. He was previously the program director of literary programs at PEN America.

CITY LIKE WATER de Dorothy Tse

Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, a wondrous and pointed message in a bottle from a city not so different from your own.

CITY LIKE WATER
by Dorothy Tse
translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce
Graywolf Press, March 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

The city you grew up in is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it—classmates, teachers, counterfeit watches, the erotic toe cleavage that used to lead the way down secret passages. Yet you still catch snatches of conversation lingering in the air and glimpse sun-dazzled residents retreating into dark crevices.

People seem to keep disappearing. Your mother joins in a housewives’ protest, each woman waving the fake, bloody lotus roots they were sold until police helicopters unleash a glittery spray that turns them into statues. Then it’s just you and your father at home, until he is quietly absorbed into the enormous new TV gifted by the government, and you spot him doing tai chi or picking through leftovers in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister, before she flew away in her school uniform? As the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you?

Lucid, nightmarish and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous and pointed message in a bottle from a city not so different from your own.

Dorothy Tse is a Hong Kong writer and the author of Owlish, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and Snow and Shadow, which was long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award. She is the cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres.

THE FIRST GIRL IN HELL de Henry Hoke

A feral western set in 1940, narrated by an ostracized actress on an infernal journey of romance and revenge.

THE FIRST GIRL IN HELL
by Henry Hoke
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Winter/Spring 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

This novel is loosely inspired by one summer in the life of the author’s cousin Tallulah Bankhead. Her fictional stand-in Lucinda’s Hollywood career has ended, and she thinks she knows why. A combination of her queerness, the debauchery of her social life, and a personal vendetta has landed her in the infamous Doom Book, a burn list created in secret by the prudish ghouls behind the Hays Code restrictions on film of the 1930s. Fragmented into prose-poetic pages that mirror the notecards on which her politician father wrote speeches, Lucinda bitingly narrates her whirlwind road trip from a divorce ranch in Reno to a jailhouse in a crumbling ghost town, all the while pining for a woman who she thinks could turn her life around. She might not get sober, but she’ll settle for payback.

Henry Hoke is the author of several books, most recently Open Throat, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, and longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. He has taught at CalArts and the UVA Young Writers Workshop, and lives in Virginia.