Archives de catégorie : Narrative Nonfiction

HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL de Jamie Hood

The ambitious and experimental debut by Jamie Hood, author of Trauma Plot, interrogating the “good girl” archetype and the price one pays to embody it.

HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL
by Jamie Hood
Vintage, March 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

In the thick of winter 2020, when so many books were buried beneath the catastrophe of the COVID-19 news cycle, one unlikely debut seemed to cut through the noise. Jamie Hood’s How to Be a Good Girl was an inventive and hybrid work of self-making, mingling diary entries, poetry, literary criticism, and love letters to interrogate the archetype of the “good girl,” and the ideas of femininity, passivity, desire, and trauma that come with it. Journeying from the ice age to our modern-day climate crisis, it devoured texts as expansive as Levinas and Plath to the Ronettes and after-school specials, all the while asking: what pound of flesh must a woman pay to be seen as “good.”

How to Be a Good Girl was a critical darling when it was first published by Grieveland. The Rumpus praised its “bold vulnerability,” and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020. Now, Vintage is proud to reissue this provocative and genre-bending debut and find new readers for an exciting, new literary voice.

Jamie Hood is a critic, memoirist, and poet. Her work has appeared in Bookforum, The Baffler, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, Observer, The Drift, SSENSE, Bookforum, Vogue, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

THE ZORG de Siddharth Kara

From Pulitzer finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red: A notorious slave ship incident that led to the abolition of slavery in the UK and sparked the US abolitionist movement.

THE ZORG:
A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
by Siddharth Kara
St. Martin’s Press, October 2025

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning both “care” and “worry”) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique.

After reaching Africa, The Zorg was captured by a privateer and came under British command. With a new captain and crew, the ship was crammed with 442 slaves, and departed in 1781 for Jamaica. But a series of unpredictable weather events and mistakes in navigation left the ship drastically off course and running out of food and water. So a proposition was put forth: Save the crew and the most valuable of the slaves―by throwing 140 people, mostly women and children, overboard.

What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front page news. For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery, in a notorious case that boiled down to a simple but profound question: Were the Africans on board the Zorg people or cargo?

The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history. In this book, Siddharth Kara utilizes primary source research, masterful storytelling, and painstaking investigation to uncover the Zorg’s journey, the lives and fates of the slaves on board, and the mystery of who finally revealed the truth of what happened on the ship.

Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, and activist on modern slavery. He is a British Academy Global Professor and an Associate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Nottingham University. Kara has authored several books and reports on slavery and child labor, and he won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He has also taught courses on modern slavery at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and Cornell University. He divides his time between the U.K. and the U.S.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM de Julian Sancton

Julian Sancton’s follow-up to his thrilling, acclaimed debut, Madhouse at the End of the Earth, is the riveting story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Columbia in 1708 with over a billion dollars in gold and silver—and one man’s obsessive quest to find and excavate it.

NEPTUNE’S RANSOM
by Julian Sancton
Crown, January 2026

Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose—he was looking for the galleon Mercedes. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime—the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of plundered riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain. But that ship, the San Jose, never reached Spanish shores. Somewhere miles off Cartegena, the Spanish armada was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean, its precise location unknown and its decaying hull shrouded in darkness beyond the reach of divers.

Dooley was at once an unlikely candidate to find it, but also a singular figure. Half Cuban by birth, his life stretched from the ballfields of Brooklyn to the shores of Castro’s Havana at the dawn of revolution, where he would help birth a fledgling nation’s diving program and make films with the likes of Jacques Cousteau before finding himself placed on an international watch list and barred from the United States. With academic training cobbled together across various disciplines, Dooley was no one’s idea of a credentialed academic, and yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to the science of ocean archeology—and to finding the San Jose—led him to breakthroughs thought impossible, as he jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors and ultimately homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three hundred year old shipwreck—or nothing at all.

Like The Orchid Thief, NEPTUNE’S RANSOM plunges into a rarified world through the eyes of an idiosyncratic protagonist, one whose work would spark the hopes of presidents and make real the dreams of a nation. In this tale of temerity and treasure, Julian Sancton blends the adventure of Indiana Jones with the international intrigue of XXX into a one-of-a-kind story of a lost fortune and a decades-long quest to shine light on the bounty of gold and silver at the bottom of the sea.

Julian Sancton is a senior features editor at Departures magazine, where he writes about culture and travel. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among others. He has reported from every continent including Antarctica, which he first visited while researching this book.

THE WIREGRASS de Matt Kessler

A vital and propulsive true crime narrative of corruption, injustice, and two young women’s murder in a little-known corner of the American Deep South.

THE WIREGRASS:
A Tale of Murder and Retribution
by Matt Kessler
Grand Central Press, Spring 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

In 1999, in the rural Alabama town of Ozark, high schoolers Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley were found shot in the trunk of their car, weeks before the start of their senior year. The night of their murder remains shrouded in mystery. They were driving between field parties. They were lost. But why were their jeans muddy, soaked to the bone? And what drove someone to kill them?

Twenty years passed, but locals could not forget the girls’ deaths. Suspicions of a police cover-up reached a fever pitch until, out of the blue, a softspoken Black man named Coley McCraney—a long-haul trucker and ordained deacon—was arrested for the crime. The dramatic trial and controversial conviction that followed would tear this small farming community in two.

THE WIREGRASS is an under-documented region of the American Deep South, known for its peanuts. Religiously conservative and historically poor, it stretches from Montgomery, Alabama to Macon, Georgia and south to the Florida Panhandle. Cut off from major highways, effectively run by local law enforcement, it’s a place where America’s fundamental prejudices present themselves without veneer; inequality, violence and racism run bone deep.

A native Alabamian, seasoned journalist, and student of Maggie Nelson and Percival Everett (who gave the book its title), Matt Kessler has spent seven years researching the tangled case of the Beasley-Hawlett murders, attending the trial of Coley McCraney, and gaining the trust of the local community—as well as the ire of local police enforcement.

THE WIREGRASS is an atmospheric and utterly compelling true crime narrative, as interested in the rippling effects of murder on a small, tight-knit community as it is on exposing truth in places that are otherwise forgotten and neglected. Calling to mind the work of Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing, Empire of Pain) and David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager), as well as Michelle McNamara’s legendary I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, this is a thrilling yet profound story of race, class, and the corruption of power.

Matt Kessler is a journalist based in Birmingham, Alabama. His reporting appears in The Guardian and The Atlantic and has been commended by the Mississippi ACLU. His cultural criticism and award-winning short stories have appeared in Pitchfork, Vice, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is completing a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.

THE SEASON de Helen Garner

[Garner’s sharp eye, wit and warm humour bring the team and the season to life, as she documents this pivotal moment, both as part of the story and as silent witness. It’s a reflection on masculinity, on the nobility, grace and grit of team spirit and the game’s power to enthrall.

THE SEASON
by Helen Garner
Text Publishing, August 2024

I pull up at the kerb. I love this park they train in. I must have walked the figure-of-eight around its ovals hundreds of times, at dawn, winter and summer, to throw the ball for Dozer, our red heeler, but he’s buried now, in the backyard, under the crepe myrtle near the chook pen.

The boy jumps out with his footy and trots away, bouncing it. Boy? Look at him. He’s five foot eleven. The last of my three grandkids. This year he’s in the Under 16s.

It’s footy [Australian football] season in Melbourne, and Helen Garner is following her grandson’s suburban team. She turns up not only at every game (give or take), but at every training session, shivering on the sidelines in the dark, fascinated by the spectacle.

She’s a passionate Western Bulldogs supporter (with a rather shaky grasp of the rules) and a great admirer of the players and the epic theatre of the game. But this is something more than that. It is a chance to connect with her youngest grandchild, to be close to him in his last moments as a child and in his headlong rush into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to fear for his safety in battle, to gasp and to cheer for the team as it fights its way towards the finals.

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. And in 2023 she was awarded the ASA Medal for her outstanding contribution to Australian literature. Her works include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, The First Stone, The Spare Room, This House of Grief and three volumes of her diaries. She lives in Melbourne.