Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

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.

WILD ASTER d’Anna Hogeland

A powerful portrait of an unforgettable woman with a talent for survival, whose life spans the early twentieth century, from a writer acclaimed for her “unwavering passion and insight” (Jess Walter, NYT bestselling author of The Cold Millions)

WILD ASTER
by Anna Hogeland
Bloomsbury, Fall 2026
(DeFiore and Co.)

Mae Smith starts her life as a stolen good: her biological mother, Ida, kidnaps her from her adoptive parents, and Mae grows up on the run, constantly changing towns and names, never able to find a home. After her mother’s death, Mae is determined to live a different kind of life. But over the next half century, as she reinvents herself against the backdrop of the Depression and Second World War and pursues stability amid the personal upheavals of marriage and motherhood, she must reckon with the choices she’s made and life’s inexorable turns.

For readers of Zorrie by Laird Hunt, The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott, and The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant, Wild Aster explores the price of security, the drive to be a different mother than your own, and the daily gains and losses that define who we become. Ultimately, Mae’s story challenges us to confront the choices we make for personal fulfillment and family obligation and the perseverance that even a seemingly ordinary life demands.

Anna Hogeland is the author of the novel The Long Answer (Riverhead, 2022). She is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Big Issue, Gloss Magazine, Romper, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts.

FOUNDERING de Cameron Yarbrough

A manifesto for anyone who has risked everything, failed, and found the courage to start again. It celebrates the journeys of individuals with mental health conditions who succeeded because of these conditions, not despite them. It inspires those who feel marginalized to turn their weaknesses into strengths.

FOUNDERING:
How Silicon Valley’s Greatest Entrepreneurs Go Deep to Rise High
by Cameron Yarbrough
Grand Central Publishing, November 2026
(via DeFiore and Co.)

Cameron Yarbrough knows the best-kept secret in Silicon Valley: nobody takes that brilliant idea from the proverbial back of the napkin to the stratosphere without enduring painful growth and seismic psychological breakthroughs. As a therapist and coach, he has helped founders of the most successful startups in tech achieve the impossible without sacrificing their well-being in the process. Renowned figures like Garry Tan, the president of the famous startup incubator Y Combinator, Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, and Justin Kan, cofounder of Twitch. Yarbrough not only witnessed their spectacular highs and desperate lows from the sidelines; he walked in their shoes when he himself started his own company. In this book, he offers that unique expertise and guidance to aspiring leaders everywhere.

FOUNDERING is about what happened behind the scenes to this generation of founders and how they learned what it takes to survive and thrive as business leaders and human beings in the brutal world of growth-stage startups. It is about the existential crises, breakdowns, and self-reinventions that turn out to be unavoidable features of the process – the emotional crucible that no entrepreneur can avoid, and that no would-be entrepreneur can afford not to master. It’s about the takeaways–secrets, lessons, and tools to help every leader redefine success on their own terms.

FOUNDERING is a manifesto for anyone who has risked everything, failed, and found the courage to start again. It celebrates the journeys of individuals with mental health conditions who succeeded because of these conditions, not despite them. It inspires those who feel marginalized to turn their weaknesses into strengths. In a world obsessed with success, this book dares to explore psychological crisis as the birthplace of resilience, innovation, and meaning. It is an invitation to anyone who is contemplating a bold move, in the thick of an entrepreneurial crisis, or ready to rise from the ashes to join the ranks of these elite founders.

Cameron Yarbrough is an executive coach, therapist, and entrepreneur who has worked with some of Silicon Valley’s most influential founders and leaders. He was invited to productize his approach by Silicon Valley’s famous tech incubator, Y Combinator. Now, Yarbrough is the co-founder and Executive Chair of Torch, a preferred coaching vendor of LinkedIn, Roche, Alphabet, FICO, AirBnB, Stripe, and many other companies. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Business Insider, Inc, and TechCrunch.

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.