Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS de Ben Kafka

With an accessible, witty, and honest voice, a Stanford-trained historian, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist explores the maddening situations and relationships we all find ourselves in, and explains that while there are no quick or easy answers, recognizing and understanding these scenarios as they happen can help us muddle through in a better way.

THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS:
How People, Work and The World Drive Us Crazy
by Ben Kafka
John Murray Press, publication date TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

Despite what much pop psychology will tell you, sometimes it’s not a matter of doing more work on yourself. And while psychopharmacology has made some incredible and life-saving advances, our responses to crazy-making situations are often not purely biochemical. Sometimes the call isn’t coming from inside the house. Sometimes crazy really is other people.

In THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS, Kafka draws from decades of fascinating psychotherapeutic research as well as his own work with patients to help us understand the mechanics of things that make us rant and rave—passive-aggressive partners, borderline workplaces (a term Kafka coined), bureaucracy that feels like crucifixion—to help us better understand our own responses to these maddening stimuli, and in time, not be so reactive to them.

Ben Kafka is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in Greenwich Village. Originally trained as a historian, he was on the faculty of NYU for many years; he is now affiliated with the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He has been a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities since 2007, and a member of its board since 2012. He also serves on the board of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012).

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.

THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE de Vanessa McCausland

A small-town mommy blogger kayaked across the lake each morning at dawn, snapping selfies in the early-morning sun. Everyone obsessively watched her document a picturesque life on Instagram. But when an ominous, brooding image is posted to her account and the next day she is discovered drowned, immediately everyone wonders – suicide or was her online persona a façade?

THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE
by Vanessa McCausland
Crown, June 2025

Paige has always lived a picture-perfect life, now documented closely on her social media. The world she has curated exudes an old-fashioned, wholesome lifestyle set against a quaint, lakeside town in Australia. Her page is littered with breakfasts lakeside with her daughter, sunny afternoons in the family van, and romantic picnics with her husband.

Jane was one of Paige’s childhood best friends, but left her and their small town behind to pursue a bigger life in Sydney. When Paige’s death makes national news, Jane, a journalist, finds herself reluctantly traveling back to where it all began. Struggling with the morality of covering her friend’s death, and forced to come back to her childhood home, Jane must confront the friends and family she abandoned, and the secrets she left in her wake. But one thing Jane is sure about? This was not a suicide.

Readers will fall in love with Vanessa McCausland’s THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE, told through Paige’s perspective from the beyond, Jane’s present-day narration, an anonymous voice that watched Paige each morning, and flashbacks to Paige and Jane’s high school days, all leading towards a shocking, gasp-worthy ending.

“Compelling, haunting, and beautifully written, THE LAST ILLUSION OF PAIGE WHITE is a clever, page-turning modern mystery as well as a thoughtful exploration of female friendship, family dynamics, and the complex impact of social media on self-identity. You’ll be thinking about it long after you turn the last page!” —Liane Moriarty, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Vanessa McCausland studied English and Australian literature at Sydney University and graduated with honors in theatre and performance studies. She worked as a journalist for nearly twenty years, including as a news and arts journalist for the Daily Telegraph, and her writing has appeared in numerous other publications. She’s published four novels in Australia, and now lives in Sydney with her husband and daughter.

A KITCHEN IN ITALY de Mimi Thorisson

With recipes for antipasti, primi, secondi, and dulci, A KITCHEN IN ITALY brings Mimi’s Italian secrets to your dinner table.

A KITCHEN IN ITALY:
A Year of Family Meals and Celebrations from Our Home
by Mimi Thorisson
Clarkson Potter, October 2025

Mimi Thorisson first captivated readers with her family’s idyllic lifestyle in the French countryside before turning to the rich culinary treasures of Italian regional cuisine in Old World Italian. Now that she has found a true home in Italy, Mimi is back with a new Italian cookbook sharing how she cooks and eats in her Italian home.

Allow Mimi’s cooking to transport you to Italy, with 100 simple yet elegant dishes that celebrate the seasons. The recipes collected here are Mimi’s favorites, the staple dishes that she enjoys at home with her family and friends. In the spring, she loves Risi e Bisi, a brothy, risotto-like Venetian dish served in every home and restaurant when peas are in season. At the end of a long week, she turns to Involtini de Pollo, a comforting stuffed chicken served with a parmesan cream sauce. And there’s no better way to use up abundant summer zucchini than in Spaghetti alla Nerano, a dish that encapsulates the beautiful simplicity of Italian cooking.

Mimi Thorisson is a French cook and writer living with her family between Médoc, France and Turin, Italy. She is the author of A Kitchen in France, French Country Cooking, and Old World Italian, and she runs the award-winning food blog Manger, which documents her cooking adventures in Médoc and around Italy.

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.