With the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty-three years apart and the strange circumstances connecting them.
CAVE MOUNTAIN
by Benjamin Hale
Harper, March2026
(via DeFiore & Company)
This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley—Benjamin Hale’s cousin—got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance—and her account, after she was found, of the “imaginary friend” she met in the woods—would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.
Enriched by Benjamin Hale’s own family history and the lore of the Arkansas Ozarks, CAVE MOUNTAIN is a gripping story about nature and survival, religion and skepticism, and good and evil. At its center are two young girls, years apart, both in danger in the verdant wilds of northern Arkansas.
Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve, 2011) and the collection The Fat Artist and Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2016). His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Conjunctions, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is a senior editor at Conjunctions, teaches at Bard College and Columbia University, and lives in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley.
In IT BEGINS WITH YOU, Jillian will share hard-won lessons from her own life experience and from her years of coaching thousands of people on their love lives. She will share personal anecdotes, as well as her clients’ experiences, alongside her best advice and practical tools, tips, and questions, to help readers examine their own lives and relationships. Each chapter will focus solely on one of her 9 Hard Truths, such as: “No One is Coming To Save You” – which looks at inner strength, accountability, and dependences – in the relationships we keep, and in ourselves. Jillian holds nothing back as she weaves her own experiences into her lessons; imperfections and failures are a part of all relationships and acknowledging this truth is a core principle of her teaching.
Where mostly male behavioral psychologists have previously dominated the categories of happiness and optimization, Corinne, a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, applies economic principles to uniquely female concerns. Teaching readers how to use concepts like personal utility function (how we individually maximize profit and joy) and constrained optimization (making the best choice within external limits) to think about decisions and tradeoffs like the cost of a biological clock, Corinne will arm women with the tools they need to ask for more: from their partners, from their bosses, and from the system itself.