MAKE IT YOURS WITH MIMI G de Mimi G. Ford

The ultimate collection of basic patterns that can be sewn, modified, and styled to yield more than 100 unique looks.

MAKE IT YOURS WITH MIMI G:
A Sewist’s Guide to a Custom Wardrobe
by Mimi G. Ford
Abrams, June 2023

MAKE IT YOURS WITH MIMI G is all about creating a fully functional wardrobe to love. Starting with six base patterns, Mimi G then hacks each pattern to create 26 new designs that will be styled both together and separately for a total of more than 100 looks. But this book isn’t just about hacking patterns to give you a complete wardrobe; it’s also about showing you how to style each garment and make your DIY wardrobe work for you.
Fashion and style are an integral part of making your own clothing, and this book offers a complete guide to making the perfect wardrobe for each individual. Mimi G’s own understanding of fit, her size-inclusive patterns, and ability to make what most would call “basic patterns” into unforgettable looks give this book incredible appeal. Focused on the modern maker wanting to create a sustainable wardrobe—with sewing, style, and design options—Mimi G’s take is unlike any other.

Mimi G. is the creator of Mimi G Style, Inc., an award-winning business born from her love of sewing and design. She is also the founder of the fashion, lifestyle, and DIY blog Mimi G Style, the founder of Sew It! Academy, and the host of the widely popular podcast Business S.H.E.T. She lives in Atlanta with her family.

ELI HARPO’S ADVENTURE TO THE AFTERLIFE d’Eric Schlich

An accessible and big-hearted novel that explores belief and forgiveness as a boy grapples with his faith and sexuality on a rollicking family road trip to Bible World.

ELI HARPO’S ADVENTURE TO THE AFTERLIFE
by Eric Schlich
The Overlook Press/Abrams, January 2024

When Eli Harpo was three, he underwent emergency open-heart surgery, flatlined on the operating table, and for a brief time, went to heaven and met Jesus. Or at least that’s what his father, a loving but devout Baptist minister, has raised him to believe.
Ten years later, Eli isn’t so sure. His rounds with his father to evangelize at hospices and sell his father’s self-published book, Heaven or Bust!, feel inauthentic and strange, especially now that he’s started having sex dreams about Jesus. Between that and his mother’s terminal breast cancer diagnosis, Eli feels further from heaven than ever. But when the famous televangelist Charlie Gideon shows up at the Harpos’ doorstep with a proposal to create a new attraction based on Eli’s trip to the afterlife at his Bible-themed park, Eli isn’t able to say no.
As the Harpos head off on a rollicking road trip from Kentucky to Bible World in Orlando, Eli is left to grapple with not just his faith and his sexuality, but also his own parents’ messy humanity and what happens when a family held together by mythmaking starts coming apart at the seams. Hilarious and moving, Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife is a big-hearted story about self-discovery and the search for truth, wherever it takes you.

Eric Schlich is the author of the story collection Quantum Convention, which received the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Prize and the 2020 GLCA New Writers Award in Fiction. His work has appeared in numerous publications and has been selected for prizes by writers including Roxane Gay, Helen Oyeyemi, and Justin Torres. He holds a PhD in fiction from Florida State University and an MFA from Bowling Green State University. He lives in Tennessee, where he is an assistant professor at the University of Memphis.

THE LITTLE MERMAID de Benjamin Lacombe & Hans Christian Andersen

Benjamin Lacombe’s haunting illustrations alongside Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story of love and loss showcase the tale in an enchanting new light.

THE LITTLE MERMAID
by Benjamin Lacombe & Hans Christian Andersen
Cernunnos/Abrams, November 2023

French artist Benjamin Lacombe has created stunning, one-of-a-kind artwork to illustrate the pages of Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale about a young mermaid who makes a devastating deal with a sea witch and transforms into a human, only to end up heartbroken, lose the deal, and lose her life. The book’s illustrations and design are unique, captivating, and unexpectedly haunting, appealing to adult fans of Benjamin Lacombe and the pop surrealist movement as well as a younger audience, especially with the upcoming nostalgia-fueled remake of Disney’s The Little Mermaid.
In addition to Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story, the book also includes additional pages featuring Andersen’s unrequited love letters to Edvard Collins and a postface by Lacombe with historical biography and context. In an essay, Lacombe explores LGBTQ themes in Hans Christian Andersen’s life. Frustrated with the overly feminine depictions of the story’s protagonist throughout history, Lacombe has created an androgynous mermaid to showcase the classic tale in a new light.

Benjamin Lacombe is one of the leading representatives of the new French illustration. At the age of 19, he published his first graphic novel and several other illustrated books. His final school project, Cerise Griotte (Cherry and Olive), became his first children’s book and was published by Seuil Jeunesse in March 2006. It was published the following year by Walker Books (USA) and listed as one of Time magazine’s 10 best children’s books in 2007. Lacombe has written and illustrated a number of books since. He regularly exhibits his work, most prominently with the following galleries: Ad Hoc Art (New York), Dorothy Circus (Rome), Maruzen (Tokyo), Nucleus (Los Angeles), and Daniel Maghen Gallery (Paris). Benjamin lives and works in Paris with his dogs, Virgile and Lisbeth.
Born in Denmark in 1805, Hans Christian Andersen was a writer of literary fairy tales, plays, poems, and novels. He died in 1875.

NUMBER GO UP de Zeke Faux

The harrowing, highly entertaining inside chronicle of how FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and a cast of fellow nerds and hustlers convinced the world to send trillions of dollars of real money to buy useless virtual coins—from a Bloomberg Businessweek writer.

NUMBER GO UP:
Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Currency/PRH, September 2023

After years on the financial world’s margins, crypto went mainstream in 2021. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady and Justin Bieber endorsed it, and Washington bigwigs debated new regulations. It seemed like everyone knew someone who was bragging about their returns from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and other bizarrely named “digital assets.” FOMO spread: Was crypto the new path to financial freedom? Unspoken was that hardly anyone knew how it worked. To borrow a phrase from crypto parlance, the only thing that mattered was “number go up.”
Observing this mania, Zeke Faux decided to embark on a quest to pull back the curtain on the wizards behind this new financial machinery. He first sets his sights on Tether, a digital currency dreamed up by a former child actor from the 1992 Disney film The Mighty Ducks. Tether had become crypto’s de facto bank, with $69 billion pouring into it. Each Tether was supposedly backed by one dollar. But where was the money?
As he chases this mystery around the globe, Faux is driven by a nagging question: Is it all just a global confidence game of epic proportions? In the Bahamas, he meets Tether’s biggest customer: Sam Bankman-Fried, a schlubby 29-year-old who Fortune once suggested was “the next Warren Buffett.” In El Salvador, he discovers what happens when a country decides to gamble its treasury on Bitcoin. A spam text message leads him to a crypto-fueled human-trafficking ring in Cambodia. And in Lugano, Switzerland, he finally tracks down the mysterious former plastic surgeon who runs Tether.
Then, in 2022, the crypto bubble burst, and Tether’s biggest customers started collapsing one by one. It culminated in November, when Bankman-Fried’s FTX failed in spectacular fashion. Faux returns to the Bahamas and takes readers inside the glittering sadness, lies and delusion of SBF’s luxury loft in the days after FTX’s implosion, revealing the emptiness at the center of the crypto industry. Fueled by the absurd details and authoritative reporting that earned Faux the title “our great poet of crime” (Matt Levine), NUMBER GO UP is a riveting account of the biggest financial mania the world has ever seen.

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News in New York. He’s a winner of the Gerald Loeb award for explanatory business journalism and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel award, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Faux lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their three children.

MIRIAM de Kate Riley

Miriam comes from a German-flavored utopian commune where dating is forbidden and the Sewing Sisters decide who can wear what kind of ugly plaid. Is beauty a sin? Is oddity? Will she ever get married? A pulsing literary debut about a woman born into an anabaptist community, whose life we follow from childhood to middle age.

MIRIAM
by Kate Riley
Riverhead, Fall 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Kate Riley wrote MIRIAM about eight years ago as a series of micro-dispatches (on an iPod Touch) to her heroically patient, encouraging friend, Molly Young (also The New York Times book critic), who helped her wrestle it into its sublime final shape. Molly has been intending to publish it in an edition of a few hundred lovingly designed copies, to be circulated by supportive, awed friends among would-be enthusiasts, one whom catchily volunteered to send an early blurb:

“The Biblical Books of Ruth and Esther have found their American sister-wife in Miriam, the serenely weird testament of an unintentional heroine in an intentional community, and an act of novelistic grace that deserves more than cult status, but its own goddamned religion.” —Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus, 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

This said rare edition is now available, and Riverhead will publish their hardcover edition Fall 2024. A selection of the novel has also appeared in n+1 in 2017 and another excerpt is featured in the last issue of The Paris Review.

Kate Riley was born in New York City and now lives in rural Virginia on a farm with her husband.