AFTER THE BLINDING de Thomas Mullen

From Thomas Mullen, the internationally acclaimed author of Darktown and The Last Town On Earth, and in the tradition of Blade Runner and Minority Report, AFTER THE BLINDING is a fast-paced speculative thriller about the ways technology has warped how we see the world and the people around us.

AFTER THE BLINDING
by Thomas Mullen
St. Martin’s Press, Fall 2022
(via Writers House)

Years ago, in a still little-understood phenomenon known as The Blinding, all of mankind lost the ability to see. Now, people can “see” again thanks to vidders, devices that transmit radar and other visual information directly to the brain. It feels like slightly enhanced vision, complete with night vision and, alas, pop-up ads. But now someone’s figured out to hack it.
Mark Owens is a burned-out, grieving detective called to investigate a murder in which the killer supposedly blacked himself out of view of every single witness. Owens doesn’t believe the story—until the killer strikes again, and this time Owens himself “sees” not the killer but a black blur, like a human censor bar, the killer somehow redacted from Owens’ vision.
In this police procedural set in a recognizable but fully imagined world, Owens needs to figure out how the killer is redacting himself, and who he is, before he strikes again. His investigation will take him from tech billionaires to anti-modernity cultists, and he’ll be forced to confront his past mistakes and the tragic loss of his wife, a visual artist who was driven to suicide by The Blinding.
Tackling subjects like the pervasive impact of technology, the role of police, government censorship, and a world recovering from collective trauma, AFTER THE BLINDING has the social resonance and immersive world-building of Darktown but with an escapism that whisks the reader someplace new.

Thomas Mullen’s first novel, The Last Town On Earth, was named Best Debut of the Year by USA Today, won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, was optioned in a preempt by DreamWorks, and has been a popular choice for colleges’ Freshmen Reads programs (and its treatment of the 1918 flu has proven eerily prescient). Darktown was named an NPR Best Book of the year and was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Indies Choice Award, and several international prizes, and is currently under development for television with MGM. The follow-up, Lightning Men, was named one of the top 10 crime novels of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Five of Mullen’s novels have been optioned for TV and film.

MELANCTHA de Wayétu Moore

A masterful work of magical realism which follows the life of a West African immigrant girl living in the US who discovers that she can breathe underwater.

MELANCTHA
by Wayétu Moore
Viking, Fall 2022
(via Writers House)

Melanctha is dealing with relentless bullying from her middle school classmates when she meets Habila, a sea witch in the vein of Mami Wata (an ancient West-African mythological figure who drowns civilians so she won’t be alone). Habila first coerces Melanctha to drown her bully. He is the first of two men throughout her life who she hypnotizes with help of a family heirloom. As Habila pushes Melanctha further, encouraging her to use her power to rid the world of evil men, Melanctha discovers that the use of this power has a catch.
As the novel unfolds in three parts: “small girl,” “gronah girl,” and “woman,” we see Melanctha come of age and enter adulthood, while the narrative voice takes on a unique style in each part to coincide with each phase of her life. This wrenching story is a complex exploration of the many faces and stages of a woman’s power, and what happens when she decides that she does not want to use it for good.
Moore invites her readers to carefully consider how racism and misogyny overwhelmingly encourage Black women to act out a pathology of perpetual forgiveness by presenting it as a seemingly necessary means of survival. By showing what can happen when a remarkably strong woman goes against the grain and chooses to seek justice and dole out punishment on her own terms, rather than do what is expected of her, MELANCTHA offers a revolutionary alternative to this insidious aspect of our culture.
Through her brilliant weaving of history, myth, cultural criticism, and the supernatural, Moore’s writing resonates with readers of contemporary greats Imbolo Mbue, Naomi Alderman, Marlon James, Yaa Gyasi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and recalls classic writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison.

Wayétu Moore is the author of She Would Be King, which was a Sarah Jessica Parker Book Club selection, a BEA Buzz Panel Book and a #1 Indie Next Pick, and the memoir The Dragons, The Giant, The Women. She is the founder of One Moore Book, a non-profit organization that encourages reading among children of countries with low literacy rates and underrepresented cultures by publishing culturally relevant books that speak to their truths, and by creating bookstores and reading corners that serve their communities. Her first bookstore opened in Monrovia, Liberia in 2015. Her writing can be found in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Guernica Magazine, The Rumpus, The Atlantic Magazine and other publications, and she has been featured in Vogue, The Economist Magazine, NPR, NBC, BET and ABC, among others.

LOVE de Maayan Eitan

An incendiary tale of sex work from a young literary provocateur.

LOVE
by Maayan Eitan
Penguin Press, April 2022
(via Writers House)

LOVE is a fever dream of a novel about a young sex worker whose life blurs the boundaries between violence and intimacy, objectification and real love. Startlingly vulnerable and lyrically deft, Maayan Eitan’s debut follows Libby as she goes about her work in a nameless Israeli city, riding in cars, seeing clients, meeting and befriending other sex workers and pimps. In prose as crystalline as it is unflinching, Eitan brings us into the mind of her fierce protagonist, as Libby spins a series of fictions to tell herself, and others, in order to negotiate her life under the gaze of men. After long nights of slipping in and out of the beds of strangers, in a shocking moment of violence, she seizes control of her narrative and then labors to construct a life that resembles normalcy. But as she pursues love, it continually eludes her. She discovers that her past nights in cheap hotel rooms eerily resemble the more conventional life she’s trying to forge. 
 A literary sensation in Israel, Maayan Eitan’s debut set off a firestorm about the relationship between truth and fiction, and the experiences of women under the power of men. Compact and gemlike, this is a contemporary allegory of a young woman on the verge.

“Maayan Eitan is a pensive rebel seductress and a literary trickster. Love, her debut, is celebrated by various deans and kingmakers of Israeli letters as one of the new century’s most important books. Her prose-poem account of life as an underage whore is so emotionally persuasive, so transparently metaphorical, so startlingly concrete, so obviously not true, that it had everyone in Israel convinced it was straight-up autofiction.” —Nell Zink, author of Mislaid and The Wallcreeper

Maayan Eitan’s short fiction and essays have been published in The Kenyon Review, World Literature Today, and The Tel Aviv Review of Books, and her work appears regularly in Israeli literary magazines. She holds a master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Hebrew literature in Israel. LOVE is her first book. She lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

THE HOP de Diana Clarke

From the author of Thin Girls, a page-turning feminist novel that tells the story of how a poor girl coming of age in rural New Zealand grows to be a sex icon, the face of a movement, and a mother, all at the same time.

THE HOP
by Diana Clarke
Harper, June 2022
(via Writers House)

Kate Burns grows up wanting attention from her Ma, but her Ma wants only money and Kate learns how to get both. She and her childhood friend, Lacey, run kissing lessons for cash in the janitor’s closet of Fenbrook High, and, just like that, they find themselves in the sex work industry. When Ma dies, Kate discovers that the men her Ma was always inviting over to their home were, in fact, clients. Ma was no stranger to sex work either.
Following in Ma’s footsteps, Kate heads to Nevada where she picks up a job at America’s largest and most successful brothel: The Hop. In her new life as a Bunny, Kate searches for an identity she can perform—the other Bunnies include a goth, a housewife, a hippy, a rebel, all of them acting their archetype flawlessly. She befriends Betty, a trans woman who is a Bunny for kicks rather than cash; Mia, who is marketed as The Asian Persuasion; Dakota and Rain, who are ex-dominatrixes and newly in love. Kate becomes Lady Lane. Lady quickly becomes a bestselling Bunny and the owner Daddy’s favorite at this high-class establishment. But when ten street workers are killed in a nearby city, just bodies with no names, Lady joins her sister Bunnies in mourning and begins to see things in a new light.
Lady’s success breeds scandal and unwanted fame, deeply affecting her, transforming her life and The Hop forever. Diana Clarke’s provocative second novel is subversive in the very best way, an unforgettable work of fiction with a feminist message that couldn’t be more important.

Purdue MFA (with Roxane Gay as her thesis adviser) and University of Utah PhD candidate, Diana Clarke is a New Zealander who now lives in Salt Lake City. Her work has been published in Glimmer Train, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, The Master’s Review, and Hobart, among other places. THE HOP is her second novel.

THE HOUSE PARTY de Rita Cameron

A compulsively readable novel for fans of book club favorites like Such a Fun Age, Little Fires Everywhere, and Dear Edward that poses powerful questions about privilege and mercy, and examines how a single, irreversible event can send a seemingly tranquil town into total disarray…

THE HOUSE PARTY
by Rita Cameron
William Morrow, September 2022
(via Writers House)

The party starts out innocently enough. On a Friday afternoon, with only six weeks ‘til graduation, a few local teenagers find a garage door opener on the deck of a nearly-fully-constructed luxury home. By evening, word has gotten out, and virtually the entire the senior class is partying at the house, music blasting, booze flowing. The skaters are using the empty swimming pool as a half-pipe, some kid is selling coke in the upstairs bathroom, and the stoners are building a fire pit in the backyard. It’s a bona fide rager. Of course nobody plans to trash the house, but somehow, by the end of the night, the kitchen is flooded, there are holes in the walls, the deck is singed, and the custom glass windows are shattered. What should have been the best party of the year has become the town’s worst ever case of vandalism.
And just like that, Mae Jensen’s dream house has been destroyed, before she ever even had a chance to live in it. The house she has spent countless hours designing and obsessing over, the house that was going to be proof she had made the right choices, that she had built something beautiful out of her life. The perfect house that would compensate for her failure to have a child, the house that was going to save her marriage. All ruined. And for what?
THE HOUSE PARTY explores the fallout from this one out-of-control night, putting Mae’s marriage to the ultimate test, jeopardizing the futures of the “good kids” who have done a very bad thing, and dividing the town over questions of privilege and responsibility. As the police close in on a list of suspects, the tight-knit community begins to turn on each other, and on anyone they consider an outsider, as they attempt to protect their futures and their families.
Set against the backdrop of the 2008 mortgage crisis and recession, THE HOUSE PARTY examines how easily friendships, careers, and marriages can unravel when the differences in wealth and power that lie beneath them are forced to the surface.

Rita Cameron is the author of Ophelia’s Muse (Kensington, 2015). She studied English literature at Columbia University, and law at the University of Pennsylvania.