Archives par étiquette : David Black Literary Agency

GOOD GIRLS de Leesa Gazi

A stunning literary novel of thrilling suspense by writer and filmmaker Gazi, and translated by Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Nadiya.

GOOD GIRLS
by Leesa Gazi and translated by Shabnam Nadiya
Amazon Crossing, December 2023
(via David Black Literary Agency)

For sisters Lovely and Beauty, home is a prison under the toxic watch of their controlling, abusive mother, Farida Khanam. The girls are each locked in their own rooms, their own gilded cages, and have never been allowed to leave the house by themselves. GOOD GIRLS opens and it’s Lovely’s 40th birthday, the day Farida will give Lovely the freedom to go to the Gausia Market alone. “Today was the day for everyone to be what they weren’t, or perhaps be what they were.” With a tragic foreboding, we know today is the day that will change everything.

Taking place over the span of a single day, GOOD GIRLS unfolds in page-turning slow-motion, as Lovely interacts with the outside world, as the secrets of their lives in captivity emerge, and as she battles the man inside her head. With masterful precision and lyrical prose, Gazi and Nadiya grab us from the opening pages with a sinister premise: what does a 40-year-old woman who has never been granted freedom for a few hours do? Farida’s tautly constructed world begins to unravel as temptations, demons and the past come to haunt each of them. Good Girls explores the emotional violence of the matriarchy as well as the patriarchy’s suffocating effort to keep women within four walls. Lovely and Beauty show us the cost of freedom.

GOOD GIRLS was originally published in Bengali in 2010 by Sucheepatra Publishers, under the title Hellfire. It was published in English in India by Eka/Westland Books (Sept 2020) and was shortlisted for the Kâpylä Translation Prize. Listed by Words Without Borders as One of the Best Translated Books of 2020.

Leesa Gazi is a Bangladeshi British author, theater practitioner, award-winning filmmaker, and joint artistic director of the London-based arts organization Komola Collective. She has dedicated her career to presenting stories from women’s perspectives. Multiple plays written and translated by Gazi toured nationally and internationally. She was the cowriter and performer of the play Birangona: Women of War, nominated for the Offies (UK), which she later developed into the documentary feature Rising Silence, which sheds light on the lives of sexual violence survivors in the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War.

MIND YOUR BODY de Nicole Sachs

Chronicling her clinical work and associated research, Sachs reveals how uncovering and understanding the puzzle of your mind can transform your physical health.

MIND YOUR BODY
Understand and Master the Tools to Release Chronic Pain and Anxiety
by Nicole Sachs
Tarcher, March 2025
(via David Black Literary)

Nicole J. Sachs, LCSW

In MIND YOUR BODY, Sachs will teach readers about Mindbody medicine and how to turn inwards using her JournalSpeak practice, which has helped countless people around the world better understand their inner workings and experience striking mental, emotional, and physical healing. Sachs knows that the answer to much of the chronic pain debacle resides in understanding that a person’s stress, repressed emotions, unresolved trauma, and smaller daily frustrations are causing nervous system dysregulation. The solution lies in rewiring the brain and nervous system’s misguided reflex to protect us with pain and syndromes. Through personal storytelling and patient case studies, Sachs chronicles how her prescription of JournalSpeak, mindset management, and self-affirming meditation has transformed her life and the lives of her many clients and retreat participants.

Psychotherapist Nicole J. Sachs was mentored by and worked alongside the late bestselling author and founder of Mindbody medicine, Dr. John Sarno. His daughter Christina Sarno Horner, LMHC says of Sachs, “After years working alongside my father, Dr. John Sarno, Nicole Sachs’s approach to chronic pain is the truest and most accessible evolution of Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS) treatment. Her work captures the essential components for healing.”

YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL de Maggie Smith

“A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes” (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author) that explores coming of age in your middle age—from the bestselling poet and author of Keep Moving.

YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL: A Memoir
by Maggie Smith
Publisher, April 2023
(via David Black Literary)

In her memoir, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman’s personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.
YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is “extraordinary” (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more.

THE LITTLE LIAR de Mitch Albom

Beloved bestselling author Mitch Albom returns with a powerful novel that moves from a small village in Greece during the Holocaust, to America, where the intertwined lives of three survivors are forever changed by the perils of deception and the grace of redemption.

THE LITTLE LIAR
by Mitch Albom
Harper, November 2023
(via David Black Literary)

Credit: Jenny Risher

Eleven-year-old Nico Crispi never told a lie. When the Nazi’s invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico has to do is convince his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading towards “the east” where they are promised jobs and safety. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the innocent boy goes to the station platform every day and reassures the passengers that the journey is safe. But when the final train is at the station, Nico sees his family being loaded into a large boxcar crowded with other neighbors. Only after it is too late does Nico discover that he helped send the people he loved—and all the others—to their doom at Auschwitz.
Nico never tells the truth again.
In THE LITTLE LIAR, his first novel set during the Holocaust, Mitch Albom interweaves the stories of Nico, his brother Sebastian, and their schoolmate Fanni, who miraculously survive the death camps and spend years searching for Nico, who has become a pathological liar, and the Nazi officer who radically changed their lives. As the decades pass, Albom reveals the consequences of what they said, did, and endured.
A moving parable that explores honesty, survival, revenge and devotion, THE LITTLE LIAR is Mitch Albom at his very best. Narrated by the voice of Truth itself, it is a timeless story about the harm we inflict with our deceits, and the power of love to ultimately redeem us.

Mitch Albom is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, which have collectively sold more than forty million copies in forty-seven languages worldwide. He has written seven number-one New York Times bestsellers – including Tuesdays with Morrie, the bestselling memoir of all time, which topped the list for four straight years – award-winning TV films, stage plays, screenplays, a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and a musical. Through his work at the Detroit Free Press, he was inducted into both the National Sports Media Association and Michigan Sports halls of fame and is the recipient of the 2010 Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement. After bestselling memoir Finding Chika and “Human Touch,” the weekly serial written and published online in real-time to raise funds for pandemic relief, his latest work is a return to fiction with The Stranger in the Lifeboat (Harper, November 2021). He founded and oversees SAY Detroit, a consortium of nine different charitable operations in his hometown, including a nonprofit dessert shop and food product line to fund programs for Detroit’s most underserved citizens. He also operates an orphanage in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, which he visits monthly. He lives with his wife, Janine, in Michigan.

ADULT BRACES de Lindy West

ADULT BRACES will provide exercises, thought experiments, and prescriptions that will help her reader map the fears that prevent her from becoming the attentive, active navigator of her own life.

ADULT BRACES:
A Self-Help Book from a Self-in-Progress, or, How You Can Go from Being a Mess to Being a Way Happier Mess
by Lindy West
Hachette US, 2024
(via David Black Literary)

Through SHRILL, the book and then the Hulu series, Lindy West became an inspiration. To this day she is stopped on the street and told she is a beacon of empowerment by women who felt they couldn’t conform to the categories deemed acceptable—thin, straight, compliant—and felt bad about it. To them she modeled someone who had achieved self-actualization.
But what if casting off society’s pre-conceived notions was only the first part of the journey? What if it all the progress that culminated in SHRILL—the actualized self—turned out not to be a destination but an overnight stay on the way to somewhere else even more fulfilling?
Modeled on the sturdy breed of self-esteem-builders like the Sinceros, Mansons, Hollises, and even The Artist’s Way (which Lindy loves), ADULT BRACES uses Lindy’s own, post-SHRILL emotional implosion to chart her way back to an evolving, non-static happiness, and to the realization that the roads to self-actualization are infinite, unpredictable, and endlessly gratifying—and long as you don’t pull over.
ADULT BRACES takes Lindy back to SHRILL yet leaps ahead to something entirely new. She is providing a guide out of indolence and fear. For her, as has been made quite public, it led to a complete reinvention of her marriage. It doesn’t have to be precisely that for every reader, but that is the bold standard she sets. Whatever the particulars, she wants to help readers find what she has, a map to more love, more sex, more trust, more openness. And the courage to keep driving.

Lindy West is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributor to This American Life. She is the bestselling author of the essay collection The Witches Are Coming as well as Shrill, a memoir, which she adapted into a comedy for Hulu starring Aidy Bryant. She lives in Seattle.