Archives par étiquette : Frances Goldin Literary Agency

FREE LOVE de Michelle Tea

A wildly entertaining, authentic, and profound guide to navigating freedom and commitment, in a society intent on pinning us down.

FREE LOVE: Adventures in Marriage and Polyamory
by Michelle Tea
HarperOne, Fall 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Polyamory is having a moment. Whether you love it or hate it, the explosion of non-monogamy into the mainstream suggests a widespread frustration and stuck-ness within traditional relationship structures, perhaps especially among women and femmes, whose sexual freedom has long been contained and policed. Why do we have to choose between adventure and security? Why can’t we try, at least, to have them both?

Long before its current it-girl moment, polyamory was foundational to many radical subcultures, who saw in it not only the chance for sexual freedom, but a path towards dismantling patriarchal oppression and the zero-sum game of capitalism – a path towards personal, spiritual, and collective growth, care, and empowerment. Polyamory was also foundational to the life of beloved writer and queer icon Michelle Tea, from the clandestine, ill-fated throuples of her late teens, to the punk lesbian underground of 90s San Francisco, through marriage and divorce, Tinder flings and enduring friendships, heartbreak and motherhood.

In FREE LOVE, she will share these juicy, hilarious, and moving stories with her characteristic wit and charm, while delving into the radical, forgotten history of openness, and interviewing and researching widely, to guide readers through the thorny choices we make in our own relationships – poly or no. A modern-day The Ethical Slut meets Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, it marries the storytelling of Maggie Smith and Samantha Irby with the practical wisdom and heartwarming appeal of writers like Glennon Doyle, Emily Nagoski, and Vanessa Marin.

Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen widely acclaimed books memoir, fiction, and cultural criticism, and the recipient of awards from PEN/America, the Guggenheim, Lambda Literary, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her books have been translated into French, Japanese, Slovenian, German, Italian, and Swedish.

THE GREAT WORK de Sheldon Costa

A grieving man and his nephew hunt down a myth in this gothic Western adventure for fans of Karen Russell and Victor LaValle.

THE GREAT WORK
by Sheldon Costa
Quirk Books, November 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Alone in a frontier town in the brand-new state of Washington, Gentle Montgomery is grieving his best friend. Liam, a self-taught alchemist, was killed when he tried to capture a creature that shouldn’t exist: a giant salamander that drives men mad. When Gentle’s nephew Kitt arrives at his doorstep, the two set out together to track the monster down, so they can use its blood in an alchemical formula that will bring Liam back to life.

It’s a hard and haunted journey through the Northwestern frontier. The salamander produces surreal nightmares and waking dreams of a blighted, burning future. And Gentle and Kitt soon find themselves pursued by a bloodthirsty hunter, a sadistic judge, and a doomsday cult, all of whom have their own plans for the river monster. Armed with nothing but Liam’s alchemical notebooks, they must not only find the salamander but learn to understand it—and the terrifying visions it causes—before it’s too late.

Unsettling and profound, THE GREAT WORK is an arcane adventure through the wilderness of friendship and the rotten heart of the early American empire.

“The Great Work is a vision of America as both homeland and horror story. And it also is just a good ol’ page turner, the kind of dark tale that delivers on every promise it makes.” — Joseph Fink, co-creator of Welcome to Night Vale

“Costa’s rip-snorting debut is a wild ride through freaky old America: backwoods alchemists, a sadistic reverend judge, an animalistic cult, and a quest for a primeval monster of nightmares come together in a hell-for-leather frontier yarn packed with action, wonder, and heart.” — James Kennedy, author of Bride of the Tornado “A moody, atmospheric, and singular novel which navigates corners of American history through the complicated territory of horror, the monstrous, and the heroic.” — Kelly Link, best-selling author of The Book of Love

Sheldon Costa is a writer originally from Post Falls, Idaho. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Electric Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, and Crazyhorse, among others. He is a winner of the AWP Intro Journal Project, the 2018 Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award, and the Cream City Review’s 2019 Summer Prize in Fiction, judged by Ramona Ausubel. He holds an MFA from the Ohio State University and lives in rural Missouri with his wife and three cats. This is his debut novel.

NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE de June Jordan

The definitive selected essays of the revolutionary writer and activist June Jordan, the first publication in an ambitious program to reissue her long out-of-print work.

NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE: The Selected Essays of June Jordan
Edited and introduced by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Penguin Classics, Spring 2027
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Known in her time as the most widely published African American writer to date, June Jordan was a courageous agitator for change, writing with love and rage at the frontlines of literature and injustice on an international scale. A contemporary of Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, she received a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement, and the civil rights movement.

And yet Jordan knew that she never got her due within her lifetime. She was too fiery, too fierce in her political commitments to be embraced and lauded by the establishment. In the years after her untimely death in 2001, her remarkable work largely fell out of print. Yet it is the very fierceness and foresight of Jordan’s commitment to freedom and human dignity that has fueled a recent, international upsurge of interest in her work. NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE will be the first in a major reissue program from Penguin Classics in the US.

Edited by the celebrated poet and Black feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and timed to coincide with the first biography of Jordan (also by Gumbs) for Yale University Press, this definitive selected essays includes hugely influential treatises alongside lesser known gems, all organized around the power of Jordan’s unyielding commitment to love.

“In political journalism that cuts like razors, in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light … [June Jordan] has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept… I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.” —Toni Morrison

June Jordan (1936 – 2002) became, in her lifetime, the most published Black poet in American history. Known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism, she founded the Poetry for the People program at U.C. Berkeley and received, among many honors, a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement and the civil rights movement.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Survival is a Promise, the biography of Audre Lorde (FSG, 2024), a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, Guardian Book of the Week, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award. She is a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize Winner in Poetry, and a 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Nonfiction.

HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL de Jamie Hood

The ambitious and experimental debut by Jamie Hood, author of Trauma Plot, interrogating the “good girl” archetype and the price one pays to embody it.

HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL
by Jamie Hood
Vintage, March 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

In the thick of winter 2020, when so many books were buried beneath the catastrophe of the COVID-19 news cycle, one unlikely debut seemed to cut through the noise. Jamie Hood’s How to Be a Good Girl was an inventive and hybrid work of self-making, mingling diary entries, poetry, literary criticism, and love letters to interrogate the archetype of the “good girl,” and the ideas of femininity, passivity, desire, and trauma that come with it. Journeying from the ice age to our modern-day climate crisis, it devoured texts as expansive as Levinas and Plath to the Ronettes and after-school specials, all the while asking: what pound of flesh must a woman pay to be seen as “good.”

How to Be a Good Girl was a critical darling when it was first published by Grieveland. The Rumpus praised its “bold vulnerability,” and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020. Now, Vintage is proud to reissue this provocative and genre-bending debut and find new readers for an exciting, new literary voice.

Jamie Hood is a critic, memoirist, and poet. Her work has appeared in Bookforum, The Baffler, The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, Observer, The Drift, SSENSE, Bookforum, Vogue, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU d’Erin Jones

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU explores themes of climate change, wealth inequality, queer lives, and immortality, combining the ensemble storytelling of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, the speculative nature of Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark and C. Pam Zhang’s Land Of Milk and Honey, with the humor and heart of Glass Onion.

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU
by Erin Jones
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, publication 2026-2027
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

In a not-too-distant future, the world’s last glacier has been downgraded to the world’s last iceberg. While society mourns another natural wonder lost to climate change, the billionaire—a former tech mogul turned restaurateur—becomes obsessed with obtaining a piece of the ice to serve at his restaurant. The iceberg has been deemed a protected entity by the United Nations, but that doesn’t worry the billionaire. He needs the ice.  

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU is a speculative, propulsive literary novel-in-stories following the waning days of the world as we know it, and the nine people who find their fates intertwined with the iceberg and one another across space, time, and class. There’s the helicopter pilot who aids and abets the billionaire’s heist despite physical and emotional scars from what she saw while working in search and rescue amid environmental catastrophes wrought by global warming; the billionaire’s wife, who reserved her place in a future Mars colony by allowing her consciousness to be contained in a box as the world burned; a pair of twins who have only ever lived at sea and now lead scuba tours of communities drowned by rising waters; and finally, the security guard who will do whatever it takes to provide protection (and air conditioning) for his young family, and becomes embroiled in a plot to reclaim the little of the iceberg that remains in containment before it’s gone forever.

Erin Jones is the author of the YA novel Tinfoil Crowns (Flux Books, 2019), a 2020 Moonbeam Awards Silver Medalist, and one of Barnes & Noble’s most anticipated YA books of the year. Jones graduated with her MFA in fiction from Emerson College where she is now affiliated faculty and a writing consultant for ELL students. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.