Archives par étiquette : Levine Greenberg Rostan

MEET THE NEWMANS de Jennifer Niven

Set in sun-drenched 1964 Los Angeles, MEET THE NEWMANS chronicles America’s favorite TV family whose perfect façade starts to unravel when their iconic show (titled of course, Meet the Newmans) is up for renewal and one of them suffers a tragic accident. You can think of this as a mix of Lessons in Chemistry and The Nest with a dash of Daisy Jones and the Six as well as an affectionate nod to Ozzie and Harriet.

MEET THE NEWMANS
by Jennifer Niven
Flatiron Books, Spring 2025
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

For two decades, Del (45) and Dinah Newman (43) and their sons, Guy (22) and Shep (18), have ruled the airwaves as America’s Favorite Family. Thirty million viewers tune in every week to watch them play airbrushed, flawless versions of themselves. But behind the smiling black-and-white exterior, the Newmans are a mess.

Patriarch Del is the propulsive motor and visionary behind the Newmans machine— producing, directing, writing, and starring in every single one of the 400 plus episodes. But at forty-five, he suddenly feels like a relic. Ratings have plummeted, the studio is threatening cancellation, his own fame has been eclipsed by his youngest son’s, and their money (that he was managing) is suddenly gone. Meanwhile, Dinah struggles to figure out what is making her body literally go numb, and to break out of her traditional roles as wife and mother. Roles that—off camera— she is terrible at. Lately she finds herself wondering is this all there is and daydreaming about having an affair with the neighbor. Guy and Shep aren’t faring much better. Guy has lived life by the book, doing everything right—at least as far as anyone can see— in a futile effort to win his dad’s approval. Behind closed doors, though, his personal life is in chaos. Younger brother Shep, on the other hand, is a dreamy rock n’ roll idol who seems to be on top of the world—until an ill-timed romance and a surprise baby change the course of his life.

When Del gets into a car accident in a mysterious location across town, the Newmans’ world is turned upside down. Dinah, Guy, and Shep scramble to keep his hospitalization and comatose state from the press and the studio and at the same time figure out how to keep the show afloat without Del at the helm. Being everyone’s fantasy family is a lot to carry!

Enter LA Times Reporter Juliet Dunne (26), here to cover the life and times of America’s beloved Newmans. Trouble is, Juliet loathes them. She grew up watching the show and blames Dinah in particular for setting an unrealistic and antiquated version of what it means to be a woman. Juliet fully expects to get her fluff interview and go back to her actual journalism pursuits.

But Dinah has a different plan…

Meet the Newmans is as relevant today as it will be tomorrow as it was yesterday. A novel about love, money, fame, purpose, friendship, creativity, loss, and most of all the evolution of a family. This funny, warm, affecting read is also about the dual lives we all lead— the version we present to the world and the version that exists off stage. Because it turns out, even when our lives aren’t televised weekly, we all have a behind-the-scenes.

Jennifer Niven is the #1 New York Times and internationally bestselling author of fiction and nonfiction, including the massive breakout All the Bright Places which she also adapted for the Netflix film directed by Brett Haley and starring Elle Fanning, Justice Smith, Luke Wilson, and Keegan-Michael Key. Her books have been translated into over 75 languages and have won literary awards around the world. When she isn’t working on multiple book and screen projects, Jennifer oversees Germ, an online literary journal for high school age and beyond.

TRANS TIME TRAVEL de Thomas Page McBee

Thomas Page McBee defines the concept of “trans time,” and how the trans experience can be a torch into the future for all of us.

TRANS TIME TRAVEL
A Mind-Bending Journey Across Continents, Centuries, and Dimensions
by Thomas Page McBee
Scribner, TBD
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

© A Klass Thomas Page McBee is at 42, he writes, one of the oldest trans people he knows, an “elder,”—and he’s also 12, “a man without a boyhood, alive at the end of the world.” Time is linear, but it’s also cyclical. This moment, with its fever-pitch of anti-trans rhetoric, a broken political system, not to mention climate change, can feel like the end of the world—as have other moments in our history. And yet, as Thomas writes, “the future is already here.” The seeds of what is to come already exist. We need to be asking different and better questions.

This books takes us through time and space and through the ideas that Thomas finds himself obsessed with: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; queer history of the American West; the story of Brandon Teena, subject of the film “Boys Don’t Cry” and the first trans person Thomas ever heard of; how the media, the medical system, the prison system, the archives have all told trans stories.

Thomas Page McBee’s TV and screenwriting career has been enormously successful, with several collaborations with Elliott Page and others, including for an adaptation on Amateur that HBO has momentum behind. He’s been praised by some of the most iconic writers of our generation, from Roxane Gay to Maggie Nelson. His work as a journalist is highly sought after, from the current piece on Mary Shelley he’s writing for Travel and Leisure to a T Magazine feature commissioned by Hanya Yanagihara.

WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE de Julian Zabalbeascoa

WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE is a daring, haunting, and, at times, darkly funny work of fiction that will both transport you to the treacherous days of the Spanish Civil War and bring into sharper focus the world we find ourselves in today.

WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE
by Julian Zabalbeascoa
Two Dollar Radio, Fall 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in Northern Spain to join the fight to preserve his country’s democracy from the fascists. Months earlier, a group of Spanish generals launched a military coup to overthrow Spain’s newly elected left-wing government. They assumed the population would welcome the coup but throughout the country people like Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest.

Isidro’s odyssey through war-ravaged Spain connects him to a diverse cast of characters on both sides of the war—a female soldier in an all-male battalion, a reluctant conscript recently emigrated from Cuba, a young girl whose parents have abandoned her to fight against the fascists, a mother of two who is secretly an anonymous writer of liberal propaganda, and a fascist soldier determined to avenge his murdered captain, among several others. Through this chorus of voices, we follow Isidro and many others as they struggle to maintain their humanity in a country determined to tear itself apart.

Conceived as a unified piece of fiction and unfolding in chronological order, WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE has the scope and power of a traditional novel, though its episodic structure and shifting perspectives also call to mind books like Julia Philips’s Disappearing Earth and Phil Klay’s Redeployment.

A remarkable feat of research and imagination, Julian’s all too timely fiction brings both the Spanish Civil War, and, by extension, the many atrocities unfolding today, into stark relief, as Isidro and others navigate a country where cities are shelled beyond recognition, where the big lies of fascism have poisoned many members of society, and where even the most heinous acts of horror have quickly become permissible.

“A stunning first novel, ambitious, intensely true, certain to be read for a long time. Zabalbeascoa is a phenomenon. » – Phillip Meyer, NY Times bestselling author of The Son and American Rust

“In the tradition of such master storytellers as Isaac Babel and Phil Klay, Julian Zabalbeascoa has written a piercing narrative set during the Spanish Civil War. Alive with wonderful characters, moments of dread, bathos and humour, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here illuminates a crucial period of history. This is a timely and important story.” – Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field, Mercury and The Flight of Gemma Hardy

“Julian Zabalbeascoa is the real deal, a major talent, and the story he’s telling here is both riveting and terrifying.” —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls

A first-generation Basque-American (dual citizen), Julian Zabalbeascoa is a Visiting Professor in the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he teaches classes on Basque culture and the Spanish Civil War and leads annual study abroad programs to Donostia-San Sebastian, Havana, and Madrid. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans. His interviews and reviews have appeared in The Believer, Electric Literature and The Millions.

THE ONES WE LOVE d’Anna Snoekstra

Simmering tensions in a family of Australian expats newly living in L.A. explode when their daughter commits a crime she can’t remember on a big night out, and they all become complicit in the cover up…

THE ONES WE LOVE
by Anna Snoekstra
Dutton, Spring 2025
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Since the morning after the party – the one Liv can’t remember, the one that left her covered in bruises – there’s been a padlock on the door of her bedroom. Her parents said they found mold and it needs to be decontaminated, but they’re acting kind of strange. And her friend Leilani isn’t answering her texts, so maybe Liv did get a little out of control that night. Sharing a room with her brother Cas for a while isn’t the end of the world, as long as he doesn’t tell their parents that she’s started sleepwalking. They’re already worried enough.

Janus brought his family from Australia to LA to chase his dream of turning his bestselling novel into a screenplay. Yeah, money is tight, but he’s sure THIS rewrite is the one. He knows he let his wife down with that Liv situation, and he can’t let her down again.

Kay wasn’t sure she wanted to be a mother when she got pregnant with Liv, but she gave up everything for her daughter and then her son, Casper, as well. She’ll do whatever she has to do to take care of her kids. Her marriage, though, is a different story. And the neighbors – well, they’ll just have to be more careful.

All Cas wanted was to go home for the summer – to Australia, his real home. But his parents are making him stay in LA, AND he has to share a room with his sister. Mold? He doesn’t believe it. Since Cas’s plans were ruined, he might as well find out the truth about the padlock. And whatever it is that no one is telling him.

Anna Snoekstra’s earlier novels have been translated into fifteen languages and she is a bestseller in her homeland of Australia. She is also the creator and writer of The Ridge, a television series in development with Lucky Chap Entertainment and CreateNSW. Her first novel, Only Daughter, has been optioned by Universal Studios and Working Title, and is now being adapted by Anna into a feature film with Fictious (In Vitro). In addition, Anna writes about culture and creative process for The Guardian, Crimereads, Lindsay, HERE Magazine, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Saturday Paper, and teaches fiction writing at RMIT University in Melbourne.

THE CASTLE de Seth Rogoff

But what she said…

THE CASTLE
by Seth Rogoff
FC2, Fall 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Franz Kafka’s enigmatic masterpiece The Castle famously ends mid-sentence. A century later, the renowned translator Sy Kirschbaum finds his way into Kafka’s abandoned world. He crosses a wooden bridge leading from the road into the village. He finds an inn to spend the night. He sees a castle on a hill in the distance. The Castle begins again.

But now the village of Z. is empty, the people seemingly have vanished from one day to the next. Only traces of a former society remain for Kirschbaum to discover—three eiderdown blankets, a teacher’s journal, a chambermaid’s revolutionary manifesto, a gardener’s ledger, salt and caraway seeds from a village secretary’s pretzel, jars of canned fruits and pickled vegetables from the larder. From these clues, Kirschbaum forms a vision of a world in crisis, a crisis initiated by the arrival of a stranger to the village, a man named K. To understand this crisis, not only for the village of Z. but for his life and the broader world—to discover meaning amid the seemingly meaningless—Kirschbaum senses that he needs to penetrate where K. could never go: the innermost chamber of the castle on the hill, the ultimate unreachable destination.

Kirschbaum’s journey out of the valley to the heart of the castle is at once physical, psychological, literary, and metaphysical. It points beyond despair about the hopelessness of humankind. The discovery of life after the “end of time,” beyond the interrupted sentence, requires of Kirschbaum an inverse reenactment of the original creative act—the bringing forth of chaos from form.

Rogoff’s THE CASTLE is built on a foundation of lost documents, erased texts, invented histories, boxed manuscripts, stolen sources, and translations with no originals. Unbound from the fetters of an authoritarian and doomed reality, Kirschbaum seeks the truth in imagination and paradox.

Seth Rogoff is the co-writer of former NBA player and media star Kendrick Perkins’ recently announced memoir, to be published as a major lead title by St. Martin’s Press in 2023. Seth is the author of the novels First, the Raven: A Preface (Sagging Meniscus Press 2017) and Thin Rising Vapors (Sagging Meniscus Press 2018) and the nonfiction book The Politics of the Dreamscape (Palgrave 2021). He is one of five people/pairs to have published a full translation of Kafka’s The Castle (Vitalis 2014). He lives in Prague.