Archives par étiquette : Sterling Lord Literistic

QUALITY TIME de Suzannah Showler

A literary love story of Millennial discontent that explores how far two people can go inventing their own parallel reality—with raccoons.

QUALITY TIME
by Suzannah Showler
McClelland & Stewart/PRH Canada, May 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Credit: © Andrew Battershill

Ferociously in love and in their own universe, Lydie and Nico’s first year together was so beautiful that they’ve been recreating it, day by day, ever since. The anniversaries, sometimes elaborate, sometimes small, become the couples’ own internal logic, tethering them to a reality they’ve built together.
But the real world is starting to creep in. As the people around them start to get married, get pregnant, get serious, Lydie wonders what it is they’re really doing—and why it leaves her so little time to focus on what she moved to the city for: creating art. Meanwhile, Nico experiences a divine event that convinces him the anniversaries matter more than ever, and in the city around them, the urban wildlife is rising up on a mission of their own.
A vivid time capsule of recession-era Toronto, Quality Time is a universal story of self-discovery and invention, capturing that rare, innocent time when we feel like masters of our own fate, and what happens when the real world starts to press in from the edges.

Suzannah Showler is the author of Most Dramatic Ever, a book of cultural criticism about The Bachelor (ECW 2018), and the poetry collections Thing is (McClelland & Stewart 2017) and Failure to Thrive (ECW 2014). You can read her work in the New York Times Magazine, Slate, the Walrus, Hazlitt, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. She is the poetry editor for Maisonneuve. She also does contingent labour teaching creative writing. She currently lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations with her partner, Andrew Battershill.

VICTIM d’Andrew Boryga

A debut novel with the bite of Paul Beatty and the subversive wit of Danzy Senna about a Puerto Rican writer from the Bronx who manipulates his stories by playing the victim, bending the truth until it finally breaks.

VICTIM
by Andrew Boryga
Doubleday, April 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Javier Perez is a hustler from a family of hustlers. He learns from an early age how to play the game to his own advantage, how his background—murdered drug-dealer dad, single cash-strapped mom, best friend serving time for gang activity—becomes a key to doors he didn’t even know existed. This kind of story, molded in the right way, is just what college admissions committees are looking for, and a full academic scholarship to a prestigious university brings Javi one step closer to his dream of becoming a famous writer. As a college student, Javi embellishes his life story until there’s not even a kernel of truth left. The only real connection to his past is the occasional letter he trades with his childhood best friend, Gio, who doesn’t seem to care about Javi’s newfound awareness of white privilege or the school-to-prison pipeline. Soon after graduating, a viral essay transforms Javi from a writer on the rise to a journalist at a legendary magazine where the editors applaud his “unique perspective.” But Gio more than anyone knows who Javi really is, and sees through his game. Once he’s released from prison and Javi offers to cut him in on the deal, will he play along with Javi’s charade, or will it all come crumbling down? A sendup of virtue signaling and tear-jerking trauma plots, Victim asks what real diversity looks like and how far one man is willing to go to make his story hit the right notes.

Andrew Boryga grew up in the Bronx and now lives in Miami with his family of four. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and been awarded prizes by Cornell University, The University of Miami, Tin House, The Susquehanna Review, and The Michener Foundation. He’s taught writing to college students, elementary students, and incarcerated adults.

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.

WHAT THE RIVER KNOWS de Isabel Ibañez

The Mummy meets Death on the Nile in this lush, immersive historical fantasy set in Egypt filled with adventure, a rivals-to-lovers romance, and a dangerous race.

WHAT THE RIVER KNOWS
by Isabel Ibañez
Wednesday Books, November 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Bolivian-Argentinian Inez Olivera belongs to the glittering upper society of nineteenth century Buenos Aires, and like the rest of the world, the town is steeped in old world magic that’s been largely left behind or forgotten. Inez has everything a girl might want, except for the one thing she yearns the most: her globetrotting parents―who frequently leave her behind.
When she receives word of their tragic deaths, Inez inherits their massive fortune and a mysterious guardian, an archeologist in partnership with his Egyptian brother-in-law. Yearning for answers, Inez sails to Cairo, bringing her sketch pads and a golden ring her father sent to her for safekeeping before he died. But upon her arrival, the old world magic tethered to the ring pulls her down a path where she soon discovers there’s more to her parent’s disappearance than what her guardian led her to believe.
With her guardian’s infuriatingly handsome assistant thwarting her at every turn, Inez must rely on ancient magic to uncover the truth about her parent’s disappearance―or risk becoming a pawn in a larger game that will kill her.

« Take a plucky heroine, a historically grounded Indiana Jones-esque adventure through Ancient Egypt, and add a surprising dollop of magic ― it’s a recipe for a delightful read. » ―Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author

« Expertly plotted, explosively adventurous, and burning with romance. » ―Stephanie Garber, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Isabel Ibañez is the author of Together We Burn (Wednesday Books), and Woven in Moonlight (Page Street), a finalist for the William C. Morris Award, and is listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books Of All Time. She is the proud daughter of Bolivian immigrants and has a profound appreciation for history and traveling. She currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband, their adorable dog, and a serious collection of books. Say hi on social media at @IsabelWriter09.

THE MONSTROUS KIND de Lydia Gregovic

Sense and Sensibility meets The Walking Dead.

THE MONSTROUS KIND
by Lydia Gregovic
Delacorte, Summer 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Merrick and Estella Darling are the last residents of Norland House, and the heirs apparent to their family’s Manor seat after the disappearance of their mother leads to their father’s suicide. As the next Manor Lord, one of them will assume the responsibility of ruling over the Darling province of Sussex—and, more importantly, guarding it against the monsters that lurk, unseen, in the fog that edges the province’s borders. History tells that the Phantoms used to be human, until the mist crept into their veins and turned their blood white instead of red. Now, the Manors are all that stand between the creatures and their redblooded prey. Vain and beautiful Merrick just wants to get back to the bustle of New London, where she never wants for an admirer. She sees an advantageous marriage to a Manorborn man from one of the wealthier, more cosmopolitan, Inner Ring provinces as her ticket out of provincial, countryside Sussex. But when her return home to Norland House results in the reveal of a world-altering secret—that her father was himself a Phantom—her future changes in a flash.
Merrick discovers that her father’s condition isn’t the only skeleton in Norland House’s closet. There may be more to their mother’s death than meets the eye—and the deeper Merrick looks, the surer she becomes that whoever killed her isn’t finished quite yet.
THE MONSTROUS KIND is a fantasy retelling of Jane Austen’s classic romance
Sense and Sensibility, set in an alternate, Victorian-inspired England. A meditation on sisterhood, privilege, and the strict system of class hierarchy that governed Austen’s novels, it will appeal to fans of Hannah Whitten, Melissa Albert, and Erin A. Craig.

Lydia Gregovic grew up in the suburbs of Texas and along the coastline of Montenegro, where she inherited her love of storytelling from her grandmothers. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York, along with a couple half-dead plants and the complete works of Jane Austen. THE MONSTROUS KIND (prev. titled A Bleeding Like Smoke) is her first novel.