Archives par étiquette : Sterling Lord Literistic

CAN’T YOU HEAR ME KNOCKING d’Erin A. Craig

A gothic thriller that blends psychological suspense with elements of classic horror, perfect for fans of Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, Riley Sager’s Home Before Dark, and Alix Harrow’s Starling House.

CAN’T YOU HEAR ME KNOCKING
by Erin A. Craig
Pantheon Books, Summer 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Everyone in the world has heard of Holly in Everhallow. They’ve read the books—or at least listened to the radio broadcasts. But very few people know the real little girl behind the stories—Holiday Harris. Holiday never asked to be a muse for Holly’s creator, Herbert Atkinson, and she certainly never dreamed of the fame that came along with any of it.

Fifteen years have passed and now, as an adult, Holiday is entirely unrecognizable as her beloved counterpart. After Herbert’s death in 1974, Holiday returns to California, renting a room at the Chateau Marmont, keen on building a life as far removed from Everhallow as she can get. There she meets Brett Barten, notoriously private but endlessly celebrated, who seems to have struck a perfect balance flickering in and out of the spotlight in a way that greatly appeals to Holiday. He’s witty and razor smart and, best of all, he’s never read Holly. Their courtship is dazzling and intense and when Brett dies tragically on the morning of their wedding, Holiday is consumed by grief. Nothing can pull her from the fog until she’s summoned to the office of the Barten family’s attorney. Days before the wedding, Brett altered his will, leaving nearly all his estate—including a Big Sur cabin purchased as a surprise honeymoon gift—to Holiday. Upon first impression, the cabin is an idyllic dream. But everything at the cabin is not what it seems, and a darker truth slowly reveals itself.

Erin A. Craig is the author of the bestselling Sisters of Salt young adult fantasy novels and The Thirteenth Child. She holds a BFA in Theatre Design and Production from the University of Michigan. When she is not stage-managing tragic operas with hunchbacks, séances, or murderous clowns, she writes books that are just as spooky. An avid reader, basketball fan, and collector of typewriters, Erin makes her home in Michigan with her husband and daughter.

OBSERVER de Nicholas Russell

A mystical and mercury-ladened mystery involving trees that walk, desert illusions, and a 100-year-old diary.

OBSERVER
by Nicholas Russell
Ecco, Fall 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

For fans of Brian Evenson, K-Ming Chang, and Jeff VanderMeer, OBSERVER is the story of the American desert, government cover-ups, family devotion, and how curiosity for the truth or a version of it sends even the most sane into the deepest depths.

Renata’s mother left her in the care of her aunt and took a job at an observatory when she was young, never to return. Now in her early twenties, Renata receives a truck load of her mother’s papers and possessions one day; the family assumes her dead. Renata, curious and undeterred, packs up her camera and her mothers’ notebooks and drives to the Observatory, asking questions the locals would prefer not to answer and reminding them of what they’ve been denying for years. Renata might be able to complete the research her mother was undergoing, but she might also reach for a truth much stranger than any of the tall tales the desert weaves through her dreams.

Nicholas Russell is a writer from Las Vegas. His work has appeared in The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, The Baffler, The Drift, and Defector. He is a bookseller at The Writer’s Block, Managing Editor of Still Alive magazine, and a contributor to Defector.

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA de Joseph Ogilvy

A cautionary tale of human exploitation and the consequences for our oceans.

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
by Joseph Ogilvy
Bloomsbury, Spring 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Look west from San Francisco, or Monterey, or Long Beach, past the pleasure boats and the surfers and the cargo ships. This is the California Current, the ocean system that made the Golden State; 1900 miles of the most productive waters on earth, flowing all the way from the Salish Sea to the furthest tip of the Baja Peninsula. For more than ten millennia generation after generation of Native Californians built their lives on the Current—delicately managed and exceptionally productive—home to innumerable sardines, tuna, and abalone galore.

But it was not to last. As modernity beckoned we could not resist the urge to plunder. As each stock collapsed we moved to seek another, reconstituting our economies around each new creature we found in plenty, until all were gutted in turn. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is the untold ocean story that brought California violently into the modern world, helped build its major cities, and brought thousands to its shores. At the heart of tremendous growth lay a remarkable boom-bust cycle, not just of the ocean, but of the human cultures that wrought it unwittingly on themselves, from Russian fur hunters tearing through territory in search of fresh otterskin, to the Chinese refugees seeking advantage in the ecological turmoil the Russians left behind, to the canning aristocracy born and destroyed by the sardine trade.

The world has vanishingly few untouched waters left to move into. At some point, we might want to start learning from our mistakes. BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA is a history of how we got here and a warning for what we may not wish to repeat.

Joseph Ogilvy is a writer and chef from London, based in Austin, TX. After graduating from Oxford University he spent several years working in London restaurants including Bocca di Lupo, while writing on his days off. His experience in kitchens led him to investigate both the tangled human and ecological history of food. He will do for the oceans what John Vaillant did for fire and has all the makings of the next Barry Lopez while appealing to the same readership as Mark Arax’s The Dreamt Land and Earl Swift’s Chesapeake Requiem.

KINGDOM OF FEAR d’Anuj Chopra

A riveting portrait of Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman and the untold stories of those living under the influence of the millennial dictator’s rule, for readers of Barbara Demick and Svetlana Alexievich.

KINGDOM OF FEAR:
A millennial dictator rises from the shadows, unmaking and remaking Saudi Arabia
by Anuj Chopra
Granta, Late 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In incisive, deeply-reported prose, KINGDOM OF FEAR introduces us to ten indelible characters, from a monied rival to a flashy aide, and from a defiant female activist to an outspoken dissident. Through their carefully unfolded stories, we come to understand them not only as individuals but also as representatives of different strata of Saudi society, layers that have been, as Anuj says, “upended, uprooted, or uplifted” by dramatic changes under MBS.

Along the way, Anuj himself becomes an eleventh character. His on-the-ground reporting grants us an intimate view of a country in turmoil, one that can often seem opaque to the outside world. And through the eyes of a reporter fighting for his sources and their stories, we witness the terrifying impact of a growing culture of fear, one that seeks to silence and oppress. But as Anuj reminds us, silence, too, can speak volumes, and he thoughtfully unpacks those weighted moments, bringing clarity to darkness.

In shifting the focus to those impacted by MBS, Anuj pulls our attention away from the Crown Prince himself, spotlighting and empowering Saudi citizens in order to better understand them and their nation in all their complexity. KINGDOM OF FEAR is a powerful, necessary exploration of Saudi Arabia as it exists today, and how to grapple with the fear that undergirds MBS’s rule.

Anuj Chopra is a Washington D.C.-based reporter for Agence France-Presse (AFP). He was the 2022 Knight-Bagehot Fellow and Dart Center Ochberg Fellow at Columbia Journalism School in New York, and has won several prizes for his work, including the CNN Young Journalist Award, the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Award, the Human Rights Press Award and the Ramnath Goenka prize for excellence in journalism. He covered Saudi Arabia and Yemen for four years (2017-21) as AFP’s Riyadh bureau chief. Anuj has also written from hotspots around Asia and the Middle East for international publications such as The Atlantic, The Guardian, TIME, The Economist, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post.

SLOPOPOLIS de Laura Preston

A truly unique investigation of the people driving the AI revolution and the forces that drive them.

SLOPOPOLIS:
Travels in the New Digital Kingdom
by Laura Preston
W. W. Norton, 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

SLOPOPOLIS is a people first dispatch from tomorrow’s industrial frontier. It is not an AI explainer, nor does it aspire towards future forecasting. It is not a work of philosophy, nor a meditation on machines and human consciousness. Instead, it asks: who are the speculators racing West? How do they think about their place in history, and what sort of future are they trying to build? While the book will ostensibly be about tech, its chief interest will be people—people and their ambitions, delusions, contradictions, and ambivalent moral frameworks. It is an anthropological expedition to the quarries of the AI gold rush, where we are about to stake everything—even the hope of a habitable planet—on the opportunity not to think.

Laura Preston’s work has appeared in n+1, The New Yorker, The Believer and elsewhere. She graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 2013 with a degree in Art History and certificates in Studio Art and Creative Writing. She received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where her work received Hopwood awards in both fiction and nonfiction categories. Laura lives in Brooklyn and this is her first book.