Archives par étiquette : Sterling Lord Literistic

BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS de Jenny Lawson

A thought-provoking, supportive, and funny creativity journal that fosters creativity.

BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS
by Jenny Lawson
Penguin Life, Spring 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Photo Credit: © Laura Mayes

BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS is an inspiring self-help book for the rest of us—the ones who haven’t successfully stacked a tower of Atomic Habits or cultivated the 7 traits that would make us highly effective individuals. Now more than ever, readers crave a book that meets them where they are. And where they are just might be still in their pajamas at 2pm, unable to turn on their Zoom video, and feeling worse every time someone recommends yet another book outlining a 10-step plan they can’t muster up the enthusiasm or energy to read, much less conquer.

The question Jenny has heard most over the past decade is, “How?” How did you —struggling with depression, anxiety, ADD, chronic pain—manage to publish four bestsellers and open a successful bookstore (in April 2020, no less). Too often, people assume you must conquer your demons, cure your ills, and leave behind the brokenness completely before you can even begin to create your life’s work and succeed. Nothing could be further from the truth, and BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS is the road map for this tribe.

Jenny Lawson has published four New York Times bestsellers, including Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy. She is the owner and proprietress of Nowhere Bookshop, a beloved independent bookstore and bar in San Antonio, Texas. She’s been writing her popular, award-winning blog (thebloggess.com) for over 15 years and has a very large social media following on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.

THISTLEMARSH de Moorea Corrigan

Faeries disappeared over one hundred years ago, as suddenly as slipping through a doorway. It was only the very foolish, or the very determined, who held out hope for their return.

THISTLEMARSH
by Moorea Corrigan
Berkley, Winter 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In the wake of World War I, the world is a decidedly unmagical place for Misneach “Mouse” Dunne. Mouse once dreamed of becoming a Faerie anthropologist, but with one telegram, her world shattered. At the Somme, her cousin Bertie’s body disappeared into the mud, and her brother Roger came home with devastating shell shock. It was time, she knew, to put aside childish dreams.

When Mouse receives news that her uncle, Lord Dewhurst, has left her Thistlemarsh Hall, a dilapidated manor in the English countryside, she has to return to her childhood home and claim her birthright. Thistlemarsh was blessed by the Faerie King himself before the Faeries left England for good. But there is a catch in Lord Dewhurst’s offer: if Mouse does not rehabilitate the crumbling house in one month’s time, Mouse will forfeit her inheritance and any hope of caring for her brother. 

It quickly becomes clear it’s impossible to repair the manor in the allotted time, until a mysterious Faerie appears with a proposition. He offers to restore Thistlemarsh…for only the price of a pinky finger. Mouse knows better than to trust a Faerie—especially one so insufferably handsome and arrogant—but she is out of options. There are dark and magical forces at work in the house, and Mouse must confront the ghosts of her past and the secrets of her heart or lose Thistlemarsh, and herself, in the process.

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries meets Divine Rivals with a dash of The House in the Cerulean Sea, in this endlessly charming, poignant, romantic, cozy-historical fantasy that will make you happy when you turn the final page.

Moorea Corrigan holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh and a Master of Publishing degree from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. She currently works at Lynne Rienner Publishers, an academic press in Boulder, Colorado. When she is not writing, you can find her singing, spending time with her menagerie of pets, or attending Jane Austen conventions in full Regency regalia. Thistlemarsh is her debut adult fantasy novel.

THE REPEAT ROOM de Jesse Ball

Franz Kafka meets Yorgos Lanthimos in this provocative new novel from one of America’s most brilliant and distinctive writers.

THE REPEAT ROOM
by Jesse Ball
Catapult, September 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant’s lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.

The case to which Abel is assigned is revealed in the novel’s shocking second act. We receive a record of a boy’s broken and constrained life, a tale that reveals an illicit and passionate psycho-sexual relationship, its end as tragic as the circumstances of its conception.

Artful in its suspense, and sharp in its evocation of a byzantine and cruel bureaucracy, THE REPEAT ROOM is an exciting and pointed critique of the nature of knowledge and judgment, and a vivid framing of Ball’s absurd and nihilistic philosophy of love.

Jesse Ball is the author of fifteen books, most recently the novel Autoportrait. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

LOVE, ME de Jessica Saunders

Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid, Emily Henry, and Emily Griffin will fall in love with this woman’s fiction debut.

LOVE, ME
by Jessica Saunders
Union Square & Co., January 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

“Love, Me.” It’s how Jack always signed his letters to Rachel. She hadn’t thought about that in years…

This is the story of Rachel Miller, a lawyer and mother of two who’s just as comfortable in the courtroom as she is on the sidelines of the soccer field. Rachel’s life is unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight when photographs and letters of her and her high school boyfriend, the famous actor Jack Bellow, are published in a tabloid. Rachel’s life is upended as this newfound attention calls into question her relationship with her husband, her career, and even her superstar ex. 

LOVE, ME takes readers on a journey through key moments in Rachel’s life: falling in love for the first time and having her heart broken; meeting her future husband and creating a life with him; and navigating the celebrity gossip circuit and her equally gossipy suburban frenemies. Betrayed by someone she trusted and reunited with the man she tried so hard to forget, Rachel has to ask herself, “How did I get here? And where am I going?” 

A pitch-perfect exploration of modern married life, Jessica Saunders’s deliciously readable novel embraces the truth that some old flames can’t be snuffed out, no matter how many years go by.

Jessica Saunders is a lawyer and writer living in the suburbs of New York City.

RABBIT HEART de Kristine S. Ervin

Told fearlessly and poetically, Rabbit Heart weaves together themes of power, gender, and justice into a manifesto of grief and reclamation: our stories do not need to be simple to be true, and there is power in the telling.

RABBIT HEART
A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story
by Kristine S. Ervin
Counterpoint Press, Spring 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Kristine Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in a nearby oil field. In the shadow of that incomprehensible act, first there was grief. Then, the desire to know: what happened to her, what she felt in her last, terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life. As more information about her mother’s death comes to light, Kristine’s drive to know her mother only intensifies and winds its way into her own fraught adolescence. In the process of both, Kristine butts up against contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self outside of the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim—what a “true” victim is supposed to look like, how complicated and elusive justice really is, and how we are meant to accept what cannot/should not be accepted.

“Kristine S. Ervin writes, in her deeply moving memoir, RABBIT HEART, ‘I don’t want to choose the lazy form of grief.’ And throughout each nuanced essay-chapter, the reader bears witness as she doesn’t. We watch our speaker encounter grief, examine grief, and ultimately transform abiding grief into abiding art. RABBIT HEART is an elegy to a lost mother, yes. It is also a profound meditation on patience, on healing, and a bildungsroman that carries us unforgettably into the speaker’s—and her family’s— bittersweet beyond. When Ervin states, ‘Some stories are unsayable,’ she is right. So, she doesn’t say; instead, she lyrically documents and viscerally embodies her survival.” —Julie Marie Wade, author of Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing and Otherwise: Essays

 Kristine S. Ervin grew up in a small suburb of Oklahoma City and now teaches creative writing at West Chester University, outside of Philadelphia. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature, with a focus in nonfiction, from the University of Houston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Brevity, and Passages North, and her essay “Cleaving To” was named a notable essay in the 2013 edition of Best American Essays. An excerpt from RABBIT HEART appeared in CrimeReads.