Archives par étiquette : The Friedrich Agency

MASQUERADE de Mike Fu

Exploring social, cultural, and sexual identities in New York, Shanghai, and beyond, Mike Fu’s MASQUERADE is a skillfully layered, brilliantly interwoven debut novel for readers of Jason Mott’s A Hell Of A Book and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.

MASQUERADE
by Mike Fu
Tin House, October 2024
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Newly single Meadow Liu is house-sitting for his friend, artist Selma Shimizu, when he stumbles upon The Masquerade, a translated novel about a masked ball in 1930s Shanghai. The author’s name is the same as Meadow’s own in Chinese, Liu Tian–a coincidence that proves to be the first of many strange happenings. Over the course of a single summer, Meadow must contend with a possibly haunted apartment, a mirror that plays tricks, a stranger speaking in riddles at the bar where he works, as well as a startling revelation about a former lover. And when Selma vanishes from her artist residency, Meadow is forced to question everything he knows as the boundaries between real and imagined begin to blur.

Mike Fu is a Tokyo-based writer, editor, and translator. He is a co-founder and editor of The Shanghai Literary Review, and currently teaches fiction and translation at Antioch University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

PREDICTED FUTURES de Jackie Snow

With the urgency of Naomi Klein and the expert on-the-ground reporting of Elizabeth Kolbert, Jackie Snow’s PREDICTED FUTURES dives into the world of climate change and technology and emerges with a rare find: hope.

PREDICTED FUTURES
How Artificial Intelligence Could Save the Natural World
by Jackie Snow
TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Using case studies that range from AI assisted reforestation in Australia to coral mapping in Belize, PREDICTED FUTURES is a cohesive, imagery-rich narrative arguing for AI’s uniquely qualified ability to help us protect our planet. Written with elegance and authority, this galvanizing proposal is free of hysteria but clear-eyed about what it will take—and more importantly, what is already being done—to save our cherished world.

Jackie Snow is a multimedia journalist published by National Geographic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others. She reported a 10-part series for PBS called “AI for Good,” and received the Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship in 2019.

THE STONE MEN de Timea Sipos

Imagine it’s possible to breathe life into stone — your hand meets the cool surface of a sculpted man and finds it pulsing with life… This is the Budapest of THE STONE MEN, a vibrantly original debut novel for fans of Clarice Lispector and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go In The Dark.

THE STONE MEN
by Timea Sipos
TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Four female sculptors in their final year of art school discover their ability to animate statues. Their first creation: the ideal man. What starts as a creative experiment grows into a media sensation. Seeing an opportunity, two of the sculptors, Bori and Hajni, begin to monetize their art, sculpting men for wealthy patrons who desire companions. As the operation grows, the streets of Budapest become restless with discarded animate statues, many of whom long for integration into human society. Haunting the novel is a mysterious mass casualty which leaves an untold number of stone men dead.

Through the perspectives of the stone men, their creators, and their occasional human companions, the novel explores the blurred the lines between art and life, female agency and sexuality, and questions what we owe our creations.

Timea Sipos is a Hungarian-American writer and translator with a MFA from the University of Nevada, and studied translation at the Balassi Institute. She has been supported by MacDowell, the Steinbeck Fellowship, Tin House, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.

THE AFTERTASTE de Daria Lavelle

An epic love story, dark comedy, and synesthetic adventure through food and grief, THE AFTERTASTE will delight readers of Alice Hoffman and Sweetbitter.

THE AFTERTASTE
by Daria Lavelle
Bloomsbury, TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Konstantin “Kostya” Duhhovny is a haunted man. His father passed shortly after they immigrated to Brooklyn from Ukraine, and ghosts have been hovering around Kostya ever since. He can’t see them, but his mouth will often flood with the tastes of meals he’s never consumed, and Kostya understands that this is how they haunt him.

Keeping to himself has served him well for most of his life, but on the night when Kostya decides to let the phantom flavors guide his hand, everything changes. Could this be his true purpose, offering real closure to grieving strangers? He sets out to learn everything he can by taking on the New York culinary scene. As his kitchen skills begin to catch up with his ambitions, Kostya cannot see the catastrophe that looms. The one person who knows Kostya must be stopped… also happens to be falling in love with him.

Daria Lavelle is a debut novelist who earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She was born in Kyiv before immigrating to the US as a child, and currently lives in New Jersey with her family.

THE WEDDING PEOPLE d’Alison Espach

For fans of Monica Heisey’s Really Good, Actually and Kevin Wilson, Alison Espach’s THE WEDDING PEOPLE is a pitch-perfect balance of humor and heartbreak.

THE WEDDING PEOPLE
by Alison Espach
Holt, 2024
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight. She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding guests, but she’s the only one who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamt of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s alone, at the lowest moment of her life.

Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe—which makes it that much more surprising when the women can’t stop confiding in each other. Soon Phoebe is swept into the lives and the dysfunction of the wedding people, finding herself forever changed.

Alison Espach is the author of the novels The Adults and Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Vogue, Joyland, Glamour, Salon, and McSweeney’s, among other places. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.