Archives par étiquette : The Gernert Company

MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS d’Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS: Essays & Writings
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Harper, June 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.
Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club Pick, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award, and five poetry collections, including the NAACP Image Award-winning The Age of Phillis, also nominated for the National Book Award. She teaches at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English.

I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME de Hala Alyan

The rich and deeply personal memoir by the award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement.

I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME: A Memoir
by Hala Alyan
Avid Reader, June 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan decides to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman—the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn—to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling—a husband who wants to leave; the cost of past traumas and addictions threatening to resurface; the city of her youth, Beirut, on the brink of crisis. She turns to family stories and communal myths: of grandmothers mapping their lives through Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon; of eradicated villages and invading armies; of places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men that left and women that stayed; of the contradictions of her own Midwestern childhood, and adolescence in various Arab cities. Hala gathers the stories that are her legacy, which makes for emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are higher: how to honor ancestors and future generations alike in the midst of displacement? How to impart love for those who are no longer here, for places one can no longer touch?

A stunningly lyrical and brutally honest quest for motherhood, selfhood, and peoplehood, I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME is a powerful story of unraveling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.

“A beautiful and intimate memoir of a life in the embrace of stories, Alyan weaves the fine threads of torn and fragmented lives into an irresistible, intergenerational tapestry. I was spellbound from the first page.”
—Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger

Hala Alyan is the Palestinian-American author of the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back, both published by Ecco. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

SCAVENGER de Kathleen Boland

A cautious daughter and her eccentric, estranged mother set off into the Wild West in search of buried treasure—and a way back to each other—before they run out of patience, money, and options.

SCAVENGER
by Kathleen Boland
Viking, January 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Junior commodities analyst Bea Macon prizes security and control over adventure—especially after being raised by free spirit Christy, who has recently been living in Utah on Bea’s dime. But when Bea is fired from her job after taking an uncharacteristic risk that backfires spectacularly, she books a one-way flight to Salt Lake City, where she plans to lay low and regroup before returning to Wall Street.

Though she’s not about to tell Christy exactly what happened back east, Bea quickly realizes that she isn’t the only one keeping secrets: Christy has a man. She has a map. She has…a username on a forum devoted to unearthing $1 million in buried treasure that an eccentric antiquities dealer claims to have hidden somewhere in the western U.S.?

Bea is convinced this is just another one of her mother’s wild larks: an elaborate way to refuse, as she has for Bea’s entire life, to finally grow up. But Christy believes she’s onto something—and she’s not the only one. When Bea realizes that Christy is planning to rendezvous in a rural town called Mercy with the man Christy has been obsessively trading theories with online, she refuses to let her go alone. Out in the desert that one woman believes to be a promised land, the other a wasteland, they find themselves barreling toward a more high-stakes, transformative escapade than either of them could have imagined.

Populated with unforgettable characters and set against one of the world’s most oddly enrapturing landscapes, Scavengers is a funny and heartbreaking novel about old injuries, new beginnings, and the lengths to which we’ll go to find, escape, and reinvent ourselves.

Kathleen Boland is a graduate of Louisiana State University’s MFA program, where she was the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and awarded the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award. Supported by the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center, her fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.

KITTEN de Stacey Yu

The “what will she do next” charged outsiderness of Emma Cline’s The Guest meets Melissa Broder’s off-kilter humor and Banana Yoshimoto’s luminosity in KITTEN, a debut novel about a detached young woman whose obsession with her boyfriend’s unusual cat ushers her into the possibilities of her own life—but not without first threatening to unravel it.

KITTEN: A Novel
by Stacey Yu
Random House, Summer 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Katie is far from home and fresh out of college in New York, desperate to skirt adulthood’s demands, all too willing to let her wealthy boyfriend make decisions for both of them. But when James takes her on vacation to his family’s house by the sea, he brings Silver, his childhood cat, and the calculus of care changes. Rocked by class dysphoria in the face of the town’s quietly insistent superiority and drifting from James, Katie finds giddy comfort in Silver, who has life figured out. Soon enough, they’re inseparable, and something inside Katie begins to crack open, or maybe just…crack.

It doesn’t help that back in New York, her roommate has abruptly moved out. Or that she’s no longer speaking to her mother, who resents her for leaving Little Rock. As the days pass and her uncomfortable awareness of her dependence on James grows, Katie becomes increasingly enamored of Silver, who looks out for her in mysterious ways. But when her fixation deepens and the stakes of her relationships intensify to the point of detonation, Katie must confront the demands and desires of her life: the one she comes from, the one she longs for, and the one she has.

KITTEN deftly explores the politics of helplessness (especially through the lens of class, family, and race), what we owe—and don’t—to those we care for and who dare care for us, and the startling joy that comes from connecting on our own terms. A tale for our times, KITTEN has all the trappings of a cult classic with mass appeal—a darkly playful, heartfelt, stylish bildungsroman about braving love in a lonely age.

Raised in California and based in London, Stacey Yu is a Chinese-American writer with a community – for now – of over 112,000 literary fiction readers on her TikTok account @literaryfling. She’s also the author of “Blue Hour,” a new literary Substack which just crossed 1,000 followers (launched earlier this month). Every day, Stacey connects with readers hungry for, in her own words, “stories that reflect their own deeply personal yet universal anxieties: growing older, loving the wrong person, missing their mother.” She began her career by working in publishing, first as an intern at Writers House, then as a reader for Alanna Feldman Scouting, and finally, in publicity at Random House before pivoting to branding as her day job, and writing (and talking about books across platforms) as her passion. In 2024, Stacey was a finalist for the UK BookTok Creator of the Year Award. She is twenty-six years old.

THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS de Ben Kafka

With an accessible, witty, and honest voice, a Stanford-trained historian, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist explores the maddening situations and relationships we all find ourselves in, and explains that while there are no quick or easy answers, recognizing and understanding these scenarios as they happen can help us muddle through in a better way.

THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS:
How People, Work and The World Drive Us Crazy
by Ben Kafka
John Murray Press, publication date TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

Despite what much pop psychology will tell you, sometimes it’s not a matter of doing more work on yourself. And while psychopharmacology has made some incredible and life-saving advances, our responses to crazy-making situations are often not purely biochemical. Sometimes the call isn’t coming from inside the house. Sometimes crazy really is other people.

In THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS, Kafka draws from decades of fascinating psychotherapeutic research as well as his own work with patients to help us understand the mechanics of things that make us rant and rave—passive-aggressive partners, borderline workplaces (a term Kafka coined), bureaucracy that feels like crucifixion—to help us better understand our own responses to these maddening stimuli, and in time, not be so reactive to them.

Ben Kafka is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in Greenwich Village. Originally trained as a historian, he was on the faculty of NYU for many years; he is now affiliated with the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He has been a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities since 2007, and a member of its board since 2012. He also serves on the board of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012).