Archives par étiquette : The Gernert Company

I’M NOT HERE TO HUNT RABBITS de Josh Kendall

This debut is a raw, tantalizing love story wrapped in a thriller that contains as much psychological intrigue as there is action – from one of the most acclaimed editors of the genre.

I’M NOT HERE TO HUNT RABBITS: A Novel
by Josh Kendall
Putnam, Spring 2027
(via The Gernert Company)

Smith thought he had left it all behind: the intense, dangerous work in Afghanistan; the grueling training; the vast reach of his former employer – the mysterious organization Cornerstone; and most of all Helen – the woman he loved and who was now gone forever. Better to start new in a place where no one knows him – Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Security for a local kingpin named Sabadi and his family. A job he could do in his sleep.

But something is off about the whole assignment. The previous security detail seems to know more than they are letting on about the nature of the job and what Sabadi is planning in Ethiopia. Smith is left in the dark, and for the first time in his life, he is not sure where the threats are coming from. The only things he is certain of are that Cornerstone knows he is here and he will have to confront his past with Helen to make it out of Addis Ababa alive.

A different kind of thriller, one in which the tension comes as much from what’s unsaid as what is left in, from an acclaimed editor of the genre, I’m Not Here to Hunt Rabbits is an existential suspense novel of a life on a knife’s edge.

Josh Kendall was VP and Executive Editor at Little, Brown, and Editorial Director of Mulholland Books where he worked with Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, Robert Galbraith, JJ Abrams, and Tana French among others. He’s worked in various editorial positions at Viking, Picador, and Scribner, and has also taught creative writing at Brooklyn College, University of Iowa, and The New School.

SUNRISE de Téa Obreht

Three lives, 100 years, one Western ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife.

SUNRISE: A Novel
by Téa Obreht
Random House, August 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old energy bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well-maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story 100 years in the making.

In 2003, Sunrise’s golden boy Coll begins to direct town’s annual historical reenactment when he is linked with a scandalous incident at a local bar. And when an upstart author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.

In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?

These three are strangers, separated by time. But Sunrise has secrets which lie in waiting like gunpowder: quiet, unassuming, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the places we lay claim to, and most of all, of our own lives.

Rooted in one place, yet traveling across three time periods, Téa explores: the complicated concept of people becoming legends big enough to support ticket sales in their own time, and how they perpetuate their own myths, even as they diverge from reality.  Our spooky fascination with ghost towns – imagining what once was in a place, or what could be again.  What it means to be truly lost and faced with back-to-survival basics in today’s uber connected world.  The novel comes together in a heart-in-mouth ending that I haven’t felt since watching Thelma & Louise, literary style. With its matryoshka doll structure and her signature command of language, this novel, brimming with wry humor, sharp observations and pure linguistic joy, is a triumph.  

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Esquire, Literary Hub, Today

“Téa Obreht never disappoints.”—Esquire

“As the novel goes on, Obreht weaves three timelines together . . . to unravel the mystery of Sunrise, the ghost town to end all ghost towns. Sorry to fangirl but: YAY.” —Literary Hub

Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, Inland and The Morningside. Her novels have won the Orange Prize for Fiction, been a finalist for the National Book Award, won the Southwest Book Award, and won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many other publications. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Obreht now resides in Wyoming.

PEOPLE SKILLS de Lily Scherlis

A razor-sharp nonfiction book that dissects the failures of the bloated self-help industrial complex to improve our lives, while also unearthing what real change could look like.

PEOPLE SKILLS:
The Impossible Task of Personal Growth–and Why Change is the Answer
by Lily Scherlis
Liveright / Norton (US) / Hutchinson Heinemann (UK), publication date TBC
(via The Gernert Company)

Psychology is rife with metaphors, and today’s self-help movement is no different: you can “optimize” your routine, as if you are designing an app; you can set better boundaries, as if you are a lawn; you can say when you’re “at capacity,” as if you are a battery; or you can “invest” in self-care, as if you are a stockbroker on the trading floor of the soul. From a pragmatist’s perspective, borrowing the language of the times to instill psychological insights makes perfect sense, and when self-help advice sounds so intuitive, it’s easy to buy in. But problems arise when we mistake metaphors forged in the crucible of our hyper-individualized neoliberal culture for a true metaphysics of the mind. You may indeed have a 401k, but you are neither a lawn nor a battery. 

In PEOPLE SKILLS, Lily Scherlis places the concepts so many of us cling to for sanity as we navigate an increasingly uncertain world–think attachment styles, emotional intelligence, and even the idea of people skills itself–in sociopolitical context, from cold war ideological panic to anxieties unleashed by globalization. Many of these ideas have their origins in legitimate psychological insights and research, and some of them can be helpful, some of the time. But when they are warped, watered down, and overapplied, they give rise to a curious paradox: As inadequate institutions crumble and we are forced deeper into financial and emotional dependence upon one another, our primary yardstick for measuring our own well-being is the ability to perform independence. In a society that values economic growth at all costs, the only way to avoid being left behind is to keep growing yourself; in a world getting worse, the only solution is to be better. 

But this is an impossible task: In the never-ending quest for self-improvement, the goal is always just out of reach–which is exactly how the $1.5 billion self-help industry wants it. Lily gives us permission to step off the hamster wheel of personal growth and think about other ways of addressing our problems—and to question whether they’re really problems at all. We are intrinsically interdependent beings, she reminds us, whose obligations to ourselves are never really divorced from our obligations to one another, and when we retreat to our own private spheres in order to self-actualize, we merely atomize our troubles, disappoint ourselves, and reinforce the status quo. In encouraging us to flex new psychic muscles instead of reaching for the same canned jargon, PEOPLE SKILLS ends up being its own kind of self-help, ironically. For Lily, the goal is not growth but change–for ourselves, and for our world. Neither can happen without the other.

Lily Scherlis is a writer and artist, and a PhD candidate in English and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Harper’s, The Guardian, Parapraxis, The Baffler, The Drift, and Cabinet, among other venues. She lives in Brooklyn.

THE FIRST STEP by Tao Wong

In a spectacular world of immortals, spirit beasts, and mystical martial arts, a young farmer’s life will be changed forever when he is unexpectedly invited to join an elite school of cultivation.

THE FIRST STEP
(A Thousand Li Series: Book 1)
by Tao Wong
Ace, March 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

It is said that a journey of a thousand li begins with a single step. . . .

Long Wu Ying never expected to become a real cultivator, never dreamed of having the chance to train and develop wondrous martial arts skills and magic of his own. As a farmer’s son in a rural village, his days were spent studying, planting rice, and spending time with his friends. Fate, however, has different plans for him.

Conscripted into the army and taken from everything he knows, Wu Ying’s chance observation of an incoming ambush prevents a bloody rout—and brings him to the attention of the powerful Verdant Green Waters sect, an elite school of cultivation. Invited to join the sect as a novice, Wu Ying is thrown into a world he is utterly unprepared for, one filled with demonic beasts, haughty nobles, and, most of all, the very real possibility of reaching immortality—if he’s brave enough to seize it.

Tao Wong is the author of the A Thousand Li progression fantasy series and the System Apocalypse LitRPG series, among others. When he’s not writing and working, he’s practicing martial arts, reading, and dreaming up new worlds. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

BOUNCE de William Milberg

An engaging, authoritative and accessible study of globalization—in the vein of A History of the World in 6 Glasses—told through the fascinating histories of six different balls used in sports.

BOUNCE: The Story of Globalization
by William Milberg
The New Press, late 2026/early2027
(via The Gernert Company)

Globalization is the central economic issue of our time: it’s tied to everything we buy; impacts elections; leads to the wholesale collapse (or revitalization) of a town, or a city, or a region, with jobs going someplace else, coming in, or never coming back. It’s a primary reason behind the Trump administration’s tariffs, which are causing major economic upheaval. Yet for all its significance, globalization is still widely misunderstood. It’s too complex, too diffuse, with too many moving parts – its design makes individuals feel powerless. In BOUNCE, a Professor of Economics examines the history of six sporting balls as a way to understand the story of globalization, how it has evolved, and how the decisions that society has made and is currently making, continue to shape it.

The golf ball, the baseball, the football, the soccer ball, the tennis ball and the basketball: each has a complex and fascinating history that parallels the evolution of globalization. Balls have been used in games for hundreds of years and each one tells us unique and vital things about this evolution: the golf ball uncovers the dynamics of the first wave of globalization, with colonial powers seeking rubber in the plantations of Africa, Asia and South America, and the importance of machine technology and innovation. The football shows how labor unions provided the “countervailing power” needed to stand up to growing industrial corporations, prompting steady growth in pay and economic security for the average worker. Milberg, Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research where he directs the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, slices each ball open, dives deep into its story, and spins a narrative revealing how each microhistory is inextricably linked to the greater economy.

Globalization has been a series of choices by individuals, corporations, governments, countries. Understanding the history of these game balls helps us to better understand the consequences of those choices and where we want the economy to go.

Professor Milberg’s research focuses on the history and philosophy of economics. He has written extensively on global value chains and their implications for economic development, jobs, finance and intellectual property.

William Milberg is Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, where he also directs the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. His recent project at the Heilbroner Center is on the economic causes and consequences of the multinational retreat from liberal democracy. Milberg has worked as a consultant to the International Labour Organization and the World Bank and lectured at the World Trade Organization. Author of three academic books, Milberg served as Dean of the New School for Social Research from 2013-2023. He lives in Westchester, NY with his wife, his youngest daughter and his dog Lola.