Archives par étiquette : Writers House

THE FREEDOM OF FALLING d’Arriel Vinson

Sold in a 7-publisher auction, debut author and Reese’s Book Club Fellow Arriel Vinson delivers an outstanding novel-in-verse about a girl who falls in love at the roller-skating rink—the only place in the world where she feels whole.

THE FREEDOM OF FALLING
by Arriel Vinson
Putnam/ Penguin Random House, Summer 2025
(via Writers House)

Jaelyn Coleman wants nothing more than to go to WestSide Roll skating rink every weekend like she always does with her best friend Noelle. As Arriel says, like many Black families, her parents—before they got divorced—made roller skating a tradition. But Jaelyn learns that her place of refuge is shutting down by the middle of the summer. Her neighbourhood is being gentrified. Which means she and her best friend might grow apart even more. Trey—the guy she just met at the rink—may become a distant memory. And the place where her family was essentially made will be gone. But, Jaelyn realizes that no one can take away what she loves, and that skating is about keeping community alive.

With searing intelligence, THE FREEDOM OF FALLING explores female friendship, complicated family relationships, and growing into confidence. But at its heart, it’s about learning to let your emotions be free. The freedom to fall in love, maybe with your cute boyfriend, but also with your family who you thought you had lost.

Arriel Vinson is a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow and Midwesterner who writes about being young, Black, and in search of freedom. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Shondaland, Kweli Journal, Catapult, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and others. A Tin House YA Scholar, 2020 Walter Grant recipient, and 2019 Kimbilio Fellow, her work has been nominated for Best New Poets 2020, Best of the Net 2019, and a Pushcart Prize.

LitUp by Reese’s Book Club is working to break down systematic barriers in traditional book publishing and provide opportunities for underrepresented women storytellers. The program provides powerful resources for diverse writers to get started and get their books onto our shelves through a writers retreat, a mentorship with Reese’s Book Club alumni authors, and marketing through Reese’s Book Club channels, including spotlights on their Instagram, features in their newsletter, and videos on TikTok.

VERY DANGEROUS THINGS de Lauren Muñoz

From the author of Suddenly a Murder comes a smart, twisty whodunnit—set on one very unique school campus, and filled with love, betrayal, and deadly secrets. Perfect for fans of Karen McManus and Maureen Johnson.

VERY DANGEROUS THINGS
by Lauren Muñoz
Penguin Random House, May 2025
(via Writers House)

The dead body should have been fake. It wasn’t.

Dulce Castillo is determined to win the murder mystery game her crime and criminology magnet school stages every fall. Last year’s loss to her ex-best friend’s team wasn’t only humiliating; it kept her from winning the $60,000 prize money she and her dad need to keep living in the town she loves. But Dulce is sure this year will be different because she and her friend Emi have a secret weapon: Zane, the new transfer student, who somehow knows everything about forensics.

It doesn’t hurt that he’s as cute as ten puppies wearing bunny ears.

The school’s golden boy, Xavier Torres, is chosen to play the victim. Unfortunately, someone wants Xavier dead for real. When he’s found murdered in the school greenhouse, the primary suspect is his girlfriend, Sierra. She swears she’s being railroaded by the sheriff, but the evidence against her is overwhelming: It shows that she stabbed Xavier with a poison-tipped knitting needle because he dumped her when he found out she was having a fling with his brother.

Sierra begs Dulce for help clearing her name, but Dulce refuses. After all, this is the same ex-bff who lied about why Dulce’s mom died in a car wreck three years ago. But when the prize committee decides to offer up the $60,000 to whoever solves Xavier’s real murder, Dulce has no choice but to throw her monocle in the ring. When she finds evidence that Sierra might be innocent and that someone she cares about might be guilty, Dulce has to determine whether justice is more important than love.

Lauren Muñoz is a writer, lawyer, and former teacher living in Southern California. She received her J.D. from Northwestern University in Chicago, where she frequently skipped class to commune with her sun lamp. When she’s not reading, she can be found knitting, crocheting, and collecting recipes for things she’ll never bake.

EDEN UNDONE d’Abbott Kahler

An incredible true story of murder, romance, and a fateful search for utopia in the Galápagos—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park

EDEN UNDONE:
A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II
by Abbott Kahler
Crown, September 2024
(via Writers House)

At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.

As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and two others dead, the survivors hurled accusations of murder.

Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.

“One of my favorite writers has knocked it out of the park yet again. In EDEN UNDONE, Abbott Kahler has created a book as fantastic as the true story she weaves. With taut prose and sublime storytelling, she crafts an atmospheric page-turner, ominous and thought-provoking, with the best last line I’ve read in decades.” —Kate Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The Radium Girls and The Woman They Could Not Silence

“In describing Abbott Kahler’s wickedly gothic tale, one is tempted to reach for handy literary or cinematic references. There’s a dash of Conrad. A bit of Hitchcock. Notes of Melville, Darwin, and Robinson Crusoe—and certainly more than a whiff of Lord of the Flies. But really, EDEN UNDONE is completely its own thing. Bizarre, mesmerizing, and compellingly tragic, Kahler’s fine book confronts an essential truth about those who ditch civilization: Try as we might, humans cannot elude the tyranny of our own nature.” —Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of The Wide Wide Sea

“Kahler (the author of previous books, including Sin in the Second City and The Ghosts of Eden Park, under the name Karen Abbott) has a gift for writing gripping histories that are both sensational and thoroughly documented. Possibly her wildest book yet.” —Booklist, starred review​

Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; and The Ghosts of Eden Park, which was an Edgar Award finalist for best fact crime and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. Her debut novel, Where You End, was published January 2024.

LOVING ME AFTER WE de Ginger Dean

A breakup can feel like the end of the world—but what if it could also serve as the start of a better you?

LOVING ME AFTER WE
The Essential Guide to Healing, Growing, and Thriving After a Toxic Relationship
by Ginger Dean
Flatiron, July 2024
(via Writers House)

This radical question is at the heart of celebrated psychotherapist Ginger Dean’s teachings. Dean, who specializes in helping women overcome heartbreak, knows all too well that often in our search for love and acceptance, we can find ourselves repeating dysfunctional patterns with new partners. In her essential debut, LOVING ME AFTER WE, Dean argues that not only is it possible to break this cycle, but that doing so will set you on a crucial path to healing and self discovery.

Through personal anecdotes, practical guidance, and a little bit of tough love, Ginger brings her wisdom and empathy to any reader who is ready to join the revolution of women healing their hearts so they can start the best love affair they’ve ever known—with themselves. And, of course, loving ourselves first is the key to finding healthy, fulfilling, and passionate love in our future partnerships.

For anyone looking to heal their heart, rediscover themselves, and find renewed peace and passion in their life, LOVING ME AFTER WE is here to help.

Ginger Dean is a psychotherapist and founder of Loving Me After We. Her specialty is helping women overcome heartbreak, increase self-love and confidence after a toxic relationship so they can become the best version of themselves.

SEARCHES de Vauhini Vara

From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize,a personal exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection.

SEARCHES
by Vauhini Vara
Pantheon, April 2025
(via Writers House)

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?

Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.

The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of herself and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. SEARCHES illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.

“Vara’s essays are beautifully written and profoundly researched, but what sets them apart is their profound vulnerability. Her use of experimental forms . . . pushes the limits of the genre without ever compromising her circumspective, confessional approach. An original essay collection about loss, technology, morality, and identity.” —Kirkus, starred

“SEARCHES picks up where Vauhini Vara’s impressive first novel, The Immortal King Rao, left off; this new book deepens, complicates, and amplifies her ongoing investigation into the nature of artificial intelligence, especially in relationship to the human body, mortality, sorrow, and grief. Blessedly free of cant or posture and extremely knowledgeable about (and acutely conscious of its complicity in) the networks it’s mapping, Searches is Vara’s best and most compelling book yet.” —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

“I cannot imagine a better guide through the infuriating, labyrinthine underworld of technology than Vauhini Vara. SEARCHES is so many things—heart-stoppingly sad, a formal high-wire act, a wise and funny and thoughtful encyclopedia of our modern age—but most of all it is a book about human relationships: how imperfectly we made this thing that connects us, and how we might use this thing to re-meet ourselves and each other.” —Carmen Maria Machado

Vauhini Vara is the author of This is Salvaged, named a notable book of 2023 by Publisher’s Weekly, The New Yorker and others, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is also a journalist, writing for Wired and others, and an editor, most recently at The New York Times Magazine.