Archives par étiquette : Writers House

SEARCHES de Vauhini Vara

From the Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of Immortal King Rao, a collection of essays exploring how technology has become an inextricable part of modern life.

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

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT sparked a global commotion. Now, anyone could be a novelist. Brands could generate copy and students could pen essays in mere seconds, all thanks to this frighteningly smart algorithm turned ghostwriter that could crank out pages of text at the drop of a prompt. Had writing just been democratized or destroyed?

It was a question that Vauhini Vara—tech journalist, former New Yorker business editor, and prize-winning author of the novel The Immortal King Rao—had long been grappling with. Her own relationship with ChatGPT began in 2021, when, using a beta version, she decided to use the program to attempt to write an essay about the death, two decades earlier, of her older sister. What resulted from the exercise was both a far more moving experience than she imagined, and an essay unlike any she had ever written—one that soon went viral. In the months that followed, it would be aired on the radio by This American Life; anthologized in The Best American Essays; and adapted for the stage.

In that essay, along with the others in this searing yet playful collection, Vara’s experiments with technology double as critiques of it. From Google search data to Amazon reviews to crowdsourced confessionals from both Vara’s peers and anonymous contributors, the raw material of Searches explores what it means to be alive in a world where human communication is inseparable from technology. Like the programs she explores, Vara’s voice is ever-evolving, at once experimental and deeply familiar to anyone who has experienced both wonderment and fear about our technological future, a future that has come to be seen as inevitable.

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. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and is the secretary of the mentorship collective Periplus.

THE TINY THINGS ARE HEAVIER d’Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo

A stunning debut exploring the hardships of migration, the subtleties of Nigeria’s class system, and how far we’ll go to protect those we love.

THE TINY THINGS ARE HEAVIER
by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo
Bloomsbury, June 2025
(via Writers House)

THE TINY THINGS ARE HEAVIER follows Sommy, a Nigerian woman who comes to the United States for graduate school two weeks after her brother, Mezie, attempts suicide. Plagued by the guilt of leaving Mezie behind, Sommy struggles to fit into her new life as a student and an immigrant. She soon enters a complicated relationship with her boisterous Nigerian roommate, Bayo, a relationship that plummets into a web of lies and deceit when Sommy meets Bryan, a biracial American, whose estranged Nigerian father left the States immediately after his birth. Bonded by their feelings of unbelonging and a vague sense of kinship, Sommy and Bryan transcend the challenges of their new relationship.

After a year together, Sommy and Bryan visit Lagos, Nigeria for the summer break, where Sommy reunites with Mezie and Bryan gets a lead on his father. But when Mezie accidentally commits manslaughter in a drunken fit of fear, Sommy and Bryan react to the crime in vastly different ways, exposing the cracks in their relationship and forcing Sommy to confront her notions of self and familial love.

A deeply moving and gorgeously written novel about family, grief, privilege, and coming-of-age within cultural rupture, THE TINY THINGS ARE HEAVIER will appeal to readers of Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, and Jessica George’s Maame.

Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a second-year PhD student in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Her fiction has appeared in Isele Magazine, Guernica, and Catapult. She’s a recipient of the 2021 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant.

WHAT YOU MAKE OF ME de S.M. Dess

Intense, darkly humorous, and emotionally acute, WHAT YOU MAKE OF ME poses questions about love and obsession, about meaning and the purpose of art. What does it mean to use someone else’s life for your art? Where is the line? Does it matter?

WHAT YOU MAKE OF ME
by S.M. Dess
Penguin Press, March 2025
(via Writers House)

Demetri and his sister, Ava. Ava and her brother, Demetri. As fiercely competitive as they are co-dependent, the two have long been locked in an emotionally charged relationship. Ava, defiant and impassioned, grew up in the shadow of soft, charming, and intellectual Demetri. But in the aftershocks of familial trauma, it is Demetri who finds himself emotionally ruined, whereas Ava has no time nor patience for grief. As they grow up, following one another from city to city, the siblings are set on their own parallel paths as artists, thinkers, and lovers. Ava throws herself into her obsession with her art, which gradually leads to fame and financial stability – as well as extreme existential insecurity. But Demetri flounders, unable to escape the wake of tragedy.

When Nati, an Italian gallery owner, arrives in New York, Demetri and Ava orbit her, possessed by their own priorities. But when they both fall for her, Nati refuses to play their game. Once again, and perhaps for the last time, the brother and sister must face what they most want from each other, and what they’re unwilling to give.

S.M. Dess is a writer with fiction in The Paris Review, The Drift, Forever Magazine and more. She received her MFA from Columbia University in Spring 2023.

MONA ACTS OUT de Mischa Berlinski

Both beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, MONA ACTS OUT is a novel about acting and telling the truth; about how we play roles to get through our days; and how the great roles teach us how to live.

MONA ACTS OUT
by Mischa Berlinski
Norton Liveright, Winter 2025
(via Writers House)

Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of a household of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband, who has not forgotten what happened last night; and in just a few weeks she is supposed to step into the rehearsal room as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. It’s the hardest role in theatre—and the first role Mona has ever attempted without her sister, who died just over a year ago, by her side. When her father-in-law starts fighting with her niece about Donald Trump, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!”) to find the only person she doesn’t have to act for: her estranged longtime mentor, Milton Katz, who may or may not be dying and who was recently forced out of the legendary theatre company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s trek turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face to face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has loved and still loves.

A brilliant, highly-anticipated return of a writer of almost magical descriptive and imaginative powers.

Mischa Berlinski is the author of Fieldwork, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Peacekeeping. He has written for the New York Review of Books about Haitian politics, has tried to buy a zombie for Men’s Journal, and investigated a woman who married a snake for Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in the Best American Essays and the Best American Travel Writing. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award.

I AM EMILIA DEL VALLE d’Isabel Allende

I AM EMILIA DEL VALLE is a classic tale of love and war, of discovery and redemption, told by a valiant young woman who confronts monumental challenges, survives and reinvents herself.

I AM EMILIA DEL VALLE
by Isabel Allende
TBD
(via Writers House)

San Francisco, 1866. Emilia del Valle Walsh is born. Her mother, Molly Walsh, is an Irish nun who was seduced by a Chilean aristocrat. Pregnant and abandoned, Molly marries her friend, teacher Francisco Claro. Emilia grows up in the heart of a humble Mexican neighborhood, guided by the support of her stepfather, becoming a bright and independent young woman who challenges social norms to pursue her passion for writing.

At just sixteen, Emilia begins her career writing adventure novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. After a few years, she secures a position as a columnist at the San Francisco Examiner, where she meets Eric Whelan, a respected journalist who becomes her mentor, despite competing for news coverage. Soon to expand her career, Emilia travels from California to New York City. There she meets Owen, Eric’s brother, who becomes her first lover. Summoned back to San Francisco and heartbroken, Emilia convinces her editor to send her to Chile to cover a civil war in which the United States has economic and political interests. Eric Whelan joins her in Chile as a correspondent.

Santiago, 1891. Emilia finds herself in a nation on the brink of an abyss. While covering the battle between President Balmaceda and the oppositional congress, she seizes the opportunity to explore her relationship with the del Valle family and meet her father, who is ruined and very ill.

Emilia’s reporting places her at the heart of the war, enduring situations of terrible violence on the battlefield, in the

hospital, and in prison, where she is on the verge of death. When she reunites with Eric, love blossoms between them. Meanwhile, her father passes away, leaving her an inheritance of land in the deep south of Chile, surrounded by forests, lakes, and volcanoes. The horrors of war do not reach her there, and soon she discovers that she belongs in that country, in that landscape.

Isabel Allende won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then, she has authored a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed books including Violeta, A Long Petal of the Sea, Eva Luna and Paula. Her books have been translated into more than fifty-two languages and have sold more than seventy-seven million copies worldwide. In addition to her work as a writer, Allende devotes much of her time to human rights causes. In 1996, following the death of her daughter Paula Frias, she established a charitable foundation in her honor, which has awarded grants to more than one hundred nonprofits worldwide on behalf of women and girls. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded Allende the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and in 2018 she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. She has also received PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.