THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAGIC de Daniel Loedel

A professor’s mysterious death exposes the dark magic her students can’t escape.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAGIC
by Daniel Loedel
Algonquin, Spring 2028
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Martin arrives at Brown as a freshman in 2008, feeling a bit of an outcast. As he struggles to find his footing and his people, he becomes engrossed in a class called “The Philosophy of Magic.” The dynamic professor, who clearly has her favorites and a bit of a cult following at the university, initiates Martin and five other “special” students with a particular and profound kind of magical gift, involving contracts signed in actual blood. However, as the novel opens, her body is found hanging from her ceiling fan in her apartment. And so we go back in time to learn what role, if any, her devoted students played in her demise, as well as how her death affects their futures indelibly, for better and for worse.

Daniel Loedel is the author of Hades, Argentina, which won the Prix du Premier Roman, was a finalist for the Prix Femina and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, and other publications. He was a book editor for twelve years, first with Simon and Schuster and then with Bloomsbury. The authors he has worked with have won or been nominated for the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and many other accolades. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner and four cats.



PEOPLE PERSON de Brad Gira

PEOPLE PERSON is as unrelenting as its anti-heroine; a summer-to-remember tale revitalized and made unforgettably new with chilly glee.

PEOPLE PERSON
by Brad Gira
Viking, Spring 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

No one really likes Jodie, but no one bullies her either. She inspires too much apathy for the popular kids she reveres to bother.

As graduation approaches, Jodie accepts that she will never see her crush again: Caelab, the carelessly charismatic, sporty bad boy who would never recognize a girl like her. Then, on the night of graduation, Caelab dies drunk driving and Jodie’s chances of getting with Caelab plummet from implausible to impossible. In the aftermath Jodie crosses paths with Caelab’s various memorials and quickly nserts herself into the life of Caelab’s identical (albeit preppier) twin, Adam, who soaks up her seeming concern at a time of acute suffering.

Though strained and occasionally hostile, their summer fling moves fast, nudging Jodie up the social ladder she’d long watched from afar, even as the twins’ friends remain confused by her presence.

But by summer’s end a quiet suspicion takes hold: is Adam really the twin she’s been left with? The possibility of deception fills Jodie’s mind with both hope and dread. As she races to confirm that she has been with her true crush all along, her elaborate scheme backfires, putting herself (and the surviving twin) in grave danger.

What first appears to be a classic coming-of-age story of delayed jutice—an unfairly overlooked teen outcast finally gets her due—instead reveals itself as the eerie rise of an unremarkable young woman made increasingly terrifying by her determination to capture a taste of life among the admired, envied desirables. Brad Gira’s ruthlessly assured, stealthily profound debut charts this fraught affair from its grisly beginning to its grisly end.

Brad Gira is a playwright who was raised in Maryland and now lives in New York. PEOPLE PERSON is his very first novel.

INNAMORATA d’Ava Reid

A modern blend of gothic horror and epic romance for fans of the necromantic magic of Gideon the Ninth, the court intrigue of The Priory of the Orange Tree and the Shakespearean family drama of House of the Dragon with two powerful women at the center.

INNAMORATA
by Ava Reid
Del Rey Books, March 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Once there was an island where the dead walked the earth, and seven noble houses ruled by the arcane secrets of necromancy.

A conqueror’s blade brought them low, burning their libraries, killing their lords, and extinguishing their eldritch magic.

But defiant against the new order stands the House of Teeth and its last living members: beautiful Marozia, the heiress to the House, and her cousin, the uncanny Lady Agnes.

Though she has not spoken a word in seven years, Agnes is the true carrier of the House’s legacy. And she has her orders. She must recapture the secrets of death magic and avenge her family’s fallen honor. She must arrange the betrothal of her beloved cousin Marozia to Liuprand, heir to the conqueror’s throne, for access to the forbidden library in his grotesquely grand castle.

Revenge burns in Agnes’s heart but so do stranger passions—and it is Liuprand, the golden prince, who speaks to her soul. This passion is as treasonous as it is powerful, poisoning the kingdom’s roots and threatening to tear the already shattered realm in two.

For Agnes’s final order is the gravest: She must not fall in love.

Ava Reid is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning, Lady Macbeth, and other novels. Her books have been published in more than fourteen territories. She lives in the New York area.

ON COURAGE de Julia Angwin & Ami Fields-Meyer

A deeply reported manual for how individuals can resist America’s slide away from democracy, based on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across the world.

ON COURAGE: HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT IN AN AGE OF FEAR
by Julia Angwin & Ami Fields-Meyer
Mariner Books, June 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Based on their acclaimed The New Yorker essay “So You Want to Be a Dissident?: A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump’s Age of Fear,” Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and former White House senior advisor Ami Fields-Meyer deliver a guide to courage in America’s age of fear. ON COURAGE is a captivating collection of stories and lessons from the front lines of the fight for the future of the free world that invite action and rouse hope.

Step into the room where the world’s new dissidents—ordinary people, in the U.S. and around the world, who never aspired to be activists—are writing the playbook for courage, risk, and resistance in the age of authoritarianism and unprecedented digital surveillance.

ON COURAGE simplifies the calculus of activism by making more accessible than ever the fundamentals of taking political risk. It’s a handbook that is equal parts practical and spiritual, a valuable resource and a powerful message for anyone, anywhere, who feels the walls of history closing in on them.

Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist, founder of the nonprofit journalism newsrooms The Markup and Proof News, and a New York Times contributing Opinion Writer. She is a winner and two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for her work at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica.

Ami Fields-Meyer is a writer, political strategist, and Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He served in the White House from 2021 to 2024, including as Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris and as a member of the President’s technology policy team. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and Newsweek. He is a graduate of Emory University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

NINE BLOCKS, ONE HUNDRED YEARS de Barbara Demick

Barbara Demick profiles a single street that encapsulates Berlin’s turbulent history over the past century.

NINE BLOCKS, ONE HUNDRED YEARS
by Barbara Demick
PRH, Spring 2028
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

From the slinky cabarets of the 1920s, to the rise of the Nazis, to the city’s destruction at the end of World War II, to the post-war division and the building of the Berlin Wall. Then reunification, gentrification, the reemergence of culture and counter-culture, the stirrings again of ethnic tensions and an emboldened right wing.

The story is told through interviews with past and present residents. Main figures are a 99-year-old Jewish woman who as a girl witnessed the trashing of the Jewish businesses on Kristallnacht 1938. A man in his late 80s (his mother was cleaning lady for Bertolt Brecht) with an impeccable memory of neighbors forced to wear yellow stars, of friends killed by bombs in the final battle for Berlin in 1945, and of smuggling between the Soviet and West sectors post-war and the building of the Berlin Wall. A former Stasi informant. Four generations of a Turkish family first moved to Berlin in the 1960s as guest workers. An artist in the first wave of West German squatters to move into East Berlin in 1989, nurturing a club scene that would turn Berlin into a destination for young tourists.

The street, Brunnenstrasse, runs between the former East and West Berlin, once bisected by the wall, and was the site of many tunnels excavated to help East Berliners escape. It was also the location of a Nazi deportation center for elderly Jews. It all happened here.

Barbara Demick is author of the award-winning books Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood and Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town. She was bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in Beijing and Seoul, and previously reported from the Middle East and Balkans for the Philadelphia Inquirer.