Archives de catégorie : Literary

THE QUEEN OF BAD INFLUENCES de Jim Shepard

Twelve compressed masterworks from this great American writer of catastrophe fiction, in which lives are upended as much by broken hearts as by collapsing dams, hideously mismanaged wars, gargantuan wildfires, and apocalyptic storms.

THE QUEEN OF BAD INFLUENCES
by Jim Shepard
Knopf, September 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In Richard Ford’s view, Jim Shepard’s “talent is so various and canny he can write about seemingly anything and make it thrilling to us,” and in these stories spanning six centuries we find viscerally evoked worlds as wildly diverse as a mercenary’s corner of 16th century Madrid, a young apprentice’s pre-Revolutionary Boston, and Edward Hyde’s London. With civil engineers and destitute veterans we encounter the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida, and we read the 1864 letters between Lucy in Boon, North Carolina (“Three privates are currently sleeping soundly on our porch in their muddy blankets”) and her great love, William, on the march in Tennessee (“I can’t write much for it seems we are looking for a fight every minute”), while the title story introduces us to the stubborn Constance, who had “no gift for flirtation” with men, preferring Minna, her best friend and “queen of bad influences,” as their vexed devotion unfolds in part on the liner Lusitania.

With irony, compassion, and withering humor, these stories evoke the terrible ease with which cataclysm, human-engineered or otherwise, can sweep away all we find most precious, and expose those limitations we’ve refused to address. At the same time, Shepard celebrates what is best in us: the love and friendships we sustain, and the passions and grace we grant one another.

“Jim Shepard is a fantastic writer—compassionate, funny, and fearless—[whose work] does what great writing always does: inspires us to look more closely at life, and be more caring.” —George Saunders

« A deft, audacious artist. » —Norman Rush, National Book Award-winning author of Mating

Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including most recently Phase Six and The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish Literature, the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner. Seven of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and two for Pushcart Prizes. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. He also won a Guggenheim Foundation Award, the Library of Congress/ Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and the ALEX Award from the American Library Association. He previously taught at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts with his wife Karen and two beagles.

CO de Rina Schmeller

“Rina Schmeller […] writes with empathy but eschews all sentimentality, revealing not only the full horror of her situation, but also love in all its facets.” —Jenny Erpenbeck

CO by Rina Schmeller
Penguin Verlag/PRH Germany, March 2026

They met on a bridge. They recognised a kindred spirit in each other. They fell in love. And now they have decided to share their lives with each other, regardless of the drug to which he is addicted, and which will henceforth govern her life too. She becomes entangled in his addiction, and starts to orbit him like he orbits the drug, both calm centre and third party. She leaves again and again, to escape the violence, but always comes back. Almost always.

CO is a story about empathy and creeping self-sabotage, about the dynamics of addiction – which affects us all – and about what life is like when you’re co-dependent. Yet it is also the story of a woman’s empowerment and liberation, who finds the strength to let go. And as she embarks on the long and tough road to survival, she gradually regains her independence and finds her way back to herself. A powerful, elegant novel about regaining your inner freedom, sober, quiet and fiercely honest.

Rina Schmeller, born in 1986, studied creative writing in Leipzig and literary studies with comparative literature in Berlin. She has been awarded several fellowships and was a member of the 2020 prose writers’ workshop at the Literary Colloquium in Berlin. In 2024 she published the essay Bedeutung erleben (‘Experiencing meaning’, Edit no. 91) about writing « Co ».

TANZENDE FRAU, BLAUER HAHN de Dana Grigorcea

In a Romanian mountain town still marked by the past dictatorship, two young people from completely different worlds experience the miracle of love.

TANZENDE FRAU, BLAUER HAHN
(Dancing Woman, Blue Rooster)
by Dana Grigorcea
Penguin Verlag/PRH Germany, March 2026

In 1990s Romania, the dust of socialism still hasn’t quite yet settled. Every summer Roxana and Camil meet in the small town of Busteni in the Carpathian Mountains: she is there on holiday, while he lives on the other side of the tracks. They observe the town’s couples, take inspiration from them and try to discover their secrets: from the successful lawyer who removes her roof when a tree starts growing through her house, to the chalk-and-cheese engineering couple who suffer from the same ailment, to the local beauty who looks like a TV star, who has found love with an unremarkable-seeming man. And with each successive summer, Roxana and Camil’s own story develops too – until they realise that they can only ever be a guest in each other’s lives.

Light as a feather yet profound, TANZENDE FRAU, BLAUER HAHN is a kaleidoscope of love and what it takes for it to take root. A novel about desires unexpectedly fulfilled, opportunities that pass by unnoticed – and how the wheel of life carries on turning regardless.

Dana Grigorcea was born in Bucharest in 1979, she is a Germanist and Dutchist and has lived with her family in Zurich for many years. The Romanian-Swiss author’s works have been translated into several languages and have received numerous awards such as the Ingeborg Bachmann/3sat Award. Her novel « Those Who Never Die » won the 2022 Swiss Book Prize and was longlisted for the 2021 German Book Prize. Dana Grigorcea is a recipient of the Romanian Order of Cultural Merit with the rank of Knight.

THIS IS AN ACTUAL TRAGEDY de Natalie Rose Richardson

A mesmerizing debut that combines the transformative friendships of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the suspense of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and the varying vocal registers of Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch.

THIS IS AN ACTUAL TRAGEDY
by Natalie Rose Richardson
Knopf, May 2027
(via Writers House)

Two weeks before freshman orientation, four soon-to-be (unlikely) friends arrive at the University of Chicago as part of its token Scholars of Color (SOC) program: there’s Darwin, an insecure physics geek on a quest to lose his virginity; Nat, an elusive aspiring writer who starts secretly dating her much older mentor; Jordan, the would-be campus all-star who’s too stuck in his head to fulfill his potential, and Stephanie, the undisputed hottest girl on campus, who’s carrying a shocking secret.

Four years later, they combine their strengths to stage a protest as part of Scav – a notorious campus secret society that organizes a yearly competition, one that often spawns dark, borderline illegal situations that the school pays good money to cover up. This year’s prompt: to dramatically reenact “an actual tragedy.” Fifty-five students from SOC don shabby costumes and pitch tents in a Chicago park that, only days prior, was purged of real asylum seekers. But when the cops arrive at the scene, performance becomes reality when tragedy strikes.

Told in four parts, the novel dives into the life of each irresistibly compelling protagonist during one year of college. Their relationships to each other and themselves are tested as they each weather their own individual tragedies. It’s these friends’ complicated ties and devotion to each other that lead them to organize the asylum seeker reenactment—the consequences of which will mark the survivors forever.

With an irreverent, razor-sharp voice that dips into the serious, THIS IS AN ACTUAL TRAGEDY probes loneliness and belonging, race, class, sex, friendship, and the absurdities of American higher education, and marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

Natalie Rose Richardson is a writer from Oak Park, Illinois with degrees from the University of Chicago (BA), Northwestern University (MA & MFA in Poetry), and the NYU Creative Writing Program (MFA in Fiction). The manuscript was closely advised by Jonathan Safran Foer, who writes: “Natalie Rose Richardson arrives with a vibrant, irreverent, singular voice. THIS IS AN ACTUAL TRAGEDY is an actual joy.” Her work has appeared in Narrative, Orion Magazine, Poetry Magazine, and more.

THE BRIGHTNESS de Chad Harbach

At long last, the NYT bestselling author of The Art of Fielding returns with an immersive, generation-defining epic: Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief—THE BRIGHTNESS follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella Affenlight and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way into a larger world that won’t stop changing.

THE BRIGHTNESS
by Chad Harbach
Little, Brown, October 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

At 27, Pella’s life looks settled: she’s a recent college grad, engaged to Mike, her longtime boyfriend, and helping her friend Owen pull off his own destination wedding on Block Island. But over that wild wedding weekend, Pella’s past and present collide spectacularly, blowing up her plans and sending her spiraling toward an unplanned future in New York City. Meanwhile, back at Westish College, 21-year-old Irma’s involvement with a politically charged prank — one that has roiled both the campus and the world beyond— threatens to derail her brilliant future. As Irma and Pella cycle through possibilities and identities, both navigate the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.

In stunning scenes and spectacular characters—each drawn with an almost superhuman vividness and humanity—Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in. Energetic, funny, and deeply human, this much-anticipated follow-up to The Art of Fielding confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and deep-seeing writers of our time.

It’s been fifteen years since The Art of Fielding published, but it continues to come up in conversation with many people referencing it as one of their favorite novels of all time. In The Brightness, Chad Harbach gives those who loved that book the opportunity to return to its indelible characters, but to see them in an entirely new light, while inviting a whole new generation of readers into his Westish world.

Chad Harbach is the author of the bestselling The Art of Fielding and a co-founder of n+1. He grew up in Wisconsin and attended Harvard and the University of Virginia. He lives in California.