Archives de catégorie : Literary

SNAKE OIL de Kelsey Rae Dimberg

From the author of Girl in the Rearview Window comes a stunning novel set in the high-stakes world of Silicon Valley.

SNAKE OIL
by Kelsey Rae Dimberg
William Morrow, Summer 2023
(via Writers House)

Radical is a fast-growing wellness startup, rumored to be approaching “unicorn” status. But on the night of a booze-fueled bacchanal celebrating another round of venture capital investment, a woman’s body is found outside the company’s San Francisco HQ. Did she fall from the roof? Did she jump? Or was she pushed?
Rhoda West, Radical’s luminous founder-CEO, has attracted both avid followers and vocal detractors in the building of her wellness company. Her Instagram page exhorts followers to #bebetter, showcasing intimate glimpses of Rhoda’s glamorous personal life alongside promotions for the mysterious, cult-status products created in Radical’s secretive Lab.
Dani is her enthusiastic employee—a “radigal”—who has fully immersed herself in the Radical lifestyle, eagerly testing products while covering up a pregnancy she’s not sure she’s ready for. When @Radicalidiocy, a twitter account devoted to lambasting the company online, starts to expose company secrets, Dani suspects her colleague and on-the-rocks friend Cecilia, a disgruntled customer service rep, might be running the account. As Rhoda engages in a cat-and-mouse chase with the Twitter author and struggles to maintain her power against mounting pressure, the women’s ambitions and beliefs will clash—with deadly results.
A page-turning literary thriller, Dimberg’s new book is an incisive examination of the high-stakes startup world, where the reputation of a leader carries outsize influence on the value of a brand, and the barbed double-standards applied to female CEOs.

Kelsey Rae Dimberg is the author of Girl in the Rearview Mirror. She received an MFA from the University of San Francisco and studied at Barrett Honors College of Arizona State University, where she was editor-in-chief of the literary magazine, Lux, and received the Swarthout Award in Fiction.

HOMEBODIES de Tembe Denton-Hurst

Urgent, propulsive, and strikingly insightful, HOMEBODIES is a thrilling debut novel about a young Black writer whose world is turned upside down when she loses her coveted job in media and her searing manifesto about racism in the industry goes viral.

HOMEBODIES
by Tembe Denton-Hurst
Harper, May 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Mickey Hayward dreams of writing stories that matter. She has a flashy media job that makes her feel successful and a devoted girlfriend who takes care of her when she comes home exhausted and demoralized. It’s not all A-list parties and steamy romance, but Mickey’s on her way, and it’s far from the messy life she left behind in Maryland. Despite being overlooked and mistreated at work, it seems like she might finally get the chance to prove herself—until she finds out she’s being replaced.
Distraught and enraged, Mickey fires back with a detailed letter outlining the racism and sexism she’s endured as a Black woman in media, certain it will change the world for the better. But when her letter is met with overwhelming silence, Mickey is sent into a tailspin of self-doubt. Forced to reckon with just how fragile her life is—including the uncertainty of her relationship—she flees to the last place she ever dreamed she would run to, her hometown, desperate for a break from her troubles.
Back home, Mickey is seduced by the simplicity of her old life—and the flirtation of a former flame—but her life in New York refuses to be forgotten. When a media scandal catapults Mickey’s forgotten letter into the public zeitgeist, suddenly everyone wants to hear what Mickey has to say. It’s what she’s always wanted—isn’t it?
Intimate, witty, and deeply sexy, HOMEBODIES is a testament to those trying to be heard and loved in a world that refuses to make space, and introduces a standout new writer.

“I saw so much of myself in Homebodies, and in Mickey’s utterly delicious and sometimes aching story. Mickey made me look back and love my young Black woman self, and I loved her so much for returning me to that place.” —Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“HOMEBODIES is a modern marvel—Tembe Denton-Hurst’s prose is both intimate and hysterical, inflammatory and elegiac. You’ll root for Mickey as she takes on the world, questioning and searching its contours, weaving a story we can’t help but find our own worlds inside of. Denton-Hurst has written a warm, brilliant novel that’s stunning and poignant; HOMEBODIES is wonderfully witty and full of empathy and entirely original.” —Bryan Washington, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot

“HOMEBODIES is a beautiful story on becoming. Denton-Hurst’s prose is perfect with an innate attention to detail and astonishing ability to capture the shapes and colors of emotions as she brilliantly illuminates the growing pains of forging one’s own path…something which so many of us are still looking to do. This is a deeply felt, assured literary debut by a writer worth watching.” —Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of award-winning novels Here Comes the Sun and Patsy

Tembe Denton-Hurst (@tembae on the internet) is a staff writer at New York Magazine’s The Strategist, covering beauty, lifestyle, and books; she previously wrote about beauty, gender, and culture for NYLON, them., and Elle. When she’s not writing, Tembe can be found on her couch in Queens where she lives with her partner and their two cats, Stella and Dakota.

 

CITY OF LAUGHTER de Temim Fruchter

A rich and riveting work that marries centuries-old folklore to 21st-century queer literary fiction, CITY OF LAUGHTER spans four generations of Jewish women who are bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years

CITY OF LAUGHTER
by Temim Fruchter
Grove Press, Spring 2023

The exciting debut of a Rona Jaffe Award winner, CITY OF LAUGHTER is a book for the reader of Orlando, Jeanette Winterson, Andrea Lawlor, and the dog-eared Bashevis Singer paperback she still returns to after her first gay kiss. It tangles beautifully with Jewish spirituality and generational silence, with a history of displacement and a present life half-lived for fear of invoking ancestral judgment—and young queer people have a way of upsetting the familial applecart…
Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter, and as this story opens an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make the bride and groom laugh on their wedding day, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter that the people of Ropshitz desperately need.
In the present day, Shiva Margolin, a young woman named for a mourning rite, is a graduate student in Jewish folklore getting over the heartbreak of her first big queer love amid mourning the death of her beloved father. She struggles to connect with her mother, who harbors secrets and barriers that Shiva can’t break. When the opportunity arises for her to visit Poland on a half-formed research trip, she takes it; she’s interested in her mysterious matriarchal line, in particular Mira Wollman, the great-grandmother about whom no one speaks, and who left a piece of herself behind in Poland when she emigrated. But as in most folklore, the answers to Shiva’s questions won’t come so easily. Zigzagging between our known universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, CITY OF LAUGHTER is epic and sharply intimate, both fantastical and hyperreal.

Temim Fruchter was raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish household, and her faith in communal experience and the spirit world remains central to her identity; this novel was inspired by her own great-grandmother, who was born in Ropshitz. Temim holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and was previously a founding member and drummer for The Shondes, a feminist punk band. She has received fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, first prize in short fiction from both American Literary Review and New South, the 2020 Jane Hoppen Residency, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She lives in Brooklyn.

AMERICAN MERMAID de Julia Langbein

The Pisces by way of Emily St. John Mandel or Karen Russell meets The Snow Child and The Need, AMERICAN MERMAID is by turns both a comic and fabulously insightful tale of two female characters in search of truth, love and self-acceptance as they move between worlds without giving up their voices.

AMERICAN MERMAID
by Julia Langbein
‎ Doubleday, Spring 2023
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Penelope Schleeman, a consistently broke Connecticut high school teacher, is as surprised as anyone when her sensitive debut novel, American Mermaid—the story of a wheelchair-bound scientist named Sylvia who discovers that her withered legs are the vestiges of a powerful tail—becomes a bestseller. Penelope soon finds herself lured to LA by promises of easy money to co-write the American Mermaid screenplay for a major studio with a pair of male hacks. As the studio pressures Penelope to change American Mermaid from the story of a fierce, androgynous eco-warrior to a teen sex object in a clam bra, strange things start to happen. Threats appear in the screenplay draft; siren calls lure people into danger. When Penelope’s screenwriting partners try to kill Sylvia off entirely in a bitterly false but cinematic end, matters off the page escalate. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her mermaid come to life, enacting revenge for Hollywood’s violations?

Julia Langbein (BA, Columbia University, 2003; PhD, University of Chicago, 2013) held a postdoctoral fellowship in Art History at Oxford University from 2014-2018 and is currently a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, where she is writing a book about how generational conflict and changing ideas of old age have shaped modern art. Her monograph, Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France, which brings to light a brilliant subculture of comic criticism and argues for its importance in the development of modernist painting, will be published in March 2022 by Bloomsbury Visual Art and has received outstanding advance praise from senior scholars (“impeccably researched,” “engaging,” “essential”). Langbein, a sketch and standup comedian for many years, was the author of the viral comedy blog The Bruni Digest (2003-2007), which reviewed New York Times critic Frank Bruni’s restaurant reviews every week. She has since written about food, art and travel for Gourmet, Eater, Salon, Frieze and other publications.

THE MOON REPRESENTS MY HEART de Pim Wangtechawat

The Joy Luck Club meets The Time Traveller’s Wife with the power of The Immortalists in this story that explores the ramifications of choices made by the generations of a British-Chinese family of time-travellers. A heart-warming, richly poetic novel, brimming with tenderness, joy and loss. Pim Wangtechawat strikes a perfect balance between vulnerability, fallibility and warmth.

THE MOON REPRESENTS MY HEART
by Pim Wangtechawat
Oneworld UK, Spring 2023
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Father: Joshua understands the strict rules of time travel: only observe, things cannot be changed. But things are changing quickly for him. When the opportunity of a lifetime comes to attend university in London and leave the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong behind, he finds the courage to take it. From there, he feels it: this is where life begins. Stepping on that plane is the first decision that will have ramifications for generations to come.
Son: When Tommy’s parents travel to the past and never reappear, it feels as though time has stopped. But as it slowly restarts and everyone else moves forward, Tommy looks to the past. Struggling with the loss of his father, Tommy falls in love with a girl from the 1930s. Although his gifts allow him to walk through time, Tommy’s inability to confront his own history in the face of tragedy begins to affect his present, and has severe ramifications for the people who can truly bring him happiness.

Pim Wangtechawat is a Thai-Chinese writer from Bangkok with a Masters in Creative Writing from Edinburgh Napier University. Her short stories, poems, and articles have been published in various magazines and journals such as The Mekong Review, The Nikkei Asian Review, and YesPoetry. She has performed her poetry at events in Edinburgh hosted by Shoreline of Infinity and the Scottish BAME Writers Network, and has given talks about her writing at Chulalongkorn University and Ruamrudee International School. She is currently working on her second book and aims to tell stories that reflect our shared humanity and bring more Asian writers to the forefront. THE MOON REPRESENTS MY HEART is inspired by the author’s family. She would like to note that her family are not time travellers, even though she wishes they were.