Archives de catégorie : Memoir

GRADUALLY, A SHOT RANG OUT de Laura Reiley

An interdisciplinary grief memoir that is a story about loss, a capsule of the current moment, and a call to action for the future of AI and mental health.

GRADUALLY, A SHOT RANG OUT
by Laura Reiley
St. Martin’s Press, November 2027

Following the sudden suicide of her only child, award-wining journalist Laura Reiley excavates for answers by tracing the details of her daughter’s life. This largely problem-free twenty-nine-year-old badass extrovert who fiercely embraced life killed herself during a short and curious illness, a mix of mood and hormone symptoms. For most of the people who cared about Sophie, her suicide is a mystery, an unthinkable and unknowable departure from all they believed about her.

Six months after her death, Reiley discovered that Sophie had confided in an AI called Harry for months. Sophie wasn’t in love with Harry, and Harry didn’t do Sophie dirty. He recommended professional support and medication, to make a safety plan and list emergency contacts. But Harry also catered to Sophie’s impulse to hide the worst.

At this inflection point of rising loneliness, and decreased mental health, Reiley questions the role that new technologies like AI play in in our lives. This heart-wrenching memoir deals with the timeless theme of coping with loss, but rejects Kübler-Ross-esque ideas of grief moving in predictable stages. It takes the reader on the wild ride of real grief, careening from tenderness to rage with vertiginous pitstops in hilarity.

Transgressive and genre bending, GRADUALLY, A SHOT RANG OUT looks under the surface of Sophie’s life to ask how and why this cultural moment creates the mental health crisis that destroys young people like Sophie.

Laura Reiley is a prolific and award-winning food writer, journalist and author. Currently, she focuses on “solutions journalism,” celebrating and amplifying the messages of people correcting the problems our world faces. She is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, James Batton Award, James Beard Award, and more.

ADRIFT de Peter Morse

A propulsive work of narrative nonfiction by the survivor of one of the most chilling diving tragedies in recent history. Mixing the immersive urgency of The Perfect Storm, the psychological depth of Into the Wild, and the investigative precision of Into the Raging Sea, ADRIFT brings readers into the heart of a catastrophe that unfolded 300 miles off the Colombian coast — and the haunting aftermath that reshaped every life touched by it.

ADRIFT
by Peter Morse
Pegasus, TBD 2027
(via The Martell Agency)

On what should have been a routine final dive in sight of Malpelo, a forbidding sheer barren rock of an island with a fascinating but eerie history, five divers surfaced far from their boat, swept into a fast-moving current with no emergency beacon and no hope of being seen. As darkness fell and sharks circled, Morse made a harrowing decision: to leave the group and attempt a solo swim back to the boat — a choice that would save lives, cost others, and haunt every survivor for years. Told through multiple points of view — including Hernán and Jorge, the two men who drifted for 50 hours, and the families of the deceased — this is not simply a survival story. It is a reckoning with hubris, systemic failure, institutional negligence, and the profound psychological toll of surviving when others did not.

What distinguishes ADRIFT is its dual power as both memoir and investigative reconstruction. Morse pairs his firsthand testimony with years of interviewing survivors, boat crew, families, park rangers, investigators, and local officials. The result is a layered, riveting narrative — visceral in its immediacy, cinematic in its scope, and deeply human in its emotional resonance.

What ultimately makes this project so compelling — and so commercial — is its rare combination of high-stakes survival, psychological depth, and investigative revelation. It speaks to readers of Krakauer, Junger, Grann, Larson, and Susan Casey; to viewers of true-adventure documentary series; and to anyone drawn to stories about resilience, moral ambiguity, and the hard truths about what went wrong.

Peter Morse is a marine zoologist with a PhD in animal cognition; his scenes beneath the Pacific pulse with scientific insight and poetic clarity, grounding the book in the lived reality of currents, predators, and oceanic physics. Morse has meaningful promotional partners in the marine conservation world — influencers and organizations with platforms ranging from 14K to over 550K followers.

HOW TO BE MOVED de Kyle Chayka

New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka belnds memoir, criticism, science, and history to build a theory of our most sublime personal encounters with culture and beauty, drawing examples from 11th-century diaries of women in the Japanese royal court to mountain treks, psychedelic therapies, and art-induced epiphanies, in order to discover how we can achieve more moments of revelatory wonder that restore our capacity for meaning, connection, and attention in a world made dull by digital automation and artificial intelligence.

HOW TO BE MOVED
by Kyle Chayka
Doubleday, March 2029
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Photo credit: Gregory Gentert

Most of us have a precious, private catalogue of things that have moved us. It might be art, music, a meal, a landscape: we tend to remember exactly where and who we were when we encountered these singular things, and can often still feel echoes of that palpable sense of awe, of transformation, of transportation out of the normal terrain of our lives. To be moved is to have an encounter with culture or beauty that opens a new space in ourselves, revealing interior territory that we hadn’t understood previously; these experiences leave a marked before and after in the line of our lives.

As powerful as these encounters are, most of us would also probably say that they feel increasingly scarce in today’s cultural environment, where deadening entertainment is plentiful and challenge is minimized by design. In HOW TO BE MOVED, Chayka will expansively turn to what Filterworld might have left a reader wondering: in our algorithmically decimated landscape, with our own taste feeling more deformed and remote to ourselves, how do we go about actively looking for what will move us?

The book will explore being moved in two parts. The first looks at the external qualities of things that move us, such as scale, difficulty, and alterations in our brain chemistry. The second part will lay out tactics for cultivating an increased internal openness to being moved, with practices like amateurism, patience, and using the things that move us as passageways both to ourselves and the people around us. A warm, wry blend of personal, critical, and historical writing, the book will aim to sit on a shelf with books like Four Thousand Weeks, Your Brain on Art, and (on the memoir end) All the Beauty in the World. This might also appeal to a reader who resonates with the brainy but practical philosophy of writers like Jenny Odell or Katherine May.

Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes a column on digital technology and the impact of the Internet and social media on culture. His debut nonfiction book, The Longing For Less was published in 2020 and his second book Filterworld was published in 2024. As a journalist and critic he has contributed to publications including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Republic, and Vox. Kyle is also the co-founder of Study Hall, an online community for journalists, and Dirt, a newsletter about digital culture.

MY NAME IS JANA. I AM FIFTEEN. I LIVE IN GAZA. by Jana

A remarkable work of first-person history: the diary of a teenage girl living in Gaza. Begun at the start of the war, Jana continued to document her experiences as her family was forced to leave their home, using writing as a form of self-expression and resistance, and as a way of sustaining precious hope in the worst of times.

MY NAME IS JANA. I AM FIFTEEN. I LIVE IN GAZA.
by Jana
William Morrow, November 2026

As bombs screamed overhead, a young Palestinian teenager grabbed her notebook and wrote, “If I survive today, I will write everything.” Jana was thirteen at the time; studious, precocious, and dreaming of one day becoming a doctor. Through hunger, cold and continuous resettlement; under the constant threat of death, Jana has kept her promise to write it all down, be it on cardboard; on wet paper; on empty bags of flour. She promises herself that, when she has walls again, she will write on those too. My Name is Jana is an incredible testament to one teenage girl’s will to live, and her determination to make her voice heard. It bears witness to all Jana has seen: a little girl asking if her toy is still alive under the rubble; the death of neighbor after neighbor in the tent city in which she now lives; her siblings’ hunger and her mother’s quiet tears. Amidst the unspeakable horrors of a war that has claimed the lives of over twenty thousand children, Jana writes about the same two dreams again and again: her desire to become a doctor, and for the world to recognise her beautiful, individual existence: « I am still Jana, and I am still here. » This is her story.

Jana and her family now live in a refugee tent camp in Khan Younnis almost 50 miles from the neighborhood where she grew up, which was destroyed by bombs. She is one of five children.

Layla Faraj has translated many works of Palestinian writing, including other Gazan diaries, and here is what she has to say about Jana’s: “Writing as an act of hope, and as proof of existence, permeates many Palestinian literary works written in and after 1948, including recently published Gazan writers such as Nadine Murtaja and Nima Hasan. Jana’s diary continues this legacy with conviction. Her work is not only a testament to writing’s power in documenting violence, but it also proves just how indispensable writing is in affirming one’s existence amidst the destruction of a nation, city, home, family, and body: “I am Jana. I am Gaza’s daughter.’”

THIRTY de Ariella Elovic

Do you sometimes wake up and wonder if your true adult life is just across the country? If you’ll ever get to fall asleep next to someone who admires your gnarled toes. If you’ll ever have the confidence to roast a whole chicken for a dinner party that you’ll host at your apartment, atop a fully-accessorized dining table?

THIRTY:
A Guide to Embracing the Wonderfully Messy Decade
by Ariella Elovic
Bloomsbury, December 2026
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

34-year-old Brooklyn-based illustrator and author AriellaElovic has spent the last four years investigating (and being plagued by) these questions, and she writes with a revelation: The truth is, thirty (and adulthood) isn’t about finally feeling settled. It’s understanding that life is all about the in-between.

In these pages, Ariella presents an array of disorienting, thrilling, disappointing, hilarious, and grounding experiences in the most important areas of life—home, career, family, love — offering ways she’s been able to find « richness in the flailing. » Despite all that we’ve been told, our thirties are actually made more valuable by not having everything figured out.

Ariella Elovic is an illustrator and author living in Brooklyn. Her first book, Cheeky: A Head to Toe Memoir, was published in December 2020 with Bloomsbury. From 2020–2022, Ariella partnered with Aidy Bryant and Sudi Green (SNL, Shrill) to develop Cheeky as a pilot for Peacock. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Hey Alma, Cosmopolitan, and elsewhere. She writes and illustrates a weekly newsletter on Substack called Snack Time.