MASQUERADE de Mike Fu

Exploring social, cultural, and sexual identities in New York, Shanghai, and beyond, Mike Fu’s MASQUERADE is a skillfully layered, brilliantly interwoven debut novel for readers of Jason Mott’s A Hell Of A Book and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.

MASQUERADE
by Mike Fu
Tin House, October 2024
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Newly single Meadow Liu is house-sitting for his friend, artist Selma Shimizu, when he stumbles upon The Masquerade, a translated novel about a masked ball in 1930s Shanghai. The author’s name is the same as Meadow’s own in Chinese, Liu Tian–a coincidence that proves to be the first of many strange happenings. Over the course of a single summer, Meadow must contend with a possibly haunted apartment, a mirror that plays tricks, a stranger speaking in riddles at the bar where he works, as well as a startling revelation about a former lover. And when Selma vanishes from her artist residency, Meadow is forced to question everything he knows as the boundaries between real and imagined begin to blur.

Mike Fu is a Tokyo-based writer, editor, and translator. He is a co-founder and editor of The Shanghai Literary Review, and currently teaches fiction and translation at Antioch University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

GREAT QUOTES FROM GREAT SCIENTISTS de Chris Ferrie

From #1 bestselling author Chris Ferrie comes a collection of can’t miss quotes and life lessons from some of history’s greatest scientists!

GREAT QUOTES FROM GREAT SCIENTISTS
Quotes, Lessons, and Universal Truths from the World’s Greatest Scientific Minds
by Chris Ferrie
‎ Simple Truths/Sourcebooks, May 2024

Mixing famous scientists from history with modern-age ground breakers, this collection explores life lessons from the scientific mindset of: experiment, fail, repeat. Curiosity is king and finding answers through the process of learning (and failure) is all any good scientist can ask! This giftable package offers quotes and life lessons that are equally educational and inspirational, allowing people to learn and feel inspired when meeting new challenges and in their every day life.

Chris Ferrie is an award-winning physicist and Senior Lecturer for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney. He has a Masters in applied mathematics, BMath in mathematical physics and a PhD in applied mathematics. He lives in Australia with his wife and children.

PREDICTED FUTURES de Jackie Snow

With the urgency of Naomi Klein and the expert on-the-ground reporting of Elizabeth Kolbert, Jackie Snow’s PREDICTED FUTURES dives into the world of climate change and technology and emerges with a rare find: hope.

PREDICTED FUTURES
How Artificial Intelligence Could Save the Natural World
by Jackie Snow
TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Using case studies that range from AI assisted reforestation in Australia to coral mapping in Belize, PREDICTED FUTURES is a cohesive, imagery-rich narrative arguing for AI’s uniquely qualified ability to help us protect our planet. Written with elegance and authority, this galvanizing proposal is free of hysteria but clear-eyed about what it will take—and more importantly, what is already being done—to save our cherished world.

Jackie Snow is a multimedia journalist published by National Geographic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others. She reported a 10-part series for PBS called “AI for Good,” and received the Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship in 2019.

THE STONE MEN de Timea Sipos

Imagine it’s possible to breathe life into stone — your hand meets the cool surface of a sculpted man and finds it pulsing with life… This is the Budapest of THE STONE MEN, a vibrantly original debut novel for fans of Clarice Lispector and Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go In The Dark.

THE STONE MEN
by Timea Sipos
TBD
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Four female sculptors in their final year of art school discover their ability to animate statues. Their first creation: the ideal man. What starts as a creative experiment grows into a media sensation. Seeing an opportunity, two of the sculptors, Bori and Hajni, begin to monetize their art, sculpting men for wealthy patrons who desire companions. As the operation grows, the streets of Budapest become restless with discarded animate statues, many of whom long for integration into human society. Haunting the novel is a mysterious mass casualty which leaves an untold number of stone men dead.

Through the perspectives of the stone men, their creators, and their occasional human companions, the novel explores the blurred the lines between art and life, female agency and sexuality, and questions what we owe our creations.

Timea Sipos is a Hungarian-American writer and translator with a MFA from the University of Nevada, and studied translation at the Balassi Institute. She has been supported by MacDowell, the Steinbeck Fellowship, Tin House, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.

MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING de Zee Carlstrom

A loud, fast-paced debut that punches the road-trip novel right in the face.

MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING
by Zee Carlstrom
Flatiron, Spring 2025
(via Neon Literary)

The newly nameless narrator of MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING has rejected the gender binary, flamed out with a vengeance at their corporate job, is most likely brain damaged from a major tussle with their now ex-boyfriend, and is drinking enough booze for two people.

A call from their mother with the news that their conspiracy-theorist father has gone missing, launches the narrator from Chicago to Deep Red Arkansas in a stolen car and their new bestie in tow a self-proclaimed « garbage goth » with her own emotional baggage (and someone on her tail). Along the way. they unpack the narrator’s childhood, one ruled by the whims of their father’s anger and paranoia, and a recent personal loss they would rather eat glass than face.

An unflinching interrogation of class rage, economic (im)mobility, the liberal/conservative divide, toxic masculinity, and the rot at the heart of capitalism, Make Sure You Die Screaming is the loud, funny, tragic, fucked-up enby road-trip novel of our times.

Zee Carlstrom is a creative director and writer from Illinois. They live in Brooklyn.