AMERICAN WOMAN de Katie Rogers

Through deep reporting and newly discovered correspondence, AMERICAN WOMAN is the first book to paint a full picture of Jill Biden while exploring how she helps answer the evolving question of what the role of the modern First Lady should be.

AMERICAN WOMAN
The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden
by Katie Rogers
Crown, February 2024

Since the Clinton era, shifts in media, politics, and pop culture have all redefined expectations of First Ladies, even as the boundaries set upon them have often remained anachronistic. With sharp insights and dozens of firsthand interviews with major players in the Biden, Obama, Trump, Bush, and Clinton orbits, including Jill Biden and Hillary Clinton, New York Times White House correspondent Katie Rogers traces the evolution of the role of the twenty-first-century First Lady from a ceremonial figurehead to a powerful political operator, which culminates in the tenure of First Lady Jill Biden.

Dr. Jill Biden began her journey toward public life in 1975 as a twenty-three-year-old who caught the eye of a widowed Senator Joe Biden. Recovering from the heartbreak of her failed first marriage, she found a man who was still grieving. She knitted his life together after unspeakable tragedy and stood by his side through three presidential campaigns.

In some ways, her legacy as First Lady was set before she ever entered the White House: She is the first presidential spouse in history to work in a paid role outside the White House, a decision that blazes the path for future first spouses. But as a prime guardian of one of the most insular operations in modern politics, she is also a central part of her husband’s presidential legacy.

Rogers is deeply sourced in the West and East Wings of the White House, and the book will include original interviews with Jill Biden, Hillary Clinton, as well as major figures in the Trump and Obama administrations.

Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for the New York Times. She covers life in the Biden administration, Washington culture, and a mix of international and domestic policy.

ALL ALONE by Dr. Robert Coplan

In ALL ALONE, Coplan distills over 30 years worth of psychological research on solitude into an accessible, approachable, and endlessly applicable work of popular science.

ALL ALONE
How to Improve Your Relationship with Solitude and Find Your Personal Balance
by Dr. Robert Coplan
Simon & Schuster, early 2025
(via The Whalen Agency)

ALL ALONE works against the myth that being alone is necessarily equivalent to being lonely or being antisocial, instead it argues for an understanding of solitude as a natural, necessary, and beneficial part of a healthy human life. It is a guidebook on how to approach solitude in a healthy way and how to best strike a balance between solitude and socialization at home, in the workplace, in our romantic relationships, as parents, and at different life stages.

After years of people writing passionate essays about the assumed positive value of time alone, it is only in the last few years that researchers have actually been able to produce tangible evidence of such effects. Coplan’s research has contributed to such breakthroughs in the study of solitude including:

• The (somewhat paradoxical) notion that spending time alone helps our relationships with others

• A preliminary finding that spending time alone on your phone can interfere with the positive impacts of solitude

• The finding that children, adolescents, and adults who report that they are not getting enough solitude) tend to report heightened stress, negative moods, and symptoms of depression

• And much more …

In the end, Coplan hopes that by fostering a healthy relationship with solitude, we will come to better understand ourselves, our relationships with others, and our relationship with the world around us.

As a developmental psychologist with over 30 years of experience, Dr. Robert Coplan is a well-established expert in the study of solitude. He has participated in interviews with The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, Vox, Psychology Today, WebMd, and VICE among others and has co-authored five books and hundreds of academic articles on topics ranging from childhood shyness to solitude in adulthood to social withdrawal.

BOOKIE AND COOKIE de Blanca Gómez

An irresistible tale of a sweet-as-biscuits friendship, BOOKIE AND COOKIE is both a fun and thoughtful picture book about the emotions and everyday obstacles of childhood, and a beautiful, inventive object to be treasured and enjoyed together..

BOOKIE AND COOKIE
by Blanca Gómez
Penguin/Rocky Pond Press, Fall 2024
(via Writers House)

Meet Bookie and Cookie. They are best friends. Bookie loves to read. Cookie loves to bake. Bookie lives in the left page of the book, and Cookie lives in the right. When they spend time together, Bookie ALWAYS goes to Cookie’s right-side page, where they share a plate of yummy biscuits. As much fun as this is, one day, Bookie decides it’s time for Cookie to visit his left-side page.

When Cookie refuses, Bookie doesn’t understand why he’s being so stubborn. When Bookie presses, Cookie doesn’t understand why he’s trying to fix something that isn’t broken. (Plus, Cookie is a little nervous about leaving his safe, familiar right page of the book.) So the friends say hurtful things to one another and retreat to their respective pages, feeling MAD.

But soon, the mad turns to sad. They miss each other! Will Bookie cave and return to Cookie’s right-side page, where yet another tempting plate of freshly baked treats awaits? Will Cookie venture outside of his own kitchen, let his friend finally play host, and see the left page of the book for the first time? And what if the duo found a way to play somewhere other than the left or right page?

Blanca Gómez is a picture book creator based in Madrid. Her picture books include Bird House and Dress-Up Day. Her illustration credits include, among others, Very Good Hats by Emma Straub.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN de Griffin Hansbury

A poignant and provocative story of transgender awakening in a working-class American town.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN
by Griffin Hansbury
W. W. Norton, March 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In the summer of 1984, teenage Mel becomes entranced with the trans woman who appears in her blue-collar American town. Through the world-expanding time she spends with the woman, Sylvia, and the changes of adolescence, Mel soon discovers she is not the girl she thought she was—in fact, she might not be a girl at all. In the wake of this revelation, Mel navigates gender, sexuality, and an intense friendship with her childhood best friend in a hostile time and place for both girls and queers.

Moving back and forth to 2019, Mel has become Max, a middle-aged trans man. He returns to his hometown in the wake of his mother’s death, still reeling from his own politically-incorrect, gender-related scandal at his workplace, and bearing the burden of guilt from that pivotal teenage summer. As he reunites with his wayward older sister, spends time with his preteen great-niece and reckons with his past, Max works to come to terms with what it means to be a flawed and forgivable human being amidst constantly changing social norms.

“This gorgeous, propulsive novel is filled with beauty and danger, youth and wisdom and the life-saving lifelines of counterculture. With writing so tense and honest and real, I recognized this place and these people deeply, and felt them all in my heart long after the book was finished.” ―Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up

Griffin Hansbury is the acclaimed author of Vanishing New York (Dey Street, 2017), based on the celebrated blog written under the pen name Jeremiah Moss. As Hansbury he is the author of The Nostalgist, a novel, and Day For Night, a collection of poems. A two-time NYFA fellow, his writing has appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and online for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, Salon, and The New York Review of Books.

SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN de Dwayne Alexander Smith & Pamela Samuels Young

SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN, the long-awaited second book from Dwayne Alexander Smith, is a dual POV rom-com suspense.

SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN
by Dwayne Alexander Smith & Pamela Samuels Young
Atria, July 2024
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Jackson Jones and Mackenzie Cunningham are both private investigators operating out of Los Angeles. While Jackson specializes in high-end clientele whose swagger matches his own, Mackenzie is scrappy, defensive, and easily underestimated. Despite many years in the same industry, they first meet when they are both hired to find the same missing woman. Unaware that they’ve entered a competition, they keep bumping heads until it’s clear that something suspicious is afoot. Equally attracted to and frustrated by one another, they soon realize that the client who hired them might actually be setting them up! Just as they shift from rivals to partners, Jackson and Mackenzie find themselves fighting for their lives, a string of bodies piling up around them. With no one to trust but each other, they race to solve the case before they can be forced to pay the price for their involvement.

Dwayne Alexander Smith is the author of Forty Acres, which was previously in development as a Feature Film at Netflix, with Luke Cage’s Cheo Hodari Coker attached to write, and Jay-Z attached to produce. Dwayne is also under contract with Audible to write an eight-episode original radio play for Kevin Hart and Charlamagne Tha God’s imprint. When Dwayne received an NAACP Image Award in 2014 for his debut novel, he happened to meet a fellow author named Pamela Samuels Young, whose novel Anybody’s Daughter won an award that same year.

Pamela Samuels Young has been widely published in both commercial suspense and erotica, and many of her characters have legal backgrounds that mirror Pamela’s own. Netflix is also developing Pamela’s work, having optioned the first two books in her Vernette Henderson series, which follows a Black female attorney from Compton, working in a corporate firm. Felicia D. Henderson is attached as Executive Producer (Empire, Everybody Hates Chris, Sister Sister).