HER HIDDEN GENIUS de Marie Benedict

Discover the story of a woman who fought through a male-dominated field to unlock the secrets of DNA. The next big book by the New York Times bestselling author of The Mystery of Mrs. Christie and The Only Woman in the Room.

HER HIDDEN GENIUS
by Marie Benedict
Sourcebooks, January 2022

Rosalind Franklin knows if she just takes one more x-ray picture—one more after thousands—she can unlock the building blocks of life. Never again will she have to listen to her male colleagues complain about her, especially Maurice Wilkins who’d rather conspire about genetics with James Watson and Francis Crick than work alongside her. Then it finally happens—the double helix structure of DNA reveals itself to her with perfect clarity. Photograph 51. But Rosalind never could have predicted how far her colleagues would go to erase her names from the history books. Marie Benedict’s next powerful novel shines a light on a woman who died to discover our very DNA, a woman whose contributions to science were suppressed by the men around her but whose relentless drive advanced our understanding of humankind.

Marie Benedict is a lawyer with more than ten years’ experience as a litigator at two of the country’s premier law firms and for Fortune 500 companies. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Boston College with a focus in history and art history and a cum laude graduate of the Boston University School of Law. Marie, the author of The Other Einstein, Carnegie’s Maid, The Only Woman in the Room, and Lady Clementine, views herself as an archaeologist of sorts, telling the untold stories of women. She lives in Pittsburgh with her family.

THE NET BENEATH US de Carol Dunbar

In the vein of Delia Owens, Brit Bennett, and Leif Enger, THE NET BENEATH US is a novel about being haunted by the choices we make—and don’t make—in our lives.

THE NET BENEATH US
by Carol Dunbar
Forge, Fall 2022

Silas is dead. Or he’s almost dead, felled by the trees he was felling and now brought home, comatose, to die in his unfinished, off-the-grid house at the edge of the forest he loved. His wife, Elsa, doesn’t know much about living in the country, about running the generator or chopping enough wood to survive the winter. Raising their children here, in this dwelling carved into the side of a hill, had been Silas’s dream, not hers. She doesn’t know how she’ll ease his final days with no heat and no running water. But she knows that he would want to stay here, in his bed, on his land, as his breath shudders to a whisper.
Silas’s aunt and uncle think she’s crazy. Elsa’s father thinks she ought to leave, go find an apartment in the city. Her young children think she’ll be able to bring their daddy back. But Elsa thinks staying is the right choice. She just has to remain focused, learn how to keep the house running, and ignore the way the trees outside seem to call to one another, how the walls seem to come alive at night, how nearly dead Silas seems to be haunting her, already, from his windowless room. Staying is the right choice. Isn’t it?
Told over the course of a year, THE NET BENEATH US is a lyrical exploration of loss, marriage, motherhood, and self-reliance, a tale of how the natural world—without and within us—offers a kind of healing available to us all, if we can learn where to look.

Carol Dunbar is a ghostwriter of over 50 nonfiction titles, and for the last 15 years she has lived in the house that is the setting for THE NET BENEATH US. Her essays about living off the grid air on Wisconsin Public Radio and her work has been published or is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Midwest Review, Literary Mama, Great Lakes Review, and others. In 2018 she won the Hal Prize for fiction and an earlier draft of this novel was a 2013 finalist for the Dana Award.

FILTERWORLD de Kyle Chayka

Author of The Longing For Less and a contributor to The New Yorker and NYT Magazine, Kyle Chayka’s FILTERWORLD focuses on the history and investigation of living in a world ruled by algorithms, which profoundly determine and shape culture in both digital and physical spaces, leading to flat and frictionless experiences that are remaking human identity.

FILTERWORLD:
How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Doubleday, Fall 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

You’ve seen the smooth, uncanny artifacts: a blank, white café that looks like it could be located anywhere in the world; TikTok dance videos repeating in a dull echo; restaurant design and food plating which begs to be posted on Instagram; endlessly bingeable streaming television; influencers’ faces made up and surgically altered towards a certain photogenic ideal. While appearing in different mediums, these pieces of culture are characterized by a slick sameness. Rather than provoking us, they’re pleasing, ambient, frictionless.
In this new book, Kyle Chayka argues that these seemingly disparate cultural phenomena all have been shaped by a similar force: the algorithms governing and filtering the content that appears on digital platforms. We increasingly live in a world where the culture we encounter is not simply curated by these algorithms, but in which algorithms profoundly determine and shape culture itself in both digital and physical spaces. Chayka names this new reality, of a world both inescapably mediated and changed by algorithmic filtration, “Filterworld”.
In FILTERWORLD, Chayka traces a brief history of how we arrived in this place—from the rise of the algorithm through the corresponding erosion of human curation and taste—before launching a penetrating exploration of the flat hallmarks of Filterworld byproducts and the way that algorithmically determined taste is fundamentally reshaping human identity. Ultimately a pointed critique of the frictionless culture of Filterworld, the book turns towards what we might do to escape and dismantle this numbing cycle.
Building on the popular criticism Kyle Chayka has published for both The New Yorker online and elsewhere, FILTERWORLD is the product of a career spent as one of our keenest observers of the intersection of technology and modern culture. While much has been written about the way that algorithms impact everything from news to policy, there has been no major book published on the impact of algorithms on culture.
FILTERWORLD will appeal strongly to readers of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: a book that not only seeks to give language to the slippery ways that technology is reshaping our lived experience, but also gives readers tools to imagine a world in which things could be otherwise.

Kyle Chayka is a freelance writer and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, n+1, Vox, the Paris Review, and other publications. He has contributed chapters to Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology and A Companion to Digital Art. Chayka is cofounder of Study Hall, a newsletter and digital community for journalists. He began his career as a visual art critic for Hyperallergic in Brooklyn, and now lives in Washington, D.C.

MUTINOUS WOMEN de Joan DeJean

From distinguished scholar Joan DeJean, the secret history of the rebellious Frenchwomen who were exiled to colonial Louisiana and found power in the Mississippi Valley.

MUTINOUS WOMEN:
How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast
by Joan DeJean
Basic Books, April 2022

In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women. Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship’s hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi.
Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, MUTINOUS WOMEN introduces us to the Gulf South’s Founding Mothers.

« What transpired after they landed ashore, however, is a clear demonstration of the beauty and power of the feminine spirit, and DeJean chronicles their experiences in well-written, often gripping prose….Readers will come away fascinated and inspired by this relatively unknown tale of strength and the human spirit. » —Kirkus (starred review)

“Gripping from its opening scene of a corpse discovered on a Paris side street, Joan DeJean’s MUTINOUS WOMEN tells the stories of these French women, deported as unwanted criminals to what would become, less than a century later, part of the United States… Through astounding research in French and Louisiana archives… Ms. DeJean uses her knowledge as a scholar of early modern France to great effect. … A fascinating history and a reminder that all kinds of people helped to build what became the United States.” —Wall Street Journal

“Working with a chaotic and often confusing historical record, DeJean traces the constellation of forces—including avarice, corruption and misogyny—that permitted the rapid roundup of another 96 or so female prisoners to be transported in the dank hold of La Mutine. The horrific conditions of the women’s journey and the will to survive that must have sustained them when they were set down, largely without resources, in a barren, swampy, inhospitable land, are evoked in vivid detail.” —New York Times Book Review

Joan DeJean is Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at Yale and Princeton. She is the author of eleven books on French literature, history, and material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including most recently How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (2014); The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern Home Began (2009); and The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (2005). She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Paris, France.

THE FIRST CAT IN SPACE ATE PIZZA de Mac Barnet, illustré par Shawn Harris

A brand-new middle-grade graphic novel series from New York Times bestselling author Mac Barnett and illustrator Shawn Harris, based on the live cartoons for the shelter-in-place Instagram show, Mac’s Book Club Show. It follows an unlikely trio—a bionic cat, toenail-clipping robot, and moon queen—as they race to save the moon from the rats who want to eat it… and maybe find some pizza along the way.

THE FIRST CAT IN SPACE ATE PIZZA
by Mac Barnett
illustrated by Shawn Harris
Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins, Summer 2022

At the beginning of the pandemic, lifelong best friends Mac and Shawn experimented with a new animation format: they made a « live » cartoon, done entirely over Zoom. It was a hit and they serialized it weekly, following the (mis)adventures of a cat who is sent to space to stop rats from eating the moon. He teams up with a stowaway robot and the moon queen and the result is something truly hilarious and special. People (from all 7 continents!) connected deeply with it and Mac & Shawn made their own merchandise, with proceeds going to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation. Publication of the first book is set for summer 2022, with volume 2 to follow in Summer 2023.

Mac Barnett is the New York Times bestselling author of many picture books, including Extra Yarn and Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, both illustrated by Jon Klassen and both Caldecott Honor Award winners. He is also the co-author of the bestselling Terrible Two series with Jory John. Mac lives in Berkeley, California.

Shawn Harris is an artist and musician who lives and works in Half Moon Bay, California. His first picture book, Her Right Foot, by Dave Eggers, was the recipient of seven starred reviews and was an Orbis Pictus Award Honor Book. He is also the illustrator of Dave Eggers’s What Can a Citizen Do? and Colin Meloy’s Everyone’s Awake.