Dare Me meets Black Swan and Luckiest Girl Alive in a captivating, voice-driven debut novel about a trio of ballerinas who meet as students at the Paris Opera Ballet School.
THE BALLERINAS
by Rachel Kapelke-Dale
St. Martin’s Press, December 2021
Fourteen years ago, Delphine abandoned her prestigious soloist spot at the Paris Opera Ballet for a new life in St. Petersburg—taking with her a secret that could upend the lives of her best friends, fellow dancers Lindsay and Margaux. Now thirty-six years old, Delphine has returned to her former home and to the legendary Palais Garnier Opera House, to choreograph the ballet that will kickstart the next phase of her career—and, she hopes, finally make things right with her former friends. But Delphine quickly discovers that things have changed while she’s been away…and some secrets can’t stay buried forever. Moving between the trio’s adolescent years and the present day, THE BALLERINAS explores the complexities of female friendship, the dark drive towards physical perfection in the name of artistic expression, the double-edged sword of ambition and passion, and the sublimated rage that so many women hold inside—all culminating in a twist you won’t see coming, with magnetic characters you won’t soon forget.
Rachel Kapelke-Dale is the co-author of Graduates in Wonderland (Penguin, 2014), a memoir about the significance and nuances of female friendships. The author of Vanity Fair Hollywood’s column “Advice from the Stars,” Kapelke-Dale spent years in intensive ballet training before receiving a BA from Brown University, an MA from the Université de Paris VII, and a PhD from University College London. She currently lives in Paris.
Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned maximum security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, HOW THE WORD IS PASSED illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.
Paramount Players vient de remporter aux enchères les droits d’adaptation audiovisuelle de RAZORBLADE TEARS de S. A. Cosby. Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Pirates des Caraïbes, Armageddon…) et Chad Oman produiront le film, dont le réalisateur et la date de sortie n’ont pas encore été annoncés. Le scénario sera adapté du roman par Virgil Williams, co-scénariste du film Mudbound sorti en 2017.
Netflix vient d’acquérir les droits audiovisuels des trois romans de Jenna Evans Welch publiés chez Simon Pulse aux États-Unis : LOVE & GELATO, LOVE & LUCK et LOVE & OLIVES, tous les trois des New York Times Bestsellers. C’est le scénariste et producteur Brandon Camp (Coup de foudre à Seattle, 2009 ; Benji, 2018) qui écrira, réalisera et produira les trois adaptations. Aucune date n’a été annoncée pour l’instant.
After a near-death experience in Snowdonia, journalist Cecily Wong swore she’d never go to the mountains again. But when she’s offered the career opportunity of a lifetime – to interview world famous mountaineer Charles McVeigh as he completes his record-breaking mission in Nepal – she has no choice but to take it. There’s just one caveat: she has to summit the mountain first. It’s a mammoth task that Cecily fears she cannot handle, especially when disaster strikes before they’ve even left for base camp in the form of an earthquake that seriously injures one of the team, and an anonymous note left pinned to her tent, warning her there’s a murderer on the mountain.