YOU’RE SO DEAD d’Ash Parsons

A hilarious Agatha Christie-inspired YA thriller-comedy about three best friends who sneak into an influencers-only festival event (gone wrong), only to discover a killer is in their midst–and they have to uncover the truth and solve the mystery before it’s too late. Perfect for fans of One of Us Is Lying and Truly Devious.

YOU’RE SO DEAD
by Ash Parsons
Philomel, Summer 2021

Plum Winter has always come in second to her sister, the unbelievably cool, famous influencer Peach Winter. And when Peach is invited to an all-expenses paid trip to a luxurious art and music festival for influencers on a private island in the Caribbean, Plum decides to intercept the invite. This time, she’s going to have some fun. She convinces her two best friends Antonia and Marlowe to come with her—’cause hey, they were planning on a spring break trip anyway, right? But when Plum and her friends get to the island, it’s not anything like it seemed in the invite. The island is run-down, creepy, and there doesn’t even seem to be a festival—it’s just seven other quasi-celebrities and influencers. And then people start to die… Plum and her friends soon realize that someone has lured each of them to the « festival » to kill them. Someone has a vendetta against every person on the island–and no one is supposed to leave the island alive. So, together, Plum, Antonia, and Marlowe will do whatever it takes to unravel the mystery of the killer, and fight to save themselves and as many influencers as they can, before it’s too late.

Ash Parsons is a graduate of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College as well as other, more traditional schools. She is a PEN America Literary Award Winner for the Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship. Ash previously taught English to middle and high school students. Ash lives in Alabama with her family. She is also the author of Girls Save the World in This One, Still Waters, and Holding On to You, previously published as The Falling Between Us.

THE CRANE WIFE And Other Love Stories From Life, de C.J. Hauser

Over a million readers flocked to read CJ Hauser’s essay The Crane Wife when it ran in the Paris Review last year. In her first book-length work of non-fiction, Hauser uses that now-beloved title essay as a thematic anchor around which to explore, through an excavation of both her own personal and larger familial hope chest of ‘love stories,’ what it looks like when a person realizes the traditional narrative she thought was to be the story of her life turns out to be a story which must be rewritten.

THE CRANE WIFE And Other Love Stories From Life
by C.J. Hauser
Doubleday, July 2022
(via DeFiore and Co.)

Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realized she’d almost signed up to live someone else’s life.
In this intimate, frank, and funny memoir-in-essays, Hauser releases herself from traditional narratives of happiness and goes looking for ways of living that leave room for the unexpected, making plenty of mistakes along the way. She kisses internet strangers and officiates a wedding. She re-reads Rebecca in the house her boyfriend once shared with his ex-wife and re-winds Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story to learn how not to lose yourself in a relationship. She thinks about Florence Nightingale at a robot convention and grief at John Belushi’s rock and roll gravesite, and the difference between those stories we’re asked to hold versus those we choose to carry. She writes about friends and lovers, blood family and chosen family, and asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer us all.
Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most big-hearted friend, THE CRANE WIFE is a book for everyone whose life doesn’t look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.

Feature film rights to “The Crane Wife” essay have been sold to an award-winning producer, and streamer, with an Oscarwinning actress attached to star and produce.

C.J. Hauser teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University. She is the author of the novels The From-Aways and Family of Origin, and her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Esquire, and The Kenyon Review. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in Creative Writing from The Florida State University. She lives in Hamilton, New York.

HOW TO BE FEARLESS (In 7 Simple Steps) de Jessica Hagy

Returning to what made her book How to Be Interesting so successful, artist Jessica Hagy has written HOW TO BE FEARLESS, an illustrated guide to going from stuck to unstoppable by banishing worry and becoming your best self.

HOW TO BE FEARLESS (In 7 Simple Steps)
by Jessica Hagy
Sasquatch Books, August 2021
(chez DeFiore and Co. – voir catalogue)

Full of energy and optimism, HOW TO BE FEARLESS takes readers by the hand and confidently sets them on the path to fulfilling their dreams. Anyone feeling unsure or hesitant — and that’s all of us at one time or another — will find the encouraging push they need to exceed their potential. For fans of Lee Crutchley’s How to Be Happy (Or at Least Less Sad) (TarcherPerigee), Elena Bower’s Practice You (Sounds True), and Mari Andrews’ Am I There Yet? (Clarkson Potter), HOW TO BE FEARLESS makes a great gift for oneself or anyone who needs a pick-me-up.

Jessica Hagy is an artist and writer best known for her Webby Award-winning blog, Indexed. Her book How to Be Interesting: (In 10 Simple Steps) (Workman, 2013) has sold more than 159,000 copies and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. It has been carried by various specialty retailers, from Urban Outfitters to FedEx. She has also illustrated others’ works, including Seth Godin’s Linchpin and Jason Oberholtzer’s The Hustle Economy.

CHEEKY: A Head-to-Toe Memoir, d’Ariella Elovic

The funny, exuberant, inspiring antidote to body shame—a full-color graphic memoir celebrating the imperfections of the author’s female body in all its glory.

CHEEKY:
A Head-to-Toe Memoir
by Ariella Elovic
Bloomsbury, November 2020
(chez DeFiore and Co. – voir catalogue)

Too tall. Too short. Too fat. Too thin. The message is everywhere—we need to pluck, wax, shrink, and hide ourselves, to not take up space, emotionally or literally; women are never “just right.” Well, Ariella Elovic, feminist and illustrator extraordinaire, has had enough. In her full-color graphic memoir CHEEKY, she takes an inspiring and exuberant head-to-toe look at her own body self-consciousness, and body part by body part, finds her way back to herself. How does Ariella learn not to see herself as a never-finished DIY project, but to accept and even love the physical attributes society taught her to hide? How does a mirror go from a “black hole of critique” to a “who’s that girl” moment? Essential to her journey is her posse of girlfriends, her “yentas.” Together, they discover that sharing “imperfections” and some of the gross and “unsightly” things our bodies produce can be a source of endless laughs and deep bonding. It helps to have a team with some outside perspectives to keep our inner bullies in check. Charming and hilarious, full of empathy and candor, and gorgeously illustrated, CHEEKY aims to inspire women everywhere to embrace their bodies, flaws and all, and also their respective bodies’ needs, desires, and inherent power.

“An entertaining, jubilantly body-positive memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews

Ariella Elovic holds a BFA in Communication Design from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has been featured by The New Yorker, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Buzzfeed, KAAST, and Womanly Magazine. Ariella has collaborated with various female-interest brands, including Lunette Cup, What’s In Your Box?, Lunapads, and Cora for Women. She lives in New York.

OUR MOON de Rebecca Boyle

Science journalist Rebecca Boyle explores the cultural and scientific history of the Moon and discovers that far from being a lifeless ornament of the sky, the Moon holds the answers to some of our most fundamental questions—from the origins of the Earth and the genesis of life to the nature of time itself.

OUR MOON:
Uncovering the Secrets It Holds to Our Past and Our Future
by Rebecca Boyle
Random House, January 2024
(via DeFiore and Co.)

The Moon is our constant companion. It has been watching over us since before there was an “us.” From our earliest beginnings, we have worshipped the moon, used it to mark our days, depended on its predictability to grow our crops and follow migrating herds, and looked to it for artistic and spiritual inspiration. The Moon has played many roles in our lives, and now it is ready to tell us all it knows.
In OUR MOON, award-winning science journalist Rebecca Boyle traces our relationship with the Moon over the centuries and explores the latest scientific findings into what the Moon can now tell us about Earth’s origins and its future. As we prepare to return to the Moon, it is more important than ever to take a closer look at this still mysterious neighbor of ours.
No other book has delved into the cultural and scientific history of the Moon. A subject with truly global appeal, OUR MOON is for readers who enjoy single-subject works such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and David George Haskell’s The Songs of Trees.

Rebecca Boyle is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, a frequent contributor at FiveThirtyEight, and a freelance journalist whose work has been published in the New York Times, Wired, Aeon, Quanta, Popular Science, The New Yorker, and Scientific American. Boyle was a 2011 Ocean Science Journalism fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and a 2013 journalism fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. This is her first book.