ON LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT d’Emanuele Lugli

Despite its cultural ubiquity, there has never been a non-fiction book about love at first sight. Stanford professor and cultural historian Emanuele Lugli will change that, bringing a deeply-researched, gorgeously written, Big Idea approach to this most fascinating of subjects.

ON LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
by Emanuele Lugli
Viking, 2028
(via The Gernert Company)

Credit: Harrison Truong

Lugli argues that love at first sight is perhaps the most transformative form of love and an idea worthy of serious study. Across eight chapters, he explores the phenomenon: first as a mysterious pull between strangers; then as a complex neurobiological process by which the eyes end up doing half a dozen jobs at once; and, finally, as an approach to seeing the world anew. He’ll spend time with scientists using AI to decode how macaque monkeys perceive faces, and in labs studying cells in the visual cortex that quicken the heartbeat before the brain even registers what it is happening. He discovers ancient Chinese tales of students struck dumb by the sight of a beauty and English royals smitten by miniature portraits.

On this narrative journey Lugli asks: Can love at first sight tell us something about attraction? Does it really need the adult supervision of reason? Is there a meaningful relationship between erotic urgency and the prospect of building a life with another person, one that goes beyond the reductive evolutionary story that we’re all just primitives programmed to reproduce?

Through revisiting science and culture, present and past, the book arrives at its life-affirming proposal that instantaneous love isn’t a delusion, but a way of living more receptively: an invitation to move through the world as if charged with wonder. It arrives at the sort of gentle, optimistic prescription readers need today: a way to understand not just why sudden attraction happens, but what to do with it, and perhaps even why you might seek out such a leap of faith. You choose first—then spend a lifetime figuring out who you have chosen. It’s not the instinctual lightning strike that makes love at first sight a form of freedom, it’s the openness inspired by recasting love as a perpetual attempt at knowing.

Emanuele Lugli is an Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Public Humanities at Stanford. He writes regularly for magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian, Slate, Il Sole 24 Ore, Domani, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.

REG DICH AB! de Manfred Schedlowski & Gaby Miketta



I could explode! Why we no longer need to be at the mercy of our anger – 10 steps for leaving our continual turmoil behind.

REG DICH AB!
(Calm Down!)
by Manfred Schedlowski & Gaby Miketta
Penguin Verlag/PRH Germany, June 2026

Do you feel at times overwhelmed by annoyance, frustration, or anger? Do you get repeatedly upset – about politics, the children, the morning commute and traffic jams? Getting upset might provide short-term relief, but in the long run this stress will wreck you physically and mentally. The good news is that you can learn to control such emotions.

With their tried and tested anti-agitation training program, Manfred Schedlowski, a professor of medical psychology and behavioural immunobiology, and the science journalist Gaby Miketta show how this can be done. In 10 simple steps (1 hour per week for each step), this program helps you recognise and minimise your personal triggers and leave unnecessary feelings of anger and irritation behind you. Practical exercises, illustrative case studies, and effective strategies for inner peace will support you on your path to calmness.

• Clear explanations and strategies easy to implement in both professional and private life – training in impulse control in anger situations
• An array of specific exercises and strategies

Manfred Schedlowski has been a professor of medical psychology and behavioural immunobiology at Essen University Hospital since 1997. His research focuses primarily on the interactions between mental and physical processes and how the reciprocal effects between body and mind can be made use of therapeutically to promote mental and physical health. As a psychological psychotherapist, he has spent many years supporting people with stress-related mental and physical illnesses. He is also a sought-after speaker at national and international conferences.

Gaby Miketta studied communication science and biology in Munich and Münster. She then worked for the science departments of various radio stations, produced TV reports for Sat 1, and in 1992 joined the Focus founding team under Helmut Markwort in the news magazine’s research and technology department. From 2004 to 2009, she was the developer and editor-in-chief of the education magazine Focus-Schule. In October 2009, she took over as editor-in-chief of Das Haus, Europe’s largest construction and housing magazine. In addition, she gives seminars on creativity at the Burda School of Journalism. In 2023, she founded her bureau for science communication. She has written several books with Martin Korte.

DEAD WEIGHT de Hildur Knútsdóttir

An Icelandic night may hide secrets and affairs – or even bodies – in this gruesomely cathartic horror thriller from the author of The Night Guest.

DEAD WEIGHT
by Hildur Knútsdóttir
Tor Nightfire, May 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Unnur was living a normal, if lonely, life until a black cat showed up at her door.

When she tracks down the cat’s wayward owner, she finds a young woman just as lost and in need of help. Like a gust of cold air in a Reykjavík night, Ásta and her pet slip into Unnur’s life.

It’s unexpected, but welcome. Unnur likes the company, and she begins to rely on Ásta in turn. But like a black cat, trouble has been tailing her new friend, and Unnur is the only one there for Ásta when things take a violent turn.

The two women quickly learn: nothing tests a friendship like blood on your hands.

Hildur Knútsdóttir was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1984. She has lived in Spain, Germany, and Taiwan and studied literature and creative writing at The University of Iceland. She writes fiction both for adults and teenagers, as well as short fiction, plays, and screenplays. Hildur is known for her evocative fantastical fiction and spine-chilling horror. The Night Guest is her first book translated into English. She lives in Reykjavík with her husband, their two daughters, and a puppy called Uggi.

THE FUTURE PERFECT de Cay Kim

A radiant portrait of a young woman caught between cultures, and what is lost and found in the struggle to succeed.

THE FUTURE PERFECT: A Novel
by Cay Kim
Riverhead, June 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Before you are anything, you are a daughter.

At first you are at home inside your pregnant mother: a beloved daughter, a vision of the future. But who will you become?

As your family moves back and forth between Korea and the United States, you find yourself caught between two countries. Prioritizing your future over her own happiness, your mother marshals you through a childhood of homework and violin practice and academic achievement to shape you into the person she most wants you to be. Is hers the ultimate form of love? And, despite her sacrifices, is there a world somewhere between your motherland and homeland that can feel like your own?

Told in incandescent prose, Cay Kim’s exquisite debut novel is a portrait of a brilliant young woman growing up between cultures, and a love letter to girlhood, family, and the great dreams we hold for ourselves, no matter where we’re from.

“A book I have been waiting for all my life. Cay Kim has written a daring, sonic, incandescent debut, full of verve and heartache. A story about the pain and love between daughters and mothers, the deep gulf between desire and duty, and the particular experience of straddling both Korean and American homelands, this is a magnificent debut.” —Crystal Hana Kim, author of The Stone Home and If You Leave Me

“Timeless, taut, and daringly tempestuous . . . A masterful and unforgettable debut.” —Paul Beatty, author of the Booker Prize–winning The Sellout

« Elegant and deeply felt, this is a novel full of poise, precision and luminous prose. An assured debut. » —Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

“Intense, lyrical, heartfelt . . . Written with gorgeous attention to detail and a sense of wonder. A beauty.” —Yoon Choi, winner of the Whiting Award and author of Skinship

“A lyrically profound and triumphant coming-of-age novel.” —Nancy Jooyoun Kim, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Story of Mina Lee, a Reese’s Book Club Pick

“A masterpiece of concision and nuance, a searing picture of what it is to grow up between cultures. » —Joshua Furst, author of Revolutionaries

Cay Kim was born in Seoul in 1998. She received her BA from Stanford University, where she won the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, and her MFA from Columbia University. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta and One Story. This is her first novel.

I’M NOT HERE TO HUNT RABBITS de Josh Kendall

This debut is a raw, tantalizing love story wrapped in a thriller that contains as much psychological intrigue as there is action – from one of the most acclaimed editors of the genre.

I’M NOT HERE TO HUNT RABBITS: A Novel
by Josh Kendall
Putnam, Spring 2027
(via The Gernert Company)

Smith thought he had left it all behind: the intense, dangerous work in Afghanistan; the grueling training; the vast reach of his former employer – the mysterious organization Cornerstone; and most of all Helen – the woman he loved and who was now gone forever. Better to start new in a place where no one knows him – Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Security for a local kingpin named Sabadi and his family. A job he could do in his sleep.

But something is off about the whole assignment. The previous security detail seems to know more than they are letting on about the nature of the job and what Sabadi is planning in Ethiopia. Smith is left in the dark, and for the first time in his life, he is not sure where the threats are coming from. The only things he is certain of are that Cornerstone knows he is here and he will have to confront his past with Helen to make it out of Addis Ababa alive.

A different kind of thriller, one in which the tension comes as much from what’s unsaid as what is left in, from an acclaimed editor of the genre, I’m Not Here to Hunt Rabbits is an existential suspense novel of a life on a knife’s edge.

Josh Kendall was VP and Executive Editor at Little, Brown, and Editorial Director of Mulholland Books where he worked with Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, Robert Galbraith, JJ Abrams, and Tana French among others. He’s worked in various editorial positions at Viking, Picador, and Scribner, and has also taught creative writing at Brooklyn College, University of Iowa, and The New School.