Archives par étiquette : David Black Literary Agency

THE WILL de Maggie Smith

THE WILL is part psychological thriller, and part meditation on motherhood, the rabbit holes of magical thinking, and the terrifying power of desire. This deeply unnerving, yet psychologically relatable story by New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith will appeal to fans of Helen Phillips’ The Need, Ashley Audrain’s The Push, and Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch.

THE WILL
by Maggie Smith
Knopf, 2027
(via the David Black Agency)

When Caroline’s sister and brother-in-law are killed in a car accident, the couple’s will names Caroline as the guardian of their two young children. After years of miscarriages and failed fertility treatments, Caroline had said she’d do anything to be a mother. Anything. Grieving her only sibling and struggling to parent two heartbroken children, Caroline begins to unravel, convinced she willed the accident in some Faustian bargain. But that’s impossible—isn’t it?

Maggie Smith is the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of nine books of poetry and prose, including You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, Goldenrod, Keep Moving, and My Thoughts Have Wings. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received a Pushcart Prize, and numerous grants and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, and more. She is the host of The Slowdown podcast, and she writes about craft in her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life. You can find her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

THE PROSPEROUS HEART de Julia Cameron

Create a sense of security and abundance in your life today by applying Julia Cameron’s bestselling Artist’s Way techniques to the topic of prosperity.

THE PROSPEROUS HEART:
Creating a Life of Enough (New Edition)
by Julia Cameron
St. Martin’s Essentials, March 2026 (first published 2011)
(via David Black Agency)

In this dynamic creative-renewal program, New York Times bestselling author Julia Cameron presents a twelve-week program for using your creative heart and soul to lead you to prosperity in all the areas of your life. With inspiring new daily tools and strategies that follow in the footsteps of Cameron’s groundbreaking Artist’s Way, this book guides readers in developing a life that is as full and as satisfying as they ever thought possible.

Drawing on her decades of experience working with artists as an expert on the creative process, Cameron shines a clear light on the path to forging a direct relationship between the passion that ignites our creative work and the more practical aspects of living our lives (for example, how one can keep a roof over their head without losing track of their soul!) In this wise volume, Cameron gives readers the courage and permission to live their lives as they create their art: purposely and fully.

Hailed by The New York Times as “The Queen of Change,” Julia Cameron is credited with starting a movement in 1992 that has brought creativity into the mainstream conversation― in the arts, in business, and in everyday life. She is the bestselling author of more than fifty books, fiction and nonfiction; a poet, songwriter, filmmaker and playwright. Commonly referred to as “The Godmother” or “High Priestess” of creativity, her tools are based in practice, not theory, and she considers herself “the floor sample of her own toolkit.” Her #1 bestseller, The Artist’s Way, has been translated into more than forty languages and sold over five million copies to date.

BLASTING THROUGH BLOCKS de Julia Cameron

A guide to getting (and staying) unblocked, by best-selling author of The Artist’s Way Julia Cameron.

BLASTING THROUGH BLOCKS:
Get Unstuck & Unleash Your Creative Potential
by Julia Cameron
St. Martin’s Essentials, November 2026
(via David Black Agency)

Every artist—or aspiring creator—knows the sting of being stuck. BLASTING THROUGH BLOCKS is a “good news” book: yes, you will find yourself in its pages. You’ll recognize the resistance, the internal critic, the fear of failure, the perfectionism, the inertia. But the promise here is simple: you can always unblock. You don’t need grand methods or deep dives into theory—just the willingness to work with small, powerful tools.

Across 52 essays, you’ll encounter one creative block and one practical practice each week. Some tools will feel familiar—rooted in The Artist’s Way heritage—but many will surprise you with their straightforwardness, their clarity, their freshness. Over time, these practices build into a living, flexible toolkit you can revisit whenever you feel stuck again.

This is a book for personal pilgrimage and communal practice alike. Use it as a companion through a year of your creative life. Bring it to your writing group or your classroom. Gift it to any artist in your life. As these pages light up one shadow at a time, you’ll begin to see the spiritual and psychological pathways through your creative difficulties—and rediscover why your work matters.

BATTLEGROUND STATES de Shawn Otto

A scientist and her young son embark on a harrowing journey through the Midwest in the not-too-distant post-civil war future in which the country has divided into different geographical factions, disinformation reigns, and the most powerful weapon ever created is about to be unleashed. Pitched as The Road meets Station Eleven.

BATTLEGROUND STATES
by Shawn Otto
Milkweed, 2027
(via David Black Agency)

For those millions who binged “The Last of Us” and those millions more who still look to 1984, It Can’t Happen Here and The Handmaid’s Tale as dystopian classics.

What if you alone could save the world, and the enemy trying to stop you was your father?

Ten years have passed since the outbreak of the second American Civil War. The United States has been torn into four new nations and an ungoverned Midwest region known as Heartland, where the war rages on.

Christine Haber, once the UW-Madison’s youngest endowed chair in genetics at age twenty-three, lost everything in the war. Now she runs the Preserve, the last functioning university in Heartland, while her father rises in power as a ruthless demagogue intent on controlling the war-torn region.

Situated in tents on a former nature preserve in Wisconsin, the Preserve has survived because it offers objective, neutral education to anyone regardless of their politics. There Christine has also been raising her eight-year-old son Robby alone, after his father was killed in the war.

One night Christine is woken by a fellow scientist seeking her help. The woman carries a stolen vial containing a new type of biological weapon—a deadly virus designed using advanced epigenetic editing to infect and kill “genetic liberals,” the people Christine’s father blames for the war. The scientist wants Christine’s help to smuggle the stolen vial out of Heartland to Canada so researchers can develop a vaccine before it’s too late.

But then the Preserve is attacked. Christine and Robby escape with the vial and begin a harrowing journey through a darkly beautiful world that is both recognizable and strange, where destruction and disinformation reign and questions about what is true or not become more and more unanswerable.

Ultimately, Christine’s odyssey leads her to confront her radicalized father and, in a stunning twist, to make a devastating choice that will change them all forever. Otto’s unforgettable novel imagines a dysfunctional family writ large and, by probing the biological roots of how we see ourselves and each other, asks how different we really are.

Shawn Otto speaks to audiences worldwide about writing, the scientific foundation of democracy, and the causes of anti-truth, antidemocratic movements. He is a past board chair of the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, where he lives in a solar- and wind-powered home he designed and built. His award-winning debut novel, Sins Of Our Fathers (Milkweed), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He wrote and co-produced the Academy-Award nominated movie House of Sand and Fog, starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. Otto is also author of two award-winning nonfiction science books, Fool Me Twice (Rodale) and The War On Science (Milkweed), which predicted the rise of anti-truth authoritarianism. The Guardian called The War On Science “a game changer, and probably the most important book you’ll read this year.”

BABY QUEEN de Ty Landers

Already optioned by HBO for development, Ty Landers’ debut novel is a vivid, sharp-as-a-blade tale of family crime set in his home state of Alabama. For fans of S.A. Cosby, Ace Atkins, and Eli Cranor.

BABY QUEEN
by Ty Landers
HarperPerennial, Fall 2026
(via David Black Agency)

When a queen bee can no longer do her job, the workers will kill her, producing a baby queen to take her place.

A perfectly preserved but very dead body is found in a barrel of honey, and the town of Noccalula, Alabama, will never be the same.

Natalie Link has inherited the family honey business from her beloved grandmother Lana, who raised Nat after her mother ran off to Los Angeles. But it turns out Nat had no idea what Lana’s been hiding in the bee goop. Is Nat up to running an enterprise of questionable repute, evading the investigator whose been on her family’s case since she was a kid, and surviving her suddenly lethal life?

Bob Sauk is a PI on a twenty-year losing streak who torpedoed his own promising cop career once upon a time when a man vanished under very suspicious circumstances and Sauk knew in his core that Lana Link was to blame. Will he finally get the chance to prove he was right all along?

Ed Sorter is a small-town sheriff who has to get this all figured out without pissing off absolutely everyone in town, or at least not too bad.

Ty Landers writes southern crime fiction. His short stories have appeared in Popshot Quarterly, In Shades Magazine and Fjords Review. He is currently working on his first novel, set in his home state of Alabama. Ty spent over twenty years in Nashville, Tennessee before moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his wife Emily and their sons Jack, Rowan, and Barrett.