Archives par étiquette : DeFiore and Company

ONE WRONG WORD de Hank Phillippi Ryan

A heart-racing new psychological thriller from USA Today bestselling and multiple award-winning author, Hank Phillippi Ryan.

ONE WRONG WORD
by Hank Phillippi Ryan
Forge/Macmillan, February 2024
(via DeFiore and Company)

Words have the power to change lives, and no one knows that better than crisis management expert Arden Ward. But she’s in big trouble—she’s accused of having an affair with a client. It’s not true! She would never do such a thing! But she gets the blame—and now she’s about to be fired.

Arden is granted two weeks to save her career and her reputation. And then she meets Cordelia Bannister.

Cordelia needs help for her husband Ned, a successful Boston real estate mogul. Though he was recently acquitted in a fatal drunk driving accident, his reputation has been ruined, and the fallout is devastating not only to the Bannisters’ lives, but the lives of their two young children.

Arden devotes her final days on the job to helping this shattered family, but soon, revelations about what really happened the night of the accident begin to emerge. And then—another car crash throws Ned back into the spotlight.

This case is Arden’s last chance to protect her own future and clear her name—and the Bannister kids may be in danger! But the more she tries to untangle the truth, the more one disturbing question haunts her—what if she’s protecting a killer?

Everyone believes that words can never hurt them, but Arden knows the reality. Sometimes one wrong word can kill.

USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan has won five Agatha Awards in addition to Anthony, Macavity, Daphne du Maurier, and Mary Higgins Clark Awards. As on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV, she’s won 37 Emmys and many more journalism honors. A past president of National Sisters in Crime and a founder of MWA University, Ryan lives in Boston with her husband.

ARISTOTLE’S GUIDE TO SELF-PERSUASION de Jay Heinrichs

Show yourself who’s in charge using the original art of persuasion, backed by contemporary pop culture examples that make transforming your habits and achieving goals easy, even fun—from the New York Times bestselling author of Thank You for Arguing

ARISTOTLE’S GUIDE TO SELF-PERSUASION:
How Ancient Rhetoric, Taylor Swift, and Your Own Soul Can Help You Change Your Life
by Jay Heinrichs
Crown, April 2025
(via DeFiore and Company)

Rhetoric once sat at the center of elite education. Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, and Martin Luther King, Jr., used it to build empires, write deathless literature, and inspire democracies. Now it will help you to take leadership over yourself; not through pop psychology or empty inspiration, but with persuasive tools that have been tested for more than three thousand years. In Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, Heinrichs helps readers persuade their most difficult audiences—themselves—by using techniques invented by the likes of Aristotle and Cicero and deployed by our culture’s most persuasive characters. With their help, rhetoric can convert the most negative situations into positive ones.

Heinrichs brings in examples from history and pop culture—Winston Churchill, Iron Man, Dolly Parton, and the woman who serendipitously invented the chocolate chip cookie—to illustrate the concepts. But the core of the book tests the tools of self-persuasion and asks: Can the same techniques that seduce lovers, sell diet books, and overturn governments help us achieve our most desired goals?

Filled with entertaining and scientific studies that showcase the power of what language can do for you, Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion will teach you how to be the most successful person you can be, just by talking to yourself.

Jay Heinrichs is the New York Times bestselling author of Thank You for Arguing. He spent twenty-six years as a writer, editor, and magazine publishing executive before becoming a full-time advocate for the lost art of rhetoric. He now lectures widely on the subject, to audiences ranging from Ivy League students and NASA scientists to Southwest Airlines executives, and runs the language blog figarospeech. He lives with his wife in New Hampshire.

NOT QUITE A GHOST d’Anne Ursu

From award-winning author Anne Ursu comes a dark, deeply-felt story of illness, of growing up, and of the ghosts that that lurk just beyond our sight—as well as the ones we carry with us.

NOT QUITE A GHOST
by Anne Ursu
HarperCollins, January 2024
(via DeFiore and Company)

The house on Katydid Street seems to sit apart from the others, silent and alone, like it doesn’t fit among them. For Violet Hart—whose family moves into the house—little feels like it fits anymore. Like her old home, too small since her mother remarried and the new baby arrived. Or her friend group, which since middle school began is no longer enough for Violet’s best friend, Paige. But maybe, Violet tells herself, change is sometimes okay. Then Violet sees her new room.

The attic bedroom is shadowy, creaky, and wrapped in faded wallpaper covered with twisting vines and sickly flowers. After moving in, Violet falls ill, and days turn into weeks without any improvement. Her family grows more confused and her friends wonder if she’s really sick at all.

Violet finds herself more and more alone in the room with the yellow wallpaper, the shadows moving in the corners, wrapping themselves around her at night. But soon, she starts to suspect that she might not be alone in the room at all….

Anne Ursu is the author of the acclaimed novels The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy, The Lost Girl, Breadcrumbs, and The Real Boy, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. The recipient of a McKnight Fellowship Award in Children’s Literature, Anne lives in Minneapolis with her family and an ever-growing number of cats.

STEFI AND THE SPANISH PRINCE de Donna Freitas

In Barcelona, the beach is beautiful, the tapas are delicious, and the boys are plentiful.

STEFI AND THE SPANISH PRINCE
by Donna Freitas
Harper Teen, June 2024
(via DeFiore and Company)

Good thing, because Stefi’s nursing a broken heart after a disastrous breakup. Excited to reinvent herself in a magical city where no one knows her, she hopes a summer in Barcelona will do wonders for her love life, her Catalan language skills, and her pastry-making repertoire after she enrolls at Catalunya’s famed culinary institute.

Another thing Barcelona has? A secret prince. The heir in question, Xavi Borges, helps his mother run a popular tapas spot. After Stefi stops at their counter, Xavi can’t get the beautiful American girl off his mind. His life is way too complicated for romance, but doesn’t he deserve to enjoy his final summer of anonymity before assuming his royal duties?

Part bodyguard, part confidante, Santiago is tasked with keeping Xavi out of trouble. Santiago knows Xavi and Stefi’s budding relationship can’t last once Xavi’s real identity becomes public. But soon Santiago is crushing on Xavi’s best friend, Diego, and his focus shifts from royal protection duties to the possibility of enjoying a romance of his own.

With so many sparks flying, a threat to expose Xavi’s royal secret goes unheeded, and when the news blows up, it threatens to burn down all of their lives.

Donna Freitas is the author of several young adult and middle grade novels. She is also the author of the adult novel The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano. She has appeared on NPR, The Today Show, CNN, and many other news media outlets, and she has lectured about her research at over two hundred colleges and universities across the United States.

COMPANY de Shannon Sanders

A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family.

COMPANY: Stories
by Shannon Sanders
Graywolf Press, October 2023
(via DeFiore and Co.)

Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, COMPANY tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.
Each piece in COMPANY includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone’s home. In « The Good, Good Men, » two brothers reunite to oust a « deadbeat » boyfriend from their mother’s house. In « The Everest Society, » the brothers’ sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In « Birds of Paradise, » their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost’s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister’s daughter comes calling.
These are stories about intimacy, societal and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.

Shannon Sanders lives and works near Washington, DC. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, Joyland, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and was a 2020 winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers