Archives par étiquette : Frances Goldin Literary Agency

WILL AND ATTENTION de Meghan O’Gieblyn

In her exquisite memoir of secret drinking, fragile recovery, and the deep pull of religion, award-winning essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn seeks to understand why it is so hard to sustain the difficult work of personal change.

WILL AND ATTENTION
by Meghan O’Gieblyn
Doubleday, October 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

After leaving evangelical Christianity in her early twenties, kicking an addiction, and building a life as a writer, Meghan O’Gieblyn was admired by her friends for having a strong will. Then, in her late-thirties, she began secretly attending Catholic mass and meeting with a priest to discuss conversion. After eleven years of sobriety, she began drinking again. Both returns — to organized religion and to alcohol — felt to her like a regression, a personal defeat. Knowledge and determination had proven useless when it came to her most vexing personal battles. She was forced to reckon with her inner doubleness, a self “who both wants and wants not to want,” as she puts it.

In WILL AND ATTENTION O’Gieblyn captures those perplexing days. Soon after her return to sobriety, she turned to a series of spiritual texts— by Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, the Desert Fathers—and began putting them in conversation with her life. She set out to find a spirituality that could meet her longings and prove capacious enough to hold the dark side of human nature. Beautifully written, intellectually sparkling, wryly funny, this memoir from a beloved essayist explores a fundamental question of being human: the mystifying nature of our power over ourselves.

GRINGAS de Manola Gonzalez Rosillo

The first Luisa may have passed away, but that won’t stop her from giving her granddaughter unsolicited advice from beyond the grave.

GRINGAS
by Manola Gonzalez Rosillo
Bloomsbury, Winter 2028
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

In 1950s Mexico, Luisa is a sheltered young woman who jumps at the chance to escape her hometown of Obregón for a bustling Mexico City. There, she meets and falls in love with Victor, a handsome lawyer with grand political ambitions for improving the future of their country. But as Luisa ascends the social ladder into the opulent, treacherous center of Mexico City’s elite, Victor’s behavior becomes increasingly suspicious, just as Luisa’s roles as wife and mother grow ever more claustrophobic. As her marriage fractures, Luisa must decide how to wield her power within a patriarchal society—and makes a risky choice to go behind her husband’s back.

Decades later, a tragic incident endangers Luisa’s family, forcing them to flee to Tijuana and try to obtain American visas. During this upheaval, the third and final Luisa is born, the last in a line of proud Mexican matriarchs. Over the next decade, the first Luisa, now Abuela, discovers what the price of crossing the border will mean for her family as they move between Mexico and America, navigating the opaque immigration process while raising the third Luisa as an Americanized border child and, much to Abuela’s mortification, slowly losing the privilege and identity to which they’d become accustomed. But only Abuela knows that she’s the one who caused the family’s downfall, and must confess her secrets before it’s too late.

Moving between the past and the present, GRINGAS explores the sacred bond between grandmother and granddaughter while navigating questions of class privilege, family loyalty, and assimilation. It has the intergenerational, wisecracking family dynamics of Elizabeth Acevedo’s Family Lore and the playful perspectives of Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Calendaria—with a dash of the pithy humor of a Mexican Gilmore Girls, if Emily Gilmore had grabbed the reins of the story.

Manola Gonzalez Rosillo is a Mexican-Spanish-American writer originally from San Diego, California. She is a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellowship Finalist and Columbia M.F.A grad, where she received the Fondation Femme Debut scholarship and the Writing Program scholarship. She has been published by The Bare Life Review, Columbia Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine and Longreads.

FREE LOVE de Michelle Tea

A wildly entertaining, authentic, and profound guide to navigating freedom and commitment, in a society intent on pinning us down.

FREE LOVE: Adventures in Marriage and Polyamory
by Michelle Tea
HarperOne, Fall 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Polyamory is having a moment. Whether you love it or hate it, the explosion of non-monogamy into the mainstream suggests a widespread frustration and stuck-ness within traditional relationship structures, perhaps especially among women and femmes, whose sexual freedom has long been contained and policed. Why do we have to choose between adventure and security? Why can’t we try, at least, to have them both?

Long before its current it-girl moment, polyamory was foundational to many radical subcultures, who saw in it not only the chance for sexual freedom, but a path towards dismantling patriarchal oppression and the zero-sum game of capitalism – a path towards personal, spiritual, and collective growth, care, and empowerment. Polyamory was also foundational to the life of beloved writer and queer icon Michelle Tea, from the clandestine, ill-fated throuples of her late teens, to the punk lesbian underground of 90s San Francisco, through marriage and divorce, Tinder flings and enduring friendships, heartbreak and motherhood.

In FREE LOVE, she will share these juicy, hilarious, and moving stories with her characteristic wit and charm, while delving into the radical, forgotten history of openness, and interviewing and researching widely, to guide readers through the thorny choices we make in our own relationships – poly or no. A modern-day The Ethical Slut meets Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, it marries the storytelling of Maggie Smith and Samantha Irby with the practical wisdom and heartwarming appeal of writers like Glennon Doyle, Emily Nagoski, and Vanessa Marin.

Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen widely acclaimed books memoir, fiction, and cultural criticism, and the recipient of awards from PEN/America, the Guggenheim, Lambda Literary, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her books have been translated into French, Japanese, Slovenian, German, Italian, and Swedish.

THE GREAT WORK de Sheldon Costa

A grieving man and his nephew hunt down a myth in this gothic Western adventure for fans of Karen Russell and Victor LaValle.

THE GREAT WORK
by Sheldon Costa
Quirk Books, November 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Alone in a frontier town in the brand-new state of Washington, Gentle Montgomery is grieving his best friend. Liam, a self-taught alchemist, was killed when he tried to capture a creature that shouldn’t exist: a giant salamander that drives men mad. When Gentle’s nephew Kitt arrives at his doorstep, the two set out together to track the monster down, so they can use its blood in an alchemical formula that will bring Liam back to life.

It’s a hard and haunted journey through the Northwestern frontier. The salamander produces surreal nightmares and waking dreams of a blighted, burning future. And Gentle and Kitt soon find themselves pursued by a bloodthirsty hunter, a sadistic judge, and a doomsday cult, all of whom have their own plans for the river monster. Armed with nothing but Liam’s alchemical notebooks, they must not only find the salamander but learn to understand it—and the terrifying visions it causes—before it’s too late.

Unsettling and profound, THE GREAT WORK is an arcane adventure through the wilderness of friendship and the rotten heart of the early American empire.

“The Great Work is a vision of America as both homeland and horror story. And it also is just a good ol’ page turner, the kind of dark tale that delivers on every promise it makes.” — Joseph Fink, co-creator of Welcome to Night Vale

“Costa’s rip-snorting debut is a wild ride through freaky old America: backwoods alchemists, a sadistic reverend judge, an animalistic cult, and a quest for a primeval monster of nightmares come together in a hell-for-leather frontier yarn packed with action, wonder, and heart.” — James Kennedy, author of Bride of the Tornado “A moody, atmospheric, and singular novel which navigates corners of American history through the complicated territory of horror, the monstrous, and the heroic.” — Kelly Link, best-selling author of The Book of Love

Sheldon Costa is a writer originally from Post Falls, Idaho. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Electric Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, and Crazyhorse, among others. He is a winner of the AWP Intro Journal Project, the 2018 Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award, and the Cream City Review’s 2019 Summer Prize in Fiction, judged by Ramona Ausubel. He holds an MFA from the Ohio State University and lives in rural Missouri with his wife and three cats. This is his debut novel.

NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE de June Jordan

The definitive selected essays of the revolutionary writer and activist June Jordan, the first publication in an ambitious program to reissue her long out-of-print work.

NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE: The Selected Essays of June Jordan
Edited and introduced by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Penguin Classics, Spring 2027
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Known in her time as the most widely published African American writer to date, June Jordan was a courageous agitator for change, writing with love and rage at the frontlines of literature and injustice on an international scale. A contemporary of Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, she received a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement, and the civil rights movement.

And yet Jordan knew that she never got her due within her lifetime. She was too fiery, too fierce in her political commitments to be embraced and lauded by the establishment. In the years after her untimely death in 2001, her remarkable work largely fell out of print. Yet it is the very fierceness and foresight of Jordan’s commitment to freedom and human dignity that has fueled a recent, international upsurge of interest in her work. NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE will be the first in a major reissue program from Penguin Classics in the US.

Edited by the celebrated poet and Black feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and timed to coincide with the first biography of Jordan (also by Gumbs) for Yale University Press, this definitive selected essays includes hugely influential treatises alongside lesser known gems, all organized around the power of Jordan’s unyielding commitment to love.

“In political journalism that cuts like razors, in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light … [June Jordan] has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept… I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.” —Toni Morrison

June Jordan (1936 – 2002) became, in her lifetime, the most published Black poet in American history. Known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism, she founded the Poetry for the People program at U.C. Berkeley and received, among many honors, a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement and the civil rights movement.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Survival is a Promise, the biography of Audre Lorde (FSG, 2024), a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, Guardian Book of the Week, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award. She is a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize Winner in Poetry, and a 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Nonfiction.