Archives par étiquette : Frances Goldin Literary Agency

THE WIREGRASS de Matt Kessler

A vital and propulsive true crime narrative of corruption, injustice, and two young women’s murder in a little-known corner of the American Deep South.

THE WIREGRASS:
A Tale of Murder and Retribution
by Matt Kessler
Grand Central Press, Spring 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

In 1999, in the rural Alabama town of Ozark, high schoolers Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley were found shot in the trunk of their car, weeks before the start of their senior year. The night of their murder remains shrouded in mystery. They were driving between field parties. They were lost. But why were their jeans muddy, soaked to the bone? And what drove someone to kill them?

Twenty years passed, but locals could not forget the girls’ deaths. Suspicions of a police cover-up reached a fever pitch until, out of the blue, a softspoken Black man named Coley McCraney—a long-haul trucker and ordained deacon—was arrested for the crime. The dramatic trial and controversial conviction that followed would tear this small farming community in two.

THE WIREGRASS is an under-documented region of the American Deep South, known for its peanuts. Religiously conservative and historically poor, it stretches from Montgomery, Alabama to Macon, Georgia and south to the Florida Panhandle. Cut off from major highways, effectively run by local law enforcement, it’s a place where America’s fundamental prejudices present themselves without veneer; inequality, violence and racism run bone deep.

A native Alabamian, seasoned journalist, and student of Maggie Nelson and Percival Everett (who gave the book its title), Matt Kessler has spent seven years researching the tangled case of the Beasley-Hawlett murders, attending the trial of Coley McCraney, and gaining the trust of the local community—as well as the ire of local police enforcement.

THE WIREGRASS is an atmospheric and utterly compelling true crime narrative, as interested in the rippling effects of murder on a small, tight-knit community as it is on exposing truth in places that are otherwise forgotten and neglected. Calling to mind the work of Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing, Empire of Pain) and David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager), as well as Michelle McNamara’s legendary I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, this is a thrilling yet profound story of race, class, and the corruption of power.

Matt Kessler is a journalist based in Birmingham, Alabama. His reporting appears in The Guardian and The Atlantic and has been commended by the Mississippi ACLU. His cultural criticism and award-winning short stories have appeared in Pitchfork, Vice, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is completing a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.

IT’S HARD TO BE AN ANIMAL de Robert Isaacs

A hilarious and clever upmarket love story and cozy mystery with a strong thread of magical realism, for readers of Carl Hiaasen’s Squeeze Me looking for a bit more tenderness, or of Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures.

IT’S HARD TO BE AN ANIMAL
by Robert Isaacs
Grand Central, Spring 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

Henry Parsons is walking through Central Park on a date with Molly Bent, the quirky, sweet, and endlessly interesting woman that his colleague set him up with. After a long spell of loneliness, he is feeling hopeful for the first time in years when a sweet little warbler tells him to f*** off.

A gentle soul already troubled by the rancor and insensitivity of humans in the city, Henry tries to brush it off as a hallucination. But suddenly he can hear the voices everywhere: dogs mocking their owners, sparrows fat-shaming each other, snakes pontificating about misogyny and gender politics, police horses profiling attendees of a street fair: the man who never speaks up for himself is suddenly surrounded by animals who do.

It’s all fun and games until he overhears three rats discussing a corpse in the New York subway. Unsure what to do, he lets it slip to Molly. She’s keen to investigate, and Henry is desperate for another date. Together they descend into an abandoned tunnel under the West Fourth Street station where they find a body… and the murderers find them.

For the first time in Henry’s careful life there’s no way to duck confrontation: he’s being hunted, and must find the courage to face the Scottish gangsters stalking him across the city. Of course, that same assertiveness might transform his chances with Molly too. Inspiration arrives, unexpectedly, from his roommate’s pair of feuding beta fish on an enemies-to-lovers arc, and the neighbor’s yapping Pomeranian whose wisdom changes Henry forever.

Robert Isaacs’ writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon.com, Hindsight and The First Line. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University with a dual thesis in fiction and nonfiction. In his checkered past he’s also worked as a musician (Grammy nominated singer, conducted at Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, etc.) and street-performer (juggling, unicycling, plate-spinning, and so on.)

Robert Isaacs’ writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Salon.com, Hindsight and The First Line. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University with a dual thesis in fiction and nonfiction. In his checkered past he’s also worked as a musician (Grammy nominated singer, conducted at Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, etc.) and street-performer (juggling, unicycling, plate-spinning, and so on.).

WORK NIGHTS d’Erica Peplin

A wry, warm, and irresistible debut following a young queer woman who finds herself in a love triangle with an unobtainable intern and a quick-tempered musician, set between the sterile office of a newspaper and the intoxicating night scene of New York City, and pitched as Sally Rooney meets The Devil Wears Prada.

WORK NIGHTS
by Erica Peplin
Gallery, June 2025
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

It’s 2015 and Jane Grabowski, a self-described “dumpy dyke,” is living in Bushwick and working in advertising at the nation’s most storied newspaper. By day, she is reluctantly dragged into a glamorous, precarious, and changing industry, and into the lives of a motley crew of office workers, who alternately horrify and delight her. By night, she goes out with the cool and flighty Madeline Navarro, an ostensibly straight, staggeringly pretty Guatemalan intern with an expensive lifestyle. Despite many signs to the contrary, it feels like Madeline might be the one—except her visa is about to run out.

Also, Jane keeps running into Addy, a temperamental, deeply moral, slightly uncool singer-songwriter. Something shifts, and Jane finds herself spiraling, terrifyingly, towards love. But Madeline’s feelings are shifting too, and it feels truly impossible—and maybe unnecessary—to choose. As small betrayals pile up, alongside the soulless dramas of work, Jane finds herself stuck and desperately unhappy. She’s determined to grow up, quit her job, and change her life. But the comforts of the known, and the thrill of the chase, keep pulling her back, until all her unmade decisions collide.

Wry, tender, and acutely attuned to the spiky intimacies of love, work, and friendship, Work Nights delves deep into the existential conundrums of finding your way in a cold, capitalist world—a world that is also occasionally alight with beauty and strangeness. It joins the small but growing cannon of novels examining the casualties of modern offices, from Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End to Halle Butler’s The New Me and Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different, and writers like Kristen Arnett, Rachel Khong, Elif Batuman, and Sally Rooney, whose smart, offbeat protagonists are alert to the delusions of the world around them, though not always to their own.

Erica Peplin is a writer from Detroit, Michigan, now based in Brooklyn. Her short stories and essays have appeared in n+1, Joyland, The Millions, McSweeney’s, Autostraddle, The Brooklyn Rail, The Village Voice, Cosmonauts Avenue, Another Gaze, and Hobart. From 2015-16, she worked in the advertising department of the New York Times. Since then, she’s worked as a shipping clerk, a high school custodian, and a restaurant server.

UNTITLED ON TAYLOR SWIFT de Stephanie Burt

A leading literary and pop culture critic looks at Taylor Swift at the height of her success.

UNTITLED ON TAYLOR SWIFT
by Stephanie Burt
Basic Books, TBD
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

Based on her forthcoming course at Harvard University, the announcement of which received major media coverage from around the world, UNTITLED ON TAYLOR SWIFT will be the first serious work of cultural criticism about Taylor Swift as an artist and creator, touching on girlhood, fame, privilege, costume, economics, song and stagecraft, and the author’s own transition to womanhood. In the vein of Sarah Smarsh’s She Come By It Natural, on Dolly Parton, or Touré’s I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon, Burt’s book will be an appreciation and analysis of one of the most influential pop stars of a generation.

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with nine published books, including Close Calls with Nonsense (Graywolf Press, 2009) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent poetry collection is We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022). Her culture writing has appeared in many venues including The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, The Nation, the London Review of Books and TLS. She is a Guggenheim award winner and the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.

THE GRIEF CURE de Cody Delistraty

In this lyrical and moving story of the world of Prolonged Grief, journalist Cody Delistraty reflects on his experience with loss and explores what modern science, history, and literature reveal about the nature of our relationship to grief and our changing attitudes toward its cure.

THE GRIEF CURE
by Cody Delistraty
HarperCollins, June 2024
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

When Cody Delistraty lost his mother to cancer in his early 20s, he found himself unsure how to move forward. Planning for her recovery, he and his family had a purpose. But after she was gone, there seemed to exist only the empty advice on grief: move through the five stages, achieve closure, get back to work, go back to normal. So begins a journey into the new frontiers of grief, where Delistraty seeks out the researchers, technologists, therapists, marketers, and communities around the world looking to cure the pain of loss in novel ways. From the neuroscience of memory deletion to book prescriptions, laughter therapy, psilocybin, and Breakup Bootcamp, what ultimately emerges is not so much a cure as a fresh understanding of what living with grief truly means.

As Delistraty followed the blueprint of his own ad hoc treatment plan, the question of whether the most painful kind of grief can and should be cured had also been taken up by the American Psychiatry Association, as they recently gave extended, intense, disruptive grief an official name: Prolonged Grief Disorder. Stamping this kind of grief with a diagnosis has opened innovative avenues of treatment and an important conversation about a debilitating form of grief, but it also raises the question of whether grief, no matter how severe, is best treated medically at all?

Rigorously researched and beautifully written, The Grief Cure is a moving and eye-opening chronicle of a new diagnosis and a wide-ranging cultural history of grief of all sorts as a human rite. Braiding deep, emotional resonance with sharp research and historical insight, Delistraty places his own experience in dialogue with great writers and thinkers throughout history who have puzzled over this eternal question: how might we best face loss?

Cody Delistraty is the culture editor at The Wall Street Journal Magazine. He has written essays and criticism for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and, while living in Paris for several years, he was the European arts columnist for The Paris Review. He has degrees in politics from New York University and history from the University of Oxford, where he graduated with a double distinction (first class). He and his work have been featured on WNYC, France 5 and Arté; British Vogue named him a best young writer of the year; and he has given corporate talks about tragedy, art, and creativity to companies like PwC.