Archives par étiquette : Sterling Lord Literistic

LONELINESS & COMPANY de Charlee Dyroff

Set in a near-future tech-ruled world, LONELINESS & COMPANY is about a loveable weirdo tasked with teaching an AI to be human who becomes more open to the world in the process.

LONELINESS & COMPANY
by Charlee Dyroff
Bloomsbury, May 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Lee graduated from the top of her class at the Program and expected a placement at a top company. Instead she’s sent to collect data for a company nobody’s ever heard of that’s trying to teach an AI to act as “a true friend.” Lee begins voyeuristically: gathering information online and observing her outgoing roommate Veronika. But then the team learns that their company is secretly trying to cure loneliness, an emotion erased from society decades ago but somehow returned and spreading rapidly; the “true friend” AI is one of the few tech ventures that hasn’t yet failed. The company becomes desperate. Lee’s pressured into not just inputting data she finds online, but giving the AI the data of her own real-world experiences. She’s pushed into a zany mindset of chasing experiences to feed the AI.

LONELINESS & COMPANY will appeal to fans of Hilary Leichter’s Temporary and the bizarre humor of living in a tech-ruled world of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This. It’s thematically kin to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and the work of Alexandra Kleeman.

“Naturally intelligent. An inventive, timely, and perceptive story about human connection and being alive.” —Emily Austin, author of Everyone in this Room will Someday be Dead

“Tender and hopeful, Dyroff’s story glimmers with humor, empathy, and profound insights into the inner workings of the human heart and psyche.” —Gina Chung, author of Sea Change and Green Frog

“This is a tender, visionary, wide-hearted book that offers itself as a course corrective to our hyper-quantified, algorithm-craven age.” —Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue

Charlee Dyroff is a writer from Boulder, Colorado. She received an MFA from Columbia University and some of her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Lapham’s Quarterly, Guernica, The Best American Food Writing of 2019, and elsewhere.

NATE PLUS ONE de Kevin van Whye

A fun new, gay rom-com from the author of Date Me, Bryson Keller!

NATE PLUS ONE
by Kevin van Whye
Random House Children’s, May 2022

Seventeen-year-old Nathan Hargreaves has done the bravest thing a gay teen can do: he’s come out to all those around him. But when he and his Mom are invited to his extremely wealthy paternal Aunt’s wedding retreat in South Africa, he’s filled with dread because he knows that all eyes will be on him— the gay boy. Disaster strikes when his Mom can’t make it and Nate will be forced to brave his extended family alone. Enter Jai Patel. Jai is an indie musician whose band is hoping to get their big break through a talent competition. When Jai’s band loses their lead singer weeks before the big competition, Nate steps up to help his friend out. The truth is, Nate is starting to feel more than friendship for the other boy and he’s pretty sure that Jai feels the same way. So, when Jai volunteers to be his plus one to the wedding, Nate’s looking forward to what will be the most perfect first date ever. That is, until Nate’s secret ex-boyfriend enters the picture.

Kevin van Whye is a gay writer of color born and raised in South Africa, where his love for storytelling started at a very young age. At four years old, he quit preschool because his teacher couldn’t tell a story. Kevin’s love affair with stories led him to film school, where he studied scriptwriting. Date Me, Bryson Keller is his first novel. Kevin lives in Johannesburg, and when he’s not reading, he’s writing books that give his characters the happy rom-com endings they deserve.

THE MONSTROUS KIND de Lydia Gregovic

Sense and Sensibility meets The Walking Dead.

THE MONSTROUS KIND
by Lydia Gregovic
Delacorte, Summer 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Merrick and Estella Darling are the last residents of Norland House, and the heirs apparent to their family’s Manor seat after the disappearance of their mother leads to their father’s suicide. As the next Manor Lord, one of them will assume the responsibility of ruling over the Darling province of Sussex—and, more importantly, guarding it against the monsters that lurk, unseen, in the fog that edges the province’s borders. History tells that the Phantoms used to be human, until the mist crept into their veins and turned their blood white instead of red. Now, the Manors are all that stand between the creatures and their redblooded prey. Vain and beautiful Merrick just wants to get back to the bustle of New London, where she never wants for an admirer. She sees an advantageous marriage to a Manorborn man from one of the wealthier, more cosmopolitan, Inner Ring provinces as her ticket out of provincial, countryside Sussex. But when her return home to Norland House results in the reveal of a world-altering secret—that her father was himself a Phantom—her future changes in a flash.
Merrick discovers that her father’s condition isn’t the only skeleton in Norland House’s closet. There may be more to their mother’s death than meets the eye—and the deeper Merrick looks, the surer she becomes that whoever killed her isn’t finished quite yet.
THE MONSTROUS KIND is a fantasy retelling of Jane Austen’s classic romance Sense and Sensibility, set in an alternate, Victorian-inspired England. A meditation on sisterhood, privilege, and the strict system of class hierarchy that governed Austen’s novels, it will appeal to fans of Hannah Whitten, Melissa Albert, and Erin A. Craig.

Lydia Gregovic grew up in the suburbs of Texas and along the coastline of Montenegro, where she inherited her love of storytelling from her grandmothers. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York, along with a couple half-dead plants and the complete works of Jane Austen. THE MONSTROUS KIND (prev. titled A Bleeding Like Smoke) is her first novel.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN de Griffin Hansbury

A poignant and provocative story of transgender awakening in a working-class American town.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN
by Griffin Hansbury
W. W. Norton, March 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In the summer of 1984, teenage Mel becomes entranced with the trans woman who appears in her blue-collar American town. Through the world-expanding time she spends with the woman, Sylvia, and the changes of adolescence, Mel soon discovers she is not the girl she thought she was—in fact, she might not be a girl at all. In the wake of this revelation, Mel navigates gender, sexuality, and an intense friendship with her childhood best friend in a hostile time and place for both girls and queers.

Moving back and forth to 2019, Mel has become Max, a middle-aged trans man. He returns to his hometown in the wake of his mother’s death, still reeling from his own politically-incorrect, gender-related scandal at his workplace, and bearing the burden of guilt from that pivotal teenage summer. As he reunites with his wayward older sister, spends time with his preteen great-niece and reckons with his past, Max works to come to terms with what it means to be a flawed and forgivable human being amidst constantly changing social norms.

“This gorgeous, propulsive novel is filled with beauty and danger, youth and wisdom and the life-saving lifelines of counterculture. With writing so tense and honest and real, I recognized this place and these people deeply, and felt them all in my heart long after the book was finished.” ―Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up

Griffin Hansbury is the acclaimed author of Vanishing New York (Dey Street, 2017), based on the celebrated blog written under the pen name Jeremiah Moss. As Hansbury he is the author of The Nostalgist, a novel, and Day For Night, a collection of poems. A two-time NYFA fellow, his writing has appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and online for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, Salon, and The New York Review of Books.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS de Vinson Cunningham

A historic presidential campaign changes the trajectory of a young Black man’s life in the highly anticipated debut novel from one of The New Yorker’s rising stars.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS
by Vinson Cunningham
Hogarth, March 2024
(via Sterling Lord Lieristic)

“I’d seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency.”

When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator’s idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he’ll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States’s first Black president.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS is about David’s eighteen months working for the Senator’s presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood, all of which force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.

Meditating on politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family, GREAT EXPECTATIONS is both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas, and marks the arrival of a major new writer.

“The aptly-titled GREAT EXPECTATIONS announces Vinson Cunningham as a novelist of singular style, wit and ambition. Focused on one young man’s experience working on a historic presidential campaign, the novel is both a coming-of-age story for its narrator and—just as powerfully—a coming-of-age tale for the nation writ large. Cunningham has an uncanny ability to access the thoughts undergirding our thoughts, and his narrator is one that readers will wish they could keep by their sides to make sense of the world after the book’s final pages. Read GREAT EXPECTATIONS and see our recent past, our present, and even our future anew.” —Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House, finalist for the National Book Award

Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, FADER, Vulture, The Awl, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. A former staffer on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and in his White House, Cunningham has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Art, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in New York City. GREAT EXPECTATIONS is his first novel.