Archives par étiquette : Sterling Lord Literistic

SENSUAL WORLD de Lauren Friedlander

A stylish and surreal Midwestern coming-of-age with black humor, SENSUAL WORLD is a story about desire, destruction, and transcendence for fans of Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch and Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise.

SENSUAL WORLD
by Lauren Friedlander
Catapult, February 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Sensual World is about two young women—one escaping an isolated, sordid home in the plains, one escaping a TV-set childhood in The Big City—who meet at an avant-garde theater school in Kansas called “the Con.” They become the best of friends; together they strive to become Artists.

The founder of the Con, Una Flood, wrote a supposedly-cursed, never-performed play and a manifesto on how to become The Ultimate Artist. When the friends are cast in Possum Play, they are torn apart by the absurdist preparations and Flood’s supernatural machinations. A car crash; an identity swap; two women enter a maelstrom of obsession from which only one can emerge! The third act of redemption and reconciliation turns violent and strange—as they strive to embody The Ultimate Artist, the audience (us, fair readers) is unable to look away.

Sensual World lies somewhere in among the concepts of “if Ottessa Moshfegh went to theater camp,” and the movie Poor Things. The novel is viscerally stylish; you will taste the language of the Kansas soil and it’ll shock your senses like Sprite up the nose.

A writer from Kansas, currently in Brooklyn, Lauren Friedlander is a recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction has been longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions and published in the Best Microfiction anthology, Catapult, Hobart After Dark, Okay Donkey, The Rumpus, Shooter, Slice, and Washington Square Review.

CITY LIKE WATER de Dorothy Tse

Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, a wondrous and pointed message in a bottle from a city not so different from your own.

CITY LIKE WATER
by Dorothy Tse
translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce
Graywolf Press, March 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

The city you grew up in is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it—classmates, teachers, counterfeit watches, the erotic toe cleavage that used to lead the way down secret passages. Yet you still catch snatches of conversation lingering in the air and glimpse sun-dazzled residents retreating into dark crevices.

People seem to keep disappearing. Your mother joins in a housewives’ protest, each woman waving the fake, bloody lotus roots they were sold until police helicopters unleash a glittery spray that turns them into statues. Then it’s just you and your father at home, until he is quietly absorbed into the enormous new TV gifted by the government, and you spot him doing tai chi or picking through leftovers in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister, before she flew away in her school uniform? As the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you?

Lucid, nightmarish and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous and pointed message in a bottle from a city not so different from your own.

Dorothy Tse is a Hong Kong writer and the author of Owlish, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and Snow and Shadow, which was long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award. She is the cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres. 

THE FIRST GIRL IN HELL de Henry Hoke

A blacklisted actress exiled to the Nevada desert plots revenge on those who wronged her and hatches a plan to rescue the woman she loves as old Hollywood is consumed by moral panic.

THE FIRST GIRL IN HELL
by Henry Hoke
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, March 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Good girls want to marry the boy next door. Bad girls want to be the first girl in hell.

Lucinda is in a pinch, one unbefitting a woman of her stature. She’s made it to hell, but not the way she wanted. Instead of her previously gilded life as a Southern debutante and Broadway starlet, she’s stuck at a divorce ranch outside Reno, Nevada, during the sweltering summer of 1940, drinking herself silly. Gone are the red carpets and platoon of lovers, dreams of splashy acting roles and salacious tabloid coverage. Also gone is Maisie, a seductive showgirl and both Lucy’s best friend and romantic obsession. At least she has her flask. Everything else has been taken away by a single man, whom Lucy calls the Little Prick: the compiler of the feared Doom Book, a ledger containing the names of public figures whose immoral behavior renders them blacklisted. Unsurprisingly, Lucy’s name is first on the list. And to make matters worse, the Little Prick has also taken up with Maisie. Redemption be damned—even if it kills her, Lucy is getting her girl back.

Furious and bawdy, sensitive and quick-witted, and with the spellbinding mythmaking that made his novel Open Throat a cult sensation, Henry Hoke’s THE FIRST GIRL IN HELL follows Lucy on her zigzagging mission for vengeance and salvation, one that blurs extravagant fantasy and bloody reality, mink coats and Winchester rifles, totaled cars and debilitating hangovers. When she does finally close in on Maisie and the Little Prick, Lucy must decide how far she’ll go for revenge. And if it leads her to hell, well, that was already the plan.

Henry Hoke is the author of several books, most recently Open Throat, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, and longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. He has taught at CalArts and the UVA Young Writers Workshop, and lives in Virginia.

BAD NEWS DADS d’Adam Frost bientôt adapté en série TV

Warner Bros. Television a récemment remporté les droits d’adaptation audiovisuelle du roman BAD NEWS DADS du scénariste Adam Frost, dans des enchères très compétitives.

Greg Berlanti, connu pour Fly Me to the Moon, Love, Simon et Life as We Know It, produira la série, aux côtés de James Marsden (Paradise, Westworld, 27 Dresses et The Notebook) qui sera également producteur et acteur principal.

Voici une présentation du roman, dont les droits de langue française sont toujours disponibles :

A hilarious and superbly plotted crime novel for fans of Richard Osman and Elle Cosimano.

BAD NEWS DADS
by Adam Frost
Emily Bestler Books/Simon & Schuster, Summer 2026 
(via Sterlin gLord Literistic)

The Bad News Dads are a recreational baseball team in Los Angeles—a terrible one, made up of a bunch of 40-something dads, several of them of the stay-at-home variety. Tired of the constant grind of packing lunches and coordinating school pick-ups, the team’s catcher, Ben, is looking for some action. When a teammate’s wife dies tragically, Ben and his two closest friends decide that something fishy has happened, and they blithely take it upon themselves to solve what they’re sure is a murder. But can they fall down the dark rabbit hole of a murder investigation without ruining their home lives? Without ruining their friendships? And without getting killed themselves?

Adam Frost was born in Vancouver, Canada. He is a writer, actor, and director known for Castle (2009), Extreme Movie (2008) and Tribal (2020).

NOBODY DESERVES THIS d’Andy Callahan

Written for fans of Liz Moore and Dennis Lehane, Andy Callahan’s debut has loads of insight about fathers and sons, and about the various privileges of the wealthy; but most of all, NOBODY DESERVES THIS is an expertly plotted thriller with twists that will leave you breathless.

NOBODY DESERVES THIS
by Andy Callahan
Celadon Books, Summer 2026 or Early 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Set in Philadelphia’s elite Main Line suburbs, 21-year-old screw-up Sean Mulcahy is careening toward rock bottom ever since his sister has gone missing and the cops seem unable to crack the case. He’s been thrown out of Brown University, his father has disowned him, and a private equity magnate still blames him for his sister’s disappearance. When another young woman suddenly disappears, Sean decides to follow his nose and investigate on his own, but he will need to reconcile with his father first and enlist his help.

*Pre-empted in the US

Andy Callahan graduated from Yale in 1997 and the Warner Bros. TV Writers’ Workshop in 2014. He has written for several network crime shows including Person of Interest, Lethal Weapon, Taken, and FBI. He has also written several produced features and his inspirational drama Searching For Obama is currently in production. Andy grew up in in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania and attended one of the elite high schools on the Main Line on a partial scholarship to play basketball for them, a memory he cherishes and which has inspired his book, both the good and the ugly.