Archives par étiquette : Sterling Lord Literistic

FLYING GEESE AND OTHER FICTIONS de Kira Chung Judish

A wildly compelling debut novel about family, ambition, and a lie that spins out of control.

FLYING GEESE AND OTHER FICTIONS
by Kira Chung Judish
HarperCollins, Winter/Spring 2027
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

When high school senior Minjee Choi insists she’s been accepted to Harvard, she expects the lie to last only long enough to save face. But when her mother Dasom learns the truth, she doubles down instead—determined to keep the family dream alive. Soon, what began as a desperate cover-up becomes a dazzling performance for their tight-knit immigrant community in Fairfax County, VA, where everyone has a stake in the family’s success.

Told primarily through alternating mother–daughter perspectives, FLYING GEESE AND OTHER FICTIONS reveals the relentless pressure to succeed at all costs, masterfully details the tug-of-war between blending in and standing out, and the weight of carrying generations of hope. At the same time, it’s a total blast—darkly funny, absurd, and irresistibly entertaining, with a duo you can’t help but root for even as the lie unravels. A chorus of nosy neighbors, competitive classmates, and PTA parents adds bite, comedy, and urgency, making the story as layered as it is propulsive.

FLYING GEESE AND OTHER FICTIONS will appeal to fans of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You for its poignant portrait of family and belonging, R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface for its sharp look at deception and desire, and Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation for its satirical take on identity and community.

Kira Chung Judish is a Korean American and Jewish writer based in Silver Spring, Maryland. A graduate of Amherst College, she is pursuing a doctorate in acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine and was named a 2025 Periplus Fellowship finalist. In addition to writing, she performs in local theatre productions.

THE RETURN OF THE OYSTERCATCHER de Scott Weidensaul

From the New York Times best-selling author of A World on the Wing, an exploration of the efforts led by scientists, conservationists, and Indigenous peoples to save birds around the world.

THE RETURN OF THE OYSTERCATCHER:
Saving Birds to Save the Planet
by Scott Weidensaul
W. W. Norton, April 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

As populations fall and once-great migration multitudes wither away, the future of birds may seem grim. But surprisingly, around the world, bird conservation is making things better. From the hyperlocal to the hemispherically immense, The Return of the Oystercatcher explores the recovery efforts that are not only preventing declines in bird populations but are helping them to thrive. Scott Weidensaul compiles amazing stories of hope and progress in some of the most unlikely places—from the resurgence of ducks in North America to the return of ospreys nesting in Southern Britain—to provide a road map of breathtaking environmental resilience. Because birds are so diverse, so ubiquitous, and cover virtually every square mile of the Earth’s surface, Weidensaul argues that by saving the birds we can also save the world. The result is an inspiring story of what’s working in bird conservation, recovery, and reintroduction, and what can work for the rest of the planet.

“Scott Weidensaul ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists—Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind—whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy.” —The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Scott Weidensaul is a Pennsylvania-based naturalist, most recently the New York Times bestseller A World on The Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, and one of the most respected natural history writers in the country. He was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for his book Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds, and has written more than 30 other books on birds. He is a contributing editor to Audubon magazine and a columnist for Bird Watcher’s Digest. For the past 20 years Weidensaul has overseen one of the largest owl-migration research projects in the country, and he is one of fewer than 200 licensed hummingbird banders in the world.

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.