Archives par étiquette : The Gernert Company

ON LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT d’Emanuele Lugli

Despite its cultural ubiquity, there has never been a non-fiction book about love at first sight. Stanford professor and cultural historian Emanuele Lugli will change that, bringing a deeply-researched, gorgeously written, Big Idea approach to this most fascinating of subjects.

ON LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
by Emanuele Lugli
Viking, 2028
(via The Gernert Company)

Credit: Harrison Truong

Lugli argues that love at first sight is perhaps the most transformative form of love and an idea worthy of serious study. Across eight chapters, he explores the phenomenon: first as a mysterious pull between strangers; then as a complex neurobiological process by which the eyes end up doing half a dozen jobs at once; and, finally, as an approach to seeing the world anew. He’ll spend time with scientists using AI to decode how macaque monkeys perceive faces, and in labs studying cells in the visual cortex that quicken the heartbeat before the brain even registers what it is happening. He discovers ancient Chinese tales of students struck dumb by the sight of a beauty and English royals smitten by miniature portraits.

On this narrative journey Lugli asks: Can love at first sight tell us something about attraction? Does it really need the adult supervision of reason? Is there a meaningful relationship between erotic urgency and the prospect of building a life with another person, one that goes beyond the reductive evolutionary story that we’re all just primitives programmed to reproduce?

Through revisiting science and culture, present and past, the book arrives at its life-affirming proposal that instantaneous love isn’t a delusion, but a way of living more receptively: an invitation to move through the world as if charged with wonder. It arrives at the sort of gentle, optimistic prescription readers need today: a way to understand not just why sudden attraction happens, but what to do with it, and perhaps even why you might seek out such a leap of faith. You choose first—then spend a lifetime figuring out who you have chosen. It’s not the instinctual lightning strike that makes love at first sight a form of freedom, it’s the openness inspired by recasting love as a perpetual attempt at knowing.

Emanuele Lugli is an Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Public Humanities at Stanford. He writes regularly for magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian, Slate, Il Sole 24 Ore, Domani, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.

DEAD WEIGHT de Hildur Knútsdóttir

An Icelandic night may hide secrets and affairs – or even bodies – in this gruesomely cathartic horror thriller from the author of The Night Guest.

DEAD WEIGHT
by Hildur Knútsdóttir
Tor Nightfire, May 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Unnur was living a normal, if lonely, life until a black cat showed up at her door.

When she tracks down the cat’s wayward owner, she finds a young woman just as lost and in need of help. Like a gust of cold air in a Reykjavík night, Ásta and her pet slip into Unnur’s life.

It’s unexpected, but welcome. Unnur likes the company, and she begins to rely on Ásta in turn. But like a black cat, trouble has been tailing her new friend, and Unnur is the only one there for Ásta when things take a violent turn.

The two women quickly learn: nothing tests a friendship like blood on your hands.

Hildur Knútsdóttir was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1984. She has lived in Spain, Germany, and Taiwan and studied literature and creative writing at The University of Iceland. She writes fiction both for adults and teenagers, as well as short fiction, plays, and screenplays. Hildur is known for her evocative fantastical fiction and spine-chilling horror. The Night Guest is her first book translated into English. She lives in Reykjavík with her husband, their two daughters, and a puppy called Uggi.

THE FUTURE PERFECT de Cay Kim

A radiant portrait of a young woman caught between cultures, and what is lost and found in the struggle to succeed.

THE FUTURE PERFECT: A Novel
by Cay Kim
Riverhead, June 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Before you are anything, you are a daughter.

At first you are at home inside your pregnant mother: a beloved daughter, a vision of the future. But who will you become?

As your family moves back and forth between Korea and the United States, you find yourself caught between two countries. Prioritizing your future over her own happiness, your mother marshals you through a childhood of homework and violin practice and academic achievement to shape you into the person she most wants you to be. Is hers the ultimate form of love? And, despite her sacrifices, is there a world somewhere between your motherland and homeland that can feel like your own?

Told in incandescent prose, Cay Kim’s exquisite debut novel is a portrait of a brilliant young woman growing up between cultures, and a love letter to girlhood, family, and the great dreams we hold for ourselves, no matter where we’re from.

“A book I have been waiting for all my life. Cay Kim has written a daring, sonic, incandescent debut, full of verve and heartache. A story about the pain and love between daughters and mothers, the deep gulf between desire and duty, and the particular experience of straddling both Korean and American homelands, this is a magnificent debut.” —Crystal Hana Kim, author of The Stone Home and If You Leave Me

“Timeless, taut, and daringly tempestuous . . . A masterful and unforgettable debut.” —Paul Beatty, author of the Booker Prize–winning The Sellout

« Elegant and deeply felt, this is a novel full of poise, precision and luminous prose. An assured debut. » —Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

“Intense, lyrical, heartfelt . . . Written with gorgeous attention to detail and a sense of wonder. A beauty.” —Yoon Choi, winner of the Whiting Award and author of Skinship

“A lyrically profound and triumphant coming-of-age novel.” —Nancy Jooyoun Kim, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Story of Mina Lee, a Reese’s Book Club Pick

“A masterpiece of concision and nuance, a searing picture of what it is to grow up between cultures. » —Joshua Furst, author of Revolutionaries

Cay Kim was born in Seoul in 1998. She received her BA from Stanford University, where she won the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, and her MFA from Columbia University. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta and One Story. This is her first novel.

I’M NOT HERE TO HUNT RABBITS de Josh Kendall

This debut is a raw, tantalizing love story wrapped in a thriller that contains as much psychological intrigue as there is action – from one of the most acclaimed editors of the genre.

I’M NOT HERE TO HUNT RABBITS: A Novel
by Josh Kendall
Putnam, Spring 2027
(via The Gernert Company)

Smith thought he had left it all behind: the intense, dangerous work in Afghanistan; the grueling training; the vast reach of his former employer – the mysterious organization Cornerstone; and most of all Helen – the woman he loved and who was now gone forever. Better to start new in a place where no one knows him – Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Security for a local kingpin named Sabadi and his family. A job he could do in his sleep.

But something is off about the whole assignment. The previous security detail seems to know more than they are letting on about the nature of the job and what Sabadi is planning in Ethiopia. Smith is left in the dark, and for the first time in his life, he is not sure where the threats are coming from. The only things he is certain of are that Cornerstone knows he is here and he will have to confront his past with Helen to make it out of Addis Ababa alive.

A different kind of thriller, one in which the tension comes as much from what’s unsaid as what is left in, from an acclaimed editor of the genre, I’m Not Here to Hunt Rabbits is an existential suspense novel of a life on a knife’s edge.

Josh Kendall was VP and Executive Editor at Little, Brown, and Editorial Director of Mulholland Books where he worked with Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, Robert Galbraith, JJ Abrams, and Tana French among others. He’s worked in various editorial positions at Viking, Picador, and Scribner, and has also taught creative writing at Brooklyn College, University of Iowa, and The New School.

SUNRISE de Téa Obreht

Three lives, 100 years, one Western ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife.

SUNRISE: A Novel
by Téa Obreht
Random House, August 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old energy bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well-maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story 100 years in the making.

In 2003, Sunrise’s golden boy Coll begins to direct town’s annual historical reenactment when he is linked with a scandalous incident at a local bar. And when an upstart author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.

In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?

These three are strangers, separated by time. But Sunrise has secrets which lie in waiting like gunpowder: quiet, unassuming, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the places we lay claim to, and most of all, of our own lives.

Rooted in one place, yet traveling across three time periods, Téa explores: the complicated concept of people becoming legends big enough to support ticket sales in their own time, and how they perpetuate their own myths, even as they diverge from reality.  Our spooky fascination with ghost towns – imagining what once was in a place, or what could be again.  What it means to be truly lost and faced with back-to-survival basics in today’s uber connected world.  The novel comes together in a heart-in-mouth ending that I haven’t felt since watching Thelma & Louise, literary style. With its matryoshka doll structure and her signature command of language, this novel, brimming with wry humor, sharp observations and pure linguistic joy, is a triumph.  

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Esquire, Literary Hub, Today

“Téa Obreht never disappoints.”—Esquire

“As the novel goes on, Obreht weaves three timelines together . . . to unravel the mystery of Sunrise, the ghost town to end all ghost towns. Sorry to fangirl but: YAY.” —Literary Hub

Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, Inland and The Morningside. Her novels have won the Orange Prize for Fiction, been a finalist for the National Book Award, won the Southwest Book Award, and won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many other publications. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Obreht now resides in Wyoming.