Archives par étiquette : The Gernert Company

SCAVENGERS de Kathleen Boland

Hacks meets Rebecca Makkai in this rollicking novel about a cautious daughter and her eccentric, estranged mother venturing west in search of buried treasure—and a way back to each other—before they run out of patience, money, and options.

SCAVENGERS
by Kathleen Boland
Viking, January 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

After being fired for taking an uncharacteristic risk at her commodities trading job, Bea Macon sublets her New York apartment and books a one-way ticket to stay with her mother, Christy, a free spirit who has been living in Salt Lake City on Bea’s dime.

Usually the responsible one, Bea isn’t about to admit exactly why she’s suddenly decided to visit, but she isn’t the only one keeping secrets: Christy has a man. She has a map. She has . . . a username on a forum devoted to unearthing $1 million in buried treasure that an antiquities dealer claims to have hidden somewhere in the western U.S.?

Bea is convinced this is just another one of her mother’s wild larks, an elaborate way to refuse, as she has for Bea’s entire life, to finally grow up. But Christy believes she’s onto something—and she’s arranged a rendezvous in a rural town called Mercy with the guy she’s been obsessively trading theories with online to prove it. Out in the desert that one woman believes to be a promised land, the other a wasteland, they find themselves barreling toward a more high-stakes, transformative escapade than either of them could have imagined.

Populated with unforgettable characters and set against one of the world’s most oddly enrapturing landscapes, Scavengers is a funny and heartbreaking novel about old injuries, new beginnings, and the lengths to which we’ll go to find, escape, and reinvent ourselves..

Kathleen Boland‘s fiction has appeared in Tin House, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere, and she has received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. The former event director for Catapult/Counterpoint Press/Soft Skull Press, she earned her MFA from Louisiana State University, where she received the Robert Penn Warren Thesis Award.

KITTEN de Stacey Yu

The “what will she do next” charged outsiderness of Emma Cline’s The Guest meets Melissa Broder’s off-kilter humor and Banana Yoshimoto’s luminosity in KITTEN, a debut novel about a detached young woman whose obsession with her boyfriend’s unusual cat ushers her into the possibilities of her own life—but not without first threatening to unravel it.

KITTEN: A Novel
by Stacey Yu
Random House, Summer 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Katie is far from home and fresh out of college in New York, desperate to skirt adulthood’s demands, all too willing to let her wealthy boyfriend make decisions for both of them. But when James takes her on vacation to his family’s house by the sea, he brings Silver, his childhood cat, and the calculus of care changes. Rocked by class dysphoria in the face of the town’s quietly insistent superiority and drifting from James, Katie finds giddy comfort in Silver, who has life figured out. Soon enough, they’re inseparable, and something inside Katie begins to crack open, or maybe just…crack.

It doesn’t help that back in New York, her roommate has abruptly moved out. Or that she’s no longer speaking to her mother, who resents her for leaving Little Rock. As the days pass and her uncomfortable awareness of her dependence on James grows, Katie becomes increasingly enamored of Silver, who looks out for her in mysterious ways. But when her fixation deepens and the stakes of her relationships intensify to the point of detonation, Katie must confront the demands and desires of her life: the one she comes from, the one she longs for, and the one she has.

KITTEN deftly explores the politics of helplessness (especially through the lens of class, family, and race), what we owe—and don’t—to those we care for and who dare care for us, and the startling joy that comes from connecting on our own terms. A tale for our times, KITTEN has all the trappings of a cult classic with mass appeal—a darkly playful, heartfelt, stylish bildungsroman about braving love in a lonely age.

Raised in California and based in London, Stacey Yu is a Chinese-American writer with a community – for now – of over 112,000 literary fiction readers on her TikTok account @literaryfling. She’s also the author of “Blue Hour,” a new literary Substack which just crossed 1,000 followers (launched earlier this month). Every day, Stacey connects with readers hungry for, in her own words, “stories that reflect their own deeply personal yet universal anxieties: growing older, loving the wrong person, missing their mother.” She began her career by working in publishing, first as an intern at Writers House, then as a reader for Alanna Feldman Scouting, and finally, in publicity at Random House before pivoting to branding as her day job, and writing (and talking about books across platforms) as her passion. In 2024, Stacey was a finalist for the UK BookTok Creator of the Year Award. She is twenty-six years old.

THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS de Ben Kafka

With an accessible, witty, and honest voice, a Stanford-trained historian, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist explores the maddening situations and relationships we all find ourselves in, and explains that while there are no quick or easy answers, recognizing and understanding these scenarios as they happen can help us muddle through in a better way.

THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS:
How People, Work and The World Drive Us Crazy
by Ben Kafka
John Murray Press, publication date TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

Despite what much pop psychology will tell you, sometimes it’s not a matter of doing more work on yourself. And while psychopharmacology has made some incredible and life-saving advances, our responses to crazy-making situations are often not purely biochemical. Sometimes the call isn’t coming from inside the house. Sometimes crazy really is other people.

In THE GASLIGHT VARIATIONS, Kafka draws from decades of fascinating psychotherapeutic research as well as his own work with patients to help us understand the mechanics of things that make us rant and rave—passive-aggressive partners, borderline workplaces (a term Kafka coined), bureaucracy that feels like crucifixion—to help us better understand our own responses to these maddening stimuli, and in time, not be so reactive to them.

Ben Kafka is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in Greenwich Village. Originally trained as a historian, he was on the faculty of NYU for many years; he is now affiliated with the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He has been a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities since 2007, and a member of its board since 2012. He also serves on the board of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012).

DISCIPLINE de Larissa Pham

As slim and combustible as a match, NBCC finalist Larissa Pham’s debut novel DISCIPLINE is an astonishment.

DISCIPLINE: A Novel
by Larissa Pham
Random House, Spring 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

Christine is a writer on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, Christine is seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers and past lovers and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he’s read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. What she discovers is both terrifying, and beautiful.

Opening in a seemingly Cuskian mode, DISCIPLINE soon reveals itself to be a delicately explosive high-wire act more in the vein of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies. With a fierce aesthetic eye and elegant, charged prose (as Christine remarks at one point: “I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in a line but as in an arrow pulled back. But I don’t know which one of us holds the bow, and which one of us faces the arrow”), Pham’s novel is a taut triumph about art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

Larissa Pham is the author of the essay collection Pop Song (Catapult, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Nation, the NYTBR, Bookforum, Aperture, Art in America and elsewhere. Her essays and short fiction have been anthologized in Kink (edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, Simon and Schuster, 2021), Wanting: Women Writing on Desire (Catapult, 2023), and Critical Hits, an anthology of writing on video games (Graywolf, 2024). She holds an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Previously, she worked at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, where she focused on messaging and education around the systemic underpinnings of bias-motivated and intimate partner violence, and received training on disability justice and vicarious trauma. She paints occasionally, and currently teaches at the New School’s MFA in creative writing. DISCIPLINE is her first novel.

WHAT’S LEFT de Malcolm Harris

A vital guide for collective political action against the climate apocalypse, from bestselling leftist Malcolm Harris— “a brilliant thinker and writer capable of making the intricacies of economic conditions supremely readable” (Vulture)

WHAT’S LEFT:
Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis
by Malcolm Harris
Little, Brown, April 15, 2025
(via The Gernert Company)

Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying “blah blah blah.” Something has to change—but what, and how?

In What’s Left, acclaimed writer and public intellectual Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What’s Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns.

Vital and transformative, What’s Left is the guidebook we need at the moment we need it most. It confirms Malcolm Harris as next-generation David Graeber or Mike Davis—a historian-activist who shows us where we stand and how we got here, while also blazing a path toward a brighter future.

Malcolm Harris is the author of the national bestseller Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials; and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History. He was born in Santa Cruz, CA and graduated from the University of Maryland.