What To Read

Every once in a while, a book comes along that leaves you breathless. On October 18 at 7pm, you’ll have an opportunity to hear from some of the publishing industry’s most esteemed editors, talking about forthcoming books that left them breathless. Join us on Zoom for what promises to be an unforgettable conversation about books by the editors who helped shape and publish them. 

Registration is now closed for this event. (Tertulia members: make sure you sign up via the members RSVP link in your e-mail so that you also have a chance to win an advance copy of these books before they are available to the public.)  

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Releases December 12

Longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, Prophet Song will be released stateside this December. The book follows the life of an Irish mother and scientist who fights to keep her family together as Ireland slips into totalitarianism after the rise of the rightwing National Alliance party. The Guardian called the book 'a literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere.'

"I have been reading and adoring Paul’s books ever since Red Sky in Morning.  I had come so close to offering time and time again on his novels and something always, frustratingly, seemed to get in the way of our going forth, blast it.  I think Paul and his agent, Simon Trewin, had just about given up on me because—here’s your “inside baseball” story—Simon didn’t submit Prophet Song to me initially.  It came first via Paul’s long-term French publisher, Francis Geffard at Albin Michel.  Francis is an editor I’ve known for decades, whose extraordinary list of international authors I’ve long admired, and who knows my taste in books well.  He wrote to me last spring and said, “Elisabeth, you really need to read this.  I think it’s Paul’s masterpiece.”  Of course I did immediately, fell hard in love, and went to bat.  My offer was on the table when he was longlisted for the Booker, and bless Paul and Simon, they did not “shop it” but accepted with enthusiasm.  I’d WhatsApped Paul at 6:00 a.m. (US time) from a shabby motel room in Rockland, Maine last July, we spoke for a long time, and then we were off.

 I have been fascinated by what some traditionally grounded, realist focused writers turned to during lockdown.  Paul isn’t the only writer who traveled into the near future to see what might so quickly lie ahead.  But he is the one who wrote a novel so immediate, so very likely to be happening as soon as tomorrow, who wrote so convincingly from a mother’s perspective with such prescience, intuition, and intimacy.  I loved it from the first page and grew only more desperate to publish it as I finished.  He is an extraordinarily vital storyteller.  I can’t imagine Prophet Song won’t appeal to every person with a beating heart."

—Elisabeth Schmitz is VP, Editorial Director of Grove Atlantic.

Her Side of the Story by Alba de Céspedes

Releases November 14

Famous during her lifetime in postwar Italy for her writing and political resistance, Alba de Céspedes practically disappeared from public awareness for decades. The reissue of her Forbidden Notebook last year was praised as the revival of a feminist classic, which has found passionate fandom from devoted readers of writers such as Elena Ferrante, Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg. Originally written in 1949, this newly translated edition of Her Side of the Story tells the story of a young woman looking back on her life in Rome before and during WWII. 

“As an Italian in publishing, people always ask me who the next Elena Ferrante is. Well, as a huge Ferrante fan, I’ve been looking, and there really isn’t one. But if you were to ask me who preceded and inspired Ferrante, the answer is easy – it’s Alba de Céspedes.

De Céspedes was an Italian-Cuban feminist writer -- her grandfather was Cuba’s first president and her father was the Cuban ambassador to Italy. She worked as a journalist and screenwriter in Rome, where she was jailed twice for her anti-fascist activities during WWII and where two of her novels were banned by Mussolini’s censors.

 I had seen Alba’s novels on my parents’ bookshelves back home in Milan but I only started to read her work in earnest a few years ago when Mondadori decided to reprint her novels in an effort to reestablish her place in the canon. So when an agent approached me about acquiring English-language rights to her books, I quickly pre-empted two of her novels, starting with The Forbidden Notebook, which we published last February with an intro by Jhumpa Lahiri and Her Side of the Story, which we’re publishing in November with an afterword by Ferrante herself.

 In her afterword, Ferrante calls Her Side of the Story a “book of encouragement.” Because what de Céspedes does so well here, and Ferrante emulates in her own work, is to show that women trapped in the most banal domestic existence still have emotions, memories, and aspirations that are worthy of literary scrutiny. She also shows the extent a woman is willing to go to if she is denied the promise of romantic love. And as I’ve been telling my colleagues, this is the most Ferrante-esque novel I’ve read that’s not actually by Ferrante. I hope you love it!”

 —Alessandra Bastagli is the Editorial Director of Astra Publishing House.

Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn

Releases January 23

This debut novel follows a young author who begins to answer the cell phone texts of her dead brother after his mysterious suicide. She quickly becomes untethered from reality as she spins out a web of lies that are enmeshed with her grief and trauma. Blackburn, already an acclaimed short-fiction writer, is getting rave early reviews for this innovative first novel.

Venita Blackburn arrived to FSG as an extraordinary short story writer known for her dynamic, boundary-pushing fiction that often provides both hilarious and perspective-shifting looks at Blackness, family, queerness, and, the pains of adolescence, particularly young womanhood. I published her short story collection, How to Wrestle a Girl, in 2021, which was her first book with a major publishing house; it was also the first book of a two-book contract (editors often sign up promising fiction writers to a two book deal, in order to keep them on the list after the success of the first book. Most times, this means we don’t read a word of the second book, because it hasn’t been written yet).

Venita then more or less disappeared into her writing life—she’s not too active on social media, which gives her an air of very cool secrecy to me. So I was thrilled when her agent emailed me out of the blue last summer with her long-awaited debut novel, the much-hyped but very mysterious second book in the deal. I knew right away that Venita had gone above and beyond, bringing the form-bending and whiplash humor of her short fiction and extending it into a deeply moving and unpredictable novel, one that kept with her big themes while deepening her writing into uncharted emotional terrain. Each time I thought I was getting a certain kind of novel—sci-fi, or rom-com, or grief narrative—the book turned inside out, keeping me on my toes and absolutely in awe.

After my first read, I realized that I had lucked out beyond belief: the novel that would become Dead in Long Beach, California was a debut in name only, a work of astounding, even audacious, world building. A book this propulsive and high-concept could only come from a writer this original, who I see as writing somewhere between the stories of George Saunders, Karen Russell, and Octavia E. Butler. How’s that for a family tree? The journey this novel and its flawed, profoundly human main character takes you on—in its exploration of Blackness, inheritance, love, and loss—will remain with you. And you will also probably feel pretty proud—and a lot smarter—for conquering its twists and turns. Open this book up, and get ready to have your brain rewired like I did. This is a writer who is one of one.

—Jackson Howard is an editor at the MCD imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang

Releases October 24

K-Ming Chang, author of Gods of Want and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, has written a poetic and visceral story that straddles surrealist fantasy and folklore. The book is about two best friends who learn that they succeed generations of dog-headed women and woman-headed dogs whose bloodlines bind them together. When the two girls are separated, they will go to extreme lengths to maintain their intimate bond.

Organ Meats started as it ended, with two girls who love each other deeply and feel the sense of devotion and responsibility that only the truest of love makes us feel. There were changes as we revised the book, of course—my favorite of which is how one-character builds back the others body while she stuck in a coma—but the goal of Organ Meats remained the same: to explore the limitations and possibilities of women’s roles, and how they can be explored, disrupted, and queered through myth and fantasy.

 K-Ming is steadfastly inspired by three things: Taiwanese history, mythology and myth-making; the human-animal relation/alliance; and every part of women—the grotesque and absurdly sexy; the wondrous and the otherworldly intelligent. She became fascinated by the idea of “feral” vs “domestic.” Dogs, born of wolves, were domesticated, similarly to the women in her family who were trained to shed their own desires (& selves) in favor of their male counterparts. With Organ Meats, K-Ming asks what kind of violence we consider “natural?”

K-Ming and I have always thought of Organ Meats as the end of a lose-trilogy with her first two books, Bestiary and Gods of Want. All three create a mythic triptych that is thematically and stylistically bound. Using history, ancestry, origin, and the mythical nature of childhood, we allowed the work on every character she’s ever wrote to help guide Anita and Raine through their bodily encounters, fablelike adventures, and as always, in how they can protect and love themselves and one another.

 —Nicole Counts is Senior Editor at One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

The Madstone: A Novel by Elizabeth Crook 

Releases November 7

This novel set in Texas Hill Country has already been compared with classics like Lonesome Dove and News of the World for conjuring the Wild West in an unforgettable story of adventure and love. The book follows a young frontier tradesman and a pregnant mother and child as they band together to flee Texas in 1868 to escape from outlaws bent on revenge. 

In Elizabeth Crook’s latest novel, The Madstone, our winsome narrator, Benjamin Shreve, attempts to convey to safety, in a daring journey across Texas, a pregnant young woman, Nell, and her young son, Tot. The novel opens in 1868, in the hill country, with mother and son fleeing outlaws bent on revenge, for reasons that become plain as the story unfolds. The adventure includes wonderfully entertaining touches such as the eponymous madstone (if you don’t know what one is, wait for it!) and a cursed necklace. To say much more would be to spoil it for you. Yet amid all the page-turning action lies palpable heart. As Benjamin, Nell, and Tot discover, sometimes the bonds between members of a found family are even stronger than blood ties.

If you are at all like me, you are sure to fall in love with Benjamin’s droll and charming narration. His voice is so transporting, in fact, that I experienced The Madstone with a kind of childlike wonder I have not felt since I was in the embrace of beloved narrators such as Scout Finch, Huck Finn, Mattie Ross, and John Grimes. The unique combination of dry humor and earnestness with the unerring rendering of scenes makes reading this novel an incomparable treat.

Ultimately this is a story about a truly kindhearted person putting everything on the line to do something noble and sacrificial for someone else in a mean old world—something we don’t have nearly enough of. Early readers have rapturously invoked Larry McMurty, Paulette Jiles, Annie Proulx, Charles Portis, and Cormac McCarthy. But Elizabeth Crook has her own originality, and for my money not even the ghost of Mr. Portis himself could outdo The Madstone.

—Ben George is Executive Editor at Little, Brown.