Here are the books I’m working on this spring. To request review copies or to inquire about an interview with the authors, please email me at gabrielle.gantz [@] picadorusa.com.
MAY
Title: How to Change the World
Author: John-Paul Flintoff
Format: Paperback Original Series
On Sale: April 23, 2013
Description: We all want to live in a better world, but sometimes it feels that we lack the ability to make a difference. In HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD, author, broadcaster, and journalist John-Paul Flintoff offers a powerful reminder that through the generations society has been transformed by the actions of individuals who understood that if they didn’t like something they could change it. Combining fresh new insights from history, and other disciplines, this book will give you a sense of what might just be possible, as well as the inspiration and the courage you need to improve and change the world.
Author Bio: JOHN-PAUL FLINTOFF is an author, broadcaster and journalist. He has written several highly praised books. In one, Sew Your Own, he investigated sweat shops and global resource shortages. As a writer with the Financial Times and The Sunday Times, Flintoff has changed government policy, and raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for good causes. He lives in London. You can find him online at http://www.flintoff.org/
Title: How to Find Fulfilling Work
Author: Roman Krznaric
Format: Paperback Original Series
On Sale: April 23, 2013
Description: The desire for fulfilling work is one of the great aspirations of our age. HOW TO FIND FULFILLING WORK explores the competing claims we face for money, status, and meaning in our lives. Drawing on wisdom from a variety of disciplines, cultural thinker Roman Krznaric sets out a practical guide to negotiating the labyrinth of choices, overcoming fear of change, and finding a career in which you thrive. Overturning a century of traditional thought about career change, Krznaric reveals just what it takes to find life-enhancing work.
Author Bio: ROMAN KRZNARIC is a cultural thinker and founding faculty member of The School of Life. He advises organizations including Oxfam and the United Nations on using empathy and conversation to create social change, and has been named by The Observer as one of Britain’s leading lifestyle philosophers. His works, including The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live and The First Beautiful Game: Stories of Obsession in Real Tennis, have been translated into over a dozen languages. You can find him online at http://www.romankrznaric.com.
Title: This is How: Surviving What You Think You Can’t
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Format: Paperback
On Sale: April 23, 2013
Description: If you’re fat and fail every diet, if you’re thin but can’t get thin enough, if you lose your job, if your child dies, if you are diagnosed with cancer, if you always end up with exactly the wrong kind of person, if you always end up alone, if you can’t get over the past, if your parents are insane and ruining your life, if you really and truly wish you were dead, if you feel like it’s your destiny to be a star, if you believe life has a grudge against you, if you don’t want to have sex with your spouse and don’t know why, if you feel so ashamed, if you’re lost in life. If you have ever wondered, how am I supposed to survive this? THIS IS HOW: Surviving What You Think You Can’t is a groundbreaking book by Augusten Burroughs that explores how to survive what you think you can’t.
Author Bio: AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS is the number one New York Times bestselling author of A Wolf at the Table, Possible Side Effects, Magical Thinking, Dry, Running with Scissors, and Sellevision. You can find him online at http://www.augusten.com.
Title: Dry.: A Memoir (10th Anniversary Edition)
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Format: Paperback
On Sale: April 23, 2013
Description: You may not know it, but you’ve met Augusten Burroughs. You’ve seen him on the street, in bars, on the subway, at restaurants: a twenty-something guy, nice suit, works in advertising. Regular. Ordinary. But when the ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the drain by having twelve; when the ordinary person went home at midnight, Augusten never went home at all. Loud, distracting ties, automated wake-up calls and cologne on the tongue could only hide so much for so long… when Augusten is forced to examine himself, something actually starts to click and that’s when he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. What follows is a memoir that’s as moving as it is funny, as heartbreaking as it is true. DRY.: A Memoir is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power.
Author Bio: AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS is the number one New York Times bestselling author of A Wolf at the Table, Possible Side Effects, Magical Thinking, Dry, Running with Scissors, and Sellevision. You can find him online at http://www.augusten.com/.
Title: The Hunger Angel
Author: Herta Müller
Format: Paperback
On Sale: April 30, 2013
Description: In her new novel, THE HUNGER ANGEL Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers’ trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life.
Author Bio: HERTA MÜLLER is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the European Literature Prize. She is the author of, among other books, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment. Born in Romania in 1953, Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceauşescu’s secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987.
JUNE
Title: The Hanging Garden
Author: Patrick White
Format: Paperback Original
On Sale: May 28, 2013
Description: Patrick White, the most revered figure in modern Australian literature, born in England 1912 and raised in Australia, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. THE HANGING GARDEN is his first novel to be published in nearly 30 years.
THE HANGING GARDEN, transcribed posthumously from a handwritten manuscript, is a breathtaking and fully satisfying work that reads as a complete story.
Sydney, Australia, 1942. Two children, on the cusp of adolescence, have been spirited away from the war in Europe and given shelter in a house on Neutral Bay, taken in by the charity of an old widow who wants little to do with them. The boy, Gilbert, has escaped the Blitz. The girl, Eirene, lost her father in a Greek prison. Left to their own devices, the children forge a friendship of startling honesty, forming a bond of uncommon complexity which they sense will shape their destinies for years to come.
Author Bio: PATRICK WHITE was born in England 1912 and raised in Australia. He became the most revered figure in modern Australian literature, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. He died in September 1990.
Title: Love Bomb
Author: Lisa Zeidner
Format: Paperback
On Sale: May 28, 2013
Description: In quaint Haddonfield, New Jersey, Tess is about to marry Gabe in her childhood home. Her mother, Helen, is panicked about the guest list—which promises warring exes, racial tensions, and way too many psychiatrists. But the most challenging guest is uninvited: a woman in a wedding dress, wearing a gas mask and toting a sawed-off shotgun, with a bomb trigger strapped to her arm. While the warm, wise Helen attempts to control the hysteria, the hostages unravel their connections to their captor and to one another. Together, they await the arrival of the SWAT team—and the moment when “the terrorist of love” reveals her true motives.
Explosive, intelligent, and utterly uproarious, LOVE BOMB is at once a tough, tender social comedy and a romance with guts, written out of affection for everything it skewers.
Author Bio: LISA ZEIDNER has published four previous novels, including the critically acclaimed Layover, and two books of poems. Her stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, GQ, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is a professor in the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University. You can find her online at http://www.lisazeidner.com/.
JULY
Title: How Should a Person Be?
Author: Sheila Heti
Format: Paperback
On Sale: June 25, 2013
Description: Hailed as “a breakthrough” (Chris Kraus, Los Angeles Review of Books) for the critically acclaimed Sheila Heti, HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman’s heart and mind. It has ignited conversation and earned Heti comparisons to Joan Didion, Henry Miller, Kathy Acker, and Gustave Flaubert.
Part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part bawdy exploration of the artistic impulse, it shocked and excited critics and readers with its raw, urgent depiction of female friendships and of the shape of our lives right now. In a novel “unlike any other,” Heti breathes new life into the essential questions: What is the most noble way to love? What kind of person should you be?
Author Bio: SHEILA HETI is the author of several books of fiction, including The Middle Stories and Ticknor; and an essay collection written with Misha Glouberman, The Chairs Are Where the People Go. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, McSweeney’s, n+1, and The Guardian, among other places. She works as interviews editor at The Believer magazine. You can find her online at http://www.sheilaheti.net/.
Title: Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
Author: Rosecrans Baldwin
Format: Paperback
On Sale: June 25, 2013
Description: Rosecrans Baldwin had always dreamed of living in Paris, ever since vacationing there when he was nine. So he couldn’t refuse an offer to work at a Parisian ad agency—even though he had no experience in advertising and hardly spoke French.
But the Paris that Rosecrans and his wife, Rachel, arrived in wasn’t the romantic city he remembered, and over the next eighteen months, his dogged American optimism was put to the test: at work (where he wrote booklets on breastfeeding), at home (in the hub of a massive construction project), and at every confusing dinner party in between. A hilarious and refreshingly honest take on life in one of the world’s most beloved cities, PARIS, I LOVE YOU is a book about a young man whose preconceptions are usurped by the oddities of a vigorous, nervy metropolis—which is just what he needs to fall in love with Paris a second time.
Author Bio: ROSECRANS BALDWIN is the author of the novel You Lost Me There, an NPR Best Book of 2010 and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He is a cofounder of the online magazine The Morning News.
Title: Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West
Author: Rubén Martínez
Format: Paperback
On Sale: June 25, 2013
Description: The economic boom was writ nowhere as large as on the West. Over the past decade, the most iconic of American landscapes has undergone a political and demographic upheaval comparable only to the opening of the frontier. In DESERT AMERICA, a work of powerful reportage and memoir, acclaimed author Rubén Martínez explores a world of extremes: drug addiction flourishing in the shadow of some of America’s richest zip codes, a race war near the banks of the Rio Grande, and Native Americans hunting down Mexican migrants crossing the most desolate stretch of the border.
Author Bio: RUBÉN MARTÍNEZ, an Emmy-winning journalist and poet, is the author of Crossing Over and The New Americans. He holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University.
Title: Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail
Author: Rubén Martínez
Format: Paperback
On Sale: June 25, 2013
Description: In the decade since CROSSING OVER first appeared, illegal immigration from Mexico has only become more fraught and more lethal, the rallying cry of nativist politics and a pawn in the war on terror. Yet the U.S.-Mexican border remains one of the most permeable boundaries in the world, breached daily by Mexicans in search of work. Thousands die crossing the line, and those who reach “the other side” are branded as illegals, undocumented and unprotected.
Following the exodus of the Chávez clan, an extended Mexican family who lost three sons in a tragic border accident, Martínez traces the migrants’ progress from their small southern-Mexican town of Cherán to California, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Far from joining the melting pot, Martínez argues, the seven million migrants in the U.S. are creating a new culture that is dramatically altering both Mexico and the United States.
Hailed as “valuable,” “passionate,” and “terrific,” Crossing Over puts a human face on the phenomenon of Mexican immigration, and remains a beautifully written classic of our time.
Author Bio: RUBÉN MARTÍNEZ, an Emmy-winning journalist and poet, is the author of Crossing Over and The New Americans. He holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University.
AUGUST
Title: We Sinners
Author: Hanna Pylväinen
Format: Paperback
On Sale: July 23, 2013
Description: Despite the extent to which each of the Rovaniemis lives are built around their church—music, television, makeup, and even school dances are strictly prohibited—their places in the wider world and their paths to get there could not be more different. Through alternating perspectives, Pylväinen captures each singular Rovaniemi voice deftly, seamlessly, delivering their individual struggles both in and outside of the church.
Author Bio: HANNA PYLVÄINEN graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was also a Zell Postgraduate Fellow. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony residency, a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a 2012 Whiting Award. You can find her online at http://www.hannapylvainen.com/.
Title: Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power
Author: Seth Rosenfeld
Format: Paperback
On Sale: July 23, 2013
Description: SUBVERSIVES traces the FBI’s secret involvement with three iconic figures at Berkeley during the 1960s: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal university president Clark Kerr. Through their converging narratives, the award-winning investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld tells a dramatic and disturbing story of FBI surveillance, illegal break-ins, infiltration, planted news stories, poison-pen letters, and secret detention lists.
The FBI spent more than one million dollars trying to block the release of the secret files on which SUBVERSIVES is based. This is an extraordinary view of what the government was up to during a turning point in our nation’s history.
Author Bio: SETH ROSENFELD was for many years an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, where his article about the FBI and the Free Speech Movement won seven national awards. You can find him online at http://www.sethrosenfeld.com/.
The Hunger Angel: A Novel
This is How: Surviving What You Think You Can’t
The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us
WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend
Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Books on Tap 