Dare Me by Megan Abbott

DARE ME
Megan Abbott
Reagan Arthur Books / Back Bay Books
On sale: August 27, 2013

For a review copy (US and Canada only), or to schedule an interview with Megan Abbott, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] hbgusa.com.

From Edgar Award-Winning Author, Now in Paperback

PRAISE FOR DARE ME
“It’s ‘Heathers’ meets ‘Fight Club’ good.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Abbott’s latest is not only a page-turning mystery—it’s also a close look at teen girls’ ferocious rivalries and intense bonds….A psychologically astute thriller.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Ms. Abbott turns the frothy world of high-school cheerleading into something truly menacing.”—Wall Street Journal

“A very grown-up look at youth culture and how bad behavior can sometimes be redeemed by a couple of good decisions.” —O, the Oprah Magazine

“Following the direction taken by her last novel (The End of Everything), Edgar winner Abbott again delivers an unsettling look at the inner life of adolescent girls in the guise of a crime story….Compelling, claustrophobic and slightly creepy in a can’t-put-it-down way.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A gut-churning tale of revenge, power, desire, and friendship in the insular world of high school cheerleading….Deliciously slick and dark…the plot is tight and intense, building a world in which even the perky flip of a cheerleader’s skirt holds menace.”—Publishers Weekly

ABOUT DARE ME
Rivalries, secret alliances, the looming threat of bodily harm: welcome to the world of competitive high school cheerleading, where friendship and loyalty are pared away to reveal the dark heart of adolescence—a subject about which award-winning novelist Megan Abbott “writes with total authority and an almost desperate intensity,” says Tom Perrotta.

Megan Abbott’s dark and seductive thrillers have been lauded by everyone from Gillian Flynn to Tana French, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal. In DARE ME (on sale August 27, 2013; Reagan Arthur Books / Back Bay Books), Abbott turns her lens to the lives of head varsity cheerleader Beth Cassidy and her lifelong best friend and lieutenant Addy Hanlon.

A far cry from the pom-pom shakers and prom queens of yore, their squad is no fluffy respite or easy ticket to popularity. Dangerous and bruising, today’s acrobatic style of cheerleading is a kind of Fight Club for girls, the most perilous of sports: highly competitive, addictive, and a powerful outlet for all the tumult and complexities of teenage girlhood.

Beth and Addy’s unchallenged reign over this club comes to an abrupt end with the arrival of a new coach, charismatic and seductive, who upsets the established pecking order and wins the girls over with her seeming perfection. When Addy falls under the new coach’s spell, Beth becomes reckless.

A shocking turn of events and a police investigation of the coach and her squad send the tension sky high. As the last game of the season approaches, and as the girls’ physical feats get increasingly dangerous, Addy and Beth are forced to ask where their loyalties truly lie.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award–winning author of five previous novels. She received her PhD in literature from New York University and has taught literature, writing, and film at NYU, the New School, and SUNY Oswego. She lives in New York City.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Cover image for download
Visit Megan’s website
Listen to Megan on the Other People podcast

We Sinners by Hanna Pylväinen

We Sinners: A Novel
Hanna Pylväinen
Picador Paperback
On sale: July 23

For a review copy (US and Canada only), or to schedule an interview with Hanna Pylväinen, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com.

PRAISE FOR WE SINNERS
“In some ways, the Rovaniemi family is like ordinary American families. But the questions about faith—how it binds the family together but also mutates and divides it—elevate it beyond the confines of the traditional domestic novel and into a resonant and magical work of imagination.”—Chicago Tribune

“A beautiful, understated novel…We Sinners hums with rare respect for religious outsiders.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“[A] nuanced portrait of an unnuanced world.”—The New York Times

“It’s impossible not to like these characters, so beautifully drawn, and so very loving to one another.”—Los Angeles Times

“In a debut collection of dazzling economy, precision, and reach, Hanna Pylväinen explores a familiar yet unfamiliar world—a distinct culture of amazing power—from the points of view of ten different family members with immense sensitivity to her characters, and a surprisingly light, deft touch.”
—Jaimy Gordon, author of National Book Award Winner Lord of Misrule

ABOUT WE SINNERS
“[A] spare, quietly devastating novel” (The Boston Globe), WE SINNERS examines the effect that the Rovaniemi family’s fierce dedication to their conservative church has on its eleven members.

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, Hanna Pylväinen captures each singular Rovaniemi voice deftly, seamlessly, delivering their individual struggles both in and outside of the church. She follows both the siblings who remain in the church into their adulthood and those who leave, and explores the difficulties that each group faces. In WE SINNERS, a dazzling, highly praised debut, Pylväinen shows us the remarkable distances and differences that love and faith can sustain, and those they cannot.

ABOUT HANNA PYLVÄINEN
HANNA PYLVÄINEN is from suburban Detroit and lives in Brooklyn. She 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.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Cover image for download
Visit Hanna’s website
Listen to Hanna on Weekend Edition
Listen to Hanna on To The Best of Our Knowledge

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

How Should a Person Be?
Sheila Heti
Picador Paperback
Publication Date: June 25, 2013

For a review copy (US and Canada only), or to schedule an interview with Sheila Heti, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com.

PRAISE FOR HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?
“A vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western city.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker

“Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…unlike any novel I can think of.”
—David Haglund, The New York Times Book Review

“Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral, and sexy.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“One of the bravest, strangest, most original novels I’ve read this year.”
—The Boston Globe

ABOUT HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?
By turns loved and reviled upon its U.S. publication, Sheila Heti’s “breakthrough novel” (Chris Kraus, Los Angeles Review of Books) is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman’s heart and mind. Part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part vivid exploration of the artistic and sexual impulse, HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? earned Heti comparisons to Henry Miller, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, and Flaubert, while shocking and exciting readers with its raw, urgent depiction of female friendship and of the shape of our lives now. Irreverent, brilliant, and completely original, Heti challenges, questions, frustrates, and entertains in equal measure. With urgency and candor she asks: What is the most noble way to love? What kind of person should you be?

ABOUT SHEILA HETI
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 been translated into ten languages and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, McSweeney’s, n+1, The Guardian, and other places. She works as interviews editor at The Believer magazine.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Cover image for download
Visit Sheila Heti’s website
Listen to an interview with Sheila on KCRW’s Bookworm
Read an interview with Sheila at The Rumpus
Read an interview with Sheila at Bomb Magazine

The Hanging Garden by Patrick White

The Hanging Garden
Patrick White
A Picador Paperback Original
Publication Date: May 28, 2013

For a review copy (US and Canada only) please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com.

The first novel by White to be published in nearly thirty years.

PRAISE FOR THE HANGING GARDEN
“[The Hanging Garden is] a complete, complex, and beautiful portrait, an important addition to classic contemporary fiction.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Like all great impressionistic artists, Patrick White recreates the world by depicting the life we think we know in an entirely original and luminous way. Everything about The Hanging Garden, his final novel, is thrilling, consummate, and revelatory. Its belated publication is a rare and wonderful gift to White devotees and a perfect introduction for new readers.”
—Peter Cameron, author of Coral Glynn and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

“Atmospheric and unsettling. White’s writing is infused with a powerful sense of yearning and loss. A book poignant with the uncertainty and bewilderment of childhood’s passing.”
—Tan Twan Eng, author of The Garden of Evening

“White’s novels [are] boldly ambitious, inventive, sensual, eloquent…shrewd and tender about its two protagonists.”—The Spectator (London)

“The late, virtuosic performance of a master. Here is White conjuring in 200 pages one of the most vivid, erotically charged, emotionally wrenching works of fiction, I’ve read this century.”—The Age (Australia)

“The Hanging Garden returns fiction to greatness. Reading it brings exhilaration, tinged with dismay at our diminished expectations of the literary novel….A gift.”—The Monthly (Australia)

ABOUT THE HANGING GARDEN
From the Nobel Prize-Winning author of The Eye of the Storm comes a vivid, visceral tale of childhood friendship and sexual awakening from beyond the echoes of World War II.

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.

Seamlessly shifting among points of view, and written in dazzling prose, White’s mastery of style and highly inventive storytelling transports readers as few writers can.

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.

ABOUT PATRICK WHITE
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.

MORE INFORMATION
Patrick White’s Picador page
Cover image for download

Love Bomb: A Novel by Lisa Zeidner

Love Bomb: A Novel
Lisa Zeidner
Picador Paperback
Publication Date: May 28, 2013

For a review copy (US and Canada only) or to schedule an interview with Lisa Zeidner please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com.

A wedding satire like no other … Now in paperback for wedding season

PRAISE FOR LOVE BOMB
“Smart, funny, irreverent…[Zeidner tosses] well-aimed zingers this way and that while treating her characters with understanding, kindness, and affection. … A perfect summer novel.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“The fluidity of Zeidner’s prose, keeps us eagerly turning the pages….With the pleasing intensity of an action film and none of the boring car chases, Love Bomb is a witty, smart, and densely packed novel.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Explosively funny.”—Vanity Fair

“[I] thoroughly enjoyed Lisa Zeidner’s Love Bomb: It’s wise, laugh-aloud funny, and totally entertaining.”—Nancy Pearl

“It’s Zeidner’s insight into—and keen sympathy for—human foibles that supplies Love Bomb’s biggest impact.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Love Bomb is buoyed by Zeidner’s sympathetic sense of humor… Even the grumpiest reader will warm to Zeidner’s sweeter ideas about love and loyalty, marriage, motherhood, and romance.”—Katie Haegele, The Philadelphia Inquirer

ABOUT LOVE BOMB
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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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 in Camden, New Jersey.

MORE INFORMATION
Cover image for download
Lisa’s website

The Hunger Angel: A Novel by Herta Müller

The Hunger Angel: A Novel
Herta Müller; Translated by Philip Boehm
Picador Paperback
Publication Date: April 30, 2013

For a review copy (US and Canada only), please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com

PRAISE FOR THE HUNGER ANGEL
“A wonderful, passionate, poetic work of literature…Herta Müller is a writer who releases great emotional power through a highly sophisticated, image studded, and often expressionistic prose.”—Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

“This is not just a good novel, it is a great one… Müller is through and through a stylist. Her novel is written in a taut idiomatic German, which breaks into paragraphs of wrenching, Rilkean lyricism…A masterpiece.”—Financial Times

“Written in terse, hypnotic prose…exquisite.”—New Yorker

“Wry and poetic, and Müller’s evocative language makes the abstract concrete as her narrator’s sanity is stretched…Boehm’s translation preserves the integrity of Müller’s gorgeous prose, and Leo’s despondent reveries are at once tragic and engrossing.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The stunning, exhilarating, heartbreaking culmination of Müller’s work as a novelist…A 300-page prose poem of resistance to totalitarian repression, the book is a haunting paean to the human angel–the inventive, imaginative, invincible force that transcends suffering and absement, that defies depersonalization and deprivation to survive, and even thrive.”
—The Wichita Eagle

“A work of rare force, a feat of sustained and overpowering poetry…Müller has the ability to distil concrete objects into language of the greatest intensity and to sear these objects on to the reader’s mind.”—Times Literary Supplement

ABOUT THE HUNGER ANGEL
The new novel from the Nobel Prize–winning author about a Romanian teenager’s detention in a Soviet gulag.

It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.

In her new novel, THE HUNGER ANGEL (Picador / On Sale: April 30, 2013 / ISBN: 9781250032089 / $16.00 / 304pgs.), 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.

Müller has distilled Leo’s struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man’s soul.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.

MORE INFORMATION
Cover image for download
Herta Müller’s page at Picador

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Yoko Ogawa; translated by Stephen Snyder
Picador Original / $14.00 / 176 pages
On Sale: January 29, 2013 (February 2013)
Fiction / Short Stories / Horror

For review copies (US and Canada only), please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com

PRAISE FOR REVENGE

“Yoko Ogawa is an absolute master of the Gothic at its most beautiful and dangerous, and REVENGE is a collection that deepens and darkens with every story you read.”  —Peter Straub

“Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge is a secret garden of dark, glorious flowers: silky, heart-breakingly beautiful… and poison to their roots.”—Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box and Horns

“Ogawa crafts 11 interlocking short stories with eloquent prose that belies the nature of the tales she spins…. With dark calm and disquieting imagery, the author leads readers on a journey of the macabre in a progression of tales that resound long after the last page is turned…. Ogawa’s writing is simple and effective, and her technique for merging the tales demonstrates her mastery of the written word… The author paints each tale exquisitely.”—Kirkus

“Weaving together the morbid tales of 11 unnamed narrators, prolific Japanese author Ogawa (Hotel Iris), a Shirley Jackson Award winner, presents an intense rumination on the precariousness of interconnected lives.”—Publishers Weekly

“Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge is a delicious mosaic that concerns much more than its titular subject, as the messy human emotional spectrum gets exposed in 11 compulsively readable tales that become increasingly multilayered and interlocked.”—Shelf Awareness

“If creepy were a place, Ms. Ogawa has come up with many ways to get there… Even while punctuated [by] macabre flourishes her book maintains its restraint, like a dark alley that’s too quiet, or an insane person acting too calm.”—Susannah Meadows, The New York Times

“From Japan comes Revenge, a spine tingling volume subtitled Eleven Dark Tales, from Yoko Ogawa … These are shiningly sinister stories that grab you by the vulnerable back of the neck and don’t let go.”—ELLE

“Woven through the 11 interconnected tales is a thread of the grotesque, the macabre, the mournful.… Ogawa’s language is both spare and searingly precise, crystallizing the details of everyday existence and capturing the unexpected shock of the bizarre…. Readers willing to explore the murkier edges of the human psyche will not be disappointed.” —Associated Press

“Every act of malice glows creepily against the plain background. It’s a book that ought to be distributed to every fiction-M.F.A. candidate who tends to overwrite: Ogawa is an expert in doing more with less.”—New York Magazine

“[Revenge] erupts into the ordinary world as if from the unconscious or the grave…. A haunting introduction to her work… the overall effect is [that of] David Lynch: the rot that lurks beneath the surface.”—The Economist

“Japan’s best teller of macabre tales… Ogawa is such a master that she pushes the boundaries and suspends the mystery… You never know ‘why,’ only that humans are slaves to time, and we keep on with our lives so that someday we might understand.”—The Daily Beast

“Magnificently macabre … Ogawa is the Japanese master of dread … These tales are not for the faint of heart, but Ms. Ogawa is more “Masque of the Red Death” than she is The Ring. She elevates herself above any limitations of the genre she’s working in.” —The New York Observer

“The deeper you go into this book, the more the oddness ramps up, and the more you start to notice unsettling connections… Powerful and strange. The tangle of sadism and lonely anguish will sneak up on you.”—Charlie Jane Anders, io9

“Interwoven stories from Ogawa involve murder, desire, jealousy, love, and torture, making for creepy but compelling experimental horror that stays with you long past the book’s last page.”—The Atlantic Wire

“Revenge is about as elegant as horror gets, in both style and presentation. … an exceptionally well-done and well-balanced piece of horror-writing, disarmingly detached — and all the more unsettling for that.”—Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review

ABOUT REVENGE
Yoko Ogawa’s REVENGE: Eleven Dark Tales (Picador Original / February 2013 / ISBN: 978-0-3126-7446-5 / $14.00 / 176 pages), is a collection of macabre and fiendishly clever linked stories that flirt with the supernatural. Together they create a haunting tapestry of death—and the afterlife of the living.

An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer’s stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the strange stories she used to tell him. Meanwhile, a surgeon’s lover vows to kill him if he does not leave his wife. Before the lover can follow through on her crime of passion, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman—a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body. When the surgeon promises to repair her condition, he sparks the jealousy of another man who would like to preserve the heart in a custom tailored bag. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders—their fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape.

The eleven eerie and absorbing stories in REVENGE draw together sinister forces and a cast of desperate characters that will leave you haunted after you close the covers.

YOKO OGAWA’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Harper’s Magazine. Since 1988, she has produced more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, which have been published in several countries. In 2008 her novel The Diving Pool won the Shirley Jackson Award for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. Her novel Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010.

MORE INFORMATION
Cover image for download
Yoko Ogawa author photo for download (credit included in file name)
Stephen Snyder on Yoko Ogawa, Haruki Murakami, and the Business of International Literature at the Center for the Art of Translation

Tides of War: A Novel by Stella Tillyard

TIDES OF WAR: A Novel
Stella Tillyard
On Sale: October 30, 2012
Picador
Historical Fiction

For a review copy (US and Canada only) or to schedule an interview with Stella Tillyard, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com

PRAISE FOR TIDES OF WAR
“[A] welcome and entertaining contribution to the genre… In this novel, as in its many predecessors, the Napoleonic era is seldom dull….The book is a page turner.”—Charles McGrath, The New York Times

“As a historian, Tillyard brings a good deal of expertise to her subject. She sees those tendrils of the war that have reached into our time: the effectiveness of guerrilla action, the perils of worker unrest, the appeal of technological innovation, the dangers and promises of medical curiosity. Above all, she depicts the drive toward independence by women of all classes and types.”—Jane Smiley, The Washington Post

“Historian Stella Tillyard’s passion for the Regency Period shines through in her first novel, which is as painstakingly detailed as any piece of nonfiction….The descriptions of the era, from the battlegrounds of the Peninsula War to the lab that captivates Harriet back in England, are enchanting.”—USA Today

“This sophisticated, unusual portrait of Regency society will appeal to all readers of historical fiction, especially admirers of Bernard Cornwell.”—Library Journal, Starred Review / A Top 10 Book of 2011

“Tillyard is at her best with historical figures and when depicting the era; readers share Harriet’s discovery of the waltz, Jane Austen, and ice cream, and witness cutting-edge battlefield surgeries under real-life Surgeon Gen. James McGrigor.”—Publishers Weekly

ABOUT TIDES OF WAR
An epic novel about love and war, set in Regency England and Spain during the Peninsular War (1812-15), by the acclaimed historian and bestselling author of Aristocrats

Tides of War opens in England with the recently married, charmingly unconventional Harriet preparing to say goodbye to her husband, James, as he leaves to join the Duke of Wellington’s troops in Spain.

Harriet and James’s interwoven stories of love and betrayal propel this sweeping and dramatic novel as it moves between Regency London on the cusp of modernity—a city in love with science, the machine, money—and the shocking violence of war in Spain. With dazzling skill Stella Tillyard explores not only the effects of war on the men at the front but also the freedoms it offers the women left behind. As Harriet befriends the older and protective Kitty, Lady Wellington, her life begins to change in unexpected ways. Meanwhile, James is seduced by the violence of battle, and then by love in Seville.

As the novel moves between war and peace, Spain and London, its large cast of characters includes the serial adulterer and war hero the Duke of Wellington, and the émigrés Nathan Rothschild and Frederic Winsor who will usher in the future, creating a world brightly lit by gaslight where credit and financial speculation rule. Whether describing the daily lives and desires of strong female characters or the horror of battle, Tides of War is set to be the fiction debut of the year.

ABOUT STELLA TILLYARD
Stella Tillyard has been described by Simon Schama as “dazzling . . . a phenomenally gifted writer.” Her books include Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832; Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763-1798; and most recently A Royal Affair: George III and his Troublesome Siblings. She has lived in the United States and Italy and now lives in London.

MORE INFORMATION
Cover image for download
Stella Tillyard’s website
Read an excerpt

Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story

OBJECT LESSONS
The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story
Edited by The Paris Review
On Sale: October 2, 2012
A Picador Paperback Original
Fiction / Short Stories / Literature

For a review copy (US and Canada only) or to schedule an interview with Lorin Stein (Editor of The Paris Review) or Sadie Stein (Deputy Editor of The Paris Review), please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com

PRAISE FOR OBJECT LESSONS
“The editors call this a guide for young writers and readers interested in literary technique, and the book achieves that purpose while also serving as a tribute to the role The Paris Review has played in maintaining the diversity of the short story form. The collection reminds us that good stories are always whispering into each other’s ears.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A compendium of The Paris Review’s short story hits, curated with the ambitious, aspiring writer in mind. … Jeffrey Eugenides’ discussion of Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” captures that story’s heartbreak and serves as an essay on the virtues of the form itself. … A smart showcase of a half-century’s worth of pathways in fiction.”
—Kirkus

“Who needs an MFA when there’s The Paris Review?”
—The Millions

ABOUT OBJECT LESSONS
Twenty contemporary authors introduce twenty sterling examples of the short story from the pages of The Paris Review.

What does it take to write a great short story? In OBJECT LESSONS, twenty contemporary masters of the genre answer that question, sharing favorite stories from the pages of The Paris Review. Over the course of the last half century, the Review has launched hundreds of careers while publishing some of the most inventive and best-loved stories of our time. This anthology—the first of its kind—is more than a treasury: it is an indispensable resource for writers, students, and anyone else who wants to understand fiction from a writer’s point of view.

A repository of incredible fiction, OBJECT LESSONS includes:
Ann Beattie on Craig Nova’s “Another Drunk Gambler”
David Bezmozgis on Leonard Michaels’s “City Boy”
Lydia Davis on Jane Bowles’s “Emmy Moore’s Journal”
Dave Eggers on James Salter’s “Bangkok”
Jeffrey Eugenides on Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”
Mary Gaitskill on Mary Beth Hughes’s “Pelican Song”
Aleksander Hemon on Jorge Luis Borges’s “Funes the Memorious”
Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Glynn’s “Except for the Sickness I’m Quite Healthy Now. You Can Believe That.”
Ben Marcus on Donald Barthelme’s “Several Garlic Tales”
Lorrie Moore on Ethan Canin’s “The Palace Thief”
Mona Simpson on Norman Rush’s “Lying Presences”
Ali Smith on Lydia Davis’s “Ten Stories from Flaubert”
Wells Tower on Evan S. Connell’s “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge”
…and more

FROM THE EDITORS’ NOTE
“Some chose classics. Some chose stories that were new even to us. Our hope is that this collection will be useful to young writers, and to others interested in literary technique. Most of all, it is intended for readers who are not (or are no longer) in the habit of reading short stories. We hope these object lessons will remind them how varied the form can be, how vital it remains, and how much pleasure it can give.”

ABOUT THE PARIS REVIEW
Founded in Paris by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton in 1953, The Paris Review began with a simple editorial mission: “Dear reader,” William Styron wrote in a letter in the inaugural issue, “The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they’re good.”

MEDIA
Interview with Sadie Stein at The Millions
Interview with Lorin Stein at The Rumpus
Interview with Sadie at Days of Yore
Interview with Lorin at Days of Yore
Interview with Lorin at the Huffington Post
Interview with Lorin on the Other People podcast
Chicago Tribune review
Christian Science Monitor review
Jeffrey Eugenides introduces Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” (excerpt)
Aleksandar Hemon introduces Borges’s “Funes the Memorious” (excerpt)

MORE INFORMATION
Cover image for download
The Paris Review website
The Paris Review on Facebook
The Paris Review on Twitter

Emperor of Lies: A Novel by Steve Sem-Sandberg

Emperor of Lies
Steve Sem-Sandberg
Translated from the Swedish by
Sarah Death
On sale: July 3, 2012
Paperback
Fiction / Historical Fiction

PRAISE FOR EMPEROR OF LIES
“Fiction of true moral force, brilliantly sustained and achieved…I find it difficult to think of any book that has had such an immediate and powerful impact on me…Brave and brillant.”—Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

“Was Rumkowski a sinner or a saint? Collaborator or a liberator? It is around this central question that The Emperor of Lies swirls, providing along the way. . . cinematic detail that invites immersion in the way few contemporary novels of serious ambition do.”—Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Book Review

“A resolute masterpiece, The Emperor of Lies looks for truths in the great domain of dissolving syntax and shadows we call history….A great achievement.”—Sebastian Barry, Salon

ABOUT EMPEROR OF LIES
In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second-largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lódz. Its chosen leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman and orphanage director. From one of Scandinavia’s most critically acclaimed and bestselling authors, The Emperor of Lies chronicles the tale of Rumkowski’s monarchical rule over a quarter million Jews. Driven by a titanic ambition, he sought to transform the ghetto into a productive industrial complex and strove to make it —and himself — indespensable to the Nazi regime. Drawing on the chronicles of life in the Lódz Ghetto, Steve Sem-Sandberg captures the full panorama of human resilience and asks the most difficult questions: Was Rumkowski a ruthless opportunist, an accessory to the Nazi regime driven by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatic strategist who managed to save Jewish lives through his collaboration policies?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Sem-Sandberg was born in 1958. He divides his time between Vienna and Stockholm.

More Information
Emperor of Lies on the Picador website
Cover image for download
Author photo for download

For a review copy, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com