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News

A rave review from NPR praised the "immensely inviting" world of Lucy Ives’s COSMOGONY. Reviewer Lily Meyer called the collection "snappy, voice-driven...sly and extremely funny," with a title story that is "nearly perfect" and "downright exceptional.” COSMOGONY was featured on a Lit Hub roundup of “22 New Titles to Add to Your TBR Pile,” and three stories from the collection —“Scary Sites,” “The Volunteer,” and “The Poisoners” — were excerpted on n+1, Electric Lit, and Lit Hub. The book was recommended by a bookseller in BuzzFeed’s roundup of “42 Great Books to Read This Spring” as “a playfully odd collection and a breath of fresh air for short stories in general.” New York Magazine also recommended the book for its “playful approach…mingl[ing] the supernatural with the mundane.” Soft Skull published the book on March 9, 2021.

The Debutiful podcast praised the “vivid and urgent prose” of Jakob Guanzon’s debut novel, ABUNDANCE, while the St. Paul Pioneer Press called it “an example of how fiction can be more ‘real’ than real life.” The book was also highlighted in the New York Times Book Review, which called it “relentless” and “worthy,” and is one of Big Other’s “Most Anticipated Small Press Releases: March 2021.” Graywolf published the book on March 2, 2021

Georgia Clark’s upcoming novel, IT HAD TO BE YOU, received a starred review from Booklist. They rave: “Full of immersive details, rich characters, and great banter, Clark's latest…perfectly balances sweetness with an edge of realism that will draw readers in.” Emily Bestler Books will publish the book on May 4, 2021.

LIFE EVENTS by Karolina Waclawiak was selected as the #BookoftheDay for March 30 by the New York Public Library. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published the book on July 28, 2020.

EXHALATION author Ted Chiang spoke to Ezra Klein of The New York Times for his podcast “The Ezra Klein Show.” The award-winning author discussed “A.I., suffering, free will, Superman’s failures, and more.” Chiang also wrote an article for the New Yorker titled “Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter.” Knopf published Exhalation on May 7, 2019.

Debutiful interviewed Jamie Figueroa about her debut novel, BROTHER, SISTER, MOTHER, EXPLORER. When asked about how “being othered…as a child influenced [her] writing,” Figueroa said: “When you were pushed to the margins in the community you grew up in and around, you’re given a very particular vantage point to observe. Because there is this subtext that you are not safe, you become hyper vigilant. You are activating all of your senses, constantly. That can really be fatiguing and traumatizing, but it can make for the perfect environment for an artist to potentially reference that experience of watching and taking in those details. I would say that’s what it did for me.” Catapult published the book on March 2, 2021.

FIGURE IT OUT by Wayne Koestenbaum is a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. The Randy Shilts Award “honors the journalist whose groundbreaking work on the AIDS epidemic for the San Francisco Chronicle made him a hero to many in the community. This award recognizes the best nonfiction book of the year by or about gay men, bisexual men, and/or trans men, or that has significant influence upon the lives of queer men.” Soft Skull published the book on May 5, 2020.

Wayne Koestenbaum’s collection of fables, THE CHEERFUL SCAPEGOAT, is featured on The New York Times Book Review’s New & Noteworthy. They write: “These charmingly insouciant short stories by the noted critic, poet and essayist exhibit the same surreal whimsy that distinguishes his work in other formats.” Meanwhile, Negar Azimi raves for Bookforum: “Koestenbaum’s imaginative magic extends to his sentences, sensuous and syntactically adventurous, rarely a means to an end but ends in themselves—bravura, permissive, frivolous. His lines make one’s own feel anorexic, dull by comparison.” Lastly, the collection received a glowing blurb from COSMOGONY author Lucy Ives, who praises it as “an elegant, rude book—beautiful and acerbically composed. Like scenes scripted by Edward Gorey and directed by Ryan Trecartin, Wayne Koestenbaum’s brief parables manage to be at once delicate and extreme, vile and flowery, coolly precise and gorgeously insane. I don’t know anyone else who writes like this.” Semiotext(e) published the book on March 23, 2021.

EVERYBODY by Oliva Laing has earned another starred review, this time from Kirkus. They write: “Laing reveals in visceral detail society’s terror of ‘different kinds of bodies mixing too freely’ and envisions a future in which that terror no longer exists. Intellectually vigorous and emotionally stirring.” W.W. Norton will publish the book on May 4, 2021.

Robert Jones Jr. joined the Bookworm Podcast for an interview and reading of his novel, THE PROPHETS. G.P. Putnam’s Sons published the book on January 5, 2021.