The Adult Author Fall Preview, "The Stories Behind the Stories," will be held on Tuesday, May 18, from 2:00-3:00 PM ET. The five following titles—inspiring debuts and noteworthy picks in both fiction and nonfiction—will be featured, with the authors and their editors revealing the stories behind the stories that everyone will be talking about this fall.
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| Christine Pride | |
We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza (Atria, $27, 9781982181031, October 5), in conversation with Lindsay Sagnette.
Told from alternating perspectives, We Are Not Like Them is an evocative and riveting novel about the lifelong bond between two women, one Black and one white, whose friendship is indelibly altered by a tragic event—a powerful and poignant exploration of race in America today and its devastating impact on ordinary lives.
Christine Pride is a writer, editor, and longtime publishing veteran who's held editorial posts at many different trade imprints, including Doubleday, Broadway, Crown, Hyperion, and Simon & Schuster. As an editor, Christine has published a range of books, with a special emphasis on inspirational stories and memoirs, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. As a freelance editorial consultant, she does select editing and proposal/content development, as well as teaching and coaching, and pens a regular column, "Race Matters," for Cup of Jo. She lives in New York City.
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| Jo Piazza | |
Jo Piazza is an award-winning journalist, editor, and podcast host. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Marie Claire, Glamour, and other notable publications. She is also the author of Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, How to Be Married, The Knockoff, Fitness Junkie, and If Nuns Ruled the World. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two small children.
Lindsay Sagnette is Vice President and Editorial Director of Atria Books and Washington Square Press. Prior to her current role, she was Editorial Director for Fiction at Crown, Hogarth, and SJP for Hogarth imprints. Over her career she has edited and acquired a distinguished list of titles, including Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, I Almost Forgot About You by Terry McMillan, Ruby by Cynthia Bond, and A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza. In her time at Atria, she has acquired and edited new books by #1 New York Times bestselling authors Jennifer Weiner and Lisa Jewell, as well as Rebecca Serle's instant New York Times bestseller In Five Years, a new novel from New York Times bestseller Jamie Ford, Zakiya Dalila Harris's debut, The Other Black Girl, and New York Times bestseller Akwaeke Emezi's forthcoming romance novel You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty.
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| Ash Davidson | |
Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson (Scribner, $28, 9781982144401, August 3), in conversation with Kathryn Belden.
An epic, immersive debut, Damnation Spring is the deeply human story of a Pacific Northwest logging town wrenched in two by a mystery that threatens to derail its way of life.
Ash Davidson was born in Arcata, California, and attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and MacDowell. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Kathryn Belden, Vice President and Editorial Director, joined the staff at Scribner in 2015. She is interested in the breadth of the American experience, which she pursues through fiction and nonfiction acquisitions. Her engagement with all books begins with voice. General categories in which she works include literary fiction, social and cultural history, race and gender, nature and environment, as well as memoir and biography. Some of the writers she has worked with include Roz Chast, Jessica Harris, Mitchell S. Jackson, Kiese Laymon, Andrew Krivak, Nora Krug, Tom Perrotta, Lisa See, Sarah Smarsh, Jesmyn Ward, John Edgar Wideman, among many others. Previously she worked at Bloomsbury, Four Walls Eight Windows, and Harmony Books/Crown Publishers.
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| Sarah Ruhl | |
Smile by Sarah Ruhl (Simon & Schuster, $27, 9781982150945, October 5), in conversation with Marysue Rucci.
Smile is the extraordinary story of one woman's ten-year medical and metaphysical odyssey that brought her physical, creative, emotional, and spiritual healing, by a MacArthur genius and two-time Pulitzer finalist.
Sarah Ruhl is a playwright, and writer of other things. Her ten plays include In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play), The Clean House, and Eurydice. She has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Tony Award nominee and the recipient of the MacArthur "genius" award. Her plays have been produced on- and off-Broadway, around the country, internationally, and have been translated into over fifteen languages. Her book 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her other books include 44 Poems for You and Letters from Max, with Max Ritvo. She has received the Steinberg Award, the Sam French Award, Feminist Press under 40 award, the Playwright of the Year from the National Theater Conference, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Whiting Award, the Lily Award, and a PEN Award for mid-career playwrights. You can read more about her work online. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tony Charuvastra, a child psychiatrist, and her three children.
Marysue Rucci was named Vice President and Editor-in-Chief, overseeing the Simon & Schuster imprint's fiction program, in 2012. She acquires a range of literary and commercial fiction and narrative nonfiction. Recent titles include: the New York Times bestseller Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman; White Ivy by Susie Yang, a New York Times bestseller and Jenna Reads/Today show Book Club Pick; Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon, longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; The Last House Guest by Megan Miranda, a New York Times bestseller and Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection; Piece of My Heart by #1 New York Times bestselling author Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke; and The Need by Helen Phillips, longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction.
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| Stanley Tucci | |
Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci (Gallery, $28, 9781982168018, October 5), in conversation with Alison Callahan (recorded).
From award-winning actor and food obsessive Stanley Tucci comes Taste, an intimate and charming memoir of life in and out of the kitchen.
Stanley Tucci is an actor, writer, director, and producer. He has directed five films and appeared in over seventy films, countless television shows, and a dozen plays on- and off-Broadway. He has been nominated for an Academy Award, a Tony, and a spoken word Grammy; won two Golden Globes and two Emmys; and has received numerous other critical and professional awards and accolades.
Alison Callahan began her publishing career as a reader for the fiction editors at The New Yorker and The Atlantic. After attending the Radcliffe Publishing Course, she worked at International Creative Management, HarperCollins, and Knopf Doubleday. In 2014, she joined Simon & Schuster, where she is currently Vice President and Executive Editor. In 2015, she helped launch the literary imprint Scout Press with Ruth Ware's debut, In a Dark, Dark Wood. Along the way, the authors Alison has edited include Amy Schumer, Stanley Tucci, Erin Morgenstern, Ann Patchett, Liane Moriarty, America Ferrera, Iain Reid, Armistead Maupin, Daniel Alarcon, and Peter Straub, among many others. Alison's interests include literary fiction with ambitious, cutting edge, and inventive plotlines and characters. She also enjoys stylistic and visionary stories that are just left of center, domestic dramas, fish-out-of-water stories, and books that take readers outside of their comfort zones and perhaps cause them to view the world in a different way. Alison likes to keep her feet on the ground and her head in the clouds.
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| Chloé Cooper Jones | |
Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones (Avid Reader Press, $28, 9781982151997, March 2022), in conversation with Lauren Wein.
Easy Beauty is a memoir which finds the author—after unexpectedly becoming a mother—embarking on a journey across the globe to reclaim the spaces, both physical and emotional, that she'd been denied and denied herself.
Chloé Cooper Jones is a writer based in New York City. In 2020, Chloé was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing for "Fearing for His Life," a profile of Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed the killing of Eric Garner. She was the recipient of the 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and the 2021 Howard Foundation Grant from Brown University. Both grants are in support of Easy Beauty.
Before joining Avid Reader Press, where she oversees the imprint's fiction and memoir program, Lauren Wein spent eight years as an executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and, before that, more than a decade at Grove Atlantic, as an editor and foreign rights director. Since arriving at Avid Reader in 2019, she has published two Reese Book Club selections—Group by Christie Tate and Infinite Country by Patricia Engel, both of which were New York Times bestsellers—and Katharina Volckmer's debut novel, The Appointment, a Triangle Book Award finalist and Folio First Book prize nominee. At HMH, she acquired and edited Adrienne Brodeur's Wild Game (one of Amazon and People's top 10 books of the year), Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (a New York Times bestseller and one of Amazon's top 10 books of the year), Rachel Kadish's The Weight of Ink (winner of a National Jewish Book Award), Derek B. Miller's Norwegian by Night (winner of the Dagger Award for best debut crime novel), Sarai Walker's Dietland (basis for the AMC television series), and Hala Alyan's Salt Houses (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize). Lauren graduated from Cornell University, where she studied English and biblical literature, and is a member of the Jerusalem Book Fair Committee.