Please send me your long lists and I'll post your books, so folks have some time to consider the books you will be pitching!
Steph
So Big, Edna Ferber (classic)
- Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"A masterpiece." — Literary Review
"A novel to read and to remember." —New York Times
So Big is a powerful and stirring portrait of one of the most memorable women in American literature, and still resonates today with its unflinching views of poverty, sexism, and the drive for success.
Set in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, So Big tells the story of Selina Peake, orphaned at nineteen after her father is shot and killed in a gambling house. Alone and resolved to make something of her life, Selina gets a job as a schoolteacher in a farming community outside Chicago and falls in love with a kind but struggling farmer. She soon leaves the schoolhouse for long grueling days in the fields and gives birth to a son, Dirk, nicknamed “So Big.” When she finds herself unexpectedly widowed, she takes the reins of the farm, defying convention and all those around her, determined to give Dirk every opportunity to follow his dreams.
Explores themes of ambition versus authenticity; art and beauty in everyday life; and resilience.
Widely regarded as the masterwork of celebrated author and Algonquin Round Table mainstay Edna Ferber—who also penned other classics including Show Boat, Giant, Ice Palace, Saratoga Trunk, and Cimarron.
Ordinary Grace, William Kent Krueger
- WINNER OF THE 2014 EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL
- WINNER OF THE 2014 DILYS AWARD A SCHOOL
- LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2013
From New York Times bestselling author William Kent Krueger, a brilliant novel about a young man, a small town, and murder in the summer of 1961.
“That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.”
New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms.
Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.
Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.
Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
- Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
- Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
- One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
- The Irish Times Best Book of the 21st Century
"A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." —Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers
Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
An international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.
James, Percival Everett
- Pulitzer Prize Winner (2024)
- National Book Award Winner
A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view.
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town.
As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
- National Book Award Winner, 2017
- Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times
- A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, and Aspen Words Literary Prize
This majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward tells the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi. It is a “tour de force” (Oprah Daily) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic.
Jesmyn Ward’s historic second National Book Award–winner is “perfectly poised for the moment” (The New York Times), an intimate portrait of three generations of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle.
Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.
His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister’s lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children’s father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can’t put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances.
When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.
Rich with Ward’s distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic and unforgettable family story and “an odyssey through rural Mississippi’s past and present” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
The Wager, David Grann
A “TOUR DE FORCE OF NARRATIVE NONFICTION” (WSJ) WITH OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NYT BEST SELLER LIST
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, TIME, Smithsonian, NPR, Vulture “Riveting...Reads like a thriller, tackling a multilayered history—and imperialism—with gusto.” —Time
From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.
On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.
The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.
A Book of Life, Peter Kingsley
Hauntingly personal, almost autobiographical, this is not the story of one man's life. It's the secret story of us all. Beyond skepticism and cynicism, belief or imagination, A Book of Life offers a roadmap to reality by showing how it still is possible to experience the sacred truths our ancestors knew and lived — that inside every human being lies the universe and that life itself, in all its splendor, is what lies behind our tiny lives.
This little book is a wide open door into the timeless magic and unfathomable mystery our modern world has managed to forget. Even so, to encourage anyone to read it now would be totally wrong — because it was written to be read not by people today but in a distant future.
