Long Lists for 2025-2026

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).