25 NOV 2019 · Micah Dean Hicks is the author of the story collection Electricity and Other Dreams—a book of dark fairy tales and bizarre fables that won the 2012 New American Fiction Prize. He is also the winner of the 2014 Calvino Prize, the 2016 Arts and Letters Prize, and the 2015 Wabash Prize. His stories and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines ranging from the New York Times to Lightspeed to the Kenyon Review. Hicks teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His latest book is Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones (John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Jane is haunted. Since she was a child, she has carried a ghost girl that feeds on the secrets and fears of everyone around her, whispering to Jane what they are thinking and feeling, even when she doesn’t want to know. Henry, Jane’s brother, is ridden by a genius ghost that forces him to build strange and dangerous machines. Their mother is possessed by a lonely spirit that burns anyone she touches. In Swine Hill, a place of defeat and depletion, there are more dead than living. When new arrivals begin scoring precious jobs at the last factory in town, both the living and the dead are furious. This insult on the end of a long economic decline sparks a conflagration. Buffeted by rage on all sides, Jane must find a way to save her haunted family and escape the town before it kills them.

25 NOV 2019 · Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru. She is the author of the memoir American Chica, a finalist for the National Book Award; two novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights; and The Writing Life, a collection from her well-known column for The Washington Post. She is the author of Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story (Simon & Schuster). Against the background of a thousand years of vivid history, acclaimed writer Marie Arana tells the timely and timeless stories of three contemporary Latin Americans whose lives represent three driving forces that have shaped the character of the region: exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone). In Silver, Sword, and Stone Marie Arana seamlessly weaves these stories with the history of the past millennium to explain three enduring themes that have defined Latin America since pre-Columbian times: the foreign greed for its mineral riches, an ingrained propensity to violence, and the abiding power of religion. What emerges is a vibrant portrait of a people whose lives are increasingly intertwined with our own.

25 NOV 2019 · Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes the Atlantic's weekly "Dear Therapist" advice column and contributes regularly to the New York Times. She is on the Advisory Council for Bring Change to Mind and has appeared in media such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, the CBS Early Show, CNN, and NPR's Fresh Air. Gottlieb is the New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which is being adapted as a television series with Eva Longoria. In a starred review, Kirkus calls it, “An irresistibly addictive tour of the human condition." One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose of­fice she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but. With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.

25 NOV 2019 · Lauren Acampora’s short fiction and other writing has appeared in publications such as the Paris Review, Guernica, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Antioch Review, and LitHub. She is a graduate of Brown University, earned an MFA from Brooklyn College, and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Writers OMI International Residency, and the Ragdale Foundation. She is the author of The Wonder Garden. Her latest book, The Paper Wasp (Grove Press) is a riveting, knife-edge story of two women’s dark friendship of twisted ambition, set against the backdrop of contemporary Hollywood. In small-town Michigan, Abby Graven leads a solitary life. Once a bright student on the cusp of a promising art career, she now languishes in her childhood home, trudging to and from her job as a supermarket cashier. Each day she is taunted from the magazine racks by the success of her former best friend Elise, a rising Hollywood starlet whose life in pictures Abby obsessively scrapbooks. When Abby encounters Elise again at their high school reunion, she is surprised and warmed that Elise still considers her not only a friend, but a brilliant storyteller, and true artist. When Elise offhandedly tells Abby to look her up if she’s ever in LA, Abby soon arrives on her doorstep. There, Abby becomes enmeshed in Elise’s world, even as she guards her own dark secrets and desire for greatness. As she edges closer to Elise, and her own artistic ambitions, the dynamic shifts between the two friends—until Abby can see only one way to grasp the future that awaits her.

25 NOV 2019 · Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, journalist Karina Sainz Borgo has written two nonfiction books, Tráfico y Guaire, and Caracas Hip-Hop. In It Would be Night in Caracas (Harper Collins), her first work of fiction, Sainz, for the past 10 years a resident of Spain, chronicles one woman’s struggle to survive amid the dangerous, sometimes deadly, turbulence of daily life in modern Venezuela. After burying her mother, her only family, Adelaida Falcon faces alone a country that has disintegrated into violence and anarchy, where citizens are increasingly pitted against each other. It Would Be Night in Caracas, translated from Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer, is a chilling reminder of how quickly the world we know can crumble. (Caracas, Venezuela, 1982) Periodista y narradora residente en España. Ha publicado los libros de periodismo Caracas hip-hop y Tráfico y Guaire. El país de los intelectuales. Llega a Miami para presentar su novela debut: La hija de la española, publicada por Lumen, donde cuenta la historia de una periodista que recién ha perdido a su madre y que no logra avanzar en su profesión porque el país donde vive, Venezuela, no se lo permite.

25 NOV 2019 · Steph Cha is the author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough. She’s the noir editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay (Ecco). In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it’s been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She’s distraught that her sister hasn’t spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace’s understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale. But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence. Attica Locke, Edgar-Award winning author of Bluebird, Bluebird writes, “Steph Cha has taken a dark moment in Los Angeles’s violent history and cracked it wide open, creating a prism of understanding...It’s a touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision that tore a hole through an entire city.”

25 NOV 2019 · Cásares, Oscar (Estados Unidos, 1964) Narrador, ensayista y profesor de escritura creativa. Enseña en la University of Texas en Austin. Ha sido reconocido con la Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2006), el James A. Michener Award de la Copernicus Society of America, Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2002) y el Dobie Paisano Fellowship del Texas Institute of Letters de la University of Texas 2002). Ha dado a conocer el volumen de cuentos Brownsville: Stories (2003) y la novela Amigoland (2009). Cásares trae a la feria su novela De donde venimos, Vintage Español, donde relata el drama vivido por una familia mexicanoamericana que se ve involucrada, en contra de su voluntad, en el tráfico ilegal de inmigrantes.

24 NOV 2019 · Carrie Gibson is the author of the acclaimed Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day. She received a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, focusing on the Spanish Caribbean in the era of the Haitian Revolution, and has worked as a journalist for the Guardian and contributed to other publications, as well as the BBC. El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (Atlantic Monthly Press) chronicles the sweeping and dramatic history of Hispanic North America from the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century to the present―from Ponce de Leon’s initial landing in Florida in 1513 to Spanish control of the vast Louisiana territory in 1762 to the Mexican-American War in 1846 and up to the more recent tragedy of post-hurricane Puerto Rico and the ongoing border acrimony with Mexico. Interwoven in this stirring narrative of events and people are cultural issues that have been there from the start, but which are unresolved to this day: language, belonging, community, race, and nationality. Seeing them play out over centuries provides a vital perspective at a time when it is urgently needed.

24 NOV 2019 · Adam Platt has been a contributing editor and restaurant critic for New York magazine since 2000. He won the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for Restaurant Reviews in 2010. In his funny and irreverent memoir The Book of Eating: Adventures in Professional Gluttony (Ecco), Adam Platt recounts a globe-trotting life lived meal-to-meal. As the son of a diplomat growing up in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, Adam Platt didn’t have the chance to become a picky eater. From dim sum in Hong Kong to giant platters of Peking duck in Beijing, fresh-baked croissants in Paris and pierogi on the snowy streets of Moscow, Platt takes us around the world, retracing the steps of a unique, and lifelong, culinary education. Intertwining food and travel, The Book of Eating is a delightful and sumptuous trip that is also the culinary coming-of-age.

24 NOV 2019 · Julian E. Zelizer is a Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Considered one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history, his most recent book is The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society. Fault Lines, written with fellow historian Kevin M Kruse, is a sweeping history of the past four decades of American history. It chronicles the origins of a United States increasingly riven by stark political partisanship and deep social divisions along lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. The book also explores the ways in which a fractured media landscape aggravated our divisions in politics and society. Douglas Brinkley, history commentator for CNN, contributing editor to Vanity Fair and American Heritage, and author, called Fault Lines “[…] a brilliant primer for understanding the troubling precedents for today’s mass American political dysfunction. Both historians are deeply informed and surefooted thinkers. A must-read foundational work for our time!”     Kevin M. Kruse is a Professor of History at Princeton University. He specializes in the political, social, and urban/suburban history of twentieth-century America, with a focus on conflicts over race, rights and religion and the making of modern conservatism. His most recent book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, explored the making and meaning of American religious nationalism in the mid-twentieth century. Fault Lines, written with fellow historian Julian E. Zelizer, is a sweeping history of the past four decades of American history. It chronicles the origins of a United States increasingly riven by stark political partisanship and deep social divisions along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The book also explores the ways in which a fractured media landscape aggravated our divisions in politics and society. Douglas Brinkley, history commentator for CNN, contributing editor to Vanity Fair and American Heritage, and author, called Fault Lines “[…] a brilliant primer for understanding the troubling precedents for today’s mass American political dysfunction. Both historians are deeply informed and surefooted thinkers. A must-read foundational work for our time!”