Please check back often. Author bios and book information are being updated regularly.

Alphabetical by last name

MARLENE ADELSTEIN is a writer and editor of novels, memoirs, and screenplays. Her debut novel, Sophie Last Seen, was recently published by Red Adept Publishing. She worked for over twenty years as an executive in feature film and television development for top Hollywood production companies: Wind Dancer Films, Fine Line Features, The Zanuck Company, and The Samuel Goldwyn Company. Marlene was involved in the development of such films as: Driving Miss Daisy, Rush, and Mystic Pizza to name a few. Her personal essays have appeared in: Longreads.com, Manifestation.com, Rewireme.com, and TalkingWriting.com. She has been awarded residencies to Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, The Millay Colony, The Wurlitzer Foundation, and Robert M MacNamara Foundation. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley where she has her own freelance editorial business. (photo credit: Franco Vogt)

Sophie Last Seen
Six years ago, ten-year-old Sophie Albright disappeared from a shopping mall. Her mother, Jesse, is left in a self-destructive limbo, haunted by memories of her intense and difficult child, who was obsessed with birds. Trapped in her grief and guilt, Jesse stumbles through her workdays at a bookstore and spends her off hours poring over Sophie’s bird journals or haunting the mall to search for the face of her missing child. When Star Silverman, Sophie’s best friend, starts working at the bookstore, Jesse is uncomfortable around the sarcastic teen, who is a constant reminder of her daughter. But Star has secrets of her own, and her childhood memories could be the key to solving Sophie’s disappearance. With help from Star and Kentucky “Tuck” Barnes, a private detective on the trail of another missing girl, Jesse may finally get some closure, one way or the other.

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JACOB M. APPEL is the author of three literary novels, nine short story collections, an essay collection, a cozy mystery, a thriller and a volume of poetry. His first novel, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up, won the 2012 Dundee International Book Award and was published by Cargo. His short story collection, Scouting for the Reaper, won the 2012 Hudson Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2014. His essay collection, Phoning Home (University of South Carolina Press, 2015) won the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Other recent volumes include The Mask of Sanity (Permanent Press, 2017), Millard Salter’s Last Day (Simon & Schuster, 2017), The Liar’s Asylum (Black Lawrence, 2017), The Amazing Mr. Morality (Vandalia/West Virginia University, 2018) and Amazing Things Are Happening Here (Black Lawrence, 2019). A volume of ethics dilemmas for laypeople, Who Says You’re Dead?, is forthcoming with Algonquin.

The Liars’ Asylum
The frustrations of romantic love in its various guises—a domineering kindergarten teacher for a dashing artificial foliage designer, a suicidal physicist for his star student, a dialysis patient at a sleep-away camp for the camp owner’s daughter—provide the common theme for the stories in Jacob M. Appel’s seventh collection. We meet a psychiatrist dabbling with infidelity during a crisis in which rain turns into truth serum, a Finnish-American soldier charged with facilitating his commanding officer’s extra-marital affair, and a couple transporting a wealthy, “locked-in” patient across the Piedmont to his new nursing home. Appel’s literary short fiction offers a quirky window into the pangs and promise of love.

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SUSAN BERNHARD is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship recipient and a graduate of the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program. She was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, is a graduate of the University of Maryland, and lives with her husband and two children near Boston. Winter Loon (Little A, December 2018), her haunting debut novel about family and sacrifice, is an Amazon bestseller.
 
Winter Loon
Abandoned by his father after his mother drowns in a frozen Minnesota lake, fifteen-year-old Wes Ballot is stranded with coldhearted grandparents and holed up in his mother’s old bedroom, surrounded by her remnants and memories. As the wait for his father stretches unforgivably into months, a local girl, whose own mother died a brutal death, captures his heart and imagination, giving Wes fresh air to breathe in the suffocating small town. When buried truths come to light in the spring thaw, wounds are exposed and violence erupts, forcing Wes to embark on a search for his missing father, the truth about his mother, and a future he must claim for himself—a quest that begins back at that frozen lake. A powerful, page-turning coming-of-age story, Winter Loon captures the resilience of a boy determined to become a worthy man by confronting family demons, clawing his way out of the darkness, and forging a life from the shambles of a broken past.

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JAMES CHARLESWORTH grew up eighty miles east of Pittsburgh and attended Penn State University and Emerson College in Boston, where he currently lives. His writing has appeared in Natural Bridge and was awarded finalist status in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers.  He is also the recipient of a Martin Dibner Fellowship from the Maine Community Foundation. His first novel, The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, was published in January 2019.
 
The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill
All their lives, the children of George Benjamin Hill have fought to escape the shadow of their father, a dust-bowl orphan, self-made millionaire in bedrock American capitalism (fast food and oil), and destroyer of two families on his way to financial success. Now, they are approaching middle age and ruin: A failed ex–minor league ballplayer, divorced and mourning the death of his daughter in Miami; a self-proclaimed CIA veteran, off his meds and deciphering conspiracies in Manhattan; a Las Vegas showgirl turned old maid of The Strip, trying to stay clean; and an Alaskan bush pilot, twice un-indicted for manslaughter and recently thrown off his land by the federal government. While their father takes his place at the center of a national scandal, these estranged siblings find themselves drawn from their four corners of the country, compelled along crowded interstates by resentment and confusion, converging on a 300-acre horse ranch outside Omaha for a final confrontation with the father they never had. Migrating from the suburban anonymity of 1950s San Bernardino, to the frozen end of the world (Alaska circa 1976), and concluding in the background of one of the most horrifying moments in American history, The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill spans seventy years of life in America, from the Great Depression to the age of corporate greed and terrorism. It is a literary suspense novel about the decline and consequence of patriarchal society. It is also an intricate family saga of aspiration and betrayal. 

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K CHESS is the author of Famous Men Who Never Lived (Tin House Books, 2019). Her short fiction has appeared in PANK Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, and other fine journals. She earned a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from Southern Illinois University. K was awarded the W.K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts for fiction writing in 2008 and was named as Finalist for the Writers’ Room of Boston Fellowship in 2018. She teaches writing at GrubStreet in Boston and Rhode Island, and reads fiction for Quarterly West.
 
Famous Men Who Never Lived
Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate United States―an alternate timeline―she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram’s copy of The Pyronauts―a science fiction masterwork in her world that now only exists as a single flimsy paperback―and becomes determined to create a museum dedicated to preserving the remaining artifacts and memories of her vanished culture. But the refugees are unwelcome and Hel’s efforts are met with either indifference or hostility. And when the only copy of The Pyronauts goes missing, Hel must decide how far she is willing to go to recover it and finally face her own anger, guilt, and grief over what she has truly lost.

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​​​​KEYNOTE​​​​
THOMAS COBB is the author of Crazy Heart which was made into a 2008 Academy Award-winning movie starring Jeff Bridges. He is also the author of Acts of Contrition, Darkness the Color of Snow, and Shavetail, winner of the Western Writers Spur Award, and has had short stories and poetry published in various magazines. Cobb acquired an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from the University of Houston. In 1987, he became a member of the faculty at Rhode Island College where he taught creative writing and literature. In 2010, Professor Cobb received the Rhode Island College Alumni Faculty Award. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. (photo credit: Eugene St. Pierre)

Darkness the Color of Snow
Gritty and tense, Cobb's novel exposes small-town hypocrisy, petty rivalries, jealousy, and media-fueled hysteria as a young rookie police officer is unfairly blamed for a hit-and-run fatality. When patrolman Ronald Forbert tries to arrest Matt Laferiere for drunk driving, the confrontation turns violent and deadly, and Ronald must defend his actions in a town where everyone knows there was bad blood between him and Matt. Police Chief Gordy Hawkins and his officers back up Ronald's story, and so do three witnesses, but as public pressure to blame someone mounts, one coerced witness changes his version, with disastrous results. Lydell is a (fictional) rural farm and mill town in an unspecified state, dying a slow economic death, and the poisonous gossip feeds the local TV and print media, eventually becoming so frenzied that it interferes with the investigation and search for the hit-and-run driver. Nobody wins in this tale but that never detracts from its undeniable power.

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MOLLY DEKTAR is from North Carolina and lives in Brooklyn. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College, where she was awarded the Himan Brown Award and the Brooklyn College Scholarship for Fiction. She is a graduate of Harvard College and was the recipient of the Louis Begley Fiction Prize, the David McCord Prize for the Arts, and the Charles Edmund Horman Prize for Creative Writing. The Ash Family is her first novel. (photo credit: Julian Gewirtz)

The Ash Family
At nineteen, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place of order and chaos: the Ash Family farm. There, she joins an intentional community living off the fertile land of the mountains, bound together by high ideals and through relationships she can’t untangle. Berie—now renamed Harmony—renounces her old life and settles into her new one on the farm. She begins to make friends. And then they start to disappear. Thrilling and profound, The Ash Family explores what we will sacrifice in the search for happiness, and the beautiful and grotesque power of the human spirit as it seeks its ultimate place of belonging.

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LARA ELENA DONNELLY is the author of the vintage-glam spy thriller trilogy The Amberlough Dossier as well as short fiction and poetry appearing in venues including Uncanny, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod. Lara is a graduate of the Alpha and Clarion workshops, and has taught at the Catapult Workshops and the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. (photo credit: Debra Wilburn)

Amnesty: Book 3 in the Amberlough Dossier
In Amberlough City, out of the ASHES of revolution, a TRAITOR returns, a political CAMPAIGN comes to a roaring head, and the people demand JUSTICE for crimes past. As a nation struggles to rebuild, who can escape retribution? Amnesty is a smart, decadent, heart-pounding conclusion to Lara Elena Donnelly’s widely-praised glam spy trilogy that will have readers enthralled until the very end.

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ABBY FABIASCHI resigned from her post as a high-tech executive in 2013 to pursue writing and human rights advocacy. With starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal, her international bestselling novel, I Liked My Life (St. Martin’s Press), has been translated into five languages. Abby donates 20 percent of all net proceeds to Empower Her Network, an organization she co-founded that breaks down societal barriers for survivors of human trafficking on their path to independence. She and her family divide their time between Connecticut and Utah.

I Liked My Life
Maddy is a devoted stay-at-home wife and mother, host of excellent parties, giver of thoughtful gifts, and bestower of a searingly perceptive piece of advice or two. She is the cornerstone of her family, a true matriarch...until she commits suicide, leaving her husband Brady and teenage daughter Eve heartbroken and reeling, wondering what happened. How could the exuberant, exacting woman they loved disappear so abruptly, seemingly without reason, from their lives? How they can possibly continue without her? As they sift through details of her last days, trying to understand the woman they thought they knew, Brady and Eve are forced to come to terms with unsettling truths. Maddy, however, isn’t ready to leave her family forever. Watching from beyond, she tries to find the perfect replacement for herself. Along comes Rory: pretty, caring, and spontaneous, with just the right bit of edge...but who also harbors a tragedy of her own. Will the mystery of Maddy ever come to rest? And can her family make peace with their history and begin to heal? 

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JULIETTE FAY is the award-winning, bestselling author of five novels including City of Flickering Light, available April 2019, and The Tumbling Turner Sisters, a USA Today bestseller and Costco Pennie’s Book Club Pick, January 2017. Previous novels include The Shortest Way Home, one of Library Journal's  Top 5 Best Books of 2012: Women’s Fiction; Deep Down True, short-listed for the 2011 Women’s Fiction award by the American Library Association; and Shelter Me, a 2009 Massachusetts Book Award “Must-Read Book” and an Indie Next pick. Juliette holds a bachelor’s degree from Boston College and a master’s degree from Harvard University. She lives in Massachusetts with her family. 

City of Flickering Light
At first glance, Hollywood in the 1920s is like no other place on earth—iridescent, scandalous, and utterly exhilarating—and the three friends yearn for a life they could only have dreamed of before. But despite the glamour and seduction of Tinseltown, success doesn’t come easy, and nothing can prepare Irene, Millie, and Henry for the poverty, temptation, and heartbreak that lie ahead. With their ambitions challenged by both the men above them and the prejudice surrounding them, their friendship is the only constant through desperate times, as each struggles to find their true calling in an uncertain world. What begins as a quest for fame and fortune soon becomes a collective search for love, acceptance, and fulfillment as they navigate the backlots and stage sets where the illusions of the silver screen are brought to life. 

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JULIA GLASS is the author of the novels A House Among the Trees, And the Dark Sacred Night, The Widower’s Tale, The Whole World Over, and the National Book Award–winning Three Junes, as well as the Kindle Single “Chairs in the Rafters.” Her third book, I See You Everywhere, a collection of linked stories, won the 2009 SUNY John Gardner Fiction Award. She has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a cofounder of the Twenty Summers, a nonprofit arts-and-culture festival in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College. (photo credit: Dennis Cowley)

A House Among the Trees
Julia Glass’s richly imagined novel begins just after the sudden death of world-renowned children’s book author Mort Lear, who leaves behind a wholly unexpected will, an idyllic country house, and difficult secrets about a childhood far darker than those of the beloved characters he created for young readers of all ages. Left to grapple with the consequences of his final wishes are Tommy Daulair, his longtime live-in assistant; Merry Galarza, a museum curator betrayed by those wishes; and Nick Greene, a beguiling actor preparing to play Lear in a movie. When Nick pays a visit to Lear’s home, he and Tommy confront what it means to be entrusted with the great writer’s legacy and reputation. Tommy realizes that despite his generous bequest, the man to whom she devoted decades of her life has left her with grave doubts about her past as well as her future. Vivid and gripping, filled with insight and humor, A House Among the Trees is an unforgettable story about friendship and love, artistic ambition, the perils of fame, and the sacrifices made by those who serve the demands of a creative genius.    

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KEYNOTE
PETER GOLDEN is an award-winning journalist, historian, and novelist, and the author of nine books. He has interviewed Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush (41), Secretary of State Kissinger, and Soviet President Gorbachev, among others. His first novel, Comeback Love, dealt with the changing role of women during the 1960s and was praised by the novelist and reviewer Caroline Leavitt as an “extraordinary debut.” Wherever There Is Light, his second novel, looked at the race relations from the 1930s until the 1960s and was featured in New York Magazine’s Fall Preview issue, widely reviewed, and selected by the New Jersey Star-Ledger as one of the best books of 2016. Nothing Is Forgotten, his exploration of the connection between the Holocaust and the Cold War, is his third novel, which novelist Karin Tanabe called, “historical fiction at its finest.”

Nothing Is Forgotten
In 1950s New Jersey, Michael Daniels launches a radio show in the storage room of his Russian-Jewish grandmother’s candy store. Not only does the show become a local hit because of his running satires of USSR leader Nikita Khrushchev, but half a world away, it picks up listeners in a small Soviet city. There, with rock and roll leaking in through bootlegged airwaves, Yulianna Kosoy—a war orphan in her mid-twenties—is sneaking American goods into the country with her boss, Der Schmuggler. But just as Michael’s radio show is taking off, his grandmother is murdered in the candy store. Why anyone would commit such an atrocity against such a warm, affable woman is anyone’s guess. But she had always been secretive about her past and, as Michael discovers, guarded a shadowy ancestral history. In order to solve the mystery of who killed her, Michael sets out to Europe to learn where he—and his grandmother—really came from.​

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THEODORA GOSS is the World Fantasy and Locus Award-winning author of the Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club novels, including The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (forthcoming October 2019) as well as short story and poetry collections In the Forest of Forgetting, Songs for Ophelia, and Snow White Learns Witchcraft. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program.

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club Series,, book 2)
Mary Jekyll’s life has been peaceful since she helped Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solve the Whitechapel Murders. Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, Justine Frankenstein, and Mary’s sister Diana Hyde have settled into the Jekyll household in London, and although they sometimes quarrel, the members of the Athena Club get along as well as any five young women with very different personalities. At least they can always rely on Mrs. Poole. But when Mary receives a telegram that Lucinda Van Helsing has been kidnapped, the Athena Club must travel to the Austro-Hungarian Empire to rescue yet another young woman who has been subjected to horrific experimentation. Where is Lucinda, and what has Professor Van Helsing been doing to his daughter? Can Mary, Diana, Beatrice, and Justine reach her in time? Racing against the clock to save Lucinda from certain doom, the Athena Club embarks on a madcap journey across Europe. From Paris to Vienna to Budapest, Mary and her friends must make new allies, face old enemies, and finally confront the fearsome, secretive Alchemical Society. It’s time for these monstrous gentlewomen to overcome the past and create their own destinies. 

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JENNIFER HAIGH is a novelist and short story writer. Her most recent novel, Heat and Light, explores the fate of a Rust Belt town transformed when the natural gas industry comes to town. It won a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a Best Book of 2016 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR. Her previous books include Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers, and Mrs. Kimble, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, and the short story collection News from Heaven, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Granta, Electric Literature, The Best American Short Stories, and many other places. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. (photo credit: Rob Arnold)

Heat and Light

Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling—until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives. Told through a cast of characters whose lives are increasingly bound by the opposing interests that underpin the national debate, Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Soaring and ambitious, it zooms from drill rig to shareholders’ meeting to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to the ruined landscape of the “strippins,” haunting reminders of Pennsylvania’s past energy booms. This is a dispatch from a forgotten America—a work of searing moral clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous and necessary book.

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CAROLINE KEPNES was born and raised on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. When she was in high school, Sassy magazine gave her an Honorable Mention (and a Smith Corona typewriter) in their Fabulous Fiction Contest. After graduating from Brown University, Caroline continued writing short stories while working as a pop culture journalist for Tiger Beat and Entertainment Weekly. Her debut novel You was published in 2014. Stephen King tweeted that he found the book "hypnotic ... never read anything like it.” The popular Netflix series You is an adaptation of You. The second season will follow Kepnes’s sequel, Hidden Bodies. Booklist describes Kepnes's character Joe Goldberg as "the love child of Holden Caulfield and Patrick Bateman.” Her genre-bending third book, Providence, was released in 2018. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages. She now lives in a quaint neighborhood in Los Angeles and comes home to New England every chance she gets. (photo credit: Courtney Dowling Pugliese, Ace Photography)
 
Providence
Best friends in small-town New Hampshire, Jon and Chloe share an intense, near-mystical bond. But before Jon can declare his love for his soul mate, he is kidnapped, and his plans for a normal life are permanently dashed. Four years later, Jon reappears. He is different now: bigger, stronger, and with no memory of the time he was gone. Jon wants to pick up where he and Chloe left off—until the horrifying instant he realizes he possesses strange powers that pose a grave threat to everyone he cares for. Afraid of hurting Chloe, Jon runs away, embarking on a journey for answers. Meanwhile, in Providence, Rhode Island, healthy college students and townies with no connection to one another are inexplicably dropping dead. A troubled detective prone to unexplainable hunches, Charles “Eggs” DeBenedictus suspects there’s a serial killer at work. But when he starts asking questions, Eggs is plunged into a shocking whodunit he never could have predicted. With an intense, mesmerizing voice, Caroline Kepnes makes keen and powerful observations about human connection and how love and identity can dangerously blur together.
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GREER MACALLISTER is a novelist, poet, short story writer, and playwright who earned her MFA in creative writing from American University. Her debut novel The Magician’s Lie was a USA Today bestseller, an Indie Next pick, and a Target Book Club selection. It has been optioned for film by Jessica Chastain's Freckle Films. Her novel Girl in Disguise, also an Indie Next pick, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called it “a well-told, superb story.” Her new novel, Woman 99, was published by Sourcebooks in March 2019. Raised in the Midwest, she lives with her family in Washington, DC.
 
Woman 99
When Charlotte Smith's wealthy parents commit her beloved sister Phoebe to the infamous Goldengrove Asylum, Charlotte knows there's more to the story than madness. She risks everything and follows her sister inside, surrendering her real identity as a privileged young lady of San Francisco society to become a nameless inmate, Woman 99. The longer she stays, the more she realizes that many of the women of Goldengrove aren't insane, merely inconvenient—and that her search for the truth threatens to dig up secrets that some very powerful people would do anything to keep. A historical thriller rich in detail, deception, and revelation, Woman 99 honors the fierce women of the past, born into a world that denied them power but underestimated their strength

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CLAIRE MESSUD is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Author of six works of fiction including her most recent novel, The Burning Girl, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.
 
The Burning Girl
Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge, and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship. The Burning Girl is a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about youth and friendship, and straddles, expertly, childhood’s imaginary worlds and painful adult reality―crafting a true, immediate portrait of female adolescence.

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RANDY SUSAN MEYERS’ bestselling novels are informed by her years working with criminal offenders and families impacted by emotional and physical violence. Her most recent novel, The Widow of Wall Street, was a PopSugar Pick, a Refinery 29 Pick, a New York Post “Must Read Book,” and one of New York Subway’s “New York Stories.” Previous novels The Murderer’s Daughters and Accidents of Marriage were the Massachusetts Council of the Book “Must Read” books. The Boston Globe called Meyers’ second novel, The Comfort of Lies, “Sharp and biting, and sometimes wickedly funny when the author skewers Boston’s class and neighborhood dividing lines, but it has a lot of heart, too.” Meyers lives in Boston and teaches at Boston’s Grub Street Writers’ Center. Her next novel, Waisted, will be released May 21, 2019. (photo credit: Sharona Jacobs)
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The Widow of Wall Street
The Widow of Wall Street tells the story of a family caught in the before, during, and after of a Ponzi scheme—a man with a criminal hunger for wealth, and his wife, who unknowingly builds her life, her marriage, family, and even friendships, on disappearing sand. Phoebe sees the fire in Jake Pierce’s belly from the moment they meet as teenagers in Brooklyn. Eventually, he creates a financial dynasty, and she trusts him without hesitation—unaware his hunger for success hides a dark talent for deception. From Brooklyn to Greenwich to Manhattan, from penthouse to prison, with tragic consequences rippling well beyond Wall Street, The Widow of Wall Street exposes a woman struggling to redefine her life and marriage as everything she thought she knew crumbles around her.

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MAURA ROOSEVELT’s work has been published in places like The Nation Magazine and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Baby of the Family was developed from a short story with the same title, which was published in Joyland Magazine and was given an award for “Most Read Story of 2014.” Maura has taught writing at NYU and USC. She holds a BA from Harvard University, an MFA from NYU, and is currently completing a PhD in Writing Studies at Columbia University. Maura is also the great-granddaughter of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt. (photo credit: Josh Fisher)
 
The Baby of the Family: A Novel
The Whitbys: a dynasty akin to the Astors, once enormously wealthy real-estate magnates who were considered “the landlords of New York.” There was a time when the death of a Whitby would have made national news, but when the family patriarch, Roger, dies, he is alone. Word of his death travels from the longtime family lawyer to his clan of children (from four separate marriages) and the news isn't good. Roger has left everything to his twenty-one-year-old son Nick, a Whitby only in name, including the houses currently occupied by Shelley and Brooke—two of Roger’s daughters from different marriages. And Nick is nowhere to be found. Brooke, the oldest of the children, who is unexpectedly pregnant, leads the search for Nick, hoping to convince him to let her keep her Boston home and her fragile composure. Shelley hasn’t told anyone she’s dropped out of college just months before graduating, and is living in her childhood apartment while working as an amanuensis for a blind architect, with whom she develops a rather complicated relationship. And when Nick, on the run from the law after a misguided and dramatic act of political activism, finally shows up at Shelley’s New York home, worlds officially collide as Nick and the architect's daughter fall in love. Soon, all three siblings are faced with the question they have been running from their whole lives: What do they want their future to look like, if they can finally escape their past? Weaving together multiple perspectives to create a portrait of an American family, and an American dream gone awry, Baby of the Family is a book about family secrets—how they define us, bind us together, and threaten to blow us (and more) apart—as well as an amusing and heartwarming look at the various ways in which a family can be created.
 

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KEYNOTE
RICHARD RUSSO is the author of eight novels, most recently Everybody's Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories, with Trajectory published in 2017; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which like Nobody's Fool was adapted to film, in a multiple-award-winning HBO miniseries; in 2016 he was given the Indie Champion Award by the American Booksellers Association; and in 2017 he received France's Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Portland, Maine. (photo credit: Elena Seibert)
 
The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life
In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain's value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery, The Destiny Thief reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America's most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo's writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the perspective of one of our greatest writers.

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KEYNOTE
HELEN SCHULMAN is a novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer. She is the author of the novels This Beautiful Life (a New York Times Best Seller), A Day at the Beach, P.S., The Revisionist, and Out of Time, and the short story collection Not a Free Show. She co-edited the anthology Wanting a Child. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, TIME, Vogue, GQ, the New York Times Book Review, A Public Space, and the Paris Review. She is the Fiction Chair at The Writing Program at The New School where she is a tenured Professor of Writing. She is also the Executive Director of WriteOnNYC.com. Her new novel, Come with Me, has just been published to considerable critical acclaim. The San Francisco Chronicle called it “Mind-blowingly brilliant,” and named it one of the ten best books of 2018. The New York Times Book Review called it “Strikingly original, compelling and beautifully written.” (photo credit: Denise Bosco)

Come with Me
Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny is a baby genius, a junior at Stanford in his spare time. His play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses"—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives. Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. And even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken. Who would she be if she had made different choices, loved different people? Where would she be now? Amy’s husband, Dan—an unemployed, perhaps unemployable, print journalist—accepts a dare of his own, accompanying a seductive, award-winning photographer named Maryam on a trip to Fukushima, the Japanese city devastated by tsunami and meltdown. Collaborating with Maryam, Dan feels a renewed sense of excitement and possibility he hasn’t felt with his wife in a long time. But when crisis hits at home, the extent of Dan’s betrayal is exposed and, as Amy contemplates alternative lives, the couple must confront whether the distances between them in the here and now are irreconcilable. Taking place over three non-consecutive but vitally important days for Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected—a dark comedy that is ultimately both a deeply romantic love story and a vivid tapestry of modern life.

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WENDY WALKER is the author of the national and international bestseller All Is Not Forgotten and Emma in The Night. Her latest work, The Night Before, will be released on May 14, 2019. She has sold rights to her books in twenty-three languages as well as film and television options. Prior to her writing career, Walker practiced both corporate and family law, having earned her JD from Georgetown University Law Center and her undergraduate degree from Brown University. She also worked as a financial analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co. She is currently finishing her fourth thriller and managing a busy household in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where she lives with her three sons. (photo credit: Bill Miles)
 
The Night Before (release on May 14, 2019)
Laura Lochner has never been lucky in love. She falls too hard and too fast, always choosing the wrong men. Devastated by the end of her last relationship, she fled her Wall Street job and New York City apartment for her sister’s home in the Connecticut suburb where they both grew up. Though still haunted by the tragedy that’s defined her entire life, Laura is determined to take one more chance on love with a man she’s met on an Internet dating site. Rosie Ferro has spent most of her life worrying about her troubled sister. Fearless but fragile, Laura has always walked an emotional tightrope, and Rosie has always been there to catch her. Laura’s return, under mysterious circumstances, has cast a shadow over Rosie’s peaceful life with her husband and young son—a shadow that grows darker as Laura leaves the house for her blind date. When Laura does not return home the following morning, Rosie fears the worst. She’s not responding to calls or texts, and she’s left no information about the man she planned to meet. As Rosie begins a desperate search to find her sister, she is not just worried about what this man might have done to Laura. She’s worried about what Laura may have done to him ...

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LAUREN WILLIG is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. Her works include the stand-alone novels, The Summer Country and The English Wife, the RITA Award-winning Pink Carnation series, and two collaborative novels written with Karen White and Beatriz Williams. An alumna of Yale University, she has a graduate degree in history from Harvard and a JD from Harvard Law School. She lives in New York with her husband, preschooler, toddler, and vast quantities of coffee. (photo credit: Amanda Suanne)
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The English Wife
Annabelle and Bayard Van Duyvil live a charmed life in New York: he’s the scion of an old Knickerbocker family, she grew up in a Tudor house in England, they had a fairytale romance in London, they have three-year-old twins on whom they dote, and he’s recreated her family home on the banks of the Hudson and named it Illyria. Yes, there are rumors that she’s having an affair with the architect, but rumors are rumors and people will gossip. But then Bayard is found dead with a knife in his chest on the night of their Twelfth Night Ball, Annabelle goes missing, presumed drowned, and the papers go mad. Bay’s sister, Janie, forms an unlikely alliance with a reporter to try to uncover the truth, convinced that Bay would never have killed his wife, that it must be a third party, but the more she learns about her brother and his wife, the more everything she thought she knew about them starts to unravel. Who were her brother and his wife, really? And why did her brother die with the name George on his lips? 
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SUSAN WILSON is the author of eleven novels, including the New York Times bestselling One Good Dog. Her next novel, The Dog I Love, will be released by St. Martin’s Press in November 2019. Born in Providence, she was raised in Connecticut and has made her home on Martha’s Vineyard for more than thirty years. When not writing about the relationship between dogs and humans, she enjoys singing, taking care of her horse, and tending to her collection of bonsai trees. She lives with her husband, David, and their puppy, Cora. (photo credit: Mark Alan Lovewell)
 
The Dog I Love
In this novel, there are two amazing dogs who intersect with two amazing women. Rosie Collins is four years into a twenty-year sentence for manslaughter when she volunteers to train puppies as therapy dogs. Meghan Custer is a wounded warrior who is the recipient of Rosie's first trainee, a chocolate Lab named Shark. When a mysterious benefactor facilitates Rosie's release and then provides her with a job as a project coordinator overseeing the rehabilitation of an ancient house on the edge of Dogtown in Gloucester, everything in Rosie's life changes. Alienated from her family, perplexed by this sudden reversal of fortune, and reliving the tragedy that led to her incarceration, Rosie is befriended by a large gray dog, she names Shadow. Both Rosie and Meghan have to learn to trust and to love after the traumas that they have endured. The healing power of their dogs is the key.

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