Dijkstra Agency Hot List
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Dijkstra & Associates PMB 515, 1155 Camino Del Mar, Del Mar, CA 92014 • (858) 755-3115 www.dijkstraagency.com • Fax (858) 794-2822 Sandra DIJKSTRA AGENCY HOT LIST Spring-Summer 2016 Sandra Dijkstra Elise Capron * Jill Marr * Thao Le Andrea Cavallaro * Roz Foster Jessica Watterson * Jennifer Kim www.dijkstraagency.com SPRING 2016 LITERARY FICTION AN UNRESTORED WOMAN: And Other Stories Shobha Rao (Flatiron Books, March 2016) “With a sophisticated sense of pacing and patience… characters are meticulously developed within each story and the collection as a whole examines how little power a person might have over his or her own destiny when confronted with war and international disputes. Stunning and relentless.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred) “Rao’s raw and breathtaking short story collection is set against an epic canvas, yet her character studies are intimate. Exquisite turns of phrase and editing with a fine-edged scalpel only add to an outstanding and memorable debut.” -- Booklist (starred) “What an astonishing collection! Provoking, ferocious, moving, splendid, generous and essential. I seemed to finish the book in a different world than the one in which I began it.” – Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble Debut author Shobha Rao moved to the U.S. from India at the age of seven. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals, and her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2015. BEFORE WE VISIT THE GODDESS Chitra Divakaruni (Simon & Schuster, April 2016) “The always enchanting and enlightening Divakaruni spins another silken yet tensile saga about the lives of women in India and as immigrants in America… Divakaruni’s gracefully insightful, dazzlingly descriptive, and covertly stinging tale illuminates the opposition women must confront, generation by generation, as they seek both independence and connection.” — Booklist (starred) “Three generations of Indian women struggle with the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters. In a novel spanning India and the United States over 60 years, richly drawn characters negotiate the desire for education against family obligations and romantic entanglements… Divakaruni's novel explores the moments that reverberate across generations as well as the quiet erosions of culture that happen over time. [This is] a novel of quiet but deeply affecting moments.” – Kirkus Reviews Chitra Divakaruni is the bestselling and award-winning author of Sister of My Heart and The Mistress of Spices, among others. Her books have translated into 29 different languages, and she has had works published in many literary magazines. She currently holds the Betty and Gene McDavid chair at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. 2 | Sandra Dijkstra & Associates Spring / S u m m e r 2 0 1 6 SUMMER/FALL 2016 LITERARY FICTION BRIGHTFELLOW: A Novel Rikki Ducornet (Coffee House Press, July 2016) “A novelist whose vocabulary sweats with a kind of lyrical heat.” —New York Times “Linguistically explosive . one of the most interesting American writers around.” —The Nation “Ducornet—surrealist, absurdist, pure anarchist at times—is one of our most accomplished writers, adept at seizing on the perfect details and writing with emotion and cool detachment simultaneously. [Her style] is penetrating and precise but also sensual without being overwrought. You experience a Ducornet novel with all of your senses.”—Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of the Southern Reach Trilogy A feral boy comes of age on a campus decadent with starched sheets, sweating cocktails, and homemade jams. Stub is the cause of that missing sweater, the pie that disappeared off the cooling rack. Then Stub meets Billy, who takes him in, and Asthma, who enchants him, and all is found, then lost. A fragrant, voluptuous novel of imposture, misplaced affection, and emotional deformity. The author of nine previous novels as well as collections of short stories, essays and poems, Rikki Ducornet has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, honored twice by the Lannan Foundation, and the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages. REMEMBERING 1942: and Other Chinese Stories Liu Zhenyun (Arcade, November 2016) Translated by Howard Goldblatt & Sylvia Li-chun Lin From one of China’s most prominent contemporary authors comes a new collection of short stories featuring a diverse cast of ordinary people struggling against life’s obstacles—from bureaucratic to economic—against a background of their own personal conflicts. The masterful title story explores the legacy of the drought and famine that struck Henan Province in 1942 through the lens of one man’s personal journey through war and revolution. Each story is rich in wit, insight, and empathy-- together they bring into focus the realities of China’s past and present, evoking clearly the often Kafkaesque circumstances of contemporary life in the world’s most populous nation. Liu Zhenyun is the author of six bestselling novels, including I Did Not Kill My Husband which sold 1.2 million copies in China. His fiction has won numerous prizes in China and Hong Kong and has been translated into several languages. Several films have been made based on his novels, including the blockbuster Cell Phone. He is a graduate of Peking University's Chinese literature department. Howard Goldblatt is a translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese fiction, including the works of Chinese novelist and 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mo Yan. Sylvia Li-Chun Lin co-translated the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize-winning novel, Three Sisters, by Bi Feiyu. She has also been the winner of the Liang Shih-chiu Literary Translation Prize. 3 | Sandra Dijkstra & Associates Spring / S u m m e r 2 0 1 6 SPRING 2016 NON-FICTION THE SLAVE’S CAUSE: A History of Abolition Manisha Sinha (Yale University Press, February 2016) “The Slave’s Cause captures the myriad aspects of this diverse and far-ranging movement and will deservedly take its place alongside the equally magisterial works of Ira Berlin on slavery and Eric Foner on the Reconstruction Era.” –Wall Street Journal “The movement gets the big, bold history it deserves--militant, interracial, and nearly forgotten, the Anti-Man-Hunting League epitomizes The Slave’s Cause, a stunning new history of abolitionism.”--The Atlantic “It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive history of the abolitionist movement. Sinha has given us a full history of the men and women who truly made us free.”— Ira Berlin for New York Times Sunday Book Review “With The Slave’s Cause, Manisha Sinha joins [the company of some of our most gifted and perceptive historians.] The Slave’s Cause takes its place as a starting point for anyone interested in the history of abolitionism.”— Chronicle of Higher Education One of Eric Foner’s top students, Manisha Sinha is a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities among several others. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina 2000). THE BRAZEN AGE: New York City and the American Empire— Politics, Art, and Bohemia David Reid (Pantheon, March 2016) “Having read or seen nearly every artifact of this period, Reid delivers his opinion in a score of unrelated but brilliant chapters on iconic New York individuals (Berenice Abbott, Weegee), groups (returning soldiers, homosexuals), politics (the 1948 elections, leftist magazines), and bohemia (Greenwich village again and again). A historical tour de force.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred) A brilliant, sweeping, and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, The Brazen Age opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity—though the aristocratic FDR was its paradoxical avatar—a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition, and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation, and burgeoning bohemia. David Reid is a co-editor of Sex, Death and God in L.A. and West of the West: Imagining California. His essays, articles, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and in various anthologies, including Pushcart Prize. He lives in Berkeley, California. 4 | Sandra Dijkstra & Associates Spring / S u m m e r 2 0 1 6 SPRING 2016 NON-FICTION ADULTERY: Infidelity and the Law Deborah L. Rhode (Harvard University Press, March 2016) “Rhode succeeds in providing an unparalleled sociolegal take on the issues of infidelity and adultery with a focus on how the continued patrolling and protection of sexual relationships is not only no longer necessary, but also that it holds inherent discrimination—and is thus archaic law.”—Library Journal “A brilliant and beautifully-written jaunt through the history and present-day landscape of adultery. A wonderful combination of fascinating storytelling about human relationships and deep insight into the workings of the legal system.” —Ariela Gross, University of Southern California Gould School of Law At a time when legal and social prohibitions on sexual relationships are declining, Americans are still nearly unanimous in their condemnation of adultery. Over 90 percent disapprove of cheating on a spouse. In this comprehensive account of the legal and social consequences of infidelity, Deborah Rhode explores why, by exposing the harms that criminalizing adultery inflicts, and makes a compelling case for repealing adultery laws and prohibitions on polygamy.