Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC Rights List Spring 2021 Contact: Matt Dissen, Rights Manager [email protected] Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC / Spring 2021 New and Upcoming 2 Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC / Spring 2021 Jennifer Ackerman WHAT AN OWL KNOWS US & Canada: Penguin Press (Summer 2023) NONFICTION FOLLOWING THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING THE GENIUS OF BIRDS and THE BIRD WAY, a new investigation into the remarkable nature of owl behavior and biology, and the surprising new insights only lately being discovered by scientists regarding owls’ astonishing stealth, hunting skills, communication, and sensory prowess. JENNIFER ACKERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of THE GENIUS OF BIRDS (longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award), THE BIRD WAY (finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award), BIRDS BY THE SHORE, SEX SLEEP EAT DRINK DREAM, AH-CHOO, and CHANCE IN THE HOUSE OF FATE. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Nonfiction, a Bunting Fellowship, and a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. International sales to date: Australia: Scribe. Previous publishers: UK: Constable & Robinson; Brazil: Fosforo; Catalan: Cossetania; China: Yilin Press; Czech Republic: Kazda; Estonia: Tanapaev; Finland: Atena; France: Marabout; Germany: Ullstein; Israel: Asia Publishers; Italy: La Nave di Teseo; Japan: Kodansha; Korea: Kachi Publishing Co.; Lithuania: Kitos Knygos; Netherlands: Prometheus; Norway: Gyldendal; Poland: Jagiellonian University Press; Romania: Publica; Russia: Alpina; Slovakia: Kazda; Spain: Ariel; Sweden: Volante; Taiwan: Good Publishing; Vietnam: Phuong Vam. 3 Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC / Spring 2021 Percival Everett THE TREES World English: Graywolf Press (September 2021) FICTION HAUNTING AND DARKLY SATIRICAL, an uncanny literary thriller by Percival Everett, addressing the painful legacy of lynching in our society. Following a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi, a pair of detectives arrive from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and are met with expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a disturbing puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till. The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. THE TREES is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on the nation’s pulse. PERCIVAL EVERETT is the author of over two dozen books, including TELEPHONE (longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize), SO MUCH BLUE (finalist for the California Book Award for Fiction), PERCIVAL EVERETT BY VIRGIL RUSSELL, ERASURE, HALF AN INCH OF WATER, and I AM NOT SIDNEY POITIER. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction. Previous Publishers: UK: Influx Press; France: Actes Sud; Germany: Hanser; Italy: La Nave di Teseo; Spain: De Conatus. 4 Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC / Spring 2021 Mary-Beth Hughes THE OCEAN HOUSE US & Canada: Grove Press (January 2021) FICTION A BEAUTIFUL NEW WORK OF FICTION told through interconnected stories, exploring the fractured lives of families from a beach town and the consequences of loss passing through the generations. Faith, a mother of two young children, is in need of summer childcare. As a member of a staid old beach club and a self-made business consultant, she is appalled when her brother-in-law sends her an unruly, ill-mannered teenager named Lee-Ann to help, appearing more like a wayward child than competent help. What begins as a promising start to a redemptive relationship ends in a tragedy that lands Faith in a treatment facility, leveled by trauma. Years later, Faith visits her daughter Cece in college, discovering her with a newly shaved head and unruly force, while Faith’s mother is in the early stages of dementia, slipping in and out of clarity, telling lucid tales of her own troubled youth. “Hughes’s collection of linked stories, following various characters through a tragic vacation on the Jersey Shore and in the years thereafter, accrues a rich, novelistic sweep and leaves readers with a vertiginous sense of contingency.” – New York Times Book Review “Grief-stricken yet beautiful portraits of fractured lives.” – Kirkus (starred) “Hughes is a careful reader of her characters, and she captures their small, easy-to-miss moments of humanity through life’s vicissitudes. These stories pack a punch.” — Publishers Weekly MARY-BETH HUGHES is the author of THE LOVED ONES, WAVEMAKER II, a New York Times Notable Book, and DOUBLE HAPPINESS, which earned a Pushcart Prize. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, and A Public Space. 5 Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC / Spring 2021 Nicole Krauss TO BE A MAN US: HarperCollins (November 2020) FICTION FOLLOWING THE INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM of her novels FOREST DARK, GREAT HOUSE, THE HISTORY OF LOVE and MAN WALKS INTO A ROOM, Nicole Krauss’s first collection of short stories. Moving from Switzerland, Japan, and New York to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, these stories feature aging parents and new-born babies; young women’s coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; men as fathers and lovers and friends and spouses, including one lost husband who may never have been a husband at all; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; the mystery and wonder at a life lived or future waiting to unfold. A National Bestseller Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, Electric Literature, & Oprah Magazine A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice “Triumphant… a spectacular book.” —boxed starred Publishers Weekly “Each story is masterfully crafted and deeply contemplative… proving once again that Krauss is one of our most formidable talents in fiction.” – Esquire NICOLE KRAUSS is the internationally bestselling author of four novels: Man Walks into a Room, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The History of Love, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger; Great House, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award and Orange Prize; and most recently the international bestseller Forest Dark, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire and Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. International Sales to Date: Canada: HarperCollins Canada; UK: Bloomsbury; Bulgaria: KRYG; China: Dook; Denmark: Gyldendal; France: Editions de l’Olivier; Germany: Rowohlt; Greece: Metaihmio; Israel: Kinneret Zmora; Italy: Guanda; Korea: Munhakdongne; Netherlands: Ambo/Anthos; Romania: Humanitas; Russia: Knizhniki; Slovakia: Artforum; Spain: Salamandra; Sweden: Brombergs; Taiwan: Chi Min. Previous Publishers: Brazil: Companhia das Letras; Japan: Hakusuisha. 6 Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC / Spring 2021 Tom McCarthy THE MAKING OF INCARNATION US: Knopf (November 2021) FICTION FROM THE TWO-TIME BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST, a new novel centered on our fascination with motion, and how our efforts to imagine ourselves as agents, actors, characters or individuals are fictions that both sustain and derail us. Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers ’movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. Did she also, as her broken correspondence with a young Soviet physicist suggests, discover in her final days a ‘perfect ’movement, one that would ‘change everything’? An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion- capture consultant Mark Phocan, as well as his collaborators and shadowy antagonists, across geo-political fault lines and experimental zones: medical labs, CGI studios, military research centers . Places where the frontiers of potential – to cure, kill, understand or entertain – are constantly tested and refined. And all the while, work is underway on the blockbuster film Incarnation, an epic space tragedy. Commercial box-office fodder? Or a sublimely mythical exploration of the animation, contemplation and possession. Audacious and mesmeric, THE MAKING OF INCARNATION weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual-motion machine. Tom McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying historical and symbolic structures of human experience. TOM MCCARTHY is the author of the novels SATIN ISLAND (Booker Prize finalist), C (Booker Prize finalist), REMAINDER, and MEN IN SPACE, as well as the essay collection TYPEWRITERS BOMBS JELLYFISH. He was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University in 2013. International Sales to