|  | News to share |  | Congratulations to Elena Sheppard for selling The Eternal Forest to Executive Editor Sarah Cantin of St. Martin's Press! Happy to share preorder links as soon as they're available. |  | "Grounded,” a short story by Geeta Kothari, appears in Pleiades’s Spring 2023 issue. It was accepted by Fiction Editor Jennifer Maritza McCauley. Don’t miss Geeta’s latest book, I Brake For Moose, out from Braddock Avenue Books. | (While I’m on the subject of Pleiades, ICYMI, Ruben Quesada edited last spring's folio focused on Latinx LGBTQIA+ Poets. People don't buy back issues of literary magazines often enough. This is a good one to pick up.) | "Two-Headed Dog," a shot story by Jordan Sutlive, was accepted by Elliott Holt for publication in the Kenyon Review in Spring 2023. | | |  | | Reading recommendations |  | “My love for my daughter was immediate and forceful, but early on I felt grief and anger about the vulnerability I associated with her birth.” Ellen O’Connell Whittet, author of What You Become in Flight, wrote about birth trauma and “Fleishman Is in Trouble” for Time.
“We live in a culture that encourages hustle 24/7/365. But the truth is that our energy is cyclical and seasonal, and what compels us at one point may become less interesting eventually — especially if you’ve spent years investigating and talking about that topic. So how do you know when you’re just experiencing a little lull, and when it’s time to take a break and put your project down for a while?” For Descript, Zan Romanoff talks with Sarah Enni, creator of the podcast First Draft, and Gina Delvac, producer of Call Your Girlfriend, about when it’s time to take a break. (For CYG listeners, Delvac does in fact have a website now.)
From “Island of Rabbits”: “It was a long time / ago, but you can still see the places / they burrowed. The rabbits, I mean, though / the people, too, wanted to / live like a rabbit wants to live.” Ruth Awad has new poems just published in Prairie Schooner. They appear in a special issue on Home and Displacement guest-edited by Jamaica Baldwin.
Asked what it was like to find out she was a finalist for the National Book Award, Sarah Thankam Mathews simply says, “Bro”! In “Making It,” a new column in Vulture, she talked with Emily Gould about writing All This Could Be Different. (She’s not a client, but years ago we worked on a Kenyon Review story, “Rubberdust,” that was later selected by Curtis Sittenfeld for Best American Short Stories 2020. That edition has an incredible contributor’s note; you can read an excerpt here.) |  | Illustration by Samantha Hahn | | Recent releases |  | If you’re up for an epistolary novel about sensitive introverts who find a sense of connection in one another, Rita Zoey Chin’s The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is for you. It’s now available from Melville House.
"It's sometimes the smallest connections or kindnesses that we encounter along the way that can be life-changing for us," Chin said in an interview with Megan Lebrise of Kirkus Reviews. And here's a review of her debut by Mike Maggio in the Washington Independent Review of Books.
“Like V. E. Schwab and Audrey Niffenegger, Rita Zoey Chin is an expert guide to that territory in which magic, loss, and possibility change not only the characters but the reader, too.” — Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble |  | Thanks so much to Laura Maylene Walter, author of Body of Stars (Dutton, 2021), for talking first pages on the Ohio Center for the Book podcast. | | In-person events |  | Mark Allen convinced ACES: The Society for Editing to head to Columbus this year. I’ll be the chair of the Editorial Freelancers Association table at ACES Evolve, and am looking forward to catching up with Karyn Johnson, the Ohio Chapter co-chair. Come say hello! |  | Save the dates for EFACON 2023: August 17–19 in Alexandria, VA. Grateful, as ever, for the chance to work with the talented, committed people on the Editorial Freelancers Association board. | Good mail day |  | Dean of Bennington College and Director of the MFA in Public Action Brian Michael Murphy has a new book, We the Dead, out from UNC Press. It was edited by Brandon Proia. There’s a great recorded event from Howe Library that includes a reading by Murphy and a conversation with Rena Mosteirin, editor of Bloodroot Literary Magazine and proprietor of Left Bank Books.
“Moustakis’s language is spare and exquisite, tough and lovely. The sentences build on themselves, becoming expansive and staggering in their sweep.” Melinda Moustakis's Homestead was just reviewed by Claire Luchette in the New York Times. The book is forthcoming from Flatiron Press, edited by Caroline Bleeke. Moustakis’s launch with Danielle Evans is happening at the Cullman Center on Tuesday, February 28th. Please go! |  | “What becomes of ordinary life in times of war? According to the poets, people continue as best they can.” Ilya Kaminsky and Carolyn Forché usher urgent work from the war in Ukraine with their new anthology from Arrowsmith Press, which “includes poets whose work is known to thousands of people, who are translated into dozens of languages, as well as those who are relatively unknown in the West.” Learn more in LitHub. |  | Jonquil client Paige Towers has a memoir in essays, The Sound of Undoing, out from University of Nebraska Press on Wednesday, March 1. Her editor was Abigail Kwambamba, and her acquiring editor was Courtney Ochsner. | Remembering Jack Macrae |  | I was so sorry to hear we’ve lost Jack Macrae. I worked as Jack’s assistant at John Macrae Books/Henry Holt & Co. for three and a half years, and also helped with events at the bookstore he co-owned with Paula Cooper, 192 Books. I'll always think of Jack Macrae making a big entrance into 192 Books to give an improvised introduction for a visiting author, with piles of manuscripts erupting from his leather bag and his little dog Ferdinand riding along on his wheelchair.
He was the bravest publisher I’ve met, and he was generous with feedback and encouragement for writers at tender moments in their careers. Read more about him in the Times or Publishers Weekly. | Small business shout-out |  | Happy five years to Greedy Reads, Julia Fleischaker (and Audie)’s bookstores in Baltimore! | | | | |
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