New Podcast:

YA author Sarah Enni's podcast First Draft has shared more than 240 conversations with authors. We're excited to announce her latest venture: Track Changes, a First Draft miniseries that aims to demystify book publishing, debuting on April 16th. Over nine episodes, Track Changes answers the surprisingly complex question: How does a book get published? The U.S. book publishing industry is full of idiosyncrasies and traditions, as debut author Jennifer de Leon quickly learns. We follow Jennifer as she navigates the ups and downs leading to the release of her YA novel, Don't Ask Me Where I'm From. With the insight, curiosity, and matter-of-factness that listeners of First Draft have come to expect, host Sarah Enni talks to professionals at all stages of the publishing process—from agents and editors to publicity and marketing professionals and more—to give listeners the information they need to be more knowledgeable and prepared professional writers.

The series will take the listener on a 360-degree tour of the publishing process, providing context and human voices for every step. Aspiring authors, professional writers, and industry vets alike will have a renewed respect and appreciation for the industry—and, hopefully, some ideas about how to make it better.

Among the publishing professionals to be featured are: Holly Root, founder of Root Literary; Jo Volpe, founder of New Leaf Literary & Media; Sarah Burnes and Seth Fishman, both with The Gernert Company; Katherine Tegen, publisher with Katherine Tegen Books at HarperCollins; Stacey Barney, senior editor at Penguin/Putnam Books for Young Readers; Kate Sullivan, former senior editor at Delacourt and currently senior content development manager at New Leaf Literary & Media; Margot Wood, founder of Epic Reads at HarperCollins and director of sales and marketing at Oni Press; Nikki Pierce, co-founder of Method Agency, a boutique branding and marketing agency.

About First Draft with Sarah Enni:

First Draft with Sarah Enni is the podcast where we talk to storytellers about how their art informs their lives. Join host Sarah Enni every Tuesday for honest, meaningful conversations with storytellers about their unique perspectives on the creative process, and to provide more transparency about the professional side of artistic endeavors. Since 2014, First Draft has featured interviews with dozens of New York Times best-selling writers, as well as Emmy and Peabody-winning writers, and winners of the Caldecott Award, the William C. Morris Young Adult Debut award, the Michael El. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, and the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

Sarah Enni

www.firstdraftpod.com

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Sarah Enni is an author, podcaster, and journalist living in Los Angeles. Her debut young adult novel, Tell Me Everything, is out now. You can read her short story in the New York Times best-selling villain anthology, Because You Love to Hate Me, out now.

www.sarahenni.com

@sarahenni on Twitter

@sarahenni on Instagram

For all press requests, contact Heidi Vanderlee - 

hv@sharkpartymedia.com

In My TBR Stack:

A Soul's Journey: The Story of Traveling Through Time to Find the Truth
by G.C. DePietro
Trade Paperback

From the book publicity:

Recovered subconscious memories prove that death is not a punishment, but rather an opportunity to be reborn with new knowledge acquired from previous lives. The liberating concept of reincarnation allows us to learn from our mistakes. The reasons why we keep coming back may surprise but more importantly learning how to move on and not get stuck in the karmic cycle is the quest as you'll discover in this soul's journey.

On My Radar:

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior
Flatiron Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The story of Donald Trump’s rise to power is the story of a buried American history – buried because people in power liked it that way. It was visible without being seen, influential without being named, ubiquitous without being overt. 

Sarah Kendzior’s Hiding in Plain Sight pulls back the veil on a history spanning decades, a history of an American autocrat in the making. In doing so, she reveals the inherent fragility of American democracy – how our continual loss of freedom, the rise of consolidated corruption, and the secrets behind a burgeoning autocratic United States have been hiding in plain sight for decades.

In Kendzior’s signature and celebrated style, she expertly outlines Trump’s meteoric rise from the 1980s until today, interlinking key moments of his life with the degradation of the American political system and the continual erosion of our civil liberties by foreign powers. Kendzior also offers a never-before-seen look at her lifelong tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – living in New York through 9/11 and in St. Louis during the Ferguson uprising, and researching media and authoritarianism when Trump emerged using the same tactics as the post-Soviet dictatorships she had long studied.

It is a terrible feeling to sense a threat coming, but it is worse when we let apathy, doubt, and fear prevent us from preparing ourselves. Hiding in Plain Sight confronts the injustice we have too long ignored because the truth is the only way forward.

On My Radar:

Talking to Strangers: A Memoir of My Escape from a Cult
by Marianne Boucher
Doubleday Canada
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Welcome to a place where you are valued. Where everyone is kind. Where you can be your truest self. 

It was the summer of 1980, and Marianne Boucher was ready to chase her figure skating dream. Fuelled by the desire to rise above her mundane high-school life,      she sought a new adventure as a glamorous performer in L.A.

And then a chance encounter on a California beach introduced her to a new group of people. People who shared her distrust of the status quo. People who seemed to value authenticity and compassion above all else. And they liked her. Not Marianne the performer, but Marianne the person.

Soon, she'd abandoned school, her skating and, most dramatically, her family to live with her new friends and help them fulfill their mission of "saving the world." She believed that no sacrifice was too great to be there--and to live with real purpose. They were helping people, and they cared about her . . . didn't they?

Talking to Strangers is the true story of Marianne Boucher's experiences in a cult, where she was subjected to sophisticated brainwashing techniques that took away her freedom, and took over her mind. Told in mesmerizing graphic memoir form, with vivid text and art alike, Marianne shares how she fell in with devotees of a frightening spiritual abuser, and how she eventually, painfully, pulled herself out.

On My Radar:

Me & Patsy Kickin' Up Dust: My Friendship with Patsy Cline
by Loretta Lynn
Grand Central Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Loretta Lynn and the late Patsy Cline are legends–country icons and sisters of the heart. For the first time ever Loretta tells their story: a celebration of their music and their relationship up until Patsy’s tragic and untimely death.

Full of laughter and tears, this eye-opening, heartwarming memoir paints a picture of two stubborn, spirited country gals who’d be damned if they’d let men or convention tell them how to be. Set in the heady streets of the 1960s South, this nostalgia ride shows how Nashville blossomed into the city of music it is today. Tender and fierce, Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust is an up-close-and-personal portrait of a friendship that defined a generation and changed country music indelibly–and a meditation on love, loss and legacy.

In My TBR Stack:

Leadership Hero Code: Seven Principles for Thriving in Today's Workplace
by Kristen Hemingway
Hemingway Strategies Publishing
Trade Paperback

Confidently and authentically navigating today’s complex, ambiguous, and unpredictable workplace isn’t about putting on a brave face or taking one for the team. You need trustworthy diagnostics and tools you can count on to focus your energy on high-impact areas of leadership effectiveness. Leadership Hero Code identifies seven principles of leadership health, for you individually and for the teams you work with daily. Discover how you can recalibrate your leadership and your quality of life creating change even in the most conservative environments.

Gain mastery over your career—and your life. Leadership Hero Code will give you the courage to be your own kind of hero.

In My TBR Stack:

Her Argument: Epiphanies, Theories, Confessions
by Ellary Eddy
Darlingmedia Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

This is not just another memoir:This is a deconstruction  of life, as lived by a human.

This is not a how-to book:This is a what-if book. 

A ‘what-if you could look at life as an intellectual adventure’ book.

In a vein at once playful, philosophical and lyrical, artist Ellary Eddy builds a provocative case for the value of self-inquiry, authenticity, and radical astonishment at the marvel of existence. Using her own experiences as raw material, Eddy’s essays muse upon the nature of identity and explore the meaning of life in general. Her Argument coaxes you to throw off the shackles of everyday reality and, Tigger-like, bounce free, stripes rippling, into the frabjous wilderness of being. Eddy romps through a wide range of topics: sex, style, play, and dating, philosophy, poetry, art and dildos, daughters, joy, aging like a motherf***er and the ‘Good Life’.

On My Radar:

Swing Kings: The Inside Story of Baseball's Home Run Revolution
by Jared Diamond
William Morrow Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

We are in a historic era for the home run. The 2019 season saw the most homers ever, obliterating a record set just two years before. It is a shift that has transformed the way the game is played, contributing to more strikeouts, longer games, and what feels like the logical conclusion of the analytics era. In Swing Kings, Wall Street Journal national baseball writer Jared Diamond reveals that the secret behind this unprecedented shift isn’t steroids or the stitching of the baseballs, it’s the most elemental explanation of all: the swing. In this lively narrative romp, he tracks a group of baseball’s biggest stars—including Aaron Judge, J.D. Martinez, and Justin Turner—who remade their swings under the tutelage of a band of renegade coaches, and remade the game in the process.

These coaches, many of them baseball washouts who have reinvented themselves as swing gurus, for years were one of the game’s best-kept secrets. Among their ranks are a swimming pool contractor, the owner of a billiards hall, and an ex-hippie whose swing insights draw from surfing and the technique of Japanese samurai. Now, as Diamond artfully charts, this motley cast has moved from the baseball margins to its center of power. They are changing the way hitting is taught to players of all ages, and major league clubs are scrambling for their services, hiring them in record numbers as coaches and consultants. And Diamond himself, whose baseball career ended in high school, enlists the tutelage of each swing coach he profiles, with an aim toward starring in the annual Boston-New York media game at Yankee Stadium.

Swing Kings is both a rollicking history of baseball’s recent past and a deeply reported, character-driven account of a battle between opponents as old as time: old and new, change and stasis, the establishment and those who break from it. Jared Diamond has written a masterful chronicle of America’s pastime at the crossroads.

On My Radar:

Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein
by Bradley J. Edwards
Gallery Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In June 2008, Florida-based victims’ rights attorney Bradley J. Edwards was thirty-two years old and had just started his own law firm when a young woman named Courtney Wild came to see him. She told a shocking story of having been sexually coerced at the age of fourteen by a wealthy man in Palm Beach named Jeffrey Epstein. Edwards, who had never heard of Epstein, had no idea that this moment would change the course of his life.

Over the next ten years, Edwards devoted himself to bringing Epstein to justice, and came close to losing everything in the process. Edwards tracked down and represented more than twenty of Epstein’s victims, shined a light on his shadowy network of accomplices, and uncovered the scope of his sexually exploitative organization, which reached into the highest levels of American society.

Edwards gives his riveting, blow-by-blow account of battling Epstein on behalf of his clients, and provides stunning details never shared before. He explains how he followed Epstein’s criminal enterprise from Florida, to New York, to Europe, to a Caribbean island, and, in the process, became the one person Epstein most feared could take him down. Epstein and his cadre of high-priced lawyers were able to manipulate the FBI and the Justice Department, but despite making threats and attempting schemes straight out of a spy movie, Epstein couldn’t stop Edwards, his small team of committed lawyers, and, most of all, the victims, who were dead-set on seeing their abuser finally put behind bars.

On My Radar:

The NRA: The Unauthorized History
by Frank Smyth
Flatiron Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The National Rifle Association is unique in American life. Few other civic organizations are as old or as large. None is as controversial. It is largely due to the NRA that the U.S. gun policy differs so extremely — some would say so tragically — from that of every other developed nation. But, as Frank Smyth shows, the NRA has evolved from an organization concerned above all with marksmanship — and which supported most government efforts around gun control for a hundred years — to one that resists all attempts to restrict guns in any way. At the same time, the organization has also buried its own remarkable history. 

Here is that story, from the NRA’s surprising roots in post-Civil War New York City to the defining event that changed its culture forever — the so called “Cincinnati Revolt” of 1977 — to the present day, where President Donald Trump is the most ardent champion in the White House the NRA has ever had. For anyone who has looked at access to guns in our society and asked “Why?”, this is an unmatched account of how we got here, and who got us here.

On My Radar:

More Myself: A Journey
by Alicia Keys with Michelle Burford
Flatiron Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

As one of the most celebrated musicians in the world, Alicia Keys has enraptured the globe with her heartfelt lyrics, extraordinary vocal range, and soul-stirring piano compositions. Yet away from the spotlight, Alicia has grappled with private heartache—over the challenging and complex relationship with her father, the people-pleasing nature that characterized her early career, the loss of privacy surrounding her romantic relationships, and the oppressive expectations of female perfection.

Since Alicia rose to fame, her public persona has belied a deep personal truth: she has spent years not fully recognizing or honoring her own worth. After withholding parts of herself for so long, she is at last exploring the questions that live at the heart of her story: Who am I, really? And once I discover that truth, how can I become brave enough to embrace it?

More Myself is part autobiography, part narrative documentary. Alicia’s journey is revealed not only through her own candid recounting, but also through vivid recollections from those who have walked alongside her. The result is a 360-degree perspective on Alicia’s path, from her girlhood in Hell’s Kitchen and Harlem to the process of growth and self-discovery that we all must navigate.

In More Myself, Alicia shares her quest for truth—about herself, her past, and her shift from sacrificing her spirit to celebrating her worth. With the raw honesty that epitomizes Alicia’s artistry, More Myself is at once a riveting account and a clarion call to readers: to define themselves in a world that rarely encourages a true and unique identity.

On My Radar:

Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place
by Joan Frank
University of New Mexico Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Through the author’s travels in Europe and the United States, Try to Get Lost explores the quest for place that compels and defines us: the things we carry, how politics infuse geography, media’s depictions of an idea of home, the ancient and modern reverberations of the word “hotel,” and the ceaseless discovery generated by encounters with self and others on familiar and foreign ground. Frank posits that in fact time itself may be our ultimate, inhabited place—the “vastest real estate we know,” with a “stunningly short” lease.

On My Radar:

Had I Known: Collected Essays
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Twelve Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A self-proclaimed “myth buster by trade,” Barbara Ehrenreich has covered an extensive range of topics as a journalist and political activist, and is unafraid to dive into intellectual waters that others deem too murky. Now, Had I Known gathers the articles and excerpts from a long-ranging career that most highlight Ehrenreich’s brilliance, social consciousness, and wry wit.

From Ehrenreich’s award-winning article “Welcome to Cancerland,” published shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, to her groundbreaking undercover investigative journalism in Nickel and Dimed, to her exploration of death and mortality in the New York Times bestseller, Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich has been writing radical, thought-provoking, and worldview-altering pieces for over four decades. Her reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, among others, while her essays, op-eds and feature articles have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and many more. Had I Known pulls from the vast and varied collection of one of our country’s most incisive thinkers to create one must-have volume.