Books publishing in July, 2026.
To share your literary or cultural opinions, email hello@pagesstudio.net
Agnes Lives: A Novel by Hallie Elizabeth Newton
New York City, 2014. Agnes Maurer seeks a willing murderer and wonders what she should wear. Candidates include: an icy magazine editor with a special cutlery set; an eccentric designer from her past; and Agnes's cruel novelist boyfriend. As she Ubers from Upper East Side shopping to Craigslist gun deals, Agnes' desperation becomes an exhibition, a swan song of millennial sexuality as internalized abuse and consummate style, with the knob righty-tightened all the way.
Newton's prose is disturbingly fun, relentless, shattering. A crafted study of existential despair that culminates in a worthy, intense denouement.
Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.
1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.
1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.
The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders
At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling through adulthood. An underpaid gig worker in Washington, DC, she’s grieving the end of a serious relationship and the recent loss of her father. When Aubrey learns she has inherited his stake in a sizable Tennessee farm she sees an opportunity to get out of the city—and to erase a mounting pile of debt.
Watching her arrival with great interest are four ghosts—Aubrey’s ancestors, who’ve staked their own claims to the farm and who never hesitate to pass judgment on the mistakes made by the living, whether romantic, financial, or sartorial. As Aubrey reconnects with her living family, another story unfolds in parallel: the history of the land, beginning with its purchase by Thomas, Aubrey’s great-grandfather and one of the first Black landowners in his community. Though Thomas hopes to give his children a homestead on which they could flourish, the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it turns the Lambs against one another, culminating in a catastrophic tragedy that splinters the family and echoes through the decades.
Now, as the clock ticks on a potential sale of the farm, the ghosts fear expulsion from the home they’ve made, and Aubrey must weigh the hopes and burdens of her forebears with the very real needs of her future.
At first you are at home inside your pregnant mother: a beloved daughter, a vision of the future. But who will you become?
As your family moves back and forth between Korea and the United States, you find yourself caught between two countries. Prioritizing your future over her own happiness, your mother marshals you through a childhood of homework and violin practice and academic achievement to shape you into the person she most wants you to be. Is hers the ultimate form of love? And, despite her sacrifices, is there a world somewhere between your motherland and homeland that can feel like your own?
Unsayable by Michael Cunningham
At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively collecting the names of things: oak, Chevrolet, finch, tulip, Tupperware. . . . Each word rendered the world ever so slightly more understandable, more describable, kicking off a lifelong love affair with language—one that would, eventually, maybe inevitably, lead him to become a writer.
In Unsayable, Cunningham’s memories spill forth, and with them reflections on the craft of writing. He is fifteen, in a swimming pool at night, gazing at the first boy he ever fell in love with, who is lost in contemplative silence. He is a new college graduate, setting off for nowhere in a Dodge Dart, hoping to pull meaning (and a novel) from the expanse of America. He is on Cape Cod, regaling an elderly couple with invented tales of sexual escapades. He is in an art gallery, unwittingly having the first in a lifetime of conversations with the man he would marry. A thread ties each beautifully wrought moment to the next: what is unspoken, what won’t yield to language, what is embellished beyond recognition, what is still left to say.
Thirty years old and reeling from her mother's recent death, Frances feels as if she's lost her sense of purpose, her joy. Her husband, Ben, will do anything to help her. So when she suggests that they open their marriage, he's willing--and maybe even a little intrigued.
They invite a young woman into their bedroom, create a joint dating profile, and go on dates with other exploring couples, with mixed but often exciting results. Over the next five years, they explore their sexualities, navigating through jealousy, betrayal, desire, and obsession--and the friends and lovers in their circle find themselves asking new questions about their own lives and relationships.
When Ben finds himself falling in love with another woman, just as Frances realizes she's ready to settle down and have a baby, they're forced to confront the consequences of their experiment.
CONTRIBUTE
hello@pagesstudio.net
All over the show.