November 2024
Arcade Publishing Monthly Newsletter
At Arcade Publishing, we know that in November 2024, the election may loom large. However, we also believe books are more important, so let's discuss some of the books we have to offer. But before we dive into our November titles, we want to celebrate some recent highlights.
Let Me Try Again by Matthew Davis received high praise in the Daily Caller, calling it “a real victory,” with “sharp, fun prose, witty references and often laugh-out-loud moments.”
Additionally, Emmalea Russo, author of Vivienne, was featured in an interview with Parallel Worlds, which referred to the novel as an “immersive experience, a world unto itself.”
Take the time to check out these debut authors, and to buy their books. They both are very much worth it.
This month, we’re thrilled to announce the release of three new paperback reissues from Bruce Wagner, Force Majeure, A Guide for Murdered Children, and I'll Let You Go, alongside the first English translation of the Booklist-starred title, To the Kennels by Hye-young Pyun. More info on all of these titles below.
Thank you, and please read Arcade.
It’s Bruce’s month (is it perhaps his year?). Continuing the release of paperback editions of Bruce Wagner’s backlist, which began with the release of Dead Stars, I’m Losing You, and Marvel Universe back in July following the release of his latest book, The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Sinners on June 4th, we are thrilled to release paperback editions of three more Bruce books:
Force Majeure
576-page Arcade Publishing novel. Out November 12th, 2024. ISBN: 9781648210532
“If Jackie Collins were seduced by Dostoevsky on the floor of the William Morris mailroom, the literary offspring might read something like Force Majeure.”
— Carrie Fisher
“Force Majeure will delight movie buffs. . . . a cynical Hollywood scribe tickles and tests the system from within.”
— David Finkle, The New York Times Book Review
“A work of flat-out fucking genius.”
— Terry Gilliam
A sardonic and absurdly dark, yet hilarious take on the “business as usual” of Hollywood’s twisted class system that proved Bruce Wagner was not just an author, but a cultural anthropologist.
Force Majeure was called a “smashing debut novel” by the Kirkus Reviews upon its original publication in 1991.
The perpetually up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter, Bud Wiggins, drifts aimlessly in and out of the lives of others and from one script idea to another. Moonlighting as a limo driver to pay his bills, he finds himself immersed in a world of vanity and degradation.
Wagner infuses his novel with the familiar archetypical characters of Hollywood—a nihilistic producer, an aging film star, an obnoxious mogul—and exposes the madness that drives them all.
I’ll Let You Go
768-page Arcade Publishing novel. Out November 12th, 2024. ISBN: 9781648210556
“A masterful, modern-day fantasy of millionaires and madmen, fathers and sons, reality and dreams.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A latter-day Dickens. . . . The book succeeds, for it champions elements of fiction too often neglected in contemporary literature—plot, character, suspense—elements proved by the Victorians to have an enduring capacity to delight.”
—The Washington Post
A masterful, modern-day family saga about the valleys between wealth and poverty and reality and fantasy.
Twelve-year-old Toulouse “Tull” Trotter lives with his grandfather on a vast Bel-Air parkland estate and spends most of his time with young cousins Lucy, “the girl detective,” and Edward, a prodigy who was born disfigured by the effects of Apert Syndrome. One day, an impulsive revelation by Lucy sets in motion a chain of events that changes Tull—and the Trotter family—forever.
I’ll Let You Go, the third novel of Bruce Wagner, is a Angelino Bleak House that follows a young boy as he searches for his lost father, his beautiful, drug-addicted mother, Katrina, who is still coming down from the disappearance of her husband, and their family’s connection to a street orphan and a homeless schizophrenic.
“Mr. Wagner delineates his characters with such sympathy and verve, such a sharp eye for the status details that reveal their social standing (and secret pipe dreams), that they become palpable human beings, real in their griefs and yearnings and illusions . . . Luxuriant, bewitching prose.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
A Guide for Murdered Children
456-page Arcade Publishing novel. Out November 12th, 2024. ISBN: 9781648210570
"In her astonishing thriller, Sarah Sparrow [Bruce Wagner] has joined the ranks of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. A warning: there is no safe place to read this book."
—David Cronenberg
Originally Published under the name Sarah Sparrow, Bruce Wagner's A Guide for Murdered Children is terrifying, thoroughly original, and hauntingly written.
Ex-NYPD detective Willow Wylde is fresh out of rehab and finally able to find a job running a Cold Case squad in suburban Detroit. When the two rookie cops assigned to him take an obsessive interest in a decades-old disappearance of a brother and sister, Willow begins to suspect something out of the ordinary is afoot. He uncovers a series of church basement AA-type meetings made up of the slain innocents and a new way of looking at life, death, murder—and missed opportunities—is revealed to him.
A Guide for Murdered Children is a genre-busting, mind-bending twist on the fine line between the ordinary . . . and the unfathomable.
Bruce Wagner has written twelve novels and bestsellers, including the famous “Cellphone Trilogy,” I’m Losing You (PEN USA finalist), I’ll Let You Go and Still Holding, Dead Stars, The Empty Chair, and the PEN/Faulkner-finalist Chrysanthemum Palace. He wrote the screenplay for David Cronenberg’s film Maps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. In 1993, Wagner wrote and created the visionary miniseries Wild Palms for producer Oliver Stone and co-wrote (with Ullman) three seasons of the acclaimed Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union. He has written essays and articles for the New York Times, Artforum and the New Yorker.
And, after a brief delay, we will also be publishing Hye-young Pyun’s new book:
To the Kennels by Hye-young Pyun
A 192-page Arcade Publishing collection. Out November 26th, 2024 ISBN: 9781956763669
Translation by Sora Kim-Russell and Heinz Insu Fenkl
BOOKLIST *STARRED* REVIEW
“Pyun resonantly captures the universal, ubiquitous malais of aloneness.”—Booklist
As Un-su Kim, author of The Plotters, has observed, she “reveals to us the cellular division of emotions we’ve never seen before.”
Six elephants bolt from an amusement park and vanish; where they’re found brings back memories of a forgotten dictator. A car ride on a foggy highway at night becomes a drive through hell for a young couple getting away for the weekend together. A family lives the dream of moving from the city to a brand-new bedroom town in the country, only to be plagued by debt and fears of eviction, while the sound of incessant barking rings from the kennels nearby. In a city built on the site of ancient tombs, a homeowner’s renovation of a broken wall leads to an outcome no one expected. Older workers hired to play characters from a folk tale and wear smiles no one believes. An accountant asked to cook the books for his boss. A would-be writer disappointed in her students and her choices.
These are some of the premises and characters in Hye-young Pyun’s To the Kennels, winner of one of Korea’s most prestigious literary awards. Infused with psychological acuity, understated suspense, a touch of the uncanny, and her Kafkaesque take on the contemporary world, To the Kennels offers a thrilling, unsettling ride through territory that is both familiar and strange.
"Pyun turns the subtle anxiety hidden in the daily lives of ordinary people into an eerie but fascinating nightmare. Dark, poisonous stories make you doubt what you know about yourself and the world. . . . Spellbinding collection filled with sharp-edged observations, skillful narration, and deep insights." —JM Lee, international bestselling author of Broken Summer and The Investigation
"It's impossible to put down To the Kennels. So unique to Pyun, these stories are frightening, intriguing, and chilling to the bone all at the same time, and you won't get the likes of them from anyone else in the world. And I promise you, these penetrating stories will broaden the horizon of your world." —Kyung-sook Shin, author of Please Look After Mom and Violets
Hye-young Pyun was born in 1972 in Seoul and earned her undergraduate degree in creative writing and graduate degree in Korean literature from Hanyang University. Her published works include the short story collections Aoi Garden, To the Kennels, Evening Courtship, and Night Passes; and the novels City of Ash and Red, They Went to the Western Forest, The Law of Lines, The Hole, and Let the Dead. She has received many awards in Korea, including the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, the Yi Hyo-Seok Literature Prize, the Today's Young Writer Award, the Dong-in Literary Award, the Yi Sang Literary Award, and the Contemporary Literature (Hyundai Munhak) Award. Her novel The Hole was the 2017 winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and City of Ash and Red was an NPR Great Read. In 2019, she was awarded the Kim Yujeong Literary Award for her short story "Hotel Window." Her short stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and Words Without Borders. She currently teaches creative writing at Myongji University and lives in Seoul, Korea.
Sora Kim-Russell's translations include, besides The Hole, City of Ash and Red, The Law of Lines, and The Owl Cries by Hye-young Pyun, Un-su Kim's The Plotters; Hwang Sok-yong's At Dusk, which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize; and Suah Bae's Nowhere to be Found. Her full list of publications can be found at sorakimrussell.com. She lives in Seoul, Korea.
Heinz Insu Fenkl’s first novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, was a Barnes and Noble “Great New Writer” selection and a PEN/Hemingway finalist. He has served on the editorial board of AZALEA: the Journal of Korean Literature & Culture and is a consulting editor for Words Without Borders. His translation of Kim Man-jung’s seventeenth-century Buddhist novel, The Nine Cloud Dream, was published by Penguin Classics and his most recent novel, Skull Water, is one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023. He lives in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City.
“Arcade is a storied literary imprint (its original publisher discovered Samuel Beckett) that mirrors and embodies Tony Lyons’s fierce, lifelong commitment to writers and their art. After thirty-five years and fourteen novels, I have never been treated with more care, respect, and devotion, and have never, hands-down, had such beautiful books created from my work than with Arcade . . . Long may Arcade (and Tony Lyons) live!”
—BRUCE WAGNER