The U.S. (and The Friedrich Agency) dominates Booker Prize longlist!

Let’s set the scene: Lucy has just gotten back from LA; it’s near midnight and she’s dying for a slice of pizza 🍕. But oh no! With a groan, she realizes she’s forgotten her house keys back on the other side of the country. Screw it, she checks into a shady motel around the corner, wakes up to blinding sunlight and a call that lets her know…

We have not one, not two, but THREE authors on the Booker longlist!!! Eureka!

Congratulations Elizabeth Strout (Oh William!), Karen Joy Fowler (Booth), and Leila Mottley (Nightcrawling)!

To add even more excitement: Leila is also the youngest author ever to be nominated for the Booker! This comes on the heels of other thrilling news that has surrounded this stellar publication: a New York Times bestseller, an Oprah Book Club Pick, Center for Fiction 2022 First Novel Prize Longlist, New York Times Writer to Watch, an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, annnnnnd most recently, an appearance on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah!

My gosh, I would have been a nervous wreck in front of Trevor Noah, but Leila? Absolutely not! Here is what Trevor had to say:

“The biggest rockstar in the world of books right now… One of the most amazing books I’ve ever read… Everyone should just read [Nightcrawling].” —Trevor Noah

A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system--“the debut of a blazingly original voice and a soul-searching portrait of survival and hope” —Oprah Winfrey

Karen has had a fantastic publication across the pond and here, which is telling by the reviews she’s gotten from both countries! So far, Booth has been picked as best book of the year by USA Today, Waterstones, Real Simply, and AARP. It’s also an indie bestseller, an Amazon Pick for March 2022, as well as a Book of the Month pick.

An epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth. Booth is a startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make, and break, a family.

I wanted to highlight this NPR conversation, which gets to the fascinating questions Karen had to face when writing Booth.

SIMON: How do you balance your writing as a historian and a novelist in a work like this?

FOWLER: This is actually not my first historical novel, but it is the first one in which I dealt with actual people… This was a whole new endeavor for me and one I'm not entirely comfortable with even having done it, that, you know, to use famous names and attribute to them thoughts they might have had, but they also might not have had… because, of course, I am only pretending to know them well. I'm making my best guesses.

FOWLER: The last thing I wanted to do was to give more attention to John Wilkes Booth. And so I tried really and I believe with all my heart that people who don't murder presidents can be just as interesting as people who do and that actually John Wilkes was not the most interesting member of this family. So I tried to keep the focus on his brothers and sisters. But, you know, we all know I wouldn't be writing about them if John Wilkes Booth hadn't murdered Abraham Lincoln. So he's sort of simultaneously somebody I'm trying to keep from absolute center stage and the whole reason we're interested in this family.

Elizabeth Strout strikes again with Oh William!, the 3rd in the Amgash series, and the second book in this series (the first being My Name is Lucy Barton) to be longlisted for the Booker Award! And readers can rejoice, as Elizabeth continues the series with LUCY BY THE SEA, coming out in hardcover this September.

Oh William! is a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by these outlets: The New York Times Book Review, NPR’s Fresh Air, The Washington Post, Time, Vulture, She Reads.

"Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favorite writers, so the fact that Oh William! may well be my favorite of her books is a mathematical equation for joy. The depth, complexity, and love contained in these pages is a miraculous achievement." —Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

“Strout doesn’t dress language up in a tuxedo when a wool sweater will suffice. Other novelists must berate themselves when they see what Strout pulls off without any tacky pyrotechnics. Straightforward goes down so easy and feels so refreshing.” —The Washington Post

Oh William! is out now in paperback if you haven’t picked it up yet! I’ve also included a snippet of the audiobook above, if you’re an audio kind of person.

Congratulations again to our 3 authors! All our limbs are crossed for the shortlist.

—Marin

P.S.: Not bad for a team of 5, I must say! Did I mention that this is the record for most titles per agency? Hehe.

Women’s Prize: A Win!

I don’t know about you, but all of us at The Friedrich Agency are so glad that this heat advisory has broken. And with the cooler, much longed for summer breeze comes news that’s equally longed for:   

Ruth Ozeki has WON this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for The Book of Form and Emptiness! There was not a single dry eye in our office that day as we crowded around Lucy’s laptop to listen to Ruth’s acceptance speech. A long-deserved triumph!

'I'm a very good runner up, but I don't win things'

Ruth Ozeki reacts to being crowned the 2022 #WomensPrize winner and discusses this year's fabulous shortlisted authors 😍 pic.twitter.com/t4REd4U8cP

— Women's Prize (@WomensPrize) June 15, 2022

In addition to being the newly-minted winner of the Women’s Prize, The Book of Form and Emptiness is a New York Times’ Editors’ Choice, a Boston Globe bestseller, a Washington Post bestseller, a National Indie bestseller, among others! I wanted to highlight this rave from The Boston Globe, as well as this blurb from David Mitchell, as I think they capture the sentiment shared by many about this book:

“If you’ve lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home.”

— David Mitchell, Booker Prize-finalist author of Cloud Atlas

US cover

“An ambitious and ingenious novel that presents a stinging exploration of grief [and] a reflection on our relationship to objects… combine[s] daunting intellectual complexity and accessible big-heartedness… The most endearing aspect of Ozeki’s novel is its unabashed celebration of words, writing, and reading… Ozeki’s playfulness and zaniness, her compassion and boundless curiosity, prevent the novel from ever feeling stiff or pretentious. Clever without being arch, metafictional without being arcane, dark without being nihilistic, The Book of Form and Emptiness is an exuberant delight.

— The Boston Globe

UK cover

At the award ceremony (video below! Recommend starting at 7:32), Mary Ann Sieghart, the 2022 chair of judges, noted that The Book of Form and Emptiness “ stood out for its sparkling writing, warmth, intelligence, humor and poignancy… and is a complete joy to read. Ruth Ozeki is a truly original and masterful storyteller.”

We couldn’t agree more—congratulations, Ruth!  

—Marin

A Double Celebration: Two TFA authors on 2022 Women’s Fiction Prize Longlist!!!

A very happy International Women’s Day! I’ve basically spoiled this entire blog post, but we’re BEYOND thrilled and honored to announce that our own authors—Violet Kupersmith (Build Your House Around My Body) and Ruth Ozeki (The Book of Form and Emptiness)—are both longlisted for the Women’s Fiction Prize (formerly known as the Orange Prize), the UK’s most prestigious annual book award celebrating and honoring fiction written by women!

The shortlist gets announced at the end of April, with the winner in mid-June. All of us here at TFA will be nervously biting our nails come April 27! These books couldn’t be more different, but are each magnificent and unique—and clearly the judges agree!

If you haven’t heard of either title, I’m excited to share two podcast episodes that will definitely pique your interest!

First, a conversation between Ruth and Ezra Klein on “The Ezra Klein Show”, where they discuss what it means to hear voices in our heads and whether it’s really so rare. And next, an interview by Ari Shapiro for NPR’s “All Things Considered”, where he discusses with Violet what it means to be haunted, the legacies of the Vietnam War and colonialism, and how writing BYHAMB was a form of exorcism for Violet.

A boy who hears the voices of objects all around him; a mother drowning in her possessions; and a Book that might hold the secret to saving them both--the brilliantly inventive new novel from the Booker Prize-finalist Ruth Ozeki

EZRA KLEIN: So in the book, there’s Benny who hears the voices of objects, and there’s his mother Annabelle who — I don’t want to say she doesn’t hear them. They’re not in the way intelligibly the way Benny does, but she’s a hoarder. She loves her objects. She does not want to get rid of them. It causes all kinds of very, very dangerous problems for her in her life.

And you’re very sympathetic to her throughout the book. There’s a beautiful line where she said, this isn’t just stuff. It’s an archive. It’s my life. And I wanted to know how you would describe Annabelle’s relationship with objects.

RUTH OZEKI: I love Annabelle. And I know she’s a difficult woman. I get that. And she is a bit of a hoarder, maybe more than a bit of a hoarder.

But what I love about her is her creativity. It’s that she sees the potential in everything, and she’s just wildly optimistic about things. And one of the things that she loves to do is go to Michael’s, the arts and crafts superstore, and just walk up and down the aisles with an empty shopping cart, just looking at things and imagining what they could become, seeing all of their potential to become something else.

And there’s something so kind of hopeful about the way that she can intuit or perceive or feel the vibrancy, the aliveness of matter and its ability to transform. So in that sense, she’s not that unlike her son, who has a similar ability to perceive this vibrancy in the world around him.

Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this ingenious novel spins half a century of Vietnamese history and folklore into "a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve" (The New York Times).

SHAPIRO: This is your first novel. And before this, you wrote a collection of short stories that was also populated by ghosts, as this book is. As a writer, what appeals to you about the supernatural?

KUPERSMITH: Well, when I wrote "The Frangipani Hotel," the short story collection, I was very interested in the metaphor of the ghost as sort of a stand-in for the immigrant. Because I thought, oh, it's such a perfect figure, the ghost who's sort of trapped between worlds and doesn't really belong anywhere. But with the novel, I was more attracted to the ghost as a way of getting revenge...

SHAPIRO: Huh.

KUPERSMITH: ... And as a figure who has this agency that was denied to them in life.

Massive congratulations to both Violet and Ruth! And now, we wait for the shortlist!

xx Marin

Ce-le-bra-tion! Violet and Jackie at the Center for Fiction

Last Friday, all five of us at The Friedrich Agency donned our glitziest and glammest (but not too glam, y’know? Got to keep it chic) outfits that were collecting dust at the back of our wardrobes to trot over to the Center for Fiction to celebrate not one, BUT TWO of our authors! The lovely Jackie Polzin and Violet Kupersmith were shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize for Brood and Build Your House Around My Body respectively. Woooo!

It was a wonderful night filled with cheer and lots of hugs. The air felt electric as we came together, for what seems like the first time since Covid started, to celebrate great fiction and reunite with publishing friends and authors we hadn’t seen in ages! Not to mention, it was our first time meeting Jackie IN PERSON. How wild is that?

Molly had to leave early to catch the train, so she’s unfortunately not in our group picture, but look at us! Glowing! Enthralled to be in each other’s company!

So, here they are! Two wonderful debut novels, as different as they can be, but both equally beautiful, provocative, and impressively layered. We’ve received amazing reviews and coverage for both titles, so I want to quickly run through them.

In addition to the Center for Fiction First Prize shortlist, Build Your House Around My Body has been named as one of the best books of the year by these following places: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Good Housekeeping, and Kirkus Reviews.

“Beautiful, brilliant, powerful, and shivery-back-of-the-neck terrifying”

— Madeline Miller, author of Circe

“Fiction as daring and accomplished as Violet Kupersmith’s first novel reignites my love of the form and its kaleidoscopic possibilities.”

— David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this ingenious novel spins half a century of Vietnamese history and folklore into "a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve" (The New York Times).

Two young women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge.

As for Brood, it was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a March 2021 Indie Next Pick, and a Country Living April 2021 Front Porch Book Club Pick! EDIT (March 2022) - And more awards for Jackie and Brood: Finalist for the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Finalist for 2022 Minnesota Book Awards; Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction!

An exquisite new literary voice—wryly funny, nakedly honest, beautifully observational, in the vein of Jenny Offill and Elizabeth Strout—depicts one woman's attempt to keep her four chickens alive while reflecting on a recent loss.

A stunning and brilliantly insightful meditation on life and longing that will stand beside such modern classics as H is for Hawk and Gilead, Brood rewards its readers with the richness of reflection and unrelenting hope.

“Polzin writes beautifully about chickens; she is lovingly clear-eyed about their “idiocy” and their dearness. She writes beautifully about everything: the sound of melting snow at the end of a Minnesota winter; a forgotten container of orange sherbet frosted over; private emotion. Her eye for physical detail is surprising, gimlet… It’s a pleasure to see what Polzin sees.”

— Elizabeth McCranken, The New York Times

“A book about caretaking, about trauma and loss, about keeping others and one’s self alive, with sentences so confident and exact they continually took my breath away, Brood is that rare book that lives inside of you long after it’s over, that reminds you of the vast amounts of life that language is capable of conjuring.”

— Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want

So go on! Pick these two titles up on your next book run, I promise they’ll amaze.

xx Marin