Kathleen Alcott

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Literary Short Stories

A professor finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of a museum. A twenty-something’s lucrative remote work sparks paranoia and bigotry. A transplant to a new city must choose who she trusts when her partner reveals a violent history. 📸 The summer after her divorce from an older man, an exiled painter’s former friends grapple with rumors that she attempted to pass as a teenager.

In this long-awaited debut collection, Kathleen Alcott turns her considerable skills as a stylist on the unfreedoms of American life—as well as the guilt that stalks those who survive them. ✨ These stories roam from European cities to scorched California towns, drug-smeared motel rooms to polished dinner parties, taking taut, surprising portraits of addiction, love, misogyny, and sexual power.

Alcott confronts the hidden perils of class ascension. The women in these stories try to pay down the psychic debts of their old lives as they search for a new happiness they can afford. 💔 There’s a specificity to her observations—about money, about bodies, about the compromises women make—that cuts deep.

The prose is precise and unsettling, the kind of writing that makes you pause mid-sentence to absorb what just happened. 🌙 These aren’t comfortable stories, but they’re memorable ones, lingering in the mind long after the book is closed.

Here’s what you’re getting: literary short fiction at its sharpest—dark, beautiful, and unsparing in its examination of American womanhood. 🖤 For readers who want their stories to leave marks.

Sebastien de Castell

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Action & Adventure Fantasy

Welcome to the Operato Belleza—it might save his life, or it just might be the end of him. 🎭 Damelas Chademantaigne picked a poor night to flee a judicial duel. He has precious little hope of escaping the wrath of the Vixen, the most feared duellist in the entire city, until he stumbles through the stage doors of the magnificent opera house and tricks his way into the company of actors.

An archaic law provides temporary respite from his troubles—until one night a ghostly voice in his head causes Damelas to fumble his lines, inadvertently blurting out a dreadful truth: the city’s most legendary hero may actually be a traitor and a brutal murderer. ⚔️ Now he’s made powerful enemies who want him silenced permanently.

De Castell, author of the beloved Greatcoats series, delivers swashbuckling adventure with theatrical flair. Damelas must somehow find courage he’s never shown before, aided only by his boisterous friend Bereto, a beautiful assassin whose target may well be Damelas himself, and a company of misfit actors who’d just as soon see him dead. 🗡️ Oh, and there’s still the matter of the Vixen waiting to duel him.

The setting—a world where theater and politics intertwine, where actors have legal protections and ancient secrets hide in plain sight—is irresistible. 🎪 De Castell writes action sequences with cinematic precision and dialogue that crackles with wit.

Here’s what you’re getting: swashbuckling fantasy adventure with a theatrical twist, from an author who knows how to balance humor, heart, and sword fights. 🌟 First in The Court of Shadows series—perfect for fans of Scott Lynch and the author’s own Greatcoats.

Laura Cumming

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Biographies of Artists, Architects & Photographers

In 1654, the Thunderclap—an enormous explosion at a gunpowder store—devastated the city of Delft, killing hundreds of people and injuring thousands more. 💥 Among the dead was Carel Fabritius, an extraordinary painter whose brief career had already produced works of startling originality. He was thirty-two years old.

Art critic Laura Cumming uses this catastrophic moment as the lens for something more expansive: a meditation on art, loss, and how paintings enter our lives and change how we see. 🎨 She writes about Fabritius and the Dutch Golden Age with scholarly authority, but she also writes about her own father, a painter, and the ways art shaped her understanding of the world.

“Cumming has fashioned a book that combines memoir, art criticism, and history to illuminating effect” (The New York Times Book Review). 📖 Like Dutch art itself, the story gradually links country, city, town, street, house, interior—all the way to the bird on its perch, the blue and white tile, the smallest seed in a loaf of bread.

This is a book about attention—what it means to really look at something, whether a painting or a person or a memory. 🕊️ Cumming’s prose is luminous, and her ability to move between centuries, between the personal and the historical, gives the book an unusual emotional resonance.

Here’s what you’re getting: a beautiful hybrid of art history, biography, and memoir from one of the finest art critics writing today. 🖼️ For readers who believe that how we see shapes who we become.