Read It First

“I cannot say this urgently enough,” says Scott Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Ruins and A Simple Plan, “you have to read Gone Girl. It’s as if Gillian Flynn has mixed us a martini using battery acid instead of vermouth and somehow managed to make it taste really, really good. Gone Girl is delicious and intoxicating and delightfully poisonous.” Scott Smith’s not the only one urging you to read Gillian Flynn’s latest. Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author of Fallen, says “Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl reminds me of Patricia Highsmith at the top of her game.” Be among the first to read it! RIF is excited to give you the chance to win a copy of Gone Girl months before its June 2012 release.

The interlocking stories in The Kissing List feature an unforgettable group of young women – Sylvie, Anna, Frances, Maureen – as their lives connect, first during a year abroad at Oxford, then later as they move to New York on the cusp of adulthood. We follow each of them as they navigate the treachery of first dates, temp jobs and roommates, failed relationships and unexpected affairs – all the things that make their lives seem full of possibility, but also rife with potential disappointment.

A family is torn apart by fierce belief and private longing in this unprecedented journey deep inside the most insular Hasidic sect, the Satmar. Sweeping from the Central European countryside just before World War II to Paris to contemporary Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I Am Forbidden brings to life four generations of one Satmar family. A beautifully crafted, emotionally gripping story of what happens when unwavering love, unyielding law, and centuries of tradition collide, I Am Forbidden announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new voice and opens a startling window on a world long closed to most of us, until now.

In 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf started The Hogarth Press from their home, armed only with a handpress and a determination to publish the newest, most exciting writing. Hogarth brought the world authors who shaped the culture of the past 100 years: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Vita Sackville-West, to name a few. This year, what began in London in 1917 finds a new life in New York and Hogarth’s goals are no less lofty: bring readers the authors who will shape the culture of the next 100 years: Anouk Markovits, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, Stephanie Reents, Jay Caspian-Kang, Vincent Lam, Shani Boianjiu, Lawrence Osborne, Ben Masters.

“Try this,” recommends Patricia Ellis Herr, author of Up, “next time you and your child have a warm day to spend together, go for a walk, and let her decide on the destination, but have a ‘no carrying’ rule; this is a particularly empowering approach. Right away, your child knows that she has the power to decide where the two of you are going, and that she will be responsible for getting there on her own two feet. If her desired destination seems unrealistic, don’t worry, and don’t naysay. Without judgment or negative assumptions, let her try.”

“In 2008, I traveled nine thousand miles to northern India near the border of Pakistan, to have a child,” writes author Adrienne Arieff. “I went to India under the direction of a fertility specialist to whom I only spoken over the phone, to undergo IVF treatment, with the help of an Indian surrogate I had never met. The Sacred Thread offers my perspective and a look at the landscape and culture of India through the lens of an American couple searching for family, an Indian family searching for a future, and a doctor offering a chance for both to find what they seek.”