Dear THL friends, family, frenemies, secret admirers….
Happy 2024! We’re so excited to be bringing in a new year with you all. 2023 felt like a year of burning out and a lot of lag, but we still managed to end it with a bang.
This year, we’re carrying forward our theme of optimism in publishing despite the doom surrounding us—there are new small presses, lit mags, and writers emerging every week, and it makes us proud to be a part of the literary community.
We closed out 2023 with a true labor of love in publishing: a collab with Dirt Media on what we call The Future of Writing. For an entire week, Dirt subscribers received a newsletter in their inbox solely focused on the future of our writing, from fiction to literary criticism to poetry to the future of the essay. We featured amazing writers including: Geoff Rickly, Blake Butler, Paul Dalla Rosa, Tony Tulathimutte, Daisy Alioto, Becca Schuh, Kate Zambreno, Tiana Reid, Magdalene Taylor, Emmeline Clein, Elissa Washuta, Khadijah Queen, Niina Pollari and Jamie Hood, John Vincler, Natasha Stagg, Charlie Markbreiter, W. David Marx, and Whitney Mallett. It’s been immortalized on our website for your perusal.
We also asked our THL agents for their EOY roundups—what did they read? what did they like? This was a way for us to think critically about the books that changed us this year, and to (hopefully) give writers who might want to work with us a better sense of our tastes. See the selection below, and read our round-up reviews on our Instagram!
The first 4 books of THL’s 2024
We’re so excited for the books that are publishing this year, and it’s made even sweeter by the fact that the literary scene is supporting these titles well before their pub date with preorders, most-anticipated lists, starred reviews, and more…Here’s a look at the first four titles coming out this year:
"Vivid, emotionally intense, and unafraid of the dark."—Kirkus Reviews
"Cooke makes an assured debut . . . [she] successfully evokes the temerity and rebellious intelligence of Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse."—Publishers Weekly
First up, we have Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke, publishing on 1/23! Preorders are live now. At once cinematic yet intimate, Broughtupsy is an enthralling debut novel about a young Jamaican woman grappling with grief as she discovers her family, her home, is always just out of reach.
Don’t just take our word for it, though—Broughtupsy is on multiple most-anticipated lists: Chicago Review of Books, Lambda Literary Review, Write or Die, GoodReads, Rep.Club, I Heart Sapphic Fic, LitHub, Bookshop, Debutiful, Cosmo, and R.O. Kwon’s most-anticipated list in Electric Literature.
“Electric with insight, and suffused with a strange, stubborn tenderness—a deep regard for what intimacy, hope, and resistance might look like in a world where women are taught to devote their lives to destroying themselves.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering
Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein is a personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they've wrought. We’re not the only ones looking forward to it—Dead Weight has been named one of the top ten books Oprah wants to read in 2024, and received starred reviews from both Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly. Dead Weight is currently available for preorder and will publish on February 27th!
“Wrong Is Not My Name is a tender, urgent examination of art, grief, and self. What’s on the museum wall takes on new life, as if Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series had a soundtrack. I loved being suspended in this smoker’s sense of time, wandering the galleries of New York with what felt, at times, like Baldwin’s lost daughter. Erica N. Cardwell peers into paintings at close range; her criticism has the intimacy of breath. This search for meaning is a means of enduring, an art in itself.” —Aisha Sabatini Sloan, author of Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit
Out March 12th from Feminist Press, Wrong is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell is a dazzling hybrid of personal memoir and criticism, considering the work of Black visual artists as a means to explore loss, legacy, and the reclamation of life through art. Pioneering and inquisitive, Wrong Is Not My Name celebrates Black womanhood, and illuminates the ways in which art and storytelling reside at the core of being human.
"Worry is exacting and hilarious, the startling, familiar shock of seeing your own slightly warped face reflected back to you when your iPhone dies from hours of scrolling. I haven't shut up about this book and I don't think I will for the forseeable future." —NYLON, Most Anticipated Books of 2024
If you were worried (ha, ha) about the buzz surrounding Worry by Alexandra Tanner don’t. It’s been the talk of the town (the talk of the Twitter? the literary *scene*?) the last few weeks and we don’t anticipate that slowing down.
Worry has been included on most-anticipated lists such as: NYLON, The Millions, Hey Alma, and Debutiful. Worry also received a starred review from both Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly. The book is currently available for preorder, and publishes March 26th!
Last but certainly not least, we have a few exciting announcements about Triangle House:
Triangle House Review is now officially a nonprofit! You can now contribute directly to the boundary-pushing literary work we publish. Your donation will go straight to our wonderful writers, the events we host, and to our editorial team. Every dollar counts, and thank you for your support of THR thus far.
Going into 2024, Triangle House has also launched a consulting page. Need a manuscript edited? A proposal drafted? Want a a one-on-one with a publishing professional? We’ve got you covered. Check out our services on our website, and reach out with your requests!
Want to keep up with all the fun things TH is doing? Follow us on TikTok (expect a lot of memes!)
Until next time!
xo,
THL