In The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen, the story belongs to a 12-year-old genius mapmaker who lives with his family on a ranch in Divide, Montana. His father is a silent cowboy and his mother is a scientist who for the last twenty years has been looking for a mythical species of beetle. His brother has gone, his sister seems normal but might not be, and his dog – Verywell – is going mad. When the Smithsonian Institution calls with news that T.S. has won a major scientific prize, T.S. embarks on a life-changing adventure, fleeing in the dead of night, riding freight trains two thousand miles across America. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a story like no other: exhilarating, funny, endlessly charming and unbearably poignant. It is a journey through life’s mysteries great and small, and about how on earth a boy with a telescope, four compasses and a theodolite should set about solving them. Reif Larsen is a filmmaker, teacher, and writer. Penguin Press will publish this first novel in May 2009. Thus far, foreign rights have sold in nineteen territories. (www.tsspivet.com)

In her highly-charged and provocative third book for young adults, titled Touch, Francine Prose shows how a single incident has the power to change irrevocably the lives of kids and their community. Something happened in the last row of fourteen-year-old Maisie Willard's school bus, something involving her and her three friends, all boys. But everyone has a different version of what exactly occurred. As rumors about the incident spin out of control, Maisie's troubled stepmother and then her school and ultimately the legal system become involved. Maisie and her friends are forced to confront the difficulties of telling the truth, the consequences of lying, and the most dangerous prospect of all--the possibility that one can come to believe something while knowing that it isn't true. HarperTeen will publish Touch in April 2009.

Kevin Canty’s new collection, titled Where the Money Went, delivers raw and honest glimpses into worlds of smart-talking, heartbroken people, and demonstrates deep understanding of the human condition as he writes about drunken arguments between couples in worn-out motel rooms, a man tracking a rare animal as he recalls the particulars of an affair with his wife’s good friend, or brothers who are somehow fated to relive the memory of a horrifying accident. Canty’s work has drawn comparisons to Richard Ford, Sue Miller, Louise Erdrich and Flannery O’Connor and has been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Story, and Glimmer Train. He lives in Missoula, Montana. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday will publish this collection in July 2009.

In a dazzling new comic novel titled Amateur Barbarians, Robert Cohen, author of the highly praised INSPIRED SLEEP and THE VARIETIES OF ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE, tells the stories of two protagonists: one’s a small-town New England school principal trying to bail out of his settled life, the other’s a luftmensch from New York who’s desperate to bail into it. Cohen’s short fiction has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Iowa Review and GQ, among other places. Among the many awards Cohen has received are a Whiting Writers' Award, 2000 Ribalow Prize, Best Jewish Novel of 1997 (The Here and Now), and the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers'Award. Scribner will publish Amateur Barbarians in July 2009.

In Just Like Us, journalist Helen Thorpe enters the lives of the families of four Latinas living in Denver, Colorado and follows their story for four years. Seniors in high school when the narrative begins, the girls should have the promise of glorious, whole lives ahead of them, given their straight-A status and aspirations, but because their parents illegally crossed the border with them when they were children, their lives are circumscribed by their undocumented status in virtually every way. Like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s RANDOM FAMILY, Just Like Us is a rich, textured story that reads like fiction, but documents the struggle that is experienced by a great number of undocumented foreign-born. A former staff writer for Texas Monthly, The New York Observer, and The New Yorker, Thorpe's articles have appeared regularly in The New York Times Magazine. Just Like Us will be published by Scribner in September 2009.

Hugh Raffles is currently writing for Pantheon Books a compendium (arranged alphabetically with 26 entries) of his explorations, investigations, and discoveries, across history and culture, of the remarkable ways humans and insects come together to create new experiences, new technologies and new understandings of the world. Along the way, Raffles encounters everything from nomadic bee brokers in northern California and bio-engineers who study spiders’ webs for secrets that might lead to new weapons for the U.S. military to a refugee Flemish miniaturist in sixteenth-century Prague who painted the world’s first book of insect studies and, in doing so, found in insects a way to express his rejection of intolerance. An essay drawn from the book was selected for BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2008. Raffles’ previous book, IN AMAZONIA, won the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, an annual prize for the most innovative work in anthropology.

Aryn Kyle will follow her national bestseller debut novel THE GOD OF ANIMALS, with You Belong to Me, a collection of twelve wickedly-funny stories of concise realism which are populated by intelligent young female loners whose search for love and connection often falls poignantly short. Kyle’s stories have been chosen for BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES and received the National Magazine Award for fiction. Scribner will publish the collection in 2010.

As Michael White’s extraordinary debut novel, Weeping Underwater Looks A Lot Like Laughter, opens, 17-year-old George Flynn is moving with his family from Davenport to Des Moines, Iowa. Soon after landing in Des Moines, George becomes deeply infatuated with the magnetic, fiercely independent Emily Schell. Although Emily is the object of George’s yearnings, it’s his budding friendship with her younger sister Katie, with her penchant for time capsules, her socially crude but scathingly accurate way of seeing people, and deadpan humor in the face of her battle with MS that affects him most profoundly. The author was raised in Missouri and Iowa and received his M.F.A. at Columbia University in 2006. White’s novel will be published by Putnam in 2010.

“What is it about Anne Frank and her novel-like diary that has given this deceptively simple work such a long and spectacular afterlife? Why and how, against all odds, did a young girl's chatty, innocent, prodigiously well-crafted book become an integral part of our culture, our history, our souls, and our civilization?” These are the questions that Francine Prose answers in her powerful exploration of the life of Anne Frank and the phenomenon that is THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK. The book will appeal to, and reach, the widest possible audience--general readers, teachers and students, those of us who grew up with the diary, who want to find out more about it, and perhaps come to understand it in a deeper and different way. HarperCollins will publish Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife in September 2009.

In Aftermath, journalist Nir Rosen will tell the story of Iraq and the Middle East after the U.S. withdrawal and takes up the question of who is responsible for destroying Iraq. The book will challenge the U.S. administration’s narrative that failure in Iraq is the fault of Iraq, and it will also highlight the terrible impact the Iraq War has had on the region. Nir Rosen was the first Western journalist to penetrate the insurgency. His articles have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, Time Magazine and The New Republic. His home base moves between New York, Istanbul and Beirut. The book will be published by Nation Books/Perseus.

Harvey Sachs, whose The Letters of Arturo Toscanini caused a storm of praise, is at work on The Ninth: Beethoven and the Year 1824, which will be a vivid portrait of the creation and 1824 premiere of Beethoven's revolutionary Symphony No. 9 that will place this landmark work in its proper political and cultural context and chart its influence on other important artists at work at that time. The Ninth will be published by Random House.

Jetta Carleton's first and only work of fiction, titled The Moonflower Vine, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1964. The book is a family saga, set on a farm in central Missouri. Streamlined and modern in style, the book was a bestseller when first published and originally sold in many countries, but has been long out of print. In April 2009, HarperPerennial will publish The Moonflower Vine as the first title in its Rediscovered Classics series. Jane Smiley recently put the book on her list of 100 great novels in her THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE NOVEL.