Donald Maass Literary Agency

The Washington Post has included Gideon among their “Best new science fiction and fantasy.” Washington Post: Alex Gordon’s impressive debut, Gideon (Harper/Voyager; paperback, $14.99), delivers a fast-paced plot that makes you want to finish it in a day, even if you don’t have time. The Midwest town of Gideon is full of witches who guard the living world against demons. An execution gone wrong in 1836 haunts the present-day inhabitants, who are worried about the “thinning” space between the living and […]

Time Out New York listed Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of the Phoenix as a great genre-bending book for new readers to science fiction and fantasy. Phoenix was grown and raised among other genetic experiments in New York’s Tower 7. She is an “accelerated woman”—only two years old but with the body and mind of an adult, Phoenix’s abilities far exceed those of a normal human. Still innocent and inexperienced in the ways of the world, she is content living in her […]

Congratulations to Adam Christopher on The Burning Dark appearing on the preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award! Back in the day, Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland had led the Fleet into battle against an implacable machine intelligence capable of devouring entire worlds. But after saving a planet, and getting a bum robot knee in the process, he finds himself relegated to one of the most remote backwaters in Fleetspace to oversee the decommissioning of a semi-deserted space station well past its […]

Romantic Times: Priest continues to be an effective crafter of dread and tension, and while Jacaranda is explicitly a novella, there are a few areas where the reader might wish for more. Despite being set in her Clockwork Century universe, aside from a few background touches, this could easily take place in any version of the Old West, and the book seems to be building to something bigger than it ultimately winds up being. The characters here are vivid and interesting enough that hopefully this particular adventure isn’t the last of we […]

RT Book Reviews: This is a busy series with many characters, but the tension between Sarah and Henry takes center stage. Readers will look forward to more attention focused on the potential romance between the two in the next title in the series, especially after the cliffhanger ending that leaves a misunderstanding unresolved.

Advice Goddess Amy Alkon’s next science-based advice book, “Unf*ck Yourself!”, a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps guide to living a happier life by learning how to grow a pair, again to Michael Flamini at St. Martin’s Press by Cameron McClure at the Donald Maass Literary Agency in association with Ken Sherman at Ken Sherman & Associates.

School Library Journal: The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley gutted me. The author puts all of Drew’s pain on the page and never lets you look away. … Though Drew is suffering on every page of this story, he is also fumbling his way through the darkness to whatever is on the other side of it. All of the characters are. It’s hard to see that or remember that in the middle of so much pain, but hospitals aren’t just a place […]

Bram Stoker Award nominee Ronald Malfi’s THE NIGHT PARADE, a psychological horror novel about a man and his 9-year-old daughter who are on the run through an America whose population has been decimated by a mysterious plague, pitched as in the vein of BIRD BOX, plus a second novel, again to Peter Senftleben at Kensington, for publication in Summer 2016, by Cameron McClure.

Congratulations to Cherie Priest on Maplecroft being nominated for the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award! Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks; and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one…. The people of Fall River, Massachusetts, fear me. Perhaps rightfully so. I remain a suspect in the brutal deaths of my father and his second wife despite the verdict of innocence at my trial. With our inheritance, my sister, Emma, and I […]

Congratulations to Cherie Priest on Maplecroft being included on io9’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2014 list! Priest takes the legend of Lizzie Borden and her axe and combines it with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, for a rip-roaring story about a woman who was secretly a monster-hunter. Priest does an amazing job of fusing the real-life historical details about Lizzie and combining them with monstrous imaginings. This is a page-turning thriller that will delight true-crime fans as well as lovers […]