I Left My Homework in the Hamptons

March 1, 2021

Dragged down by cancer, kidney failure, and recurring pneumonia, Pulitzer Prize winner Bragg had his heart lifted by The Speckled Beauty--a rambunctious stray dog who also needed love. In Seeing Ghosts, a study of grief and family, journalist Chow opens with emigration from China and Hong Kong to Cuba and America and moves to her mother's death from cancer (75,000-copy first printing). From award-winning news producer and photojournalist Copaken, author of the New York Times best-selling Shutterbabe, Ladyparts contextualizes soured marriage, solo parenting, and dating while ill with the substandard treatment of women by U.S. health care. In I Left My Homework in the Hamptons, Grossberg reveals exactly what it's like to tutor the children of New York's wealthiest families (50,000-copy first printing). Author of the New York Times best-booked Ten Thousand Saints, Henderson explores a long-term marriage that has survived her husband's struggles with physical and mental illness in Everything I Have Is Yours (75,000-copy first printing). Ranging from 38 Grand Slam titles to embracing her sexual identity at age 51, King details a life lived spectacularly in All In. In Honor Bound, McGrath recounts serving as the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marine Corps and efforts to unseat Mitch McConnell as Kentucky senator. Winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, Yangon, Myanmar-born, Bangkok- and San Jos�-raised Myint's Names for Light probes silence, absence, and death over three generations of her family, defined by postcolonial struggle. In Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be, a Roxane Gay Audacious Bookclub November Pick, Perkins plumbs racism, wealth, poverty, beauty, and more from the perspective of a Southern Black woman. Qu's Made in China captures the challenges of an immigrant childhood, which included a mother so brutally demanding that Qu finally complained to New York's Office of Children and Family Services. In This Will All Be Over Soon, Saturday Night Live cast member Strong addresses grief over a close cousin's death from glioblastoma in the midst of the pandemic (75,000-copy first printing)..

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May 24, 2021
Learning specialist Grossberg (Autism and Your Teen) interweaves memoir, psychology, and exposé in this juicy yet sympathetic account of the 15 years she spent tutoring the privileged students of New York City’s elite private schools. When she took on private clients in addition to her full-time job working with students with ADHD and “learning differences” such as dyslexia, Grossberg developed a reputation as “a kind of tutoring messiah.” She delves into the high demand for tutors in New York, where some tutoring companies charge as much as $800 per hour, and describes the “endless strategy and conniving” that parents employ to get their children into “the Ivy League or Stanford.” Throughout, Grossberg spotlights the wealth gap between her and her students (one of whom gets ridiculed at the Brooklyn bodega where he tries to buy a $2 bagel with his father’s Amex Gold Card), but she also expresses genuine empathy for the pressures they and their parents face (The Great Gatsby is frequently invoked), shares inspiring stories of educational breakthroughs, and offers concrete advice on the college application process. This nuanced chronicle humanizes an oft-caricatured world. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.

July 1, 2021
A tutor gives low grades to rich, meddlesome parents of the New York prep schoolers she calls "Gatsby's children." Grossberg taught for years at an elite Manhattan prep school while moonlighting as a tutor for middle and high schoolers who might return from a weekend "and report that they had been introduced to Bono at a concert and had gone skiing." She recalls her alternately rewarding and maddening experiences, focused on students with learning differences, in a book that "has elements of memoir." She uses composite characters to show how the ultrarich work--or game--a system that favors families who can afford space camp and "$800--per hour" SAT tutors. Lily's mother demands that a school let her daughter retake a test because the proctor miscalculated the allotted time by one minute. Trevor's father expects after-school tutor Grossberg to know whether his son uses his ADHD accommodations at school because "I'm not home enough to collect more than core samples on my son." Sophie's mother plays "the legal card" so her daughter can redo a paper after her father is charged with unrelated financial missteps in the New York Times. Students suffer from the interference by "litigious and combative" parents of Gatsby-like wealth: "The result of all this meddling in their children's lives...is that many kids achieve beyond their ability, so that tutoring has to follow them to college." Some children deal with anxiety, depression, exhaustion, or White privilege (they resent having to watch the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize in class). Grossberg's novelistic flourishes ("She pauses for a minute and licks her lips nervously") can be distracting, but most of her stories ring true and insightfully support her broad point that fear drives the parental excesses: "These parents, having achieved the apogee of success and wealth, have nowhere to go but down." A sobering close-up of parental wealth and power--and the children hurt by it--at tony Manhattan schools.

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