“Murder Bimbo is Gone Girl for the Luigi Mangione era, and Rebecca Novack is one of our funniest and most acerbic new writers.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X An exhilarating and provocative debut perfect for fans of My Sister the Serial Killer, Yellowface, and Killing Eve—the origin story of sex worker turned assassin turned unlikely folk hero, Murder Bimbo, as told by the Bimbo herself (and then revised, uncensored, and reconsidered).A thirty-two-year-old sex worker is shocked when she’s approached by undercover government agents to aid them in a top-secret plot to assassinate a politician known as “Meat Neck.” But once the deed is done, she realizes what made her the perfect She’s 100% disposable. Holed up in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods, she now has only two days, her wits, and a laptop to save her own life. Her best bet is to reach out to the wildly popular feminist investigative podcast Justice for Bimbos. In a hastily typed series of emails, the newly minted “Murder Bimbo” explains how she was recruited and then trained by a cabal of code-named US agents to take out Meat Neck. Then she starts a new series of emails. This time, they’re addressed to her ex, and the facts line up a little differently… Constructed in three increasingly unhinged acts, each a more subversive, twisted version of the story than the last, Murder Bimbo can be read as a gloriously bold literary thriller, a satirical megalomaniac’s manifesto, or a raucous send-up of the political insanity we all live inside every day. Either way, it’s a dead-serious announcement of an electric new voice in American literature.

In the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger’s kiss.… Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse—a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four Oleg, a New York locksmith; the beekeeper November; Ludovico, a binder of rare books; and a young Japanese woman named Sei. They’ve each lost something important—a wife, a lover, a sister, a direction in life—and what they will find in Palimpsest is more than they could ever imagine.