Deal Announcement: Deep Vellum & A Strange Object to Publish Doris W. Cheng's Keep Your Enemies Close in August 2027

Deep Vellum and A Strange Object are pleased to announce the acquisition of Keep Your Enemies Close by Doris W. Cheng, represented by Sarah Burnes at The Gernert Company, for publication in August 2027 (world).

Keep Your Enemies Close is a novel about a Taiwanese American woman’s fixation with Holden Caulfield and a paean to female rage. It is at once a provocative recasting of the now-standardized immigrant narrative, an interrogation of the power structures and societal expectations that have shaped that narrative, and a deeply funny book reminiscent at once of Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

Jill Meyers, editor of A Strange Object, comments on the acquisition: “Keep Your Enemies Close is brilliant, incendiary—and deeply funny. I laughed so much reading it and was also deeply surprised. It does not submit to expectations.”

Doris W. Cheng is fiction editor at Bellevue Literary Review. She has been a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize and is the author of Earthling, a chapbook of stories from Word West Press.

A Strange Object was founded in Austin, Texas in 2012 by Jill Meyers and Callie Collins. It became an imprint of Deep Vellum in 2019. A Strange Object publishes surprising, heartbreaking fiction alongside thoughtful works of nonfiction that defy categorization. We’re talking about books that haunt and inspire us—big work that engulfs, that takes risks, that bucks form, that builds warm dwellings in dark places.