Deal Announcement: Deep Vellum & A Strange Object to Publish Emma Komlos-Hrobsky's CHARM, STRANGE, BEAUTY in Fall/Winter 2027-'28

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—

Deep Vellum and A Strange Object are thrilled to announce the acquisition of Charm, Strange, Beauty, by Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, represented by Jenni Ferrari-Adler at Aevitas Creative Management, for publication in Fall/Winter 2027-’28 (North American).

Charm, Strange, Beauty is a debut novel about a particle physicist who travels to CERN in Switzerland with her teenage daughter and becomes convinced she can co-opt her experiment to contact the son she recently miscarried. Examining the complex pressures of marriage, motherhood, and career alongside the implications of quantum physics, Komlos-Hrobsky tracks her protagonist across continents, through the stages of grief, and into the mysterious heart of matter itself.

“Charm, Strange, Beauty is an incandescent novel that commingles the human and the cosmic,” says acquiring editor Jill Meyers of A Strange Object. “Reminiscent of the work of Rivka Galchen and Helen Phillips’s The Need, it occupies both the head and the heart. With its fully embodied characters, dazzling, cutting-edge science, aching depiction of maternal grief, and exquisite framing of our search for patterns, meaning, and connection, this a singular novel, and a container of wild possibilities.”

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky is a writer, illustrator, and editor. An alumna of Wesleyan, she earned her MFA in fiction at the New School, where she later served as professor. She has published work in Tin House, Guernica, Conjunctions, and Book Forum and is a recipient of a fellowship from the Elizabeth George Foundation. A longtime editor at Tin House, she currently serves as Associate Deputy Editor at Poets & Writers Magazine. Charm, Strange, Beauty is her first novel.

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.