First Novel Friday: A Little Bit Bad, Mad Eden, and New Skin

Clear

Friday, 6:00 pm EDT June 5, 2026

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Members of The Center for Fiction receive free tickets to First Novel Friday and early access to registration. Become a member today. Already a member? RSVP here.

On the first Friday of the month, join us as we celebrate and launch a selection of the best debut novels published today. Be among the first to discover boundary-pushing and world-expanding work from exciting new voices in fiction.

Kick off the weekend with a happy hour at our cash bar for ticket holders in our Members Lounge starting at 6pm. Then, at 7pm, we’ll move to our auditorium for readings from the featured debut novelists, followed by a short moderated conversation. (If auditorium seating reaches capacity, guests will be invited to watch the livestream of the readings and conversation on a large screen in our Members Lounge.) The party continues with book signings and signature cocktails to round out the night. Go home with something new—a book, a friend, a favorite Friday night tradition.

This month, we are pleased to welcome debut novelists Cassandra Neyenesch (A Little Bit Bad), Morgan Thomas (Mad Eden), and Sarah Wang (New Skin). June’s novels wrestle with the unexpected relationships that can turn a person’s life upside down, while also exploring family and the human body. Vanessa Chan, internationally bestselling author of The Storm We Made, will join us as the evening’s moderator. We hope you’ll support our featured authors by buying their books at the event (purchase all three for 15% off). Space is limited, so reserve your spot today.

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $5 Community Ticket and the $40+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs for emerging writers.

Featuring

Cassandra Neyenesch

Cassandra Neyenesch

Cassandra Neyenesch is a Brooklyn-based writer, activist, and curator. Neyenesch’s reviews and cultural pieces have appeared in the Guardian, Brooklyn Rail, HuffPost, Public Books, the International Herald Tribune, and Art in America.

Photo Credit: Lo Dersin
Morgan Thomas

Morgan Thomas

Morgan Thomas is the author of the story collection Manywhere, which was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Lambda Literary Prize for Transgender Fiction, and the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Their writing has appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic, the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and the Yale Review. A graduate of the University of Oregon MFA program, they have also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and elsewhere.

Photo Credit: Candace Hope
Sarah Wang

Sarah Wang

Sarah Wang has written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, n+1, and BOMB, among other publications. Wang is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, a 2020 alumna of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship, and the winner of a Barbara Deming Award and a Nelson Algren prize for fiction. She teaches writing at Barnard College and lives in New York City.

Photo Credit: Isabel Asha Penzlien
Vanessa Chan

Vanessa Chan

Vanessa Chan is the Malaysian author of the internationally bestselling novel The Storm We Made, a Good Morning America Book Club Pick, BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick, New York Times Editors’ Choice, and longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize—about the unlikeliest of spies—a discontent mother and wife in 1930s British Malaya who, in becoming a spy for the Japanese, unwittingly ushers in the most violent war her country has ever seen. The Storm We Made has been translated into more than twenty languages worldwide.

Photo Credit: Mary Ihea Kang

Featured Books

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A Little Bit Bad

By Cassandra Neyenesch

Published by S&S/Summit Books

PURCHASE

Perdita Jungfrau thought she was going to be married to her husband forever, so falling in love with Nando, her neighbor’s anarcho-Marxist roofer, is a crisis. Life seems to put every possible obstacle in their way: she’s pregnant, he has a girlfriend, he’s fifteen years younger, she’s terrified of messing up her children and equally drawn towards this magnetic man who entrusts her with his deepest secret.

Now it’s three years later and Nando has been murdered.

As her bewildered husband tries to make sense of the wildly unpredictable person his wife has become, Perdita has other things on her mind. For starters, who is the mysterious woman sitting outside her house in a parked car all day? How can she stop her adored baby brother from being pulled under by his opioid addiction? Can someone with a childhood like hers ever be the mother her children deserve?

And most of all, what should she do with the searing memories of the affair which turned her life upside down?
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Mad Eden

By Morgan Thomas

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PURCHASE

Ro and Liam live in a ramshackle cabin in a secluded stretch of Florida. Neither their home nor their sometimes-tumultuous relationship is what the world would call perfect, but to Ro—newly diagnosed with autism and working as a patient navigator for people seeking gender-affirming care—their life, despite the deeply inhospitable political climate, is a kind of paradise.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what shatters their peace. There’s Quentin, the unpredictable teenager for whom Liam and Ro are quasi-parents, who visits on his way to college, where he plans to finally start T. There’s the appearance of “Mad Eden,” an online fantasy serial about heroic dragon riders that increasingly becomes Ro’s obsession. And then there’s a seemingly innocuous patient video call that results in consequences both unexpected and grave. This triad of circumstances sends Liam’s and Ro’s world spinning toward disaster—unless Ro can become the real-life hero their situation demands without betraying who they are and who they love.

With colossal heart and preternatural skill, Morgan Thomas crafts a deliciously destabilizing debut novel that challenges us to confront and reinvent questions of language, sex, prejudice, identity, and the shifting scales of morality. Playing with the possible relationship between autism and time to forge an ingenious new kind of storytelling, Mad Eden imagines, with exhilarating courage, how we might yet joyfully live in a precarious world.

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New Skin

By Sarah Wang

Published by Little, Brown and Company

PURCHASE

At twenty-six, Linli Feng is still trying to escape her mother Fanny’s orbit. But after three years of estrangement, just when Linli has been accepted into a prestigious graduate program, she is dragged back by Fanny’s latest medical catastrophe and forced to return home.

For decades, Fanny has been addicted to plastic surgery, getting bargain procedures in the basements of LA’s bootleg beauty industry. Now Fanny’s disfigured face is in dangerous revolt, infected and collapsing yet again from black-market injectables.

But even as Linli wades through the wreck of family finances and juggles her mother’s medical care, Fanny has another secret in store. Fanny has won a spot on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality television competition in which botched plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery as riveted audiences tune in. When Linli attempts to rescue Fanny from the sinister subculture that has already claimed her mother’s face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of American success that is at the fraught heart of their relationship.