Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Word Salad by Susan Coll, which releases on September 15th 2026.

Former economics major Matilda is moving back to her hometown of Washington D.C. to care for her ailing mother, and she’s desperate for money. She takes a job at her neighborhood bookstore and tries, in vain, to make sense of illogical business of books. To make things worse, she’s forced to team up with a new hire—the enigmatic, flaky, larger-than-life, Sage—who shows up on her first day of work with zero administrative skills and her tiny, puffy, incessantly urinating dog that resembles an underfed rat.

Something in the chaos begins to remind Matilda of her long-neglected creative side, and she starts to rediscover the person she once was before so much got in the way. But things get even more unmanageable when Matilda and Sage are tasked with putting together an event for the reclusive and controversial Dr. Jordan Rutabaga, a windbag of a public intellectual with a cult following that includes a number of people who would like to literally and figuratively see him dead. Rutabaga has a long list of alleged misdeeds, from plagiarism to failure to pay child support to stiffing the nanny.

As the event date approaches, Matilda and Sage discover that Sage and Rutabaga have their own not uncomplicated past, adding yet another person to list of people who do not wish him well. Add in a lawsuit and an impending snowstorm along with the potentially sinister presence of Rutabaga himself, and Matilda is about to come undone.

EXCERPT

I see colors. Letters and numbers, sounds sometimes too.

You say “four,” and there it is in International Klein Blue, hovering just over your left shoulder. The letter O is a rich carbon grey. The fire alarm shrieks in a downward spiral of canary yellow. There is nothing remarkable about this, in my opinion, although I have learned that others find it odd.

Another thing about me: I have a reasonably good sense of how things will unfold. To be clear, I am not clairvoyant, nor do I experience premonitions or any nonsense like that.

Being a logical, detail- oriented, data- driven, and observant person, I tend to see outcomes in an architectural way. Poor design of a foundation causes walls to crack and, over time, the building to fail.

Sage would prove to be the poor foundation, I suppose.

Looking at it through a certain lens, I was arguably the wall.

I had been working at the bookstore for some eighteen months, somewhat frozen in place, when Sage came into my office that first day, a whirlwind of chaos and distraction who brought with her multiple tote bags full of too much stuff. Her mere presence threw off my rhythms, knocked me out of my finely tuned stasis, triggering every one of my senses with her too- bright puffer coat, which made me think of the orange blaze a hunter might wear so as not to be mistaken for a deer.

To be fair, I was predisposed to dislike, or at least to be on guard about, Sage. She had been hired to assist me, yet I had not been consulted about whether she was a good fit. Usually I am brought into conversations about things that affect my workload, but Sage was an exception because her sister was a friend of Mrs. Bernstein, the owner of the bookstore. Our workplace is a fermentation vat of gossip that manages to find its way into the ear of even a person who keeps largely to herself, and I quickly learned that Sage was in the middle of a thermonuclear divorce. Now that her kid had gone off to college, she needed something to do. It didn’t have to be a job, per se, but something that could give her life meaning, a place to go each day.

From our preliminary conversation on the phone a few days earlier, I had sensed that hiring her was a mistake. It seemed clear that Sage did not possess even a trace amount of skill that might enable her to lighten my load. The job isn’t rocket science, but it does require a modicum of basic administrative ability along the lines of responding to emails, creating spreadsheets, and updating the store’s website with the extremely fluid details of our daily author events, as well as entering data on our internal calendars and monitoring the inventory systems and ordering requirements.

There are physical aspects of the job too. Carrying heavy boxes of books, moving shelves out of the way to create space on the sales floor, setting up chairs so event attendees can sit, if they so choose, along with other various and unpredictable tasks.

I do not wish to sound ageist, especially since I, Matilda, have been told that I, myself, am an old soul. But Sage was, I guessed, in her late forties and had apparently been out of the workforce since having her kid. That didn’t necessarily mean she would be without the skills this job requires. But as it happened, she was.

Sage was practically computer illiterate, she had informed me cheerfully, as if this was a good thing. She had never used a spreadsheet, and while she said she was pretty sure she could figure it out herself, her now- off- at- college daughter usually helped her with techy things.

My sense of foreboding about working with her was intensified on that very first day when she walked through the door, flung that aggressively orange coat on the fraying wicker chair in the corner, and set down so many bags full of who- knows- what that I feared she was moving in. Then, without asking who belonged where, she plopped herself down in my chair.

I was determined to be my best self, to not start things off on the wrong foot by being bossy— a word I have heard my colleagues use to describe me on more than one occasion, usually owing to their failure to realize that (1) I was within earshot and (2) I was in a weird headspace, mired in a complicated grief, and certainly did not intend to be gruff.

Hence, instead of pointing out to Sage that her coat belonged in the staff break room, or that she was swiveling about in my chair, I took a deep breath. I would be cheerful and easygoing. I would put an exclamation point at the end of each sentence. I would even begin with a compliment— or at least an attempt at one.

“That coat!” I said, puzzling about how to best frame, in a constructive manner, the rest of my many thoughts about the absurd item of clothing, which seemed better suited for skijoring with reindeer than going to work in an independent, community- minded bookstore with piped- in heat. It was thicker than a bag of marshmallows, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many ducks and geese had been painfully plucked in pursuit of keeping Sage warm.

“I know! Isn’t it gorgeous? It just arrived yesterday,” she explained.

I paused to take her in. Plopped casually and comfortably in my chair, dressed in what one might imagine to be indie bookstore chic— a brown corduroy skirt, a bright white Irish fisherman’s sweater, tall suede boots crossed at the ankle— she had what appeared to be an easy, natural beauty, but I could also tell she had been working to self- improve.

Her teeth, for example, looked a little too white, and her light brown hair seemed to have been brightened or possibly streaked. It occurred to me that in a run- up to her return to the workforce, Sage might have launched an all- out self improvement campaign, engaged a stylist or two, and gone coat- shopping, teeth- whitening, and hair- dyeing. This was a little sad, given that Sage would spend most of her time in this job ensconced here, in a windowless office in the back of the bookstore, with me.

I found myself staring up at James Joyce, who was looking back at me from inside the framed poster of Ulysses that hung in the office. The poster depicted what was evidently a new book jacket meant to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the novel. I had grown quite attached to this poster. The whimsical rendering of Mr. Joyce’s face, with its feast of refracted colors, nourished me in a way that is difficult to explain and that has absolutely nothing to do with the novel Ulysses. To be clear, although I am not bookaverse and have, in fact, read many, many books, I am not what you might call bookish. To please my mother, I majored in economics and was even accepted into an MBA program, from which I deferred when I moved back home after my mother’s cancer recurred.

My friend Clemi told me about a job opening in the store where she once worked. I applied, and here I am.

So I do not mean to suggest that James Joyce, in his soothing, hunter- green tweed number, was speaking to me in some literary bonding- of- souls sort of way. Yet we did seem to be of one mind about Sage: me, already prickly, feeling squirmy and trapped by her presence; and Mr. Joyce, staring out from inside the safety of a plexiglass frame, regarding Sage warily through his monocled eye.

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘Word Salad’ by Susan Coll appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

In the week in which this madcap story unfolds, USA TODAY bestselling author Susan Coll weaves together a charmingly witty and warm comedy of manners that offers a peek behind the literary curtain–one that anyone who’s ever been a little bit uncertain of what the future might hold can relate to.

Aspirant, bookish, and close to broke, 26-year-old Clemi steps into her dream job at a prestigious literary nonprofit and finds herself in the bull’s eye of a financial, legal, and existential calamity. The executive director has disappeared, leaving behind an inscrutable cat to which she is highly allergic. Meanwhile, the bank accounts have been overdrawn, the FBI is asking questions, and she has three days to pull off the annual fundraising gala, a glamorous affair filled with famous writers and local literati.

On the upside, she will get to meet her all-time favorite writer, who has won the award. Clemi has read and reread her novels, pouring over her every word. But her interactions with the author and her eight-year-old son, as well as with the nonprofit’s Board Members, leave her wondering whether certain writers are better on the page than in person.

All the while, Clemi is trying to sort out her own life: her current boyfriend is, like every boyfriend before him, a pompous poseur, and the clock is running on her apartment-sitting gig. She finds herself wondering what all the goings-on in this dysfunctional, scandal-plagued nonprofit have to do with literature. And if it’s time to let go of her literary aspirations and apply to law school.

Loading…

Taking too long?

Reload document

| Open in new tab

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘The Literati’ by Susan Coll appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Cassie Klein has always used stories to help her fly, but now her plot points aren’t lining up.

In her 50s, Cassie has already weathered more than most. She was orphaned at the age of two and has never fully understood why her DC-based parents were on a bridge in West Virginia that just so happened to collapse as they drove across it. Her search for answers prompted a failed career in journalism, and now she’s an aspiring novelist teaching at a local community college waiting for her literary dreams to finally come true. She stood by her once-doting husband when his meteorology career took a nosedive, and now she has learned that the man who became an internet meme has been cheating on her.

She’s had enough. She scoops up a teething puppy and embarks on a road trip that’s heavy on impulse and light on planning. She’s not sure where she’s going, but she knows she might as well start at the beginning. What really happened to her parents all those years ago?

In this comically surreal, warmhearted journey, she encounters people she never knew existed—chief among them, an enigmatic cryptozoologist, who helps her in the quest to discover her past. And along the way, she looks for answers regarding curious sightings of a creature known as the Mothman in the months before her parents died. As the line between real life and fiction blurs, Cassie finds herself grappling with the nature of stories, myths, and who gets to write the endings.

Chapter One
The Incident on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge

A heavy grey slush begins to fall from the sky, and the windshield wipers turn themselves on, startling me. Although the car is seven years old, it is new to me, and I’m still getting used to its high-tech features, many of which are already obsolete. It has none of the self-driving technology one reads about, for example, so it’s entirely on me to stomp on the brakes to avoid hitting the car ahead as traffic comes to an abrupt stop.

The vehicle which I mercifully did not plow into is a green Honda CR-V with a University of Virginia sticker affixed to the top right corner of the rear windshield. The speed at which I am traveling is precisely one mile under the fifty-miles-per-hour limit.

I lock into these details because I am the sort of law-abiding-to-a-fault motorist who minds the rules of the road, always staying at or below the speed limit, and because my daughter, Vera, has only a few days ago completed her first semester at the University of Maryland. In front of me is presumably another student, or a former student, or the parent of a student, or an instructor, or someone student-adjacent in one form or another, albeit at a different public institution of higher learning.

But also, I lock into these details as a way to ground myself. I’m feeling light, without anchor, as if I might unbuckle my seatbelt and crack the window and slip through the slit like a puff of steam or a wisp of smoke. It’s not simply that my daughter is away for the holidays for the first time in nineteen years; I have also just left my husband. I have brought to a conclusion a long, painful stalemate, taken my poorly behaved puppy, and walked out the door.

No harsh words were exchanged, although I had half-hoped for a provocation, or at least some display of emotion, when I told him I was leaving, that I was headed to my aunt and uncle’s house on the Delaware shore. We were meant to go together—it was our family’s long-standing tradition to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s at the beach— and I confess there was still a piece of me that hoped he would protest, that he would apologize and suggest we sort things out, bundle up and take some long walks along the sea and clarify our situation, maybe find a way to start anew.

Instead, he replied only with a warning: “The last place you want to be in a weather event is on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.”

Richard and I have been idling in an indeterminate state for some time now, and have more recently begun to trend in the direction of collapse. After a series of problems with which he has refused to engage—first professional, then personal—Richard moved into the basement, where he now works and sleeps. This morning, as I departed, I told him I couldn’t live like this anymore. But what, precisely, I hoped to achieve, I can’t say for sure.

I suppose I would have welcomed any sort of reaction, anger included. At least it might have moved us toward the next place, wherever that might have been. But my formerly dynamic, rabble-rousing, storm-chasing meteorologist husband has imploded on so many different, spectacularly painful levels that there is little left of him, or of us. He is like a star that has collapsed under its own gravity, a black hole, a closed presence that spends most of its time and space crafting copy for the newspaper’s weather desk, staring at a bank of screens.

***

Before slamming on my brakes, I had been singing along,

loudly, to a catchy, infectiously upbeat song that included lyrics about a dog, sung—or rather hoarsely and charmingly croaked—by an oddly named band called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. In the song, the dogs have quit their barking. In my car, as it came to its abrupt stop, my dog’s barking had just begun.

Luna, my puppy, now barks and barks and barks. She stops for a moment and then begins to bark again. In the rearview mirror I glimpse something fluttering. An insect appears to have presented itself in the car. It flutters, it lurches, from one window to the other, flutter-lurching back and forth madly, which I believe is what prompted the puppy to bark. As my foot continues to press hard on the brake, I wonder idly whether it is odd to have an insect trapped in the car in winter. I catch another glimpse and realize it is a moth. At this point I feel a shift in my equilibrium, a minor anxious jolt.

To keep myself from thinking about the possibility of being stuck in a traffic jam on a four-mile-long bridge nearly two hundred feet over the largest estuary in the country, I try to focus on practical matters: If the traffic does not ease, I should tell my aunt and uncle that I’ll be arriving later than planned. Also, I am low on kibble for the puppy and make a mental note to order more for overnight delivery as soon as I get to their house. Entirely unrelated: I need, badly, to find a new hairdresser and do something about my too-long, nearly feral hair.

I try to take a few deep breaths, the sort a yoga teacher might recommend, but my thoughts continue to boomerang toward the end of my metastable marriage, then toward this steel and concrete structure, plus the open water, plus the possible moth. The need to tend to logistics about my late arrival, or kibble, or my wild hair, does not detract from so much as compound my anxiety.

This might or might not be a good place to mention that my parents died in a bridge collapse—an event that was presaged, some say, by the appearance of a giant moth. I was never sure what to make of this story, but I find myself obsessed with it, nonetheless.

The post Read An Excerpt From ‘Real Life and Other Fictions’ by Susan Coll appeared first on The Nerd Daily.