Jessica Sinsheimer

Closed to queries. Please check ContextLit.com for updates. 

Whatever the age group, I tend to love contrast–highbrow sentences and lowbrow content, beautiful settings and ugly motives–the books that are beautiful and scary, heartbreaking and hilarious. I love secrets, scheming, revenge, plotting–and stories that have to be written forward and backward to make sense (I LOVE discovering a very cleverly planted clue that makes sense in retrospect). I love watching powerful people navigate their public and private lives, and particularly enjoy seeing characters who historically haven’t had much power flipping that dynamic and enjoying escapist fun and endless influence with style.

More underrepresented characters, please–especially with power, agency, and happy endings. Wish fulfillment, romance, specialized skills. I want to see triumph.

Sophisticated commercial and upmarket genre fiction (whether for YA or adult) usually works for me. Anything that can be described as book club, or the intersection of pretty and scary.

This season, I’m particularly interested in horror-romance, upmarket horror, dark fantasy, and characters (particularly young women and those not traditionally in power) conquering the evils of this world.

I’m also into the books that are mostly in our world–but then that veer slightly into surrealism (like Aimee Bender) or genre fiction–that really works for me. I tend to love the spooky, ghostly, dark, or pure romantic, fun, and escapist.

But if the voice is wonderful, I can love just about anything.

New twists on familiar stories. A female James Bond.

Historical novels with characters having more power than they would have at the time.

I also love characters in love–who try to deal with it all intellectually (like The Rosie Project, Kurt in The Truth About Alice–and one of my books, Love And Other Unknown Variables). I really hope someone writes a book version of the movie Her. Similarly, I loved The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, and loved hating its main character.

I love food books and am open to nonfiction works that are food-centric–cookbooks, food memoirs, and similar.

If you’re the next Ruth Reichl, I want to hear from you.

If you’re not sure, please go ahead and query. My interests are broad, and I’m happy to hear from you.

TL;DR:

• Underrepresented characters enjoying power, influence, fun, and escapist story arcs
• Sophisticated, fresh romances with neurotic characters and unusual plotlines
• Fantasy, sci fi, speculative works that speak to our world (I’m not convinced that we know our world’s genre is definitively contemporary)
• Thrillers with powerful women solving crimes (and, if justified on some level, committing them)
• Upmarket/literary works with unforgettable characters and high stakes (even if internal)
• Feminist historical fantasy (or something like Bridgerton, but with magic)
• Chaotic good characters

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be emailed to QueryJessica@ContextLit.com

Currently closed to queries. Please see https://www.contextlit.com/ for updates. 

Query letter and first 10 pages pasted in body of email to QueryJessica at ContextLit dot com, please.

Consultations