The busiest season of the publishing year is upon us, bringing a deluge of books to sift through as you curate your TBR list. We’ve got you covered. Below, you’ll find some 130 books out this fall that we’re excited about here at The Millions. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to dive into based on their authors or subjects. We leaned on our friends at Publishers Weekly to help blurb some of the many, many titles that we’re eager to put on your radar.

—Sophia Stewart, editor

While we’re still on an editorial hiatus, we’re working hard to continue producing our seasonal previews—we hope to return to our full operations soon.

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October

Literary Voyagers by Andrew Wittkop (Belt)

Educator and researcher Wittkop resurfaces in this evocative debut history a long-forgotten meeting between two notable literary women of the 19th century. Read more.

The Vanishing Family by Robert Kolker (Doubleday)

Journalist Kolker delivers a moving account of one Pennsylvania family’s struggle with a rare inherited form of frontotemporal dementia, a devastating neurodegenerative disorder that gradually erodes personality, judgment, and language. Read more.

Prairie Oyster by Sophie Robinson (University of Iowa)

A promising filmmaker with a history of addictive behavior becomes obsessed with a fellow queer director in the unsparing debut novel from poet Robinson. Read more.

Monstrous Bitch by Eleanor Johnson (Princeton)

“Patriarchy has needed—for literally thousands of years—to embody in monstrous form the things about women that it most desperately feared,” according to this riveting study from Columbia University comparative literature professor Johnson. Read more.

Bruja’s Nest by Brenda LaTorre (Creature)

LaTorre’s assured debut blends feminist folk horror with visceral body horror in a piercing tale of class aspiration and monstrous motherhood. Read more.

The Savage Mind by David Teurer (Little, Brown)

Critic Treuer offers a searing blend of history and memoir, written as a letter to his children. Read more.

Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry (Mariner)

Part loving tribute to her father-in-law, part meditation on the process of dying, this outstanding memoir from Perry is marked by a novelist’s economy of language and imagery. Read more.

Vaim Hotel by Jon Fosse, tr. Damion Searls (Transit)

“Why exactly I came to Vaim and checked into The Vaim Hotel, no, I don’t know,” begins this transfixing companion piece to Fosse’s Vaim, the second in a planned trilogy set in the eponymous Norwegian fishing village. Read more.

A Compendium of Supernatural Entities Found in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School by Kuzhali Manickavel (Angry Robot)

Manickavel makes her full-length debut with this wonderfully strange work of magical realism that toggles between a quietly profound queer coming-of-age tale and entries from the fictional compendium for which the book is named. Read more.

Hotel Casanova by Annie Ernaux, tr. Alison L. Strayer (Seven Stories)

This penetrating collection from Nobel Prize winner Ernaux combines brief personal vignettes on loss and alienation with reflections on literature and politics, all written between 1984 and 2006. Read more.

The Woman Who Heard the Sun and Other True Stories Overlooked by History by Amisha Padnani (Ten Speed)

New York Times obituaries editor Padnani profiles in this incisive collection 18 individuals “whose creativity, courage, and curiosity helped shape the world.” Read more.

How to Look Away by Daniel Peña (One World)

Pushcart Prize winner Peña interrogates Americans’ simultaneous attraction to and denial of violence, especially against people of color, in this penetrating essay collection. Read more.

Carrying by Samantha Josephs (Putnam)

Martha, the trans heroine of Josephs’s exhilarating debut, is completely stealth: she is married to a cis man, Leon, and stepmother to his daughter, without them or anyone in their wealthy Los Angeles circle knowing she is trans. Read more.

Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin’s)

Cormac McCarthy’s novels conjure a bleak American landscape in which characters struggle with temptation and only occasionally find enlightenment and redemption, according to this vivid and sweeping biography from Daugherty. Read more.

Spent Light by Lara Pawson (McNally)

In the perceptive and ruminative debut novel from British memoirist Pawson, an unnamed narrator muses on household objects, things she’s found in the woods, and more. Read more.

The Occidental Book of the Dead by T. Geronimo Johnson (Morrow)

Nothing is what it seems in this spellbinding and profanely funny novel about race, police violence, and distorted narratives from Johnson. Read more.

The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain (Harper)

In this smart, simmering sapphic love story, Tremain reimagines the origins of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Narrator Lilianne Maria “Danni” Danowski, a Polish-born Jewish seamstress, recalls the summer of 1936, when she became housekeeper at Manderville Hall, the Cornish estate that, in Tremain’s telling, inspired Rebecca’s setting of Manderley. Read more.

There’s a Monster in the Lake by Laura Fernández, tr. Alexis Almeida (Graywolf)

Journalist Fernández delivers an enthralling investigation into the legend of the Loch Ness Monster and the value of imagination. Read more.

Objects of Desire by Adam O’Fallon Price (Autumn House)

The columnist behind the Millions‘ own “William Trevor Reader,” in which he reflected on every one of the Irish author’s collected stories, makes his own debut as a short story writer with this collection, populated by characters with unfulfilled longings.

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

Pulitzer winner Kingsolver returns with an engrossing story of a middle-aged woman’s forsaken talent and chance for redemption. Read more.

Why Is the World So Beautiful? by Nicholas Humphrey (MIT)

In this roving study, neuropsychologist Humphrey interrogates why the human mind perceives beauty. Read more.

Fair Ones by Lydia Millet (Norton)

Millet explores grief in this down-to-earth story of two friends dealing with their friend’s untimely death. Read more.

Freedom’s Daughters by Celeste Headlee (Flatiron)

The We Need to Talk author’s latest profiles Black women, including Headlee’s own great-grandmother, who worked to promote Black literacy and education in the South after the Civil War.

Will and Attention by Meghan O’Gieblyn (Doubleday)

This sophisticated self-portrait from essayist O’Gieblyn examines her thorny relationships with alcohol and religion. Read more.

The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth by Jeanna Smialek (Knopf)

Journalist Smialek offers a vivid revisionist history of how classical economics went mainstream. Read more.

What Remains by Brais Lamela, tr. Jacob Rogers (Dorothy)

The Galician writer’s debut novel follows a young scholar’s journey into the forgotten history of the Franco regime.

Minor Bodies by Jonathan Bazzi, tr. Alice Whitmore (Scribe)

Bazzi’s vivid sophomore novel concerns a young man’s search for true love and his life’s purpose. Read more.

Before You Were Anne by Emiko Jean (S&S)

Jean’s taut second mystery for Seattle detective Chelsey Calhoun (after The Return of Ellie Black) hinges on the kidnapping of a nightclub hostess’s daughter. Read more.

Conspiracy by Nicolas Guilhot (Harvard)

This intellectual history rethinks the modern obsession with conspiracy theories, which Guilhot sees “as a sign of the public’s desperation in light of liberal democracy’s failures.”

Stories, Like Illnesses by James Elkins (Unnamed)

The third book in Elkins’s experimental multi-volume novel Five Strange Languages centers on a biologist’s inner turmoil.

Among the Pale Spires by David Smart (Rocky Mountain)

Smart, editorial director of Gripped Publishing, shines a spotlight on Antonia Pozzi, an Italian mountain climber and poet whose work went largely unpublished until after her death in 1938, in this combination of biography and poetry collection. Read more.

We Radiant Things by Franny Choi (Ecco)

In this potent essay collection, poet Choi explores what the portrayal of East and Southeast Asian women in science fiction reveals about race, gender, and sexuality. Read more.

The First Reader by Luiz Schwarcz, tr. Alison Entrekin (Penguin Books)

The founder of esteemed Brazilian publishing house Companhia das Letras reflects on four decades of editing in this candid meditation.

To God by Esther Yi (Astra House)

“The urge to write requires some delusional commitment to life, and I appear to have it still,” confesses an unnamed narrator in this audacious work of fiction from Yi. Read more.

Anita Brookner: Art and Life by Hermione Lee (Knopf)

In this masterful biography, Lee unravels the life of art historian and Booker Prize–winning novelist Anita Brookner. Read more.

American Socialist by Shawn Guide (S&S)

Former Jacobin editor Gude debuts with a magnificent biography of labor leader Eugene Debs (1855–1926). Read more.

The Bookshop by Andrew Pettegree (Basic)

“The book trade must always evolve, something it has done for six centuries and will continue to do,” historian Pettegree asserts in his expansive survey of the bookselling industry. Read more.

Freedom’s Gate by Soyica Diggs Colbert (Norton)

This outstanding history from Guggenheim fellow Colbert spotlights an influential group friendship between five Black female artists and civil rights activists that centered around one Greenwich Village nightclub. Read more.

The Confederacy Myth by Connor Williams (St. Martin’s)

The Civil War was brought about by an extremely small, wealthy group of “proactive, pro-slavery fanatics,” according to this exceptional study from historian Williams. Read more.

The Co-creation by Olivia Judson (Penguin Press)

Evolutionary biologist Judson delivers an impressive study of the intermingled history of the evolution of organic life and Earth. Read more.

Serling by Alan Sepinwall (Grand Central)

Critic Sepinwall, author of Welcome to the O.C., offers an electrifying biography of Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling (1924–1975). Read more.

Shelter Is Necessary for Existence by Brenda Iijima (Two Dollar Radio)

A Brooklyn family is haunted by their newly renovated brownstone in this devilishly entertaining novel from Iijima. Read more.

On Another Planet They Can Save Me by Lieke Marsman, tr. Sophie Collins (Catapult)

In this cathartic and often wondrous account, Dutch poet Marsman, who died earlier this year, catalogs the emotional and intellectual fallout of her terminal cancer diagnosis. Read more.

Long Wave by Daisy Johnson (Riverhead)

Three generations of a contemporary English family contend with shame, maternal ambivalence, and despair in the arresting and mysterious third novel from Johnson. Read more.

A Dead White by Wendy S. Walters (Scribner)

Longlisted for this year’s National Book Award, Walters’s latest takes aim at the ubiquity of white paint in society, from fine arts to architecture, and what it reveals about culture, politics, and desire.

The Man With Many Names by Georgi Gospodinov, tr. Angela Rodel (Norton)

International Booker Prize winner Gospodinov serves up a stunning collection of 40 distinctive and charming stories, mostly set in his native Bulgaria. Read more.

The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Scribner)

Thompson-Spires crafts a sizzling tale of a bootlegging bigamist and oil magnate’s mysterious death in 1927 Oklahoma. Read more.

Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li (FSG)

Li traces the origins of real-life musicians John and Adelaide Field in this fascinating tale of art and ambition. Read more.

Back by Lauren Michele Jackson (Amistad)

Jackson, an English professor at Northwestern, delivers a challenging and rewarding collection of essays interpreting the symbolism of the human back in literature, film, and art. Read more.

Lust by Erika Lust (Metropolitan)

Despite its fraught role in the cultural wars, porn has “huge potential for dealing with more complicated storytelling and ideas around sexuality,” asserts adult filmmaker Lust in her perceptive mix of memoir and feminist rallying cry. Read more.

Sutra Americana by Monona Wali (Wisconsin)

Wali’s latest follows a single Indian American immigrant family through five decades, starting in 1960, and features, in the words of blurber Yang Huang, “a philandering astrophysicist, a feminist philosopher, and their three spirited American daughters.”

Doppelgänger by Sam Riviere (Catapult)

In this fresh take on the campus novel, Riviere conjures a fictional university town in the near future, where a contagious “twinning” trend sweeps through the student body.

Needlemouth by K-Ming Chang (S&S)

Chang delivers another audaciously grotesque coming-of-age tale, this time following three cousins as they unravel under the weight of inherited violence. Read more.

The Creativity Con by Thomas Frank (Penguin Press)

This biting analysis from bestseller and Baffler cofounder Frank exposes how America’s decades-long fixation on creativity and innovation helped construct an unequal postindustrial society. Read more.

Red Ants by Kimberly Blaeser (Counterpoint)

Longlisted for the National Book Award, the poet’s prose debut comprises short stories centering Anishinaabe characters who complicate our understanding of Indigenous America.

The Story of the Body by Meghan O’Rourke (Norton)

For this excellent anthology, O’Rourke gathers poems that explore illness, disability, vulnerability, and the body’s capacity for endurance. Read more.

Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (FSG)

Guasch traces a friendship between two 20-something ravers in this exquisite dystopian novel set in an unnamed country where young men are conscripted to fight wildfires. Read more.

Stellar Smoke by Tanaïs (Dutton)

In this bold speculative novel from perfumer and memoirist Tanaïs, a harpist reluctantly retreats to her family’s tropical ashram. Read more.

Our Arab by Zaina Arafat (Little, Brown)

“One way to mitigate the pain of a shrinking homeland… is to find yourself in an expanded world,” writes Lambda Literary Award–winning novelist Arafat in this outstanding portrait-in-essays of the Palestinian diaspora. Read more.

Feels Like Trouble by Helen Betya Rubinstein (University of New Orleans)

Rubinstein’s essay collection challenges the existing landscapes of creative writing and publishing, casting a critical eye on existing paradigms and imagining new possibilities.

May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (Transit)

Perry, a poet and author of the essay collection On Trampolining, delivers a striking and singular first novel, shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize, about an unnamed curator gripped by visions of their medieval subject. Read more.

Secret Daughter by Veronica Gonzalez Peña (Semiotext(e))

A Mexican American woman comes to terms with her childhood trauma and the truth of her parentage in this perceptive novel from Gonzalez Peña. Read more.

I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex by Lisa Hanawalt (Drawn & Quarterly)

Ignatz winner Hanawalt riffs hilariously and poignantly on two of her favorite obsessions: horses and sexual relationships, though she assures readers that she keeps these preoccupations separate. Read more.

Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun (Hogarth)

Paying homage to classic horror movies and late-night television, filmmaker Schoenbrun debuts with a dazzling story about a mysterious TV channel that might be broadcasting from another dimension. Read more.

My Friend Kim Jong Un by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, tr. Janet Hong (Drawn & Quarterly)

Gendry-Kim ventures to the North Korean border and beyond in this extraordinary and empathetic work of comics journalism. Read more.

To Stay, To Stay, To Stay by Devon Halliday (McSweeney’s)

Halliday debuts with a perceptive novel featuring a loose circle of friends and acquaintances in the Midwestern college town of Eden, each on the cusp of making major life decisions. Read more.

Frost Will Come by Mary Cappello (University of Wisconsin)

Cappello pays tribute to her poet mother, whom she cared for following a diagnosis with terminal ovarian cancer, through lyric essays interspersed with her mother’s own writing.

Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell (Holt)

Birrell’s magnificent debut centers on a young German Jewish seamstress and aspiring artist whose life is changed and complicated by her wealthy patron. Read more.

The Widow van Gogh by Joan Martelli (Pegasus)

Journalist Martelli resurfaces in this detailed biography the crucial but little-remembered role Johanna van Gogh played in preserving her brother-in-law Vincent van Gogh’s legacy. Read more.

Walking by Sevgi Soysal, tr. Maureen Freely (Archipelago)

The second novel from Archipelago by the late Turkish writer follows the entwined lives of two young people coming of age in 1970s Yenişehir.

Understory by Pauletta Hansel (University of Kentucky)

Hansel excavates her family history—and that of the American South—through her women forebears, whom she traces back to her 10th great-grandmother, a “tobacco bride” shipped from England to Jamestown.

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November

Camera Obscura by Enrique Vila-Matas, tr. Valerie Miles (Yale)

Vila-Matas charms with this speculative tale about an experiment in cultivating a literary sensibility. Read more.

Shut Up, I Love You, I’ll Call You Tomorrow by Sloane Murphy (LittlePuss)

Murphy debuts with a bighearted linked story collection about a group of Chicago trans women who find love, trade gossip, and go heavy on drugs and alcohol. Read more.

The Misogynists by Allison Leigh (Abrams)

Art historian Leigh takes a trenchant look at how misogyny shaped the work of six lionized artists. Read more.

Annie Proulx Stories (Scribner)

Proulx, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for The Shipping News, stocks the stories gathered in this towering volume with hardscrabble characters like the Dunmires, a Wyoming ranching family who possess a “rigidity of attitude that said theirs was the only way.” Read more.

Ocean of Bones by David Kushner (Gallery)

Journalist Kushner offers a fast-paced, gripping account of the lives of the African survivors of the Guerrero, an outlaw slave ship which sank off the Florida Keys in 1827, and a predominantly Black group of divers hunting for the wreck’s location today. Read more.

Beyond the Baths of Stars by Schneider K. Rancy (Amistad)

A disillusioned Haitian American embarks on a Homeric joyride through South Florida in Rancy’s glimmering debut. Read more.

The Pen by Simon Garfield (Crown)

The humble writing instrument is making a nostalgic comeback, according to the entertaining latest from journalist Garfield. Read more.

Hollywood Whispers by Eileen Cope (Lyons)

Literary agent Cope debuts with a marvelous history of how rival gossip columnists Louella Parsons (1881–1972) and Hedda Hopper (1885–1966) kept movie studios vigilant during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Read more.

Whale Harbor by Mary Beth Keane (Scribner)

A taciturn Irish American longs for his long-lost brother in this quiet and deeply insightful family saga from Keane. Read more.

Just a Shot Away by Mark Binelli (Metroplitan)

Journalist and novelist Binelli delivers an epic biography of Martin Scorsese, whom he calls “our greatest living filmmaker.” Read more.

A Whole Lotta History by Jason Lipshutz (Atria)

Music journalist Lipshutz weaves together a vivid, sparkling ode to boy band One Direction. Read more.

Stations by Louise Kennedy (Riverhead)

Kennedy gestures at a generation’s dispossession with this nuanced story of Irish expats in London. Read more.

Dams by Irene Solà, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf)

In this magnificent work of metafiction from Solà, a writer examines desire, the craft of storytelling, and her connection to country life. Read more.

Air Split Open by Addie Mahmassani (University of Iowa)

Mahmassani traces the interconnected careers of Odetta and Joan Baez to craft a feminist history of the 1960s folk revival, side-stepping the often male-centered narratives surrounding the scene.

As If We Were Staying by Spencer R. Scott (HarperOne)

Drawing on his experience cofounding a collectivist regenerative farm, Scott contemplates how people living within the false, cage-like reality of capitalism can reconnect to the true reality of the natural world.

Don’t Stop Snowing by Gabriel Bump (Algonquin)

Bump spins an affecting story of a young man’s efforts to escape from the shadow of his brilliant but troubled father. Read more.

Roadshow by Nikki Ervice (Astra House)

A dancer drives across the country to reunite with the mother she never knew in Ervice’s gritty and alluring debut. Read more.

The Statuary Gardens by Jacques Abeille, tr. Alex Andriesse (NYRB)

The first English translation of this wonderfully surreal and philosophical work by Abeille (1942–2022) transports readers to a country where statues are cultivated from the ground like plants. Read more.

Jealousy by Sarah Haas (Catapult)

In this ambitious if slippery debut, Haas chronicles the corrosive intersection of desire and envy. Read more.

The Telephone by James Gleick (FSG)

Bestselling historian of technology Gleick returns with an enthralling deep dive into the telephone and the many social revolutions it has enabled. Read more.

I Regret I Am Able to Attend by Jessica Craig-Martin (Random House)

“You may stumble across a narrative arc of some kind, but I’ll be damned if you detect any redemption,” writes photographer Craig-Martin in this vivid essay collection about growing up around artists in New York City and London in the 1970s and ’80s. Read more.

The Sensualist by Gary Shteyngart (Random House)

Shteyngart’s first collection of personal essays explores the pursuit of pleasure in all its forms, from luxury cruise ships to finely tailored suits to the perfect martini.

Notes on Postcards by Jennifer Croft (Catapult)

The International Booker–winning translator’s memoir retraces her travels, relationships, and experience of motherhood through her lifelong collection of postcards.

We Belong to the Trees by Keletso Mopai (Seven Stories)

Mopai follows her story collection, If You Keep Digging, with an explosive, Rashomon-like novel of post-apartheid South Africa and the mysterious killing of a Black security guard who was working for a white farmer. Read more.

Murmurs from the Hills by Scholastique Mukasonga, tr. Mark Polizzotti (Archipelago)

Mukasonga blends autofiction and folklore in this magnificent collection of stories about colonial and post-colonial Rwanda. Read more.

Vocal Break by Lauren Elkin (FSG)

Elkin, it turns out, is not just a brilliant writer and translator, but a singer to boot; her erudite cultural analysis of women’s voices doubles as a feminist testimony to the power of song.

My Boyfriend, the Superhero by Kylie Cheung (AK)

The journalist and Jezebel staff writer makes her fiction debut with a “feminist psychothriller” that turns the superhero genre on its head.

In Latin America You Could Be Free by Yesenia Barragan (Basic)

Historian Barragan explores in this piercing study the “place and promise” of Latin America in the U.S. antebellum political imagination. Read more.

The Key Biscayne Affair by Xita Rubert, tr. Julia Sanches (Ecco)

The unnamed narrator of this magnetic coming-of-age novel by Spanish writer Rubert ries to piece together her mysterious and unsettling stint living with her father and older brother in Florida at age 12. Read more.

The Last Leaf by Willie Nelson (Penguin Press)

Grammy winner Nelson delivers an affable memoir about his past decade of writing and recording that doubles as a love letter to his wife, Annie. Read more.

The Man Who Read Books by Rachid Benzine, tr. Sam Taylor (Cardinal)

In Benzine’s taut and heartbreaking novel, a French war photographer travels to present-day Gaza to report on the region during a ceasefire with Israel. Read more.

Remember the Bees by Zineb Mekouar, tr. Maren Baudet-Lackner (Milkweed)

Zineb’s English-language debut is set in an ancient Moroccan apiary, where a young boy’s inheritance of bees is threatened by climate change.

The Intangibles by Nick Paumgarten (Penguin Press)

New Yorker staff writer Paumgarten debuts with an inventive memoir that examines the role of hockey in his life. Read more.

Any Time But This Time by Adam Peterson (Mad Creek)

Peterson’s debut story collection, which won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, counts among its cast of characters the first woman on Earth, Jesus, lost sailors, a pioneer’s wife, and the last man alive.

Objects of Desire by Celia Paul (NYRB)

The painter’s latest memoir grew from the account she kept of her work—and the many preoccupations that sprang up around it—while alone in Venice for an artist’s residency.

I Won’t See You Die by Antonia Muñoz Molina, tr. Curtis Bauer (Other)

A Spanish American man feels torn between duty and passion in this stunning novel from Muñoz Molina. Read more.

Between the River and the Railroad Tracks by Nicole R. Fleetwood (Little, Brown)

MacArthur fellow Fleetwood delivers a brilliant account of growing up in a majority-Black Ohio neighborhood in the 1970s. Read more.

Tiger’s Mouth by Lucy Tan (Ballantine)

Two tech interns from different backgrounds become friends and rivals in the sharp-edged sophomore novel from Tan. Read more.

Universe of Grace by Rachel Calnek-Sugin (Holt)

A mixed-race Philadelphia girl comes to believe she’s an animal, or maybe an alien, in Calnek-Sugin’s vivid if muddled debut. Read more.

Amazons by “Cleo Birdwell” (Scribner)

Nearly 40 years before Heated Rivalry hit bookshelves, Don DeLillo wrote a smutty hockey novel of his own under a pseudonym; when he was discovered to be the author, he disavowed it—only for Scribner to reissue the book this year.

Radio Night by Yuri Andrukhovych, tr. Mark Andryczyk (NYRB)

The Ukrainian prose stylist tells the story of a legendary pianist whose life in exile is imperiled when he is implicated in the death of the dictator of his long-oppressed country.

In the Round by Rebecca Handler (McSweeney’s)

Handler’s sophomore novel centers on a woman who is plunged into a “feminist Kafkaesque literary mystery” that unfolds over a single night in San Francisco, during which “theatrical elements”—a cast list, a prop list, an intermission—begin to creep in.

Phantoms by Rima Brusi, tr. Jessica Powell(Arte Público)

Rima’s memoir traces four generations of women—her great-grandmother through herself—to probe questions of motherhood, memory, inheritance, and obsession.

Platinum Era of Gospel by Charrise Barron (Harvard)

Musicologist Barron debuts with a multifaceted account of American gospel music’s shift toward the cultural mainstream. Read more.

Fieldwork as a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy (Soft Skull)

An Indian grad student in London is pilloried online after someone posts a deepfake porn clip featuring her face in this incisive novel about Hindu misogyny from Kandasamy. Read more.

The Lies We Tell for America by Ber Anena (Flatiron)

In 2019, Ugandan poet Anena was accepted to Columbia University’s MFA writing program, but without funding. This vulnerable memoir recounts not only Anena’s shrewd fundraising efforts—she secured enough money to pay the $100,000 bill through a combination of crowdfunding, paid poetry readings, and begging the university—but also the difficulties she endured once she reached the U.S. Read more.

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December

Weird Era by Ryan Schreiber (FSG)

The Pitchfork founder recounts the rise of the influential music site, the boom and bust of digital media, the maturation of indie rock, and more in this wide-ranging memoir.

Murder on the Graf Zeppelin by Samir Machado de Machado, tr. Rahul Bery (Pushkin Vertigo)

This ingenious riff on the locked-room mystery from Brazilian novelist Machado de Machado, making his English-language debut, takes place on a luxuriously appointed zeppelin traveling from Germany to Rio de Janeiro in 1933. Read more.

A Natural History of the Spirits by Jori Lewis (New Press)

Journalist Lewis, winner of the James Beard and Whiting awards, explores the politics of natural history in this profound essay collection. Read more.

Wild Aster by Anna Hogeland (Bloomsbury)

Hogeland, a psychotherapist and author of the novel The Long Answer, chronicles the ravages of motherhood in her sympathetic sophomore effort. Read more.

The Windowman by Christopher Goffard (Crooked Lane)

In this wicked satirical thriller, Pulitzer winner Goffard crafts a sharp story of serial killers, celebrity culture, and parasocial relationships. Read more.

Fabrications by Zachary Mason (Grove Atlantic)

“You’d be like the Olympian gods, greater perhaps in power than in wisdom, your humanity dwindling into the past,” says the narrator of “Context,” one of the stories in this clever collection from Mason…. If there’s one takeaway from Mason’s inspired and kaleidoscopic collection, it’s that while machines might claim to know more than us, at least we have lived. Read more.

Bohemians on the Breadline by Lauren Arrington (St. Martins)

Historian Arrington offers an exceptional survey of the women artists supported by the New Deal, particularly those whose works upend today’s stereotypical vision of New Deal art as social realist murals depicting stagnant gender roles like “the dignified laborer” vs. “the long-suffering woman tending to the homestead.” Read more.

Notorious by Hayley Nolan (St. Martin’s)

Doom-laden prophecies from a maid turned celebrity nun contributed to the seven-year delay of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, according to this gripping account. Read more.

The Blue Hours by Stephanie Krzywonos (Washington Square)

Essayist Krzywonos processes her trauma at the bottom of the world in her gloomy debut memoir. Read more.

A Year with Gilbert White by Jenny Uglow (FSG)

Uglow, a historian and the author of Sybil & Cyril, reconstructs a year in the life of pioneering naturalist Gilbert White (1720–1793) in this breathtaking and innovative biography. Read more.

Opening Night by Sara Baume (FSG)

Irish novelist Baume examines her relationship with painter Mollie Douthit in this evocative memoir. Read more.

Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead)

This strange and alluring 1996 novel from Nobel winner Tokarczuk spans both world wars in the fictional Polish village of Primeval, described in the book’s first line as “the place at the center of the universe.” Read more.

The Fair Fields by Rosanna Warren (Norton)

Poet Warren illuminates her artistic development in this evocative and insightful memoir-in-essays. Read more.

Friends by Aurora Venturini, tr. Kit Maude (Soft Skull)

The late Argentine writer’s novel follows a successful octogenarian artist who returns to her hometown after decades living abroad, reckoning with friends old and new.

Anne Carson and the Unknown, ed. Christine Wiesenthal and Helena Van Praet (University of Michigan)

Bringing together perspectives ranging from the world of quantum physics to feminist literary criticism, this collection explores how the newly minted Nobel laureate’s practice of “engaging with the unknown” can help demystify our current moment.

The post The Millions’ Great Fall 2026 Book Preview  appeared first on The Millions.

In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged 30 years and younger. Our goal, at the time, was to expand the popular perception of who book collectors are (and can be) by highlighting original collections built by young women, often without the knowledge or help of the rare book trade. By celebrating their achievements, we hoped to inspire potential collectors to look at their shelves differently, to identify patterns, and to think creatively about the aspects of the historical record they might recognize and preserve.

The response to this prize has exceeded all of our expectations. As we celebrate our tenth and final year, we want to thank all the collectors who shared their projects with us over the past decade. We learned more than we ever imagined from your ingenuity and dedication.

We are delighted to announce the $1000 winner of the 2026 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize.

WINNER

Darby Ronning, 25, (she/her), Youth Programs Coordinator at All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for “The Alldera Collection: Feminist Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century.”

Named after Alldera, the heroine of Suzy McKee Charnas’s decade-spanning series The Holdfast Chronicles, Ronning’s collection documents the various ways that science fiction by and about women was published, marketed, and read in the twentieth century, from pulp paperbacks featuring women in chains to self-published feminist fanzines.

While Ronning’s collection includes some of the most celebrated names in modern science fiction (Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr.), her focus is on lesser-known writers: “I try not to spend more than ten dollars per title – a rule that, by design, sways the collection towards smaller names. These writers were veterinary radiologists and gymnastics instructors, physicians and mothers, and their backgrounds inform their storytelling.” Her commitment is to the wider community of ordinary women reading, writing, and debating science fiction during a period of rapid societal change: “My collection aims to get at this entire ecosystem of imagining alternative worlds.”

We were particularly impressed by Ronning’s developing focus on the popular reception of the novels she collects: “Science fiction in the 1970s had an active fan culture, and fans connected over reviews, art, and fiction circulated through zines. Janus (later Aurora) was perhaps the best-known feminist science fiction fanzine. . . . The authors themselves were part of this meta-commentary, submitting to fanzines and contributing to scholarship on the movement; several names feature in both fiction and non-fiction sections of my collection. These zines and works of criticism are now my chief collecting priority, because they are the format that best reveals feminist science fiction as a whole. I hunt for titles that are poorly documented and undigitized, keeping a keen eye on eBay. A recent find, New Moon, had ties to the publishers of Janus but took a more scholarly approach; I hope to acquire the other three issues.”

Ronning’s ultimate goal is to share the Alldera Collection with the public through a visual archive and blog: an initiative that reflects the collaborative, independent origin of much of the material she collects.

You can read Ronning’s winning essay and bibliography here.

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We are also awarding five honorable mentions of $250 each:

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Juniper Couture, 24, (she/her), an artist, bookbinder, and freelance bibliographer in Tucson, Arizona, for “An Unusual Collection of Miniature Books Formed by a Lady.”

When Couture was a child, her father purchased a set of 1960s-era “Lilliput Dictionaries” for her at their local used bookshop, a gift that sparked a lifelong interest in the secret history of the miniature book.

The “concealable nature” of the miniature book makes it an ideal format for distributing controversial ideas and practical information. Couture’s interest in the social history of her collection ignited a wider curiosity: “No matter how far my research goes, so does the enchantment of little books as they give up new secrets again and again. . . . I came to a wall in my collecting where I could not understand my books fully without learning how they were made, and that has become an equally rewarding practice as collecting.” Couture shares her collecting and bookbinding progress on social media as @thelilliputianlibrary.

We admired the depth of Couture’s collection, which runs to four hundred volumes, as well as the way her antiquarian approach continues to open new fields of inquiry.

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Maya Fell, 30, (she/her), a graduate student in art history at Hunter College, for her collection “Armed Women Vernacular Photography,” encompassing over one hundred photographs and pieces of print ephemera.

Fell’s interest in snapshots of “the gunwoman” began with the visual culture of the Soldaderas during the Mexican Revolution, but expanded to include “the larger typology of the armed woman in liberation movements globally.”

Fell observes that vernacular photographs of women soldiers and revolutionaries tend to be romanticized and sexualized on the secondhand market: “stripped of names, dates, and locations, they are frequently sold merely for their surface aesthetic novelty.” To recenter the individual subjects in the photographs she collects, Fell “began intentionally pairing the photographic prints with a robust supporting collection of movement-generated print media, including radical newspapers, political pamphlets, and historical leaflets. . . . radical print culture acts as the historical anchor for the anonymous image.”

We appreciated the way that Fell’s pursuit of iconic images of armed women led, through her expanded collecting focus, to a more critical and contextual understanding of the movements they represent.

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Leila Louhaichy, 28, (they/them), manager of the Hauser & Wirth Gallery Bookshop in Chelsea, for “Opening the Door for a Native New Yorker.”

Beginning with the paper trail created by three generations of Louhaichy’s own New York family, the collection originally focused on books about the city’s architectural and social history.

Over time, Louhaichy’s approach shifted, as they placed apparently “incongruous” works in juxtaposition to produce a new synaptic map of the city: “The titles within this collection center New York City as a character, not so much in the anthropomorphized sense, but rather as an expansion of the narrative. . . . New York City is the collection’s overarching theme, but the sub-genres orbiting within it are queerness, working class life, urban aesthetic beauty, focusing on how these subjects interact to weave the fabric of the city’s culture.” Louhaichy’s collection represents a series of unfolding conversations: Jane Jacobs with Samuel Delany, Betty Smith with Paule Marshall, Berenice Abbott with Leslie Feinberg, Bret Easton Ellis with David Wojnarowicz. As @angelbooksnthings, Louhaichy sells used books and shares aspects of their collection on Instagram.

We were impressed by Louhaichy’s sharp bibliographic commentary, which made a convincing case for their collection as more than the sum of its parts.

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Rose McCandless, 27, (she/her), Instructional Services Coordinator in Special Collections at Ohio State Libraries, for “The Book as Art and Commodity: Design Reform and Commercial Publishing, 1890–1915.”

Her collection explores the way that the Arts & Crafts ideal of the printed book as an organic work of art trickled down into mass-produced books for the everyday reader.

While private presses like Kelmscott and Doves produced limited runs of meticulously crafted handpress books for a select readership, “their theories of design exerted a profound influence on commercial publishers seeking to distinguish their books within an increasingly competitive marketplace.” To document this influence, McCandless collects popular series like the Everyman’s Library, whose decorated endpapers and title pages echo Kelmscott’s medievalist design, and Art Nouveau publisher’s bindings that draw on the ornamental and typographic style of the private presses – all while noting the tension between the “handmade” aesthetics of these books and their machine-made production.

We applaud McCandless’s creative pivot: unable to purchase the great private press titles, she found a different way to explore Arts & Crafts publishing history by strategically shifting her focus.

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Caitlin Paton, 30, (she/her), a certified medical coder and medical coding supervisor in Palm Bay, Florida, for “‘Let Me Be a Little Girl as Long as I Can:’ A Collection of Little Women.”

Inspired by her grandmother’s nineteenth-century edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Flower Fables, Paton has collected dozens of editions of Little Women, from an abridged edition distributed free with the purchase of a can of Folger’s coffee to a Penguin anniversary edition with a foreword by Patti Smith.

The dynamics of the close-knit March family are reflected in the building of Paton’s collection, a personal quest that has taken on a social dimension: “I have found my own March sisters in this world. Women who, upon stumbling through a used bookstore, have texted me variations of, ‘Do you have this edition?! I’m getting it just in case!!’” The collection is not only a record of family and friends, but of places traveled and bookshops visited: “Some people collect airport destination coffee cups or monogrammed gift shop keychains, but I love to be able to look at my bookshelves and remember Denver, Estes Park, Maggie Valley, Asheville, Newport, Providence, and hopefully many more destinations to come.”

We enjoyed the enthusiasm that Paton brought to her single-title collection, which reflects the rewards of a targeted approach.  

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The co-founders of the Honey & Wax Prize, Heather O’Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers and Rebecca Romney of Type Punch Matrix, would like to thank the 2026 prize sponsors: Biblio, Bibliopolis, Christie’s, and Ellen A. Michelson.

Thanks also to Lit Hub, Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, Fine Books & Collections, and The Millions for their support over this decade-long project.

Most of all, thanks to all the young women who have shared their growing collections with us! We are excited to see where they take you.

The post Meet the Winners of the 2026 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize appeared first on The Millions.

—Sophia Stewart, editor

Note: While we’re still on an editorial hiatus, we’re still working hard to produce our seasonal previews—we hope to return to our full operations soon.

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July

The Abyss by Jeyamohan, tr. Suchitra Ramachandran (Transit)

Originally published in 2003, this deeply human story from Jeyamohan tells of slavery, religious hypocrisy, official corruption, and arranged marriage in 1991 Tamil Nadu. Read more.

Up All Night: A World History of Nightlife by Imogen Willetts (Grove)

In this spectacular debut, historian Willetts surveys 350 years of influential international nightlife scenes. Read more.

Élisabethr by Éric Rohmer, tr. Aaron Kerner (McNally)

Originally published in 1946, the lone novel from celebrated French New Wave filmmaker Rohmer (1920–2010) is an alluring if rambling affair set mostly in northern France before the outbreak of WWII. Read more.

Scavenging Beauty by Angelica Glass (Riverhead)

In her striking debut, social worker Glass recalls walking down every road in Santa Cruz County, Calif. Read more.

A Real Animal by Emeline Atwood (Catapult)

A young woman navigates her desires in the wake of a sexual assault in the propulsive and stunning debut from Atwood. Read more.

American Alt by Chris Lockhart (Bloomsbury)

This extraordinary memoir by anthropologist Lockhart follows his efforts to help his friend, Michael Dodd, a former Marine diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, recover his memories of events leading to his 2021 arrest for planning to kidnap Washington governor Jay Inslee. Read more.

The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders (Holt)

Sanders delivers a gripping multigenerational epic of land, home, and inheritance. Read more.

We Were Forbidden by Jacqueline Harpman, tr. Ros Schwartz (Transit)

The three female protagonists in this sharp-edged triptych from international bestseller Harpman push back against the political, educational, and sexual regimes, respectively, that govern their lives. Read more.

Good Morning Means I Love You by Kendra Allen (Ecco)

Allen continues the theme of self-manifestation explored in her memoir, Fruit Punch, in this lyrical and sensuous debut novel about a 30-something woman’s unconventional family. Read more.

Nightjar by Emily Ruskovich (Random House)

Ruskovich explores the implications of mysteries and lies in this potent collection of five stories. Read more.

You Won’t Get Free of It by Rachel Aviv (Knopf)

New Yorker staff writer Aviv delivers a sharp collection of reported stories about mothers and daughters navigating medical and moral crises. Read more.

False Prophet by Afsheen Farhadi (Melville House)

An up-and-coming actor fabricates his late mother’s life story for a memoir, in Farhadi’s beguiling debut. Read more.

A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson (S&S)

Film critic and historian Thomson delivers an insightful history of filmmaking that investigates the negative effects of the medium. Read more.

They Stole a City by Lauren Collins (Penguin Press)

Collins’s history, spanning more than 125 years, traces the impact of the 1898 white supremacist massacre and coup in Wilmington, N.C., through the stories of four families.

Ada by Mark Haber (Coffee House)

A petty French tyrant recounts his failed conquests in this cerebral and entrancing narrative from Haber. Read more.

Astronaut! by Oana Aristide (Norton)

Aristide evokes in this splendid novel the heightened fear and tension of 1989 Romania near the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s totalitarian reign. Read more.

Every Inch a Lady by Audrey Smaltz (Amistad)

Pathbreaking model and businesswoman Audrey Smaltz—who also worked as a Wall Street broker and magazine editor—details her rise to the upper echelons of the fashion industry in this lively memoir.

Going to the Moon by Sally Ashton (Duke)

The poet’s entry in Duke University Press’s Practices series meditates on the Moon’s influence on humanity—and the threat posed by our attempts to colonize it.

Living, Together ed. Samantha Paige Rosen (Beacon)

Contributors including Kristen Arnett, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Sarah Thankam Mathews reflect on the virtues of communal living, chosen family, and the many forms of home in this imaginative collection.

Seven: Or How to Play a Game by Joanna Kavenna (Faber)

An underemployed young academic assists a famous “Box philosopher” on researching her quixotic book in this stimulating if freewheeling novel from Orange Prize winner Kavenna. Read more.

Aging Out by Lucy Schiller (Flatiron)

Schiller, a nonfiction writing professor at Texas Tech, debuts with a moving examination of the complex reality of growing old in the U.S. Read more.

Our Knives Will Save Us by Nephi Craig (Penguin Press)

In this affecting debut memoir, Craig extols the culinary heritage of his ancestors and discusses how cooking supported his sobriety. Read more.

Push the Wall by Frank Miller (Saga)

Miller, creator of such celebrated comics series as the Dark Knight Returns and 300, meditates on the forces behind his art in this exuberant memoir. Read more.

Hustle, Baby by Priya Guns (Doubleday)

Guns serves up an energetic tale of a Tamil family struggling to survive in Toronto. Read more.

Should the Waters Take Us by Stephanie Soileau (Doubleday)

Steeped in history, Soileau’s wonderful debut novel, after the story collection Last One Out Shut Off the Lights, revolves around three interconnected French Acadian clans in 2019 Louisiana. Read more.

Bedlam by Jennifer Higgie (Verso)

Higgie, author of The Mirror and the Palette, captivates in this poetic story of English artist Richard Dadd (1817–1886) and his descent into madness. Read more.

Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray (Mariner)

Gray explores two women’s messy friendship and tortured love affair in her perceptive latest. Read more.

Country People by Daniel Mason (Random House)

The North Woods author’s latest narrates a year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind.

Famous Men by Julie Buntin (Random House)

In the engrossing sophomore novel from Buntin, an aspiring writer enters a complex relationship with a renowned author notorious for his romances with younger women. Read more.

Journey to Nowhere by Shiva Naipaul (Outsider)

First published in 1980, this searing report from late novelist and journalist Naipaul picks apart the story of the 1978 Jonestown massacre. Read more.

A Quiet Place by Seichō Matsumoto (Modern Library)

In this stellar psychological thriller from Matsumoto, Japanese bureaucrat Tsuneo Asai tries to unravel why a woman with a serious heart condition would risk her health by climbing a steep hill in an area where she knew no one. Read more.

Data Empire by Roopika Risam (Harper)

Data science is “not a modern tool but an ancient turning point in how humans learned to organize and imagine the world,” asserts media studies scholar Risam in this brilliant history of “how those early marks grew into systems of power over everyday life.” Read more.

Sex Diaries by Alyssa Shelasky (Random House)

These all-new anonymous accounts, compiled by Shelasky in the style of her popular New York magazine column, pull back the curtain on non-monogamy.

It Will Come Back to You by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead)

Nunez, winner of the National Book Award for The Friend, offers more close readings of human nature in this masterful career-spanning story collection. Read more.

Air by Christian Kracht, tr. Daniel Bowles (Norton)

In this disorienting tale by the International Booker Prize–nominated author of Eurotrash, a Swiss interior designer receives a strange commission to coat a massive Norwegian data center in the “perfect white.”

The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin (Penguin Press)

New York Times Book Review editor Eakin’s masterful debut blends a coming-of-consciousness memoir with an engrossing portrait of the tumultuous (and often intertwined) lives of French theorists. Read more.

Unsayable: A Life in Writing by Michael Cunningham (Random House)

Pulitzer winner Cunningham offers eloquent reflections on life, love, and literature, as well as valuable pointers on craft and storytelling, in this sterling memoir. Read more.

Olenka by Budi Darma, tr. Tiffany Tsao (Penguin Classics)

Romantic obsession drives this intelligent 1983 novel from Darma and translated by Tsao, who won the PEN Translation Prize for Darma’s People from Bloomington. Read more.

Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverhead)

In this lyrical and scathing narrative from Watkins, an environmental advocate longs for another child. Read more.

Country of Lords by Kimberly Phillips-Fein (Norton)

Responses to the rise of Trumpism often focus on “cultural and economic conflicts of recent origin,” but this striking study from historian Phillips-Fein points to a different, older “source of strength for the right today”—a tradition stretching back to the nation’s founding that “sees working people as essentially inferior” and the rich as a “natural aristocracy.” Read more.

Carousel: An Essay on Seeing by Sarah Minor (Yale)

Minor delivers a meditative exploration of seeing and being seen, following a professor as she teaches a class called “History of the Panorama.” Read more.

Rise Above by Matthew Schnipper (Random House)

Schnipper debuts with a wrenching account of his toddler’s sudden death from a congenital abnormality. Read more.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

Whitehead concludes his Harlem Trilogy with a transcendent and wildly entertaining novel in which his recurring characters grapple with the ways their lives are defined by crime and the city they call home. Read more.

The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn (Viking)

Flyn delivers an exhilarating exploration of the nature and meaning of wild lands. Read more.

Liberation Summer by Micki McElya (Avid Reader)

Pulitzer Prize finalist McElya writes a sweeping account of the road to the September 1968 protests of the Miss American Pageant and the birth of a new politics of beauty.

All That’s Unseen by Emilee Hackney (Penguin Press)

Hackney debuts with a thought-provoking account of her early life in Appalachian Virginia, which was characterized by lush landscapes, financial hardship, and church. Read more.

Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli (Knopf)

A writer and her 12-year-old daughter grapple with their family legacy while on a road trip through Sicily in this arresting and layered novel from Luiselli. Read more.

Few and Far Between by Jan Carson (Scribner)

On the eve of the Troubles, Northern Ireland’s largest lake is drained to form a new county, in this stunning alternative history from Carson. Read more.

I Made You Up Inside My Head by Marta Pérez-Carbonell, tr. Rosalind Harvey (Riverhead)

Three strangers meet on a sleeper train in this elegant debut from Pérez-Carbonell. Read more.

The Obsessed by Lizzie Buehler (Putnam)

Literary translator Buehler debuts with a thought-provoking meditation on romantic love, parasocial relationships, and academia. Read more.

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August

Profiling by Philippe Huneman (Stanford)

This demanding study from Huneman, director of research at the Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in Paris, examines how predictive algorithms influence identity and social life. Read more.

Suffer a Witch by Joy McCullough (Dutton)

YA novelist McCullough blends poetry and prose in this bruising account of being sexually abused by a youth pastor at her preacher father’s Presbyterian church. Read more.

Daylight Come by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (Penguin Press)

Jelly-Schapiro paints a revealing portrait of Harry Belafonte, whose career as the “King of Calypso” and lifelong activism helped remake America through the civil rights era and beyond.

Yñiga by Glenn Diaz (Coffee House)

The incendiary latest from Diaz chronicles a Manila woman’s displacement and reckoning with her country’s legacy of violence. Read more.

Hiroshima, 8:15 by Kiyoshi Tanimoto (Modern Library)

This previously unpublished, English-language account by atomic blast survivor Japanese Methodist minister Tanimoto features his own harrowing observations of the catastrophic event. Read more.

Etna by Paul Yoon (Scribner)

A combat-trained dog sets out for home after a war in this magnificent novel from Yoon. Read more.

Awake Awake by Fiona Mozley (Algonquin)

Struggling writer Mary Mooney comes to wonder if she’s been fabricating “fabulous tales” of her childhood to her psychoanalyst in this quirky and intellectually complex novel from Mozley, author of the Booker-shortlisted Elmet. Read more.

The People’s Historian by Dave Zirin (Dutton)

Nation sports editor Zirin offers a rousing biography of historian Howard Zinn, whose 1980 bestseller A People’s History of the United States remains as embattled as it is popular, with ongoing attempts to ban it from libraries and classrooms. Read more.

The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian (Doubleday)

A freak accident at a Westchester County, N.Y., golf course derails a young woman’s life in this powerful domestic thriller from Bohjalian. Read more.

Plant Lady by Minyoung Kang, tr. Shanna Tan (Berkley)

A woman abandons her office job to open a nursery that sells more than plants in Korean journalist Kang’s brilliant debut. Read more.

Sex and Dissent by Meaghan Beatley (Penguin Books)

Journalist Beatley’s remarkable debut surveys four feminist protest movements that raged across Latin America and Spain in the 21st century. Read more.

Kitten by Stacey Yu (Random House)

Yu’s deeply felt debut finds Katie, a young Chinese American woman and recent college grad, adrift in New York City, financially precarious and unable to muster the professional or personal ambitions being so diligently pursued by her peers. Read more.

A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett (Modern Library)

This oft-forgotten 19th-century novel centers on a young woman torn between her passion for medicine and what society expects of her.

The Ego Trip by Kimon de Greef (Doubleday)

South African journalist de Greef, who has spent years reporting on global psychedelic movements, delivers a chilling saga about a former doctor who spearheaded the rise of toad smoking in the 2010s. Read more.

Beyond Beauty by Devon Cox (Norton)

Historian Cox serves up an evocative biography of prominent 19th- and 20th-century painter and portraitist John Singer Sargent. Read more.

The Story of Your Life by Kathryn Jezer-Morton (Viking)

The Cut columnist Jezer-Morton debuts with a shrewd analysis of how social media has restricted the stories people tell about themselves and others. Read more.

Triage by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf)

Poet and essayist Rankine delivers an innovative, genre-defying mix of narrative and criticism centered on a contentious friendship between the narrator—presumably Rankine—and a character referred to as “the theorist.” Read more.

Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind by Thomas Meyer, tr. Shelley Frisch (Penguin Press)

Meyer’s intellectual biography draws on newly discovered archival materials and previously overlooked documents to trace the life and work of a philosophical icon.

Three Tenses by Ed Park (Random House)

Stray musings and recollections reveal a writer’s restless mind in this scintillating memoir from novelist Park. Read more.

A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)

The Korean American narrator of Lee’s striking latest reflects on a pivotal year of his childhood in the mid-1970s, inviting the reader to ponder with him the mystery of what drove him to act out in his wayward youth. Read more.

Mia by Leslie Bazzett (Scribner)

Two American expats in a picturesque Mexican city forge an exciting and dangerous bond in Bazzett’s nuanced and unsettling debut. Read more.

On the Mark by Florence Hazrat (Basic)

Hazrat’s history, which spans ancient Mesopotamia to the dawn of emojis, argues that all punctuation marks—from the forgotten (ever heard of an obelus?) to the ubiquitous—are worthy of attention.

Sunrise by Téa Obreht (Random House)

A Wyoming ghost town provides the stage for this spectacular novel from Obreht about the enduring myths of the Wild West. Read more.

Under the Falls by Richard Russo (Knopf)

This gripping and grounded tale of friendship and self-delusion takes place in rough-and-tumble Stone Mountain, N.Y., a small town in the Adirondacks that’s less like its upscale, tourist-destination neighbors and more like the Rust Belt communities Russo portrayed in his early novels such as Mohawk. Read more.

The Maltese Version by Katy Simpson Smith (FSG)

Smith follows The Weeds with a stimulating and slippery anti-detective novel featuring a travel writer, her missing boyfriend, a mysterious poet, and another travel writer dispatched to find out what’s going on. Read more.

A Very Special Episode by Camille Acker (Random House)

A shadowy organization offers to help a young heir to one of Washington, D.C.’s most influential Black institutions in this sly social commentary on the interplay of race, class, and family legacy.

The Breakup by Kurt Andersen (Random House)

Andersen chronicles the aftermath of a near-future American civil war—Civil War II—in this moving satire. Read more.

Hello Baby by Kim Eui-Kyung, tr. Sora Russell (Hogarth)

Switching between six characters undergoing IVF—a journalist, a police officer, a vet, a lawyer, and two housewives—this thought-provoking novel explores the social pressure and emotional strain put on women struggling to conceive.

Jolt by Ted Scheinman (Scribner)

Scheinman’s memoir of depression chronicles his intensive course of electroconvulsive therapy, which came at the price of many of his most important memories.

Range by Dorthe Nors; tr. Caroline Waight (Graywolf)

Nors’s novel follows a professor of astrophysics who has taken a leave from the institute where she teaches and moved to a rural area, kicking off a meditation on space, time, identity, and consciousness.

Unprecedented Times by Malavika Kannan (Holt)

In the tender and sharp-witted adult debut from YA novelist Kannan, an Indian American undergrad explores an alternative path for her life during Covid-19. Read more.

Crocodilopolis by John Manuel Arias (Bloomsbury)

A Costa Rican dynasty’s lust for power drives this lush and suspenseful saga from Arias. Read more.

Jacaranda by Gaël Faye, tr. Sarah Ardizzone (Hogarth)

Faye offers a nuanced if tonally uneven story of a young Frenchman reckoning with the history of Rwanda, his mother’s native country. Read more.

Daytona Teddy Riggs by Drew Buxton (Hub City)

A bumbling muscle-bound Texan pursues his dreams of competing in the World’s Strongest Man contest and losing his virginity in this hilarious debut from Buxton. Read more.

Reality TV for Snobs by Ali Barthwell (Quirk)

Barthwell’s guide to the 20 most influential reality shows of the last 25 years aims to “turn skeptics into fans and fans into scholars.”

The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani, tr. Geoffrey Brock (Other)

The narrator of this poignant Strega Prize–winning novel from Bajani traces the causes and effects of his father’s physical and emotional abuse on his family. Read more.

Goodbye, Ramona by Montserrat Roig, tr. Megan Berkobian and María Cristina Hall (Modern Library)

The debut novel by Roig, a titan of Catalan literature, was first published in 1972 and chronicles the lives, loves, and secrets of three generations of women in 20th-century Barcelona.

Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth (Modern Library)

Truth’s 1850 autobiography details how she defied 19th-century conventions to become a preacher, popular speaker, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist.

The Shame Is Over by Anja Meulenbelt, tr. Ann Oosthuizen (Astra House)

Former Dutch senator Meulenbelt traces her political awakening in this unvarnished memoir, a firsthand account—equal parts heady and heartfelt—of one woman’s liberation. Read more.

The Ghost of the Mountains by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi (Riverhead)

Ecologist and conservationist Suryawanshi debuts with an enthralling account of efforts to study and protect snow leopards, elusive creatures that have become threatened as climate change and extractive mining impact their Himalayan habitat. Read more.

Changing Gender by Susan Stryker (FSG)

In this thought-provoking treatise, theorist Stryker forges an alternative history of gender inspired by an unlikely source: a lecture by right-wing pundit Matt Walsh. Read more.

Dèy by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)

A Haitian American woman reckons with the cost of hiding her pain in this illuminating novel from Danticat, winner of the NBCC award for Everything Inside. Read more.

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore (Liveright)

Society is on the precipice of “abandoning constitutional democracy…and even humanity itself for…government by machine,” warns Pulitzer winner Lepore in this powerful anti-AI treatise. Read more.

Her Own Voice by Anne Fernald (Beacon)

Using Virginia Woolf as a guide, Fernald chronicles the stories of eight wanderers, rebels, explorers, mentors, and other radical 20th-century women who forged their own paths.

I Have This Thing for Flowers by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn (Flatiron)

Sachwyn, a creative writing professor at Bucknell University, mines her extensive plant knowledge for these introspective essays about personal relationships. Read more.

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September

O Mother by Emerson Whitney (McSweeney’s)

The Daddy Boy author turns their eye to their flawed and complicated mother and the relationship they shared in this poignant memoir.

The Castle by Jon Ronson (Riverhead)

Journalist Ronson delivers a by turns amusing and harrowing report on the desultory state of contemporary men. Read more.

Tree by Aya Kōda, tr. Charlotte Goff (HarperOne)

The first-ever English translation of this Japanese classic invites us to foster peace in our lives by connecting with trees.

The Disappearers by Marlon James (Riverhead)

The Booker Prize winner’s latest—a sprawling novel clocking in at 640 pages—follows the survivors of a homophobic attack in 1980s Jamaica.

I Liked Rex by Diane Williams (NYRB Classics)

Delightful characters, curious images, and love affairs gone awry animate this minimalist metafictional collection by Williams. Read more.

The Mess That Made Them by Ryan T. Pozzi (Bloomsbury Academic)

Pozzi pushes back against our notions of “genius,” arguing that the artists we revere didn’t succeed because of destiny or innate brilliance, but were instead shaped by rejection, persecution, illness, and grief.

Voice of a Century by Anthony Tommasini (Penguin Press)

The former chief classical music critic for the New York Times delivers a rich tribute to Marian Anderson, one of the great singers of the modern era who also broke racial barriers.

Ambivalence by Brian Dillon (NYRB)

Critic and memoirist Dillon catalogs his adolescent coming-of-consciousness in this dazzling if remote account. Read more.

Black Arts by Megan Giddings (Amistad)

Giddings’s first story collection explores complex family relationships, romances both troubled and charmed, and events that straddle the supernatural and the all-too-real.

The Chinese Lady by Bo Wang (HarperVia)

Wang’s debut novel depicts the life of Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to be brought to the United States in the 1800s, becoming a curio in a live exhibition.

Erratica by Brian Laidlaw (Milkweed)

Inspired by Laidlaw’s climb up Yosemite’s stone monolith, this ode to climbing, nature, and attention is part adventure narrative and part philosophical inquiry.

The Contessa by Benedetta Craveri, tr. Alex Andriesse (NYRB)

Craveri argues that Contessa di Castiglione, an Italian aristocrat who gained notoriety as a mistress of Emperor Napoleon III, was the original “famous for being famous” It Girl in this biography.

Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf)

Mandel’s masterful seventh novel opens in 2031, with the United States having collapsed into warring city-states and regional republics, and expands into a dizzying story of doubles and parallel universes. Read more.

The Occidental Book of the Dead by T. Geronimo Johnson (Morrow)

The National Book Award longlisted author of Welcome to Braggsville returns with a crime novel about a Black police officer in an Atlanta precinct, who sees the “white-washed veneer” of his life begin to crack after a highly publicized murder.

About Looking by John Berger (NYRB)

Part of an ongoing reissue of Berger’s major works of criticism and fiction, this 1980 essay collection considers our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see.

Foam by Kate Zambreno (Semiotext(e))

Zambreno’s latest, an unclassifiable work inspired by Eva Hesse and other masters of “soft sculpture,” explores the notions of precarity and domestic disruption across genres, textures, and time.

Justice for Jehanne by Sara McDougall (Princeton)

Centered on a sexual assault case in 15th-century France, McDougall’s narrative history challenges modern assumptions about women’s lives in the Middle Ages and and uncovers one woman’s story of survival.

Hafni Says by Helle Helle, tr. Martin Aitken (New Directions)

This unconventional road trip novel is told over the course of one long conversation, wherein its titular character rings up the book’s narrator—a protagonist from Helle’s previous novel, they—in the aftermath of her failed marriage.

Postmuslim by Youssef Rakha (Graywolf)

Rakha explores the past three decades of Islam’s clash with the West from a secular Muslim perspective, finding inspiration for the future in the multiculturalism embodied by the Ottoman Empire.

Observer by Nicholas Russell (Ecco)

In Russell’s debut novel, a woman investigates her mother’s disappearance at an abandoned observatory in Nevada—and uncovers cosmic horrors in the process.

Blood Money by Anna Seghers, tr. Lucy Jones (NYRB)

Seghers’s novel of suspense and political upheaval, first published in the 1930s, tracks the nascent rise of the Hitler movement in a German village.

Fallow by Sarah Anderson (FSG)

The 23-year-old narrator of Anderson’s darkly funny dystopian debut, hates working at the demeaning call center where she’s employed—so she signs a 10-year contract to work at exclusive surrogacy program for executives who don’t want to take time off for pregnancy and childbirth. Read more.

Music Sets You Free by Ryuichi Sakamoto, tr. Sam Bett (HarperVia)

The godfather of electronic music delivers a meditation on making art, living life, and accepting death.

Female Life on Planet Earth by Laleh Khadivi (Ecco)

A grieving Iranian American woman processes the shocking news of her late mother’s involvement in the Iranian Revolution in this darkly funny novel.

Exhibit G by Fady Joudah (Milkweed)

The National Book Award finalist’s collection of poems, essays, and photographs explores the split perspective of a Palestinian American physician caring for the sick while watching the destruction of Gaza from the United States.

Anti-Zionism by Benjamin Moser (Doubleday)

The Pulitzer Prize winner delivers a sweeping history of the oft-suppressed tradition of Jewish thinkers around the world who oppose Zionism.

Madame Composer by Sarah Fritz (Pegasus)

Fritz’s biography reveals how and why Clara Weick Schumann, a giant of Romantic music who became a household name over her 60-year career, has been diminished and sometimes deliberately obscured. 

The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar (Summit)

Akhtar unfurls an intense and transcendent philosophical novel, narrated by a successful Pakistani American novelist named Ayad Akhtar who has recently moved upstate from New York City, about the limits of words. Read more.

The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw (Mariner)

The prominent wife of a megachurch pastor reckons with her humble roots in the uproarious debut novel from Philyaw. Read more.

American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee (Cardinal)

Lee returns nine years after Pachinko with an illuminating saga of ambition, education, and familial duty. Read more.

Traumatized by Catherine Liu (Verso)

The cultural theorist explores how trauma became a weapon in the culture wars, resulting in “capitalism’s greatest coup: convincing us that wounds define us and that accom­modating each other’s trauma is more important than challenging the powerful.”

All the Love You Can Use by Carson McCullers, ed. Carlos Dews (Mariner)

The first and only comprehensive collection of the Carson McCullers’s letters, spanning 1935 to her death in 1967, chronicle the high points and tragedies that defined her.

John Berger: From Life by Tom Overton (Verso)

This biography by Overton, who catalogued Berger’s papers for the British Library, grew from the discovery, shortly after the novelist and critic’s death in 2017, of a complete untouched archive of his 1960s life and work.

Something Followed Us Home ed. Cynthia Pelayo (Primero Sueño)

For this solid anthology, Bram Stoker Award winner Pelayo brings together 17 fascinating shorts by Latinx horror authors, all of which are bite-size, easy to get into, and span a wide range of subgenres. Read more.

The Weight of Angels by John Boyne (Holt)

Boyne delivers a witty alternate history of Oscar Wilde, who, instead of dying in 1900 at 46, enjoys an influential life of letters into the 1950s.  Read more.

The post The Millions’ Great Summer 2026 Book Preview appeared first on The Millions.

—Sophia Stewart, editor

*

April

Transcription by Ben Lerner (FSG)

In the beautiful and resonant latest from Lerner, a middle-aged man constructs an elaborate farewell to his mentor. Read more.

One Leg on Earth by ‘Pemi Aguda (Norton)

The marvelous debut novel from National Book Award finalist Aguda follows a young woman whose arrival in Lagos for an exciting career opportunity coincides with a series of harrowing suicides by pregnant women. Read more.

Work to Do by Jules Wernersbach (University of Iowa Press)

Wernersbach’s debut follows a queer-owned Austin co-op as it prepares to unionize amid Texas hurricane season.

The Ritz of the Bayou by Nancy Lemann (Hub City)

The 1985-86 trials of Louisiana’s flamboyant Gov. Edwin Edwards on charges of crooked hospital deals and other racketeering is compellingly reported by Lemann, a New Orleans–born author with a New York City perspective. Read more.

Gather by Ashanté M. Reese (Norton)

In this phenomenal meditation on food’s role in Black history and culture, anthropologist Reese shares guiding principles gleaned from Black social gatherings that can help combat hunger and food insecurity. Read more.

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta (Scribner)

A middle-aged man makes peace with his childhood trauma in Perrotta’s stellar latest. Read more.

Inheritance by Jane Park (Pegasus)

Upon returning to Canada for her father’s funeral, a young woman must confront her childhood and the legacy of guilt, sacrifice, and resilience that accompanies the immigrant experience.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday)

“The truth is, everybody lies,” observes New Yorker staff writer and National Book Critics Circle award winner Keefe in this gripping investigation into a young man’s mysterious death in 2019 London. Read more.

Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron)

In her third novel, the author reimagines The Great Gatsby as a story of 2007 Fort Greene, with women in the male roles and vice versa. Read more.

Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent (Deep Vellum)

Vincent parses and probes the death of her parents in a traffic accident when she was 14 years old through artfully arranged fragments—most of which contain the number 14.

My Dear You by Rachel Khong (Knopf)

In these provocative stories, Khong offers well-wrought and intricate depictions of Asian American and Asian life, often with a fantastical or speculative twist. Read more.

Empire of Skulls by Paul Stob (Counterpoint)

Stob, a professor of American studies and communication studies at Vanderbilt, casts a light on one family’s outsize role in the rise of phrenology. Read more.

Like This, But Funnier by Hallie Cantor (S&S)

When the reader meets Caroline Neumann, the TV comedy writer at the center of Cantor’s hilarious and propulsive debut, her life is in shambles. Read more.

After Oscar by Merlin Holland (Europa)

In this unique biography, Holland, Oscar Wilde’s grandson, explores the long-lasting impact of Wilde’s criminal conviction for homosexuality in London in 1895 and seeks to clear up misconceptions related to the incident. Read more.

Witches by Steven Veerapen (Pegasus)

Veerapen offers a stirring account of witches across the ages, from the witchcraft trials under King James VI to the ultimate decline of witch-hunting in the early 1700s.

The Oyster Diaries by Nancy Lemann (NYRB)

Lemann takes readers back to the world of her 1985 cult classic Lives of the Saints with an easygoing and lovely novel of late middle-age. Read more.

Picture of Nobody by Philip Owens (McNally Editions)

The forgotten modernist reimagines Shakespeare as a young writer in 1930s London in this strange, sharp satire.

Fidelty by Susan Glaspell (Belt)

First published in 1915, Glaspell’s feminist novel chronicles an affair between a woman and a married man—and how its ramifications echo across their small hometown in Iowa.

If This Be Magic by Daniel Hahn (Knopf)

Translator Hahn shows how Shakespeare’s intricate wordplay is preserved and transformed into other languages in this lively exploration. Read more.

Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell (Ecco)

In this noir-tinged novel, a trans author returns to his childhood home after receiving a mysterious envelope in the mail with a photo of his deceased brother. Read more.

Body Double by Hanna Johansson, tr. Kira Josefsson (Catapult)

Johansson explores themes of doppelgängers, loneliness, and selfhood in her sly latest. Read more.

Wifehouse by Sonya Walger (Union Square)

Through shifting perspectives, Walger offers a nuanced portrait of a woman who embarks on an affair with her much-younger French tutor.

Starstruck by Christopher McDougall (Vintage)

McDougall delivers a propulsive, horrifying account of the sexual abuse scandal involving Mexican pop singer Gloria Trevi and her manager, Sergio Andrade, which he previously covered in 2001’s Girl Trouble. Read more.

Visitations by Julia Alvarez (Knopf)

In her prismatic fourth collection, novelist, memoirist, and poet Alvarez spins richly detailed micro-narratives of her childhood in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s, her young adulthood in New York City, and beyond. Read more.

A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia (Grove)

A vivacious woman falls in love with a priest in 1950s England in the emotive and revelatory debut novel from poet Sy-Quia. Read more.

The Madness of Believing by Josh Owens (Grand Central)

Owens, who dropped out of film school at 24 to accept a job offer from Infowars, reflects on his fall into a world of conspiracy theories, propaganda, and disinformation—and what it means for the rest of us.

Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola (Pamela Dorman)

Akinola’s debut takes a closer look at the American Dream through four siblings who reunite at their Nigerian immigrant parents’ Thanksgiving table after a decade apart.

How Black Music Took Over the World by Melvin Gibbs (Basic)

The intricate rhythms and protean harmonies of Africa lie at the heart of most modern music, according to this exuberant debut study. Read more.

The Witch by Marie NDiaye, tr. Jordan Stump (Knopf)

Witchcraft and family strife animate this 1996 novel by NDiaye, winner of the Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women. Read more.

Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar (Mariner)

Combining the drama of newsrooms, global conflicts, and personal strife, Laskar’s novel follows a foreign correspondent as she is dispatched to the war-torn Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11.

Famesick by Lena Dunham (Random House)

In her latest memoir, the writer and director contends with her swift, and often turbulent, rise to fame across three acts.

Ultranatural by Candice Wuehle (University of Iowa Press)

Wuehle’s latest sees a pop idol forced to confront her small-town past in Appalachia—and the friendship that first threatened her rise to stardom years before.

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley (NYRB)

From the author of My Phantoms and First Love comes a slender, subtle meditation on friendships and how they endure during times of strife.

Surrender by Jennifer Acker (Delphinium)

Unfolding across the bountiful fields of New England, this bildungsroman follows a 47-year-old goat farmer as she reunites with her high school best friend—and realizes she wants more from her than just friendship. Read more.

Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein (Doubleday)

For Jean Dornan, the protagonist of Langbein’s incandescent sophomore novel whose life is still in shambles following a toxic relationship with her college professor almost two decades earlier, it feels like “#MeToo had come and gone like a parade two streets over.” Read more.

American Spirits by Anna Dorn (S&S)

Dorn spins an enjoyable if chaotic satire of celebrity culture and the dark side of fandom. Just like its characters, this is messy and appealing in equal measure. Read more.

Talking Classics by Mary Beard (UChicago Press)

In her newest book, the renowned classicist considers our ongoing fascination with the ancient world and the role of antiquity in the popular imagination.

The First Emancipation by Jeremy D. Popkin (Princeton University Press)

Popkin expertly traces the influence of race on the French Revolution, charting how France became the first western country to abolish slavery throughout its empire—only to return many formerly enslaved people to bondage years later.

How It Feels to Be Alive by Megan O’Grady (FSG)

Critic and essayist O’Grady looks closely at five artworks and the circumstances of their creation, testing Barbara Kruger’s assertion that art offers the “ability to show and tell … how it feels to be alive.”

The Memory Museum by M Lin (Graywolf)

Lin debuts with a perceptive story collection about the unsettled lives of characters who were born in China and are now scattered around the world. Read more.

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, tr. Helen Stevenson (Mariner)

A French coast guard officer confronts the existential dilemma of her job in the thought-provoking English-language debut by novelist and philosopher Delecroix. Read more.

Tosquelles: Healing Institutions by Francesc Tosquelles, tr. Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem (Semiotext(e))

This rigorous anthology, the first of its kind, gathers the Catalan psychiatrist’s intellectual, clinical, and political writings, many of which have yet to appear in English.

Concert Black by Michael O’Donnell (Blackstone)

In this twisty novel, a biographer doggedly pursues a legendary but elusive conductor who is determined to thwart her efforts, setting them on a dramatic collision course.

Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov (FSG)

American-Israeli Holocaust scholar Bartov offers a powerful meditation on his birth country’s turn toward violence. Read more.

Small Town Girls by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)

Pulitzer-winning novelist Phillips takes a lyrical look at her West Virginia upbringing in this wonderful memoir-in-essays. Read more.

Exemplary Humans by Juliana Leite, tr. Zoë Perry (Two Lines)

In Leite’s ambitious English-language debut, a 100-year-old woman revisits her past, all while believing that a spy is watching her through her window.

American Men by Jordan Ritter Conn (Grand Central)

This immersive account from Ringer senior staff writer Conn profiles four American men whose lives uniquely tangle with an “inherited masculine ideal.” Read more.

Muskism by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff (Harper)

In this searing analysis of Elon Musk, historian Slobodian and tech journalist Tarnoff argue that, just as Fordism “was the operating system” of the 20th century, “Muskism” is that of the 21st. Read more.

Middlemen by Laura B. McGrath (Princeton University Press)

McGrath, an English professor at Temple University, debuts with an enlightening study of how agents have shaped the American literary landscape. Read more.

When the World Sleeps by Francesca Albanese (Other Press)

“I am writing these words at a strange moment in my life: I have just been sanctioned by the United States…. for the absurd ‘crime’ of allegedly working with the International Criminal Court,” begins this incisive, heart-wrenching account from UN special rapporteur Albanese. Read more.

Questions 27 & 28 by Karen Tei Yamashita (Graywolf)

In this innovative polyphonic novel, Yamashita blends archival documents with fictional flourishes to chronicle the detention, forced removal, and conscription of Japanese Americans during WWII. Read more.

All Flesh by Ananda Devi (FSG)

At the beginning of this sensual and provocative novel by Mauritian writer Devi, the unnamed but unforgettable narrator announces she’s about to livestream her own “sacrifice.” Read more.

Mrs. Benedict Arnold by Emma Parry (Zando)

Parry debuts with a reimagining of the life of Peggy Shippen, wife of that infamous turncoat, as she navigates the political currents of the American Revolution and conspires to commit treason.

Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg (Hogarth)

The protagonists of this glittering story collection from Eisenberg grapple with the messiness of desire and their relationship to their bodies as queer and fat people. Read more.

Presence by Erin Maglaque (Astra House)

Maglaque’s sweeping history of women’s bodies braids personal experience with scholarship to probe the ways the female form has been politicized through sex, abortion, pregnancy, caregiving, and labor.

Aside from My Heart, All is Well by Héctor Abad, tr. Anne McLean (Archipelago)

Colombian author Abad follows The Farm with a mesmerizing chronicle of Luis Cordóba, an opera-loving priest and film critic, based loosely on the life of Luis Alberto Alvarez (1945–1996). Read more.

The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared by Rosa Campbell (Melville House)

Historian Campbell debuts with a revelatory biography of sex researcher Shere Hite (1942–2020), best known for her 1976 publication, The Hite Report. Read more.

*

May

Keeper of My Kin by Ada Ferrer (Scribner)

Pulitzer winner Ferrer traces the impact of her family’s migration in this wrenching account. Read more.

Patient, Female by Julie Schumacher (Milkweed)

This shrewd short story collection explores the messy, mundane realities of both girl- and womanhood from every possible angle.

Honey by Imani Thompson (Random House)

Thompson debuts with the scintillating tale of a disillusioned Cambridge University PhD student who goes on a killing spree. Read more.

Abundance by Hafeez Lakhani (Counterpoint)

Lakhani’s perceptive debut follows the fates and fortunes of an Indian American family facing an impending loss. Read more.

A Little Bit Bad by Cassandra Neyenesch (Summit)

Neyenesch’s darkly funny debut splices a murder mystery with a torrid extramarital affair between a sleep-deprived new mother and her roofer. Read more.

Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter by Stephanie Fairyington (Pantheon)

Journalist Fairyington examines beauty standards and reflects on her meandering road to self-acceptance in her bold debut. Read more.

Five Weeks in the Country by Francine Prose (Harper)

Hans Christian Andersen visits Charles Dickens and his family in this revealing novel from Prose. Read more.

Violent Phenomena, ed. Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang (HarperVia)

Across 22 essays by established and emerging translators alike, this captivating anthology proposes radical alternatives to the act of literary translation, all while grappling with its imperial legacies.

The Hill by Harriet Clark (FSG)

Clark blends vivid Kafkaesque motifs with a whimsical coming-of-age narrative in her beautiful debut. Read more.

The Fifth Year by Marlen Haushofer, tr. Shaun Whiteside (New Directions)

Four-year-old Marili learns about life and death and discovers the beauty of the natural world in this deeply perceptive and sensuous 1951 novella from Austrian writer Haushofer. Read more.

John of John by Douglas Stuart (Grove)

Booker Prize winner Stuart showcases his impressive gift for characterization in this perceptive and propulsive story of a tight-knit community of Gaelic-speaking sheep farmers and weavers on the remote Scottish isle of Harris. Read more.

Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer by Brooke DiDonato (Thames & Hudson)

This monograph collects the photographer’s surrealist images, which distort and reimagine familiar and domestic spaces.

Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt (S&S)

“I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead,” writes Hustvedt in the opening sentences of this tender tribute to Baumgartner author Auster, who died of lung cancer in 2024. Read more.

Adrift in the South by Xiao Hai (Granta)

Xai’s memoir lays bare the realities of migrant labor in 21st-century China, from the alienation of the factory floor to the hope found in telling one’s story.

A Siege of Owls by Uchenna Awoke (Catapult)

Nigerian author Awoke offers a captivating and magic-fueled adventure set in contemporary Africa. Read more.

The Lost Soldiers by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Dralyuk (HarperVia)

The difficulty of solving crimes in a war-ravaged city is at the core of Ukrainian novelist Kurkov’s excellent third mystery featuring novice police investigator Samson Kolechko. Read more.

The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline (Mariner)

Orphan Train author Kline offers a daring and deeply empathetic tale of the sisters who married conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874). Read more.

Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu (Flatiron)

Residents of an Asian American community in Western Massachusetts respond in consequential ways to a false alert of a “ballistic missile threat” in Yu’s resonant debut. Read more.

Memory House by Elaine Kraf (Modern Library)

In this arresting posthumous novel from Kraf, who died in 2013, washed-up writer Marlane Frack attends a mysterious retreat for former artists. Read more.

The Lost Book of Lancelot by John Glynn (Grand Central)

The entertaining debut novel from memoirist Glynn puts a queer spin on Arthurian legend. Read more.

American Rambler by Isaac Fitzgerald (Knopf)

In this lyrical travelogue, memoirist Fitzgerald recounts a yearlong journey he took from Massachusetts to Indiana that was inspired by his childhood love of Johnny Appleseed. Read more.

Night Train by Xu Zechen, tr. Jeremy Tiang (Two Lines)

Hoping for a vacation before beginning his PhD program, an erratic student concocts a story about killing someone and needing to flee in Xu’s latest novel.

America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Crown)

Bestseller Glaude offers a forceful counternarrative to the official commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary by surveying the horrors attendant to some of the nation’s previous anniversaries. Read more.

Kitchen Venom by Philip Hensher (McNally Editions)

First published three decades ago, this inventive novel unravels the scandals that wracked Margaret Thatcher’s government through the eyes of the Iron Lady herself.

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda, tr. Sarah Booker (Coffee House)

Ojeda delivers an intense and remarkable polyphonic hymn to the consoling and destructive power of music. Read more.

What’s So Great About Great Books? by Naomi Kanakia (Princeton University Press)

The novelist and literary blogger makes the case that, despite their frequent difficulty and contentiousness, reading the “Great Books” is not only beneficial but necessary.

Attention-Seeking Behavior by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo (Graywolf)

In this genre-defying novel, an self-identified liar spins tales of love and betrayal, while we readers attempt to parse whether she’s telling the truth, or just looking for attention.

On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)

The two-time National Book Award winner’s creative nonfiction is collected here, from her most beloved essays to never-before-published speeches.

The Danger to Be Sane by Rosa Montero, tr. Lindsey Ford (Europa)

In this unique exploration, Spanish journalist and novelist Montero unpacks the relationship between creativity and madness. Read more.

How to Rule the World by Theo Baker (Penguin)

In this incendiary account, debut author Baker details how a tip he received as a freshman student journalist at Stanford University led to the resignation of university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Read more.

Memory Rehearsal by Eleni Sikelianos (City Lights)

Mixing poetry, prose, and archival materials, this hybrid text excavates the legacy of the author’s great-grandmother, classical Greek revivalist Eva Palmer.

The Land and Its People by David Sedaris (Little, Brown)

Humorist Sedaris returns with a funny and heartfelt essay collection on friendship, family, and aging. These essays are among the best of his career. Read more.

Glyph by Ali Smith (Pantheon)

Booker finalist Smith offers a clever and enjoyable companion piece to her 2025 novel, Gliff. Read more.

Artifacts by Natalie Lemle (S&S)

A repatriation case against a New York City museum forces a lawyer to revisit troubling memories from her college summer abroad in Lemle’s suspenseful debut. Read more.

I Would Die If I Were You by Emily Rapp Black (Counterpoint)

In her latest memoir, Rapp Black draws on two decades of teaching to meditate on disability, grief, and empathy across art.

Binary Star by Sarah Gerard (Seven Stories)

A teacher in training struggles with anorexia and a troubled relationship throughout this new paperback edition of Gerard’s 2015 debut novel in verse. Read more.

Lost Worlds by Patrick Wyman (Harper)

Historian Wyman upends myths about the rise of civilization in this profound and enchanting study. Read more.

Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon, trans. by Daniel Hahn (Bellevue Literary)

Guatemalan writer Halfon reflects on his time at a nightmarish summer camp in this resonant autofiction. Read more.

Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth (FSG)

A woman develops an all-consuming infatuation with the mare she leases part-time in Haworth-Booth’s alluring first novel.

It’s Hard to be an Animal by Robert Isaacs (Grand Central)

Riffing on Doctor Doolittle, the exciting and hilarious debut from Isaacs follows a 28-year-old New Yorker who suddenly develops the ability to hear what animals are saying. Read more.

Helen Levitt by Joshua Chuang (Thames & Hudson)

This groundbreaking survey catalogs the work of American photographer Helen Levitt (1913-2009), who, across six decades, captured the streets of her native New York City with startling intimacy.

Hope House by Joe Bond (Hub City)

Bond’s gut-punch of a debut centers on Hope House, a Kentucky group home for a motley crew of boys who, in the 1980s, don’t have much of a future ahead of them—most likely prison, living on the streets, or worse. Read more.

Pretend You’re Dead and I’ll Carry You by Julián Delgado Lopera (Norton)

Delgado Lopera dives into Colombia’s taboo queer culture in this scintillating narrative of a man torn between belonging and self-expression. Read more.

The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams (MCD)

In the hypnotic sophomore outing from Williams, a professor’s personal assistant gets drawn into a strange triangle with her boss and a male student. Read more.

The Story of Marie Powell, Wife to John Milton by Robert Graves (Seven Stories)

This reissue of Graves’s 1943 classic delves into the life of Marie Powell, who, at 16 years old, was pushed into marrying one of England’s greatest epic poets.

Spawning Season by Joseph Osmundson (Bloomsbury)

Biophysicist Osmundson blends memoir and science writing in this moving meditation on queer family, the climate crisis, and 21st-century child-rearing. Read more.

No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed (Harper)

Sayed’s impressive debut tells the parallel stories of two gay men who meet in 2015 Istanbul. Read more.

The Disease of Boredom by Josefa Ros Velasco, tr. Kyle Rosen (Princeton University Press)

In this thought-provoking historical account, Ros Velasco, a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, demystifies a misunderstood emotion.

Prophecies by Chrisopher Dell (Thames & Hudson)

Across nine richly illustrated chapters, art historian Dell reveals how we’ve grappled with the future and its attendant uncertainties through the divine, the occult, and the supernatural.

And, How Have You Been by Maria Judite de Carvalho, tr. Margaret Jull Costa (Two Lines)

This collection gathers the late stories of the Portuguese author (1921-1998), known for her incisive prose and finely-tuned portraits of women, translated into English for the first time.

*

June

Whistler by Anne Patchett (Harper)

Patchett follows 2023’s Tom Lake with another perfectly executed and quietly profound family drama. Read more.

The Children by Melissa Albert (Morrow)

The 30-something daughter of a famous novelist looks back on her traumatic Vermont childhood in the eerie and assured adult debut from YA author Albert. Read more.

The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg (Princeton University Press)

From Machiavelli to QAnon, this incisive account charts how the conspiracy theories have evolved—and remained the same—throughout the centuries.

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy (FSG)

A transplanted Londoner in contemporary Paris struggles to write an essay on Gertrude Stein in this arch novel from Levy. Read more.

Meeting New People by Daniel M. Lavery (HarperVia)

Following Women’s Hotel, Lavery returns with a novel about a 50-something, twice-divorced woman looking back on the dissolution of the nine best friendships of her life.

Cut Out by Fiona Rogers (Thames & Hudson)

Complete with 200 color illustrations, this comprehensive volume explores the relationship between photography, feminist art, and collage through the collection of the V&A.

Good-Bye by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy (New Directions)

This new collection of eleven short stories and vignettes, many never before translated into English, is sure to appeal to the rabid fanbase of the Japanese writer (1909–1948), best known for his portraits of despair.

1873 by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin)

The latest from the Pulitzer Prize–winning financial historian reckons with the fraught legacy of the Rothschilds and the famous banking family’s role in one of the world’s worst economic collapses.

It’s All River by Carla Madeira, tr. Alison Entrekin (Liveright)

In this taut narrative, the Brazilian writer offers the story of a prostitute caught in a twisted love triangle—and the destruction it leaves in its wake.

Like a Cat Loves a Bird by James Bailey (Princeton University Press)

Bailey’s stylish biography traces the arc of Spark’s life and literary career, both of which spanned nearly the entire 20th century.

Bone Horn by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain (Soft Skull)

Picasso once quipped that Alice B. Toklas’s bangs hid the stump of a horn—and in Bussey-Chamberlain’s queer detective novel, a newly registered private investigator attempts to track it down.

Freedom by Zinzi Clemmons (Viking)

The electrifying nonfiction debut from novelist Clemmons muses on the thorny concept of freedom in “a world buckling from the consequences of centuries of interlocking injustices.” Read more.

A Sense of Occasion by Brodie Crellin (Riverhead)

The British novelist’s debut sees a dysfunctional family reunite in a small English village for their matriarch’s funeral over a sweltering summer weekend.

Quake by Kitty Mrosovky (McNally Editions)

Mrosovsky, who died in 1995, weaves a sensuous tale of female desire—unpublished in her life time—in which a woman grows increasingly enamored with her younger Italian lover.

Rasputin Swims the Potomac by Ben Fountain (Flatiron)

Fountain’s satire imagines an alternate reality not that far from our own, complete with a mysterious pandemic, a desperate president, and a pro wrestler thrust into the political limelight.

Two Ships by David S. Reynolds (Penguin)

Reynolds maps the how the arrival of two ships—The White Lion, which brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamestown in 1619, and the Mayflower, which brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620—set the stage for centuries of American polarization.

Pool House by Mary H.K. Choi (Flatiron)

At the heart of Choic’s adult debut is the tense relationship between a mother and daughter, both of whom live in their backyard pool house while renting out their main home to pay the bills.

Empire of Ink by Alex Wright (Basic)

Wright’s history traces the rise of the American newspaper from the Revolutionary War through to the 20th century, and the radical spirit behind its inception.

On the Other Side Is March by Sólrún Michelsen, tr. Marita Thomsen (Transit)

A middle-aged woman adjusts to being a grandmother and caretaker for her own mother in the wake of her father’s death, in the poignant English-language debut from Michelsen—the first female Faroese writer to ever appear in the language. Read more.

Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis (S&T Classics)

Lewis’s 1929 satire, about millionaire auto manufacturer whose marriage is imperiled by his wife’s European vacation, returns in a new edition with insights from scholars Nissa Ren Cannon and Sheila Liming.

There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood by Rasheed Newson (Flatiron)

The My Government means to Kill Me author returns with a novel set in 1950s Hollywood and propelled by the untimely death of a young Black movie star.

The Summer of the Serpent by Cecilia Eudave, tr. Robin Meyers (Soho Press)

Set during a sweltering summer in 1977, this fragmented novel takes a surrealist tack to excavate the secrets of a quiet, residential neighborhood in Guadalajara.

The Perfect Moment by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury)

The National Book Critics Circle Award–Winner returns with a smart cultural history of today’s culture wars, arguing that their origins lie in a 1988 attempt by Pat Buchanan and other conservatives to stir up moral panic about contemporary artists like Robert Mapplethorpe.

The Narrow Road of Oku by Bashō, tr. Meredith McKinney (New Directions)

McKinney’s translation breathes new life the Edo-era poet’s now-famous travelogue chronicling his pilgrimage from Tokyo to Lake Biwa.

Cleanup on Aisle Five by Ann Larson (One Signal)

This illuminating debut chronicle turns Larson’s pandemic-era stint as a grocery worker into a rallying cry against corporate greed. Read more.

Without Terminus by Chaun Webster (Graywolf)

In his first work of nonfiction, the poet braids together memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to explore anti-Black violence, inheritance, and memory, as well as his own grandfather’s experience as a Pullman porter.

I’ll Take the Fire by Leila Slimani (Penguin)

Slimani’s autobiographical coming-of-age novel follows a woman who, after growing up in socially conservative Morocco, embarks on a quest for political and sexual freedom.

The Cruelty of Nice Folks by Justin Ellis (Harper)

In this penetrating and moving debut, journalist Ellis examines past and present African American life in his hometown of Minneapolis. Read more.

Shakespeare’s Margaret by Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern (Norton)

Theater critic O’Malley and lawyer Stern assemble an enthralling history of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Margaret of Anjou, who married Henry VI at 14 and ruled during the War of Roses. Read more.

Trash! A Garbageman’s Story by Simon Pare-Poupart, tr. Pablo Strauss (Melville House)

“The garbageman is the Sisyphus of our consumer society, condemned to go from house to house picking up bags, swept along day after day in the never-ending flow of refuse we produce,” writes Montréal sanitation worker Pare-Poupart in his bewitching debut memoir. Read more.

The Sixth Nik by Daniel Kraus (Saga)

This galaxy-spanning adventure follows a nine-year-old cultist with a tech-enhanced brain as boards a mysterious spaceship to investigate an even more mysterious planet.

Weimar by Katja Hoyer (Basic)

Following her history of East Germany, the historian and journalist returns with a sprawling chronicle of interwar Germany, as told through the town of Weimar—which, Hoyer notes, was both the site of the country’s first democracy and the first place Nazis were welcomed into local government.

The post The Millions’ Great Spring 2026 Book Preview appeared first on The Millions.

Below, you’ll find 100 titles out this winter that we’re excited about here at The Millions. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to dive into based on their authors or subjects. We leaned on our friends at Publishers Weekly to help blurb some of the many, many titles that we’re eager to put on your radar.

The Millions is, alas, still on hiatus, but we’re determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim (if a bit belatedly). 

—Sophia Stewart, editor

*

January

Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo (Black Cat)

NBCC Award winner Guo delivers a spectacular retelling of Moby-Dick, in which she recasts Ishmael as a 17-year-old girl and Ahab as a Black freedman named Seneca who’s battling the “white devil.” Read more.

Philosophy of Writing by David Arndt (Bloomsbury Academic)

In his latest, the comparative literature professor proposes new frameworks through which to understand writing not just as a craft, but as a philosophical undertaking.

Nothing Random by Gayle Feldman (Random House)

This cinematic biography of Random House founder Bennett Cerf from longtime PW writer Feldman teems with a star-studded cast including Truman Capote, James Joyce, Alfred Knopf, Ayn Rand, and Dick Simon. Read more.

Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso, tr. Elizabeth Plaister (Dalkey Archive)

Virgil’s Palinurus was Aeneas’s helmsman who fell victim to the god of sleep; his namesake in this complex, beautiful novel, is also a guide to a novel that straddles the conscious and subconscious, life and death. Read more.

The Last of Earth by Deepa Anappara (Random House)

Edgar winner Anappara offers a vivid narrative of two 1869 expeditions into Tibet at a time when it was still closed off to outsiders and its rivers and mountains were mostly uncharted. Read more.

Fire Sword and Sea by Vanessa Riley (Morrow)

Riley’s exciting latest follows a young Haitian woman’s fight against slavery and her turn toward piracy. Read more.

We Would Have Told Each Other Everything by Judith Hermann, tr. Katy Derbyshire (FSG)

In this deeply affecting English-language debut, German writer Hermann reflects on the connections between art and experience, delving into her protagonist’s family history in West Germany and the relationships that shaped her life. Read more.

The Hitch by Sara Levine (Roxane Gay)

Levine serves up a bizarre and mordantly funny tale of a six-year-old who might be possessed by a dead corgi. Read more.

This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Knopf)

Mueenuddin’s lavish sophomore effort spans six decades and traces the lives of a wealthy Pakistani clan and those who work for them. Read more.

The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken (Penguin)

In Knausgaard’s ingenious fourth entry in the Morning Star series, a self-absorbed Norwegian photographer strikes a Faustian bargain in exchange for success. Read more.

The Snakes That Ate Florida by Ian Frazier (FSG)

In this substantial yet brisk collection, essayist and humorist Frazier compiles highlights from his half-century career at the New Yorker and other outlets. Read more.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (Dial)

Immigration lawyer Burden traces the exhilarating start and excruciating dissolution of her two-decade marriage in this bruising debut. Read more.

Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujillo (Algonquin)

In Trujillo’s equally heady and thrilling sci-fi debut, panic attack–prone mycologist Giovanna Oddó is summoned to a provincial Chilean hospital to consult on a strange case of “lethal blight” believed to be caused by the mushroom Cryptococcus gatti. Read more.

The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin, tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Summit)

In the quietly affecting latest from Dusapin, two sisters reunite to clear out their family home in the French countryside. Read more.

Discipline by Larissa Pham (Random House)

Pham, author of the memoir Pop Song, turns to fiction with the dazzling story of an art critic who publishes a novel about the former professor who rejected her after their affair. Read more.

Eating Ashes by Brenda Navarro, tr. Megan McDowell (Norton)

The grieving unnamed narrator of Mexican writer Navarro’s spellbinding U.S. debut ruminates on the effects of migration. Read more.

Scale Boy by Patrice Nganang (FSG)

In this gorgeous memoir, Cameroonian novelist Nganang chronicles his coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s and his decision to pursue a literary life. Read more.

Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland (Unnamed)

Banned from publication in the U.S. until 1966, Cleland’s erotic novel from 1749 offers an account of a woman’s early days of prostitution in 18th-century London.

Iconophages by Jérémie Koering, tr. Nicholas Huckle (Princeton UP)

In this adroit English-language debut, Koering, an art history professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, surveys the long and surprising tradition of how “figured representations” have been ritualistically consumed. Read more.

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson (Grove)

Critic and fiction writer Winterson anchors this dazzling memoir-in-essays in her childhood obsession with One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folktales that introduced magic lamps and flying carpets to the West. Read more.

When Trees Testify by Beronda Montgomery (Holt)

Plant biologist Montgomery mixes memoir, history, and science in this unique examination of the significance of trees in Black history. Read more.

The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Random House)

In her stunning debut memoir, poet and novelist Griffiths details the most challenging period of her life, during which her best friend died and her husband, the author Salman Rushdie, was brutally attacked. Read more.

Crux by Gabriel Tallent (Riverhead)

This tense and staggering tale of rock climbing and family demons from Tallent explores the cost of following one’s dreams. Read more.

Beckomberga by Sara Stridsberg, tr. Deborah Bragan-Turner (FSG)

Stridsberg’s singular novel traces the history of Stockholm’s Beckomberga psychiatric asylum via wrenching stories of its patients. Read more.

How to Commit a Post-Colonial Murder by Nina McConigley (Pantheon)

McConigley follows her PEN/Open Book Award–winning collection, Cowboys and East Indians, with a witty and ultimately profound tale centered on two angsty preteens’ plot to kill their abusive uncle. Read more.

Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg (Avid Reader)

Torenberg debuts with a bewitching tragicomedy about a young woman who takes drastic actions to raise money for her sister’s medical bills. Read more.

A Very Cold Winter by Fausta Cialente, tr. Julia Nelsen (Transit)

In this overdue translation of Cialente’s vital 1966 novel, her first to be published in English, a family struggles to find harmony while crammed together in a frigid Milan squat. Read more.

Station of the Birds by Betsy Sussler (Spuyten Duyvil)

In the author’s latest, a son disinherited by his father while attending college returns to his hometown with an eye toward vengeance.

Vigil by George Saunders (Random House)

A ghost attempts to guide an unrepentant oil executive toward redemption and the afterlife in the staggering latest from Saunders. Read more.

A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot, tr. Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver (Penguin)

Pelicot, who first rose to prominence after waiving her right to anonymity in the court case against her husband and 50 men accused of sexually assaulting her, tells her story for the first time in this harrowing, galvanizing memoir.

Black Dahlia by William J. Mann (S&S)

Novelist and biographer Mann delivers a meticulous and humane reconsideration of one of America’s most sensationalized unsolved murders. Read more.

Rooting Interest by Cat Disabato (831 Stories)

In this sapphic sports romance from Disabato, NFL reporter Jennifer Felix is reassigned to cover WNBA All-Star Weekend, despite knowing nothing about basketball. Read more.

February

Lee and Elaine by Ann Rower (Semiotext(e))

In this second novel by Rower, the artistic and social excesses of the New York School painters—Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning—provide a welcome obsession for a painter in a midlife crisis. Read more.

The End of Romance by Lily Meyer (Viking)

Critic and translator Meyer’s sharp and sexy sophomore novel chronicles a young woman’s liberation from an abusive marriage. Read more.

Language as Liberation by Toni Morrison (Knopf)

In this series of lectures from the Nobel laureate’s tenure as a professor at Princeton, Morrison examines Black characters throughout American literature and their impact on our national imagination.

Superfan by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Flatiron)

Zhang explores the line between fandom and idol worship in her sharp sophomore outing. Read more.

The People Can Fly by Joshua Bennett (Little, Brown)

Bennett charts the complex role of Black prodigies and gifted children in American history, including by tracking the early educations of luminaries ranging from Malcolm X to Stevie Wonder.

Second Skin by Anastasiia Fedorova (Catapult)

Toggling between memoir, reportage, social history, cultural criticism, and erotic writing, Fedorova maps the worlds of sexual fetishism and kink, considering the the forces that shape desire, and how desire shapes us.

Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf)

Memoirist and novelist Rivera Garza weaves labor history, environmental catastrophe, and stories of her family into a vivid tapestry. Read more.

A Killing in Cannabis by Scott Eden (Spiegel & Grau)

Investigative journalist Eden shines in this novelistic work of true crime, which opens in 2019, when deputies responded to a 911 call reporting a kidnapping in Santa Cruz, Calif., at the home of tech CEO Tushar Atre, who’d recently launched a cannabis company. Read more.

Heap Earth Upon It by Chloe Michelle Howarth (Melville House)

Howarth captures the rhythms and underlying tensions of an Irish village through the eyes of multiple characters in her alluring sophomore outing. Read more.

Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes (Dalkey Archive)

Barnes’s trailblazing work of lesbian literature—part social satire, part Restoration pastiche, part love letter to Paris—returns nearly a century after its 1928 publication courtesy of Dalkey Archive.

The Wall Dancers by Yi-Ling Liu (Knopf)

This incisive, empathetic debut study from journalist Liu examines three decades of the internet’s evolution in China, from the mid-1990s explosion of microblogs and message boards that corresponded with the country’s increasing liberalization, to the mid-aughts raising of the Great Firewall. Read more.

Alice Baber: An Artist’s Triumph Over Tragedy by Gail Levin (Pegasus)

Levin’s biography questions why Baber—whose abstract paintings had entered into the collections of the Met, Whitney, Guggenheim, and MoMA by the time she died at 54—ultimately fell into obscurity, while also restoring the artist to her rightful place in modernist history.

Scatman John by Gina Waggot (Bloomsbury Academic)

Music journalist Waggott debuts with an affectionate biography of John Larkin (1942–1999), better known as Scatman John, who rose to fame in the mid-1990s with a blend of jazz, pop, and scat-singing. Read more.

The Jills by Karen Parkman (Ballantine)

Parkman debuts with a thrilling mystery that offers an immersive view into the lives of NFL cheerleaders. Read more.

Frog by Anne Fadiman (FSG)

Essayist and reporter Fadiman reflects on her life and the ever-changing world around her in this affecting and often humorous collection. Read more.

I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For by Bsrat Mezghebe (Liveright)

The nuanced debut from Mezghebe finds an Eritrean American teen seeking answers about her late father’s life as a revolutionary martyr. Read more.

This is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman (Dial)

Goodman delivers a bighearted linked story collection about a family’s travails. Read more.

One Bad Mother by Ej Dickson (Simon Element)

New York magazine writer Dickson debuts with a smart and funny exploration of what it means to be a “bad mom.” Read more.

On Morrison by Namwali Serpell (Hogarth)

Serpell, a novelist and professor of English at Harvard, provides an insightful and stimulating exploration of the work of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Read more.

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig, tr. Saskia Vogel

The first in a trio of works by the legendary Swedish writer set to be translated by Vogel, this 1964 novella follows a girl named Judit and her enigmatic inner life.

Lean Cat, Savage Cat by Lauren J. Joseph (Catapult)

An artist’s bohemian existence in Berlin implodes in this exquisite novel from Joseph. Read more.

Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (Ecco)

Oshetsky’s potent latest dives into the volatile inner world of a young woman who fantasizes about a life beyond her abusive marriage. Read more.

Head of Household by Oliver Munday (S&S)

Munday’s debut story collection mines the complexity, anxieties, and daily rituals of contemporary fatherhood.

The Writer’s Room by Katie da Cunha Lewin (Princeton UP)

Literature lecturer Lewin debuts with an insightful exploration of the spaces where famous writers crafted their most influential works. Read more.

Citizenship by Daisy Hernández (Hogarth)

Hernández presents a comprehensive and timely inquiry into American citizenship, weaving together memoir, history, and cultural criticism.

Beloved Son Felix by Felix Platter, tr. Seán Jennett (McNally Editions)

In 1552, a 16-year-old Felix Platter left Switzerland to study medicine in France, documenting his daily life in a diary—and now, contemporary readers can enjoy one of the world’s earliest journals, which chronicles everything from a brush with the bubonic plague to a John Calvin speech.

A Place Both Wonderful and Strange by Scott Meslow (Running Press)

The short-lived 1990 TV series Twin Peaks cast a long cultural shadow, according to this energetic account from film critic Meslow. His diligent account of the show’s cultural legacy [is interwoven] with delightful peeks into its idiosyncratic production and the eccentric directorial style of David Lynch. Read more.

Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong (Graywolf)

This mesmerizing collection from novelist and essayist Wong uses observations of small invertebrates to tackle questions about selfhood, consciousness, and humans’ relationship with nature. Read more.

Everything Lost Returns by Sarah Domet (Flatiron)

In Domet’s latest page-turner, two women are united across time by the arrival of Halley’s comet.

Every Moment Is a Life, ed. susan abulhawa (One Signal)

This Arabic-English bilingual anthology compiles essays by 18 young Palestinian writers whose writing grapples with the ongoing genocide in their homeland.

The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova, tr. Sasha Dugdale (New Directions)

In this captivating and capacious novel from Stepanova, a 50-year-old novelist experiences a bizarre and liberating metamorphosis while in exile from her unnamed home country, which has just started a devastating war with its neighbor. Read more.

I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa, tr. Adrian Nathan West (FSG)

Nobel laureate Llosa, who died last year, tackles Peruvian history and culture in this searching novel, published in Spanish in 2023, about the limits of idealism. Read more.

I Am the Ghost Here by Kim Samek (Dial)

Samek debuts with a striking collection of fantastical and speculative stories about conformity, technology, and the limits of bodily autonomy. Read more.

Doing Nothing by James Currie (Duke UP)

In his contribution to Duke University Press’s Practices series, Currie delves into modes of being such as procrastination, resignation, and melancholia—and the unexpected opportunities these states can present.

Technology and Barbarism by Michel Nieva, tr. Rahul Bery and Daniel Hahn (Astra House)

From the author of Dengue Boy comes a probing nonfiction collection which investigates the influence of “hard” science fiction and how the genre informs our complicated relationship with technology.

The Silent Period by Francesca Manfredi, tr. by Ekin Oklap (Norton)

The elegant and witty latest from Manfredi sees an unfulfilled young woman commit to silence. Read more.

Brawler by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)

Story Prize winner Groff delivers a gorgeous collection about families transformed by desperate circumstances. Read more.

More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen (Random House)

DNA test results rattle a middle-aged New Yorker in the poignant latest from Quindlen. Read more.

Starry and Restless by Julia Cooke (FSG)

In this expansive group biography, journalist Cooke profiles three prolific mid-century female journalists and examines the impact their reporting had on both their times and their profession. Read more.

March

Dream Facades by Jack Balderrama Morley (Astra House)

Morley explores what the dwellings depicted on reality TV reveal about Americans’ deep-seated desires for safety and security.

Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead)

In his latest work of alternate history, Mexican novelist Enrigue delivers his most ambitious book to date—a multilayered epic of the Apache Wars. Read more.

Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer (Putnam)

Journalist Oppenheimer contends in this impressive biography that Judy Blume “rewired the English-speaking world’s expectations of what literature for young people could be.” Read more.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life by Ellen Carol DuBois (Basic)

As a historian of woman’s suffrage, DuBois paints a definitive portrait of one of the most influential leaders in the fight for American women’s right to vote.

The Complex by Karan Mahajan (Viking)

In Mahajan’s immersive third novel, a family tragedy unfolds against the backdrop of political upheaval in India. Read more.

Will This Make You Happy by Tanya Bush (Chronicle)

This hybrid memoir and cookbook from the cofounder of Cake Zine pairs more than 50 recipes with a chronicle of the year she rediscovered her joy of baking.

Seeking Sexual Freedom by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah (S&S)

Sekyiamah profiles traditional sex practices across Africa—particularly older women and gurus who guide girls through puberty and early marital life—and argues that such open, liberated sex lives are hampered by Western norms.

A Marsh Island by Sarah Orne Jewett (S&T Classics)

Originally published in 1885, this reissue of Jewett’s idyllic classic chronicles life in a small New England coastal community through the eyes of a Manhattanite landscape painter.

Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen (Faber)

In this sly and visionary 1969 novel from Bodelsen, reissued with a new introduction by Sophie Mackintosh, a 30-something magazine editor agrees to be cryogenically frozen until a cure is found for his terminal cancer. Read more.

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli (Grand Central)

The EGOT icon tells the story of her life in her debut memoir, from her four marriages to her lifelong struggle with substance use to her experience growing up as the only child of two Hollywood legends.

Voices by Frederic Prokosch (NYRB Classics)

American fantasist Prokosch’s mostly made-up memoir of his childhood in Middle America and later years in the South of France, first published in 1982, returns thanks to a reissue by NYRB.

Down Time by Andrew Martin (FSG)

In Martin’s well-observed but listless third outing, a group of loosely connected 30-somethings float through the Covid-19 era, coping with cheating partners, enduring lockdown, and questioning their professional, romantic, and creative choices. Read more.

Whidbey by T Kira Madden (Mariner)

The propulsive debut novel from Madden, author of the memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, explores the aftermath of child sexual abuse. Read more.

I Was Alive Here Once, ed. Sarah Coolidge (Two Lines)

This anthology, the latest installment in Two Lines’ Calico series, anthology gathers ghost stories from Korea, Yemen, Poland, Japan, Uzbekistan, Iceland, Tanzania, and Thailand.

On an Inland Sea, ed. Michael Welch (Belt)

Thirty-three writers meditate on the experience of living on the Great Lakes in this anthology from Cleveland-based Belt Publishing, which promotes voices from the Rust Belt.

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood (Riverhead)

Reissued on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, this novel is allegory at its best, a phantasmagoric portrait of modern culture’s sexual politics textured by psychological realism and sparing lyricism. Read more.

Partially Devoured by Daniel Kraus (Counterpoint)

Novelist Kraus offers an entertaining deep dive into George A. Romero’s classic horror film, which inspired a lifelong passion for horror, low-budget filmmaking, and Romero’s movies. Read more.

Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, tr. by Polly Barton (Ecco)

In her follow-up to Butter, Yuzuki returns with an unnerving portrait of female obsession and friendship, in which a woman develops an all-consuming fascination with a popular lifestyle blogger.

Chains of Ideas by Ibram X. Kendi (One World)

The National Book Award winner tackles the “great replacement theory,” and how it came to find its way into contemporary politics, in his latest.

My Lover the Rabbi by Wayne Koestenbaum (FSG)

Polymath Koestenbaum charts the psychosexual relationship between the narrator and his rabbi, as the two men torture, pleasure, and exploit one another.

Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami, tr. Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio (Knopf)

Kawakami unfurls a remarkable noir-tinged tale of female desperation set during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Read more.

Who Killed Bambi? by Monika Fagerholm, tr. Bradley Harmon (University of Wisconsin Press)

Set in a fictional, affluent suburb of Helsinki, this nonlinear novel follows a successful realtor haunted by his role as one of four teenage rapists involved in a devastating sexual assault.

The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day (Astra House)

Day explores the nature of parasitic and symbiotic relationships in her wondrous debut, which largely follows the deterioration of a couple’s beloved French bulldog, Gelsomina. Read more.

Sydney Journals by Antigone Kefala (Transit)

This cosmopolitan collection of journal entries from the late Australian poet Antigone Kefala, who died in 2022, contains moving reflections on the tension between modern life and the life of the mind. Read more.

Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich (Harper)

Pulitzer winner Erdrich dives deep into the American psyche in this spectacular collection. Read more.

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro (New Directions)

Scodallero’s mesmerizing and challenging debut novel focuses on a film screening in a near-future intentional community of women. Read more.

The Life You Want by Adam Phillips (FSG)

In a series of interlinked essays, Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to unveil the difficulties of fashioning—and enjoying—our lives.

American Han by Lisa Lee (Algonquin)

Lee’s debut follows a brother and sister as they confront how they once embodied—and ultimately departed from—the American myth of the “model minority.”

The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)

The Irish writer’s latest story collection includes nine works of short fiction—many never-before-published—set across Ireland, Spain, and America.

A Good Person by Kirsten King (Putnam)

Screenwriter King debuts with the clever tale of a vengeful woman whose ex-boyfriend winds up dead after she casts a spell on him. Read more.

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel (Norton)

In the inspired latest from Booker winner Martel, a literature scholar discovers an alternate account of the Trojan War. Read more.

The Monroe Girls by Antoine Volodine, tr. Alyson Waters (Archipelago)

The fascinating and sardonic latest from Volodine plays out in the mind of a schizophrenic who lives in a postapocalyptic psychiatric hospital among the living and the dead. Read more.

The post The Millions’ Great Winter 2026 Preview appeared first on The Millions.

This year, the series is taking a more condensed form—we asked contributors for shorter reflections, and are publishing them all simultaneously—but we hope it will nevertheless help you discover your next great book. I, for one, am newly determined to finally read some Muriel Spark—thanks, Sebastian Castillo.

—Sophia Stewart, editor

* * *

Caleb Gayle

author, Black Moses

It’s usually impossible to find time to read much during a book launch. But when a book like Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement by Brandon Terry landed on my doorstop, I knew that I would need to make the time. In it, Terry upends our too-often romantic, or at other times, deeply ironic memories of the Civil Rights Movement. It isn’t the kind of book that one breezes through—I know I didn’t! But it is the kind of book that lingered with me, haunted how I revisit the past, and forced me to reconsider how that past informs the present. When I wasn’t reconsidering the past, I just had a blast reading Katie Yee’s Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. What a fun and funny ride.

* * *

James Webster

marketing director, Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive Press

I’ll be honest, this was an unusually contemporary year for me! Normally I read pretty widely, time-wise, but there were a handful of remarkably self-assured debut novels that couldn’t be ignored. First, I adored Stephanie Wambugu’s deliberately-old-fashioned Lonely Crowds, and have recommended it to so many people that they could populate an upstate college town like the one that features so heavily in the novel. I loved the flame-throwing Bad Nature by Ariel Courage, which is so furious in its voice, so cutting with its humor, that it’s almost intoxicating—like the buzzy lightheaded feeling you get from giving blood. And rounding out the trilogy was Cora Lewis’s Information Age, which is one of those fragmentary novels that we’ve all seen countless times, but incredibly, Lewis sacrifices nothing in the negative space.

Elsewhere, Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is an exemplary biography, looking at both an artist, and the creation of that artist’s legacy—itself a sort of art form. I spent several months reading nothing but Italian women (Ginzburg, de Céspedes, Morante, Terranova, Raimo, Mazzetti), and I also enjoyed playing director while reading Karl Krauss’s delirious and impossible-to-stage Modernist play, The Last Days of Mankind.

Finally, as the father of a two-year-old, I read the same 10 children’s books approximately one thousand times, each. Don’t miss Curious George Takes a Job, which contains a disquieting scene at the hospital, where George finds a bottle of ether and inhales the anesthetic until “everything went dark.”

* * *

Henry Hoke

author, Open Throat

I became a parent at the start of 2025, and although I was hanging out with my kid on the opposite coast, my heart and my reading choices were with my long-time home of Los Angeles. In an unimaginable and devastating year for the city, I was grateful to experience new work by some of my favorite LA artists. First, Season of the Rat by Elizabeth Hall, published by the freshly launched Cash 4 Gold Books. It’s a cutting marvel of hybrid prose that explores forgotten queer landmarks, sexual assault, recovery, burgeoning romance, and, of course, a rat on the roof. Then, the arrival of Sitting Vol. 2: Plein Air by Stacy Elaine Dacheux, the second in her series of illustrated chapbook memoirs. I adore the singular wit and succinct beauty of Stacy’s writing and art. This remarkable volume—much of it covering the direct aftermath of the fires, in which many of my friends lost their homes and businesses—becomes a meditation on resilience, how we shape ourselves by moving through. Lastly, Ottodokki by Patrick Michael Ballard, from art press Sming Sming, which is a pack of 24 randomized collectible cards by a visionary of material and myth. The cards’ uses are undefined, up to you. I had to buy one pack to keep sealed and one to crack open. My baby divined seven cards from the deck and we built a bedtime story with his choices.

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Grace Byron

author, Herculine

I spent a lot of the year finally reading Thomas Pynchon and Barbara Ehrenreich, a pair that perhaps never seemed so omnipotent in their prophetic powers as they do now. I was delighted to find the former reference in the latter in Bait and Switch, her chronicle of white collar unemployment, a spiritual sequel of sorts to Nickel and Dimed. I also tuned into Philip Roth for the first time; I found The Counterlife a fascinating experiment in fiction and adored Portnoy’s Complaint. I read less contemporary fiction than usual but I adored Information Age by Cora Lewis, Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood, and Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers. And, since this is a list, Things In Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li is a moving archive of grief, a list that unspools great beauty and gripping love.

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Peter Mendelsund

author, Weepers and Exhibitionist

I stopped reading about four years ago (it’s a long story). But I’m recently back in the game.

I still don’t read contemporary literary fiction, which is especially ungenerous of me having just thrown my new novel onto the toppling pile. What I do read is philosophy, poetry, fanfiction, sci fi, and fantasy (I’ve dipped my beak into romantasy this year as well). Which is to say that this list will be a mixed bag. Though as John Ashbery says, “good things sometimes come in mixed bags.”

Speaking of Ashbery, this year I read his 1989 Norton Lectures: Other Traditions. I’d read very little poetry outside of those works anthologized in my high school and college textbooks, so decided I should educate myself. Ashbery is, in many ways, a surprising guide here, as his own poetry is daunting and hermetic. (Once, after he spoke to Richard Howard’s class at Columbia, Howard told him the students “wanted the key to your poetry, but you presented them with a new set of locks.”) Yet Ashbery’s lectures have helped me quite a bit—specifically due to his reluctance and self-professed inability to explain anything. I am trying to follow his example, relinquishing my compulsive need to have a poem reveal itself completely. I sit with a poem now, let it wash over me, hear its music, and take from it what I will. Ashbery discusses six “lesser-known” poets in the book, including David Schubert, whose work I now find myself reading obsessively.

The Horus Heresy is a set of sixty-four fanfiction novels based on—and contributing to—the lore surrounding a tabletop miniatures game called Warhammer. My YouTube algorithm decided I’d like to watch videos of men meticulously painting miniature models of blood-spattered space warriors and tentacular aliens. Wanting to learn more about these characters and the world they inhabit I dove headfirst into the history of a war-torn 31st millennium.

This has been my year of considering “the object.” I’ve been reading anything I can get my hands on that contends with the ontology and phenomenology of stuff. A sampling would include, of course, Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein, etc., but most recently I’ve read Heidegger’s wonderful (though at times inscrutable) “The Thing.” Also, I reread the excellent Alien Phenomenology by Ian Bogost as well as A Philosophy of Sport by Steven Connor, which includes a wonderful chapter on sports equipment and the philosophical implications of human/object interaction.

A piano is an object, but also quite a bit more than an object. I read Sophy Roberts’s beautiful, elegiac book The Lost Pianos of Siberia, as well as the late pianist and polymath Alfred Brendel’s Music, Sense and Nonsense.

I read eight novels by Terry Prachett this year. I recommend The City Watch series, which follows a motley police force in the fantastical city of Ankh-Morpork as they contend with dragons, golems, assassins, and interspecies warfare. Pratchett also takes on larger questions around what a city is, and how it can, against all odds, function. These books are smart and wickedly funny.

I also read Cyrill Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, a book at once ingenious and utterly terrible. There are passages that fit neatly within a genre I love: the author discussing ideal conditions under which he will—but ultimately can’t—write his future masterpiece. See under Barthes’s last lectures Preparation for the Novel. Which I also re-read. Anyway, the degree of bellyaching and bathos alongside the extreme erudition in Connolly’s book is delightful.

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Eliana Ramage

author, To the Moon and Back

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Palestinian American poet and writer Hala Alyan exists in the urgent space before the birth of a child, as Alyan waits in a separate country from her surrogate Dee. With breathtaking precision, Alyan gathers and considers her daughter’s inheritance. She maps a family legacy of displacement—from Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, and Lebanon. She weaves in her own coming-of-age—in Kuwait, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dallas, and Oklahoma City—and stories of addiction, sobriety, pregnancy, and loss. Meanwhile, her daughter is the size of a grain of rice, and then a raspberry. Alyan’s writing is lyrical and surprising, open-hearted and unwavering. A tender and honest exploration of peoplehood, personhood, endings, and beginnings.

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Erin Somers

author, The Ten Year Affair

I published a book this year which makes a person—how to put this?—go completely insane. Maybe not everyone. Does someone out there not go insane? Reach out via email. I personally go buck wild. I got excessively fit this year? Like ripped? I wrote 60,000 words of a new book? I could hear how I sounded describing to people that this was only a third of the planned word count. I sleepwalked every night for five months. I am still sleepwalking every night. My nightmares are of being publicly disgraced in some way, or that I’ve forgotten about a podcast interview. Imagine dreaming of podcast interviews! A new hell for the twenty-first century.

You can get to wondering why you write for a living, if you are so ill-cut-out for it. If it fills you with horrible anxiety. If it chases you. If it sucks up all your time. If it takes you further away from the thing you liked doing in the first place, which was just reading. Why didn’t I go and make a job out of the thing I liked best?

In this frame of mind, I read Howards End by E.M. Forster. Every year I try to fill some holes, read some classics I missed. I have been doing this long enough that I should know that whatever my notions are about a classic are likely wrong. But no, I never learn. Every time I’m like, what is this turgid artifact? From what dusty tomb was it unearthed?

Howards End looks so, so dusty. It’s like they tried to make it look as dusty as possible. They should refresh the design. They must. But then when you crack it, it is funny and alive, a class novel inspired by the lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell concerning the fate of a country house.

The refrain of Howards End is “only connect,” and it’s possible that this is corny, maybe the corniest part of the book, which is mostly a closely observed and perceptive novel about how different tiers of rich people interact in Edwardian England. The old rich hate the nouveau riche and vice versa. The old rich pity the poor, while the new rich loathe the poor, and so on. It is also about a set of sisters going around being charming and slightly eccentric.

“Only connect” is Forster’s entreaty to connect the rational part of your brain with what might be called the heart. In my ragged, somnambulant, pointlessly shredded state I interpreted this as an argument in favor of art. If you go looking for the reason you do something, or a reason to keep doing whatever you’re doing, you’ll see it everywhere. You’ll hear it in a pop song or see it in a painting or in your kid’s face or in the pattern of a leaf.

Do I write to connect? I hope so? Probably not though. If I’m being honest it’s just that I’m compelled to do it. It’s that stupid and that inescapable. I just feel like doing it. In spite of everything, the part that is good—purely and without complications—is sitting down and writing. If there were moments of gratification this year they were in one of two places: in hanging out and doing nothing and on the page. These are my two vocations. Nothing and typing on my laptop. But it’s nice, isn’t it, only connect? It gives a sort of nobility to the whole endeavor. Maybe I could be worthy of it one day.

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Natan Last

author, Across the Universe

The year your first book comes out must always involve shameful rereading, pawing at the greats to avoid peering unconvinced at the competition, reviving the adolescent fantasies of reading made feeble and death-aware by the reality of publishing.

I began the year with my third encounter of Nabokov’s Pnin, that sepia shambolic schlub double-fisting his laminated antiques, pride at newly-acquired U.S. citizenship and a full-time post at a college. I hacked my way through inauguration, its days pointy and gray and tragicomic like the pigeon-proofing spikes at a baseball stadium, with the cutlass imagery of Martín Espada’s Imagine the Angels of Bread (lightning jabbed the building / … scattering bricks from the roof / like beads from a broken necklace).

John Berger’s About Looking was the perfect companion on a couple of cold-month jaunts to tropicality, first to Turks & Caicos for a residency (where the chapter on suits bent my eye from sea to sequin) and then to Colombia for a wedding (where everything from hummingbird sanctuaries to seating charts parroted the section on zoos).

More recently, Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds emerged as the best new novel I’d read this year; each chapter ends, like a Tobias Wolff short story, with an eerie, inevitable spine-tingle, simultaneously slowed-down and propulsive. I work (to the extent the field still exists) in humanitarian immigration and keep up with the fictions and analyses its horrors generate; I really liked Vincent Delecroix’s non-judgmental experiment in Small Boat and Stephanie DeGooyer’s legal-literary history, Before Borders.

Finally, Ellen Bryant Voigt, a poet I’m always imitating, passed this year, and I spent Thanksgiving re-experiencing the tractor engine of her synactic wizardy in Headwaters (it matters / what we’re called words shape the thought don’t say / rodent and ruin everything).

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Sebastian Castillo

author, Fresh, Green Life

This was a great year for reading (they are all great years) and some favorites include Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure (delectable), Dag Solstad’s Novel 11, Book 18 (protean, confounding! a compliment), Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance (prismatic and devastating), as well as Ron Padgett’s incredibly sweet Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (it made me cry).

But if I had to pick two books I think will stay with me for a while—and this is perhaps due to some recency bias—they are A Far Cry from Kensington and Loitering with Intent, both by Muriel Spark, which I read back to back. I’ve long been a great admirer of her work but I’ve never read novels so perfect as these two, with voices so utterly sui generis, with such an addictive tonal buoyancy that I now pace about my apartment and sulk, look out the window with a little vapor in my mien, because I am not reading Muriel Spark, when I should be. In fact, I am starting a new one today.

And sorry, last one: I just finished Iris Murdoch’s The Bell last night, but so far my astonishment toward this work of art is too great to replace the experience meaningfully with words. And like Lyn Hejinian, I love to be astonished!

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Hala Alyan

author, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

I wasn’t ready for Tiana Clark’s Scorched Earth in the best kind of way. It’s rare for a read to be both raucous and poignant, but this collection manages exactly that. Her explorations of Black womanhood are incisive and heart-lifting at turns, continuously testing what else language can hold. I’m sure many have characterized her tone as “unapologetic,” but that’s not quite right. Clark transcends apology. She’s willing to be ashamed, to be wrong, to be afraid. She’s willing to sit with history—and her own heart—a beat longer than is comfortable, which means the reader has to be as well. That sort of co-curated courage is what I love most in poetry, and Clark excels at it.

“The truth is: I lied,” she writes in the titular poem. “Did I have to be there for it to still hurt me?” The answer, of course, is no. Life marks us sometimes most in the act of witnessing. But more than the wound, Clark is interested in what grows around it. She writes joy with the same precision she brings to heartache—joy in femmeness, joy in Blackness, joy in restarting, in not getting what we want, and in getting it. The collection becomes a testimony to desire, to its unruly persistence, to the impossibility of a blank slate—and thank God for that.

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Deesha Philyaw

author, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes resonated with so many facets of who I am. There’s the lover-girl in me who can’t resist a sweet-but-complicated-but-genuine love story like the one Norris’s main character Davis and his husband Everett share. There’s the grieving daughter who has learned, as Davis learns, that there are unexpected and upending layers to that grief when the parent you lost hurt you when they were alive. And finally, there’s the reader-writer in me who hungers for a beautiful, breathtaking page-turner with emotional heft and narrative surprises. Norris’s debut is a powerful reminder of all the different kinds of love we’ll experience, if we’re lucky, and how those ever-evolving loves can both collide with and be shaped by important questions of legacy and identity.

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Ethan Rutherford

author, North Sun

This has been a strange year—my father died, we moved, my book came out—and I’ve felt more adrift in my reading life than at any other point I can remember. I pick things up and put them down; favorite authors no longer do the trick. I feel like I’ve lost the ability to steer myself true. Luckily, I am blessed with friends who have impeccable taste, and who are incredibly thoughtful, and who, when I look back at what I read this year on their recommendations, seem also to be watching out for me, and to them I am grateful.

Tongues by Anders Nilsen is my favorite book of the year and the one book I would press on anyone—it is beautifully drawn, beautifully told, complicated and strange, somehow feels even larger than it is. It’s perfect.

I owe my favorite (or, most meaningful) reading experience of the year to my friend Jill, who, after my dad died, found a beautiful copy of Virgil’s Aeneid: Book VI, trans. by Seamus Heaney, and gave it to me. This small chapter of the story concerns the moment Aeneas travels to the underworld and meets the spirit of his own father. I thought I had processed things, but of course I hadn’t. I read this on an airplane, slowly, and quietly cried while everyone else slept, and I felt lucky to hold that book in my hands.

The titles that follow are others I’ve read and loved this year (actually, this fall; spring was a mess), and are, in fact, some the only books now with me in our new apartment, far from home. I’ve come to think of them as cherished traveling companions, though they’re all new to me. I took a picture for accuracy. Can’t go wrong with any of these:

Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro; Orbital by Samantha Harvey; Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck; Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro; Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West; Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert; O’Clock: Sixteen Stories by Quim Monzo; The Infatuations by Javier Marías; Palaver by Bryan Washington; The Week of Colors by Elena Garro; The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor; Los Cuarto Fantasticos: Mister Fantastico (I’m trying to learn Spanish); The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow; State Champ by Hilary Plum; Magic Can’t Save Us by Josh Denslow; Look Out by Edward McPherson; States by Ciaran Berry; and The Understory by Saneh Sangsuk.

And finally, I am currently reading The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and I never want it to end.

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Angela Flournoy

author, The Wilderness

At this point I might be becoming a broken record, but I really loved The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne, which is a debut novel that feels assured, and announces Fayne as a writer with a true storytelling gift. It’s an inter-generational saga that follows one family over more than a century—from West Africa to enslavement-era Tennessee to present day Tennessee. Alongside many memorable members of this family, we spend time with the devil himself, who functions as a kind of humorous, trickster guardian fallen angel for them. It is inventive, funny, and a book I still think about.

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Emma Goldberg

reporter, the New York Times

There is something about New York that makes grit and shmaltz feel like two sides of one coin—the rat dragging its pizza on the A-train platform, the stranger holding open a subway door. The density of this place makes miracles feel more readily apparent, in the little kindnesses of people packed together like sardines and in the vastness of steel, iron, brick, and concrete. This year, I read three books about the history of New York, really about the underbelly of its miracles and about the people whose obstinance made the city as it is today, this ridiculous, jaw dropping grid of egos, lights and midnight sandwiches. One was The Power Broker by Robert Caro; the next was Gods of New York by Jonathan Mahler; the third was New York, New York, New York, New York by Thomas Dyja.

Taken together, the books explain how the city climbed from a fiscal hole to soaring wealth, how the chasm grew between the martini-drinking, Page Six names of billionaires’ row and the packed homes of NYCHA. These books course with the ambition that built oceanside boardwalks, but also with greed and plenty of petty point-scoring. In each one, the mythic men of New York turn into flesh and bones, men whose wives bought their socks: There was Robert Moses staging a fist fight with an “exceedingly drunk” city administrator, Alfred E. Smith unlocking the gates of the Central Park zoo at night to commune with the tigers, Ed Koch finally moving out of Gracie Mansion and into his nemesis Larry Kramer’s Greenwich Village apartment building. New York has a way of turning its bosses into demigods, but the authors turn those demigods back into men, characters whose grit and patriotic city schmaltz built New York and also left so many behind.

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T Kira Madden

author, Whidbey

Because I’m currently working on a story about senior superlatives, maybe I’ll try to slot some of my other favorite reads by this way of categorization; Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian made me laugh the hardest. Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch made me cry the hardest. The book that asked me to slow down in large and small ways was Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and the book that asked me to devour it all at once was Quiara Alegría Hudes’s The White Hot. The most astonishing sentences I read were in Che Yeun’s forthcoming Tailbone, and the horniest, queerest book which has lodged itself in my brain is Melissa Faliveno’s forthcoming Hemlock. Stop Me if You’ve Heard this One by Kristen Arnett made me most homesick for Florida, and Mariah Rigg’s Extinction Capital of the World made me most homesick for Hawai’i. Sophie Lefens’s forthcoming Her Kind felt the most like hanging out with friends when I didn’t have friends to hang out with, and I learned a new term in 2025, “competency porn,” which calls to mind Michael Jerome Plunkett’s mesmerizing, obsessively detailed Zone Rouge. Most times I’ve said “so and so needs to read this book” in a gossipy way: Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season (IMO her best); most times I’ve said “so and so needs to read this book” in a you’re-not-alone way: Trying by Chloé Caldwell. The most beautifully written and composed cookbooks I read were Samin Nosrat’s Good Things (how many cookbooks quote June Jordan?) and Hetty McKinnon’s Linger. 

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Canisia Lubrin

author, Code Noir and The World After Rain

I read some great books this year. Among them The Book of Records, You Will Not Kill Our Imagination, We, The Kindling, The River Has Roots and Under the Eye of the Big Bird. A year in reading can mean uncovering the nearly surreal layers of recent days and a book’s intersecting with the world in real-time.

This year, it was Olive Senior’s Hurricane Watch, a poetry volume collecting one “New and Uncollected Poems” with four previously published books. Having read it in 2022, my rereading of it felt talismanic. If you’re a reader like me, you appreciate the long arc that is the life of a book in the world and how it might defy the logic of its pub season because it accompanies you through many years. As I read Hurricane Watch super typhoons swelled to terrifying girths in the East and a category five storm called Hurricane Melissa—queue memories of Katrina and Sandy—tore down the Atlantic basin with Jamaica, the poet’s island in its path, eye and all. All at once with Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Cuba were also hit with scale-tipping winds, carnage and heartache for those on and off island. The poems in Hurricane Watch—prescient and tightly constructed—manage playfulness without being performative. Their second-order wisdoms that should by now have swayed the human hand away from the risks of treating human life as preordained resound in Senior’s poetic world of interconnected life.

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Oliver Munday

author, Head of Household

This is no exaggeration: I’ve been waiting for Maggie Gram‘s The Invention of Design for twenty years (maybe not this book exactly, but a worse version to be sure). As a graphic designer myself, I’ve found very few books that take a comprehensive look at design—and none that have done so with the rigor and wit of Maggie Gram. The book charts the ways in which design has gone from something decorative to potentially destructive, evolving from the Bauhaus to the boardroom over the last hundred or so years. Through this fascinating story, a history of the 20th century emerges, as we watch design contorting itself to serve the shifting demands of capital. Written with a sceptical Marxist bent, without ever being didactic, the book illuminates design as the overlooked phenomenon that it is: something so ubiquitous (and insidious) we often have no idea that we’re even engaging with it. Grounding her narrative with biographical sketches of figures like ceramicist Eva Zeisel and industrial designer Walter Teague, Gram gives us a deeply human sense of how design’s utopian ideals continued to be reimagined, and how we ended up endowing design with such faith to solve even society’s biggest problems. If you’ve ever wondered just how we got to this place where the facile language of Design Thinking has so deeply pervaded our culture, this is the book for you. I learned so much about something I thought I knew well. The single best book on design I’ve read. 

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Sophia Stewart

Editor, The Millions

Nonfiction tends to comprise the bulk of my reading diet, but my absolute favorite books of 2025 were two novels: Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice and Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair. Both are scarily smart and largely concerned with the unbridgeable gaps between our ideals, our fantasies, and our realities. Among my other Year in Reading–worthy encounters, I finally read Norman Rush’s Mating, a novel belonging to my preferred genre which my boyfriend calls “How Men and Women Relate.” I adored and cried reading linguist Julie Sedivy’s memoir Linguaphile, and made my first foray into audiobooks with my girl Martha Barnette’s impossibly delightful (and wonderfully narrated) Friends with Words. And finally, I continued to steadily work my way through Shelley Jackson’s Riddance, which is not just a masterpiece of stuttering literature, but a masterpiece, period.

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The post A Year in Reading: 2025 appeared first on The Millions.

Here you’ll find around 100 titles out this fall that we’re excited about here at The Millions. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to dive into based on their authors or subjects. We leaned on our friends at Publishers Weekly to help blurb some of the many, many titles that we’re eager to put on your radar.

The Millions is, alas, still on hiatus, but we’re determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim (if a bit belatedly). 

—Sophia Stewart, editor

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October

The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus (Scribner)

A successful writer chafes at criticism and obsesses over a murder case in the ponderous latest from Kraus. Read more.

The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe by Lauren D. Woods (Autumn House)

A wife literally begins to shrink inside her house, a mother remembers a surreal encounter between her infant daughter and a bear, and a woman stumbles upon a night club filled with her lover’s exes in Woods’s imaginative debut.

Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Kurt Beals (ND)

After winning the Booker International Prize in 2024, Erpenbeck returns with a stunning collection of interlinked autobiographical essays exploring memory, loss, and absence.

The Mind Reels by Fredrik deBoer (Coffee House)

In this bracing debut novel from cultural critic deBoer, a young woman becomes a prisoner of her own mind. Read more.

Mothers by Brenda Lozano, tr. Heather Cleary (Catapult)

From Mexican writer Lozano comes a smashing novel set in 1946, as a wave of kidnappings shock and scandalize northern Mexico. Read more.

It Girl by Marisa Meltzer (Atria)

In this first comprehensive biography of Jane Birkin, Meltzer gives due credit to the woman behind one of the world’s most iconic and coveted handbags—and makes the case for why she was much more than an “it girl.”

Vaim by Jon Fosse, tr. Damion Searls (Transit)

Nobel winner Fosse centers this spectacular story of loneliness, love, and death on three linked characters living in small-town Norway. Read more.

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press)

With his casually playful and chillingly resonant ninth novel, Pynchon delivers a warning against global fascism, a slapstick symphony whose antic comedy can’t begin to conceal its hopelessly broken American heart. Read more.

Unfit by Ariana Harwicz, tr. Jessie Mendez Sayer (ND)

Harwicz spins an unrelenting tale of a migrant woman who takes drastic steps to fulfill her radical conception of motherly love. Read more.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade (Scribner)

This innovative biography of Stein from Square Haunting author Wade assesses the influential writer’s life and work, from her childhood in California and productive years in Paris, to the ways that scholars constructed her posthumous legacy. Read more.

Intemperance by Sonora Jha (HarperVia)

In the jaunty latest from Jha, a twice-divorced feminist scholar decides to celebrate her 55th birthday by throwing herself a swayamvar, a traditional Indian ceremony in which a woman invites potential suitors to compete for her hand in marriage by performing various feats. Read more.

The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson (FSG)

Johnson, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son, unfolds a majestic saga of political unrest in the South Pacific and a girl’s quest to save her people. Read more.

We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat (Knopf)

Fresh off his first Oscar nomination, NoiseCat returns with an oral history and work of reportage that probes Indigenous culture through an intimate journey shared by a father and a son.

Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)

The gimlet-eyed latest from Taylor follows a creatively blocked painter through the New York City art world. Read more.

Vagabond: A Memoir by Tim Curry (Grand Central)

In this charming debut autobiography, British actor Curry offers a peek behind the curtain of his prolific screen and stage careers. Read more.

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)

Majumdar spins a luminous story of a family facing climate catastrophe and food scarcity in near-future Kolkata. Read more.

A Wooded Shore: And Other Stories by Thomas McGuane (Knopf)

McGuane rounds up another memorable group of misguided and doomed characters in this stellar collection. Read more.

Analog Days by Damion Searls (Coffee House)

Searls, translator of Jon Fosse and author of The Philosophy of Translation, offers in these clear-eyed ruminations a Gen Xer’s impressions of the technology and violence that shape 21st-century life. Read more.

Three or More Is a Riot by Jelani Kobb (One World)

New Yorker staff writer Cobb offers an expansive collection of his published essays, spanning from 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, which “ruined the mood of a nation that had, just a few years earlier, elected its first black president,” to Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025. Read more.

The House of Beauty by Arabelle Sicardi (Norton)

Across this searing collection of essays, former beauty editor Sicardi takes a knife to the industry in which they built their career, considering everything from the shimmering mica in beauty products to the historical connection between fragrance and fascism.

Twice Born by Hester Kaplan (Catapult)

In this affecting memoir, Kaplan examines her relationship with her father, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Justin Kaplan, who died in 2014. Read more.

Bog Queen by Anna North (Bloomsbury)

The discovery of a woman’s body in an English bog kicks off the piercing latest from North, which alternates between the perspectives of a forensic scientist tasked with identifying the remains and the long-dead woman, a young Druid leader who died around the year 50 BCE.  Read more.

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu (Saga)

This dazzling near-future mystery from Hugo winner Liu sparkles with suspense, intensity, and effortless worldbuilding. Read more.

The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee (Harper)

This posthumous collection of Lee’s work offers up newly discovered short stories and previously published essays and magazine pieces that reveal another side to the To Kill a Mockingbird author.

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers (S&S)

Somers’s latest novel is a wry and ingenious tale of marital infidelity, offering a sardonic view into the pressures of marriage and motherhood and the ambient temptation of adultery. Read more.

Look Out by Edward McPherson (Astra House)

Guggenheim fellow McPherson presents a charming, idiosyncratic meditation on the human urge to see further, and more, in this cultural history of the “aerial view.” Read more.

Time Tunnel by Eileen Chang, tr. Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang (NYRB)

This sweeping collection gathers stories and essays from every stage of the late Chinese author’s career, some of which have never before been translated into English, spanning Shanghai and Hong Kong to the freeways of Los Angeles.

Looking for Tank Man by Ha Jin (Other Press)

In the latest from the National Book Award winner, a Chinese Harvard student grows fixated on the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Read more.

Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe (Ecco)

This kaleidoscopic volume from Ioffe, a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, combines memoir, journalism, and history to paint a nuanced portrait of modern Russia, all through the lens of womanhood.

That’s How It Works, ed. Katherine Webb-Hehn (Hub City)

This vibrant collection highlights the best Southern fiction published by the Spartanburg, S.C.–based Hub City Press over the past three decades, featuring work by Carter Sickels, James Yeh, and more.

Sacrament by Susan Straight (Counterpoint)

Straight’s immersive latest is a vibrant drama following a group of nurses at the height of Covid-19 in August 2020. Read more.

The Anthony Bourdain Reader by Anthony Bourdain (Ecco)

This career-spanning collection offers up new and never-before-seen material, including diary entries and unpublished short stories, while also celebrating Bourdain’s most compelling and definitive essays.

Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen by Kate Evans (Verso)

This artful and thought-provoking graphic biography from Evans stitches a postcolonial layer into the narrative by examining the fabrics worn by Jane Austen and her contemporaries. Read more.

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan, tr. Jack Hargreaves (Astra House)

A literary sensation in China when it was first published in 2023, this vivid self-portrait is a universal exploration of gig work and the financial pressures of surviving in today’s big cities.

One, None, and a Hundred Grand by Luigi Pirandello, tr. Sean Wilsey (Archipelago)

The 1926 novel by the late Nobel Prize winner—a meditation on relativism that poses urgent questions about self-perception, insecurity, and doubt—gets a second life in this elegant new translation.

The Book of Kin by Jennifer Eli Bowen (Milkweed)

Bowen’s probing debut questions how we forge relationships, community, and joy within a world rife with isolation and solitude, drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Bigger by Ren Cedar Fuller (Autumn House)

Fuller’s collection of personal essays calls on readers to imagine a “bigger” way of being in the world, from accommodating and celebrating difference, to finding new modes of expressing ourselves and loving others.

Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück (NYRB)

Glück’s novel of sex and art—a cult classic and trailblazing work of postmodern gay fiction—traces the gradual dissolution of a love affair against the backdrop of 1980s San Francisco.

Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)

Novelist and critic Smith brings an incisive eye and keen wit to art, music, fiction, politics, and more in these wide-ranging essays. Read more.

Little F by Michelle Tea (Feminist Press)

By turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and hope-filled, the latest from Tea follows a 13-year-old runaway’s search for a queer paradise. Read more.

November

Across the Universe by Natan Last (Pantheon)

New Yorker crossword constructor Last debuts with an enthusiastic exploration of the crossword puzzle, amounting to a love letter best suited for fellow obsessives. Read more.

On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle, tr. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (ND)

In the ingenious third installment of Balle’s septology, Danish rare book dealer Tara Selter is still trapped in the 18th of November. Read more.

Dress, Dreams, and Desire by Valerie Steele (Bloomsbury)

Steele, once described by critic Suzy Menkes as “the Freud of fashion,” probes the intersections of psychoanalytic principles and the clothes we wear.

Queen Esther by John Irving (S&S)

Irving revisits the setting of The Cider House Rules with a novel about a Viennese Jewish orphan and her adoptive family in New Hampshire. Read more.

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)

The remarkable debut memoir from Booker Prize winner Atwood recounts pivotal moments in her personal life that shaped some of her most enduring work as a writer. Read more.

Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel (Riverhead)

A California couple’s marriage is put to the test when they take part in a dodgy experiment in Gabel’s satisfying sophomore novel. Read more.

Palaver by Bryan Washington (FSG)

Washington revisits the Japanese setting of his novel Memorial with a bighearted drama about a 30-something Houston man’s reunion with his estranged mother. Read more.

The Year of the Wind by Karina Pacheco Medrano, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf)

Pacheco Medrano dazzles in her English-language debut, the surreal story of a 50-something Peruvian writer reckoning with her cousin’s disappearance during the government’s conflict with a Maoist insurgency in the 1980s. Read more.

Helm by Sarah Hall (Mariner)

This virtuosic outing from Hall gives voice to the Helm—a storied northeasterly wind known for its destructive power and distinctive cloud formations that blows down the Cross Fell escarpment in Northwest England. Read more.

Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (Random House)

Smith returns with yet another memoir, even more intimate than the last, traversing her teenage years, romantic entanglements, defining losses, and creative liberation.

False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, tr. Natasha Wimmer (Graywolf)

Cuban writer Álvarez constructs a mesmerizing novel out of vignettes featuring characters who left Castro’s Cuba only to experience more dispossession and indignity. Read more.

Hidden Portraits by Sue Roe (Norton)

In six biographical essays, Roe paints a detailed study of the women who inspired, loved, and troubled Pablo Picasso: models Fernande Olivier and Marie-Thérèse Walter, ballerina Olga Khokhlova, painters Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, and Picasso’s widow, Jacqueline Roque. Read more.

Pandora by Ana Paula Pacheco, trans. by Julia Sanches (Transit)

Equal parts ribald and unsettling, Brazilian writer Pacheco’s English-language debut chronicles a literature professor’s mental breakdown. Read more.

Governing Bodies by Sangamithra Iyer (Milkweed)

Iyer traces her passion for conservation and animal rights activism back two generations in this beautiful debut memoir. Read more.

Queen Mother by Ashley D. Farmer (Pantheon)

Historian Farmer offers an impressive biography of pioneering Black Nationalist Audley “Queen Mother” Moore. Read more.

Life on a Little-Known Planet by Elizabeth Kolbert (Crown)

Kolbert has radically informed the way modern audiences understand climate change, and her newest collection is no exception, zooming into stories of hope, activism, and innovation across the globe.

Black-Owned by Char Adams (Tiny Reparations)

Former NBC News journalist Adams debuts with an illuminating history of America’s Black-owned bookstores, from the Tribeca storefront opened in 1834 by abolitionist David Ruggles to the radical bookshops of the 1960s. Read more.

Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Baconi (Washington Square)

In this poignant autobiography, queer Palestinian writer and activist Baconi tenderly explores identity, nationality, and family history. Read more.

The Bridegroom Was a Dog by Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani (ND)

First published in 1998, Parul Sehgal called Tawada’s absurd yet tender tale of unexpected romance “her masterpiece.”

The Silver Book by Olivia Laing (FSG)

Laing, who’s written nonfiction about the lives of artists and one previous novel, Crudo, fuses the two forms with a lush narrative of art and love in 1970s Italy. Read more.

The White Hot by Quiara Alegria Hudes (One World)

The potent debut novel from playwright and memoirist Hudes follows a single mother who abandons her daughter to try and find herself. Read more.

The Emergency by George Packer (FSG)

Packer, a journalist and National Book Award winner, delivers a propulsive Orwellian novel set in a strange future world known as “the empire.” Read more.

Find Him! by Elaine Kraf (Modern Library)

Kraf, who died in 2013, depicts in this striking 1977 novel the eccentric life of a mysterious unnamed woman who confesses she has “no identity, no ability to think or speak.” Read more.

This Unruly Witness, ed. Lauren Muller, Becky Thompson, Dominique C. Hill, and Durell M. Callier (Haymarket)

June Jordan’s legacy as a poet, activist, and healer is celebrated in this landmark collection, complete with contributions from such luminaries as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Imani Perry, and Angela Davis.

The Book of Women’s Friendship, ed. Rachel Cooke (Norton)

Drawing on fiction, diaries, poetry, and letters, this first major anthology of female friendship succinctly mines the impact, history, and beauty of platonic love between women.

The Body Digital by Vanessa Chang (Melville House)

Chang, director of programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, debuts with a lofty history of the relationship between technology and the human body. Read more.

Estate by Cynthia Zarin (FSG)

The elegant latest from Zarin offers a new and seemingly autofictional version of the love story central to her previous novel, Inverno. Read more.

Girls Play Dead by Jen Percy (Doubleday)

Percy, a New York Times Magazine contributing writer, offers a groundbreaking exploration of women’s often shamed and silenced responses to sexual assault. Read more.

Blank Space by W. David Marx (Viking)

Marx offers an astute glimpse into how culture has stagnated throughout the past 25 years while examining how commercial and technological forces have played into that shift.

My Little Donkey by Martha Cooley (Catapult)

In this elegant volume, novelist Cooley reflects on her late-in-life move to Italy. Read more.

Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times by Tracy K. Smith (Norton)

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet demystifies an art form that for many can seem inaccessible and intimidating, arguing that poetry—and the humanity it brings to the fore—is needed now more than ever.

Winning the Earthquake by Lorissa Rinehart (St. Martin’s)

Historian Rinehart offers an illuminating biography of the first woman elected to Congress. Read more.

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts by Alla Gorbunova, tr. Elina Alter (Deep Vellum)

The 61 stories in this razor-sharp collection from Gorbunova evoke the absurdity of everyday life in post-Soviet Russia. Read more.

Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines)

In this propulsive, deeply researched narrative, readers accompany Barrera as she investigates the influential 20th-century Mexican novelist Elena Garro, using everything from Garro’s archives to astrology.

The Week of Colors by Elena Garro, tr. Megan McDowell (Two Lines)

Publishing in tandem with Barrera’s The Queen of Swords is this dazzling 1963 collection of stories about hauntings, curses, and the uncanny from Garro, a pioneer of magical realism. Read more.

Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac (NYRB)

The autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac’s daughter, first published in 1981, offers a thrilling and unflinching glimpse into the author’s difficult childhood—shaped by paternal neglect—and the sense of resilience and self-reliance it instilled in her.

Married Life by Sergio Pitol, tr. George Henson (Deep Vellum)

From one of Mexico’s most influential writers comes a satirical, unsparing story about a heartbroken wife seeking a fresh start in the wake of her husband’s infidelity.

Palace of Deception by Darrin Lunde (Norton)

The rise of scientific racism takes on a new dimension in Lunde’s stunning investigation into the American Museum of Natural History and its complicated origins.

Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen, tr. David Hackston (Little, Brown)

Turpeinen’s fantastic debut interweaves the fate of an extinct aquatic species with the stories of the people who discovered and destroyed it. Read more.

Racial Fictions by Hazel V. Carby (Verso)

Combining historical analysis, literary criticism, and cultural theory, Carby’s interrogation of the racial myths that have shaped our world is as insightful as it is timely.

December

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead)

This vivid 1998 novel from Nobel winner Tokarczuk prefigures the discursive style of her later work such as Flights, with the story of a woman who moves with her husband from their Polish city to rural Silesia. Read more.

A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken (Ecco)

Story Prize winner McCracken distills decades of personal experience into 280 idiosyncratic reflections on writing. Read more.

Algorithm of the Night by A.S. Hamrah (n+1)

The film critic’s talents are on full display in this collection, which gathers recent essays from n+1, The Baffler, the New York Review of Books, the Criterion Collection, and more.

The Complete C Comics by Joe Brainard (NYRB)

Throughout the 1960s, Joe Brainard teamed up with such poets as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Barbara Guest to create pioneering, collaborative comic strips—and now, these comics are compiled for the first time in a single, sweeping volume.

Galapagos by Fátima Vélez, tr. Hannah Kauders (Astra House)

Colombian writer Vélez makes a striking debut with a fever dream of a novel that evokes the AIDS epidemic as it follows a group of artists and political radicals on a phantasmagoric voyage. Read more.

Barbieland by Tarpley Hitt (One Signal)

Timed perfectly to Barbie’s cultural resurgence, Hitt deftly unpacks the history behind and enduring appeal of the beloved doll.

The Jaguar’s Roar by Micheliny Verunschk, tr. Juliana Barbassa (Liveright)

The Brazilian author’s fifth novel, and first to be translated into English, weaves an extraordinary tale about an Indigenous girl’s kidnapping during a colonial expedition and the ramifications that unfold centuries later.

The Award by Matthew Pearl (Harper)

Pearl takes a knife to the publishing industry and its much-ballyhooed literary prizes, offering a keen-eyed portrait of ambition, jealousy, and desperation.

Casanova 20 by Davey Davis (Catapult)

Davis unfurls a fascinating narrative of art and desire, following an amorous and preternaturally beautiful young man and his unusual friendship with an elder painter. Read more.

Googoosh by Googoosh (Gallery)

The legendary Iranian superstar tells the story of her rise to fame in pre-revolution Iran, her arrest and imprisonment, her 20 years in exile, and, eventually, her triumphant return to the global stage.

The Aquatics by Osvalde Lewat, tr. Maren Baudet-Lackner (Coffee House)

Cameroonian filmmaker and photographer Lewat makes her English-language debut with a shocking morality tale about an African woman torn between her bureaucrat husband and her artist friend, whose homosexuality is a high crime in their fictional country of Zambuena. Read more.

The Lord by Soraya Antonius (NYRB)

This timely, vivid novel meditates on myth, community, revolution, and prejudice through the eyes of a magician living in Palestine before the Nakba.

Television by Lauren Rothery (Ecco)

Rothery’s nimble debut zooms in on an aging, A-list movie star, the relationships that buoyed him throughout his career, and the disparities of talent, wealth, and artistry that mar Hollywood.

A Danger to the Mind of Young Girls by Adam Morgan (One Signal)

Morgan, founder of the Chicago Review of Books, debuts with a comprehensive biography of Margaret C. Anderson (1886–1973), founder of the early-20th-century avant-garde magazine The Little Review. Read more.

Daring to Be Free by Sudhir Hazareesingh (FSG)

In this stunning revisionist history, Hazareesingh makes the case that enslaved people rebelled against their captivity throughout all four centuries of the Atlantic slave system—and that those efforts contributed more to their freedom than “the campaigns of enlightened white abolitionists.” Read more.

Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether (Feminist Press)

This new edition of Meriwether’s classic novel about a young Black girl’s coming of age in 1930s Harlem offers a fresh glimpse into the author’s legacy, featuring new writing celebrating her life, work, and activism.

The post The Millions’ Great Fall 2025 Book Preview appeared first on The Millions.

In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged 30 years and younger. Our goal, at the time, was to expand the popular perception of who book collectors are (and can be) by highlighting original collections built by young women, often without the knowledge or help of the rare book trade. By celebrating their achievements, we hoped to inspire potential collectors to look at their shelves differently, to identify patterns and projects, to think creatively about the aspects of the historical record they might recognize and preserve.

The response to this prize over the past nine years has exceeded all of our expectations, and this year’s cohort of collectors was particularly strong. We are delighted to announce the $1000 winner of the 2025 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize:

WINNER

Alexandra E. LaGrand, 29, (she/her), a doctoral candidate at Texas A&M University, for “Archiving the Shakespearean Breeches Actress.” LaGrand’s research on the nineteenth-century British stage led to her interest in actresses in breeches roles: performances in which a woman plays a part originally written for a man, as Sarah Bernhardt did when she starred as Hamlet.

LaGrand’s winning collection brings together almost forty printed and manuscript artifacts that document Shakespearean breeches actresses over the long nineteenth century. The collection includes books, letters, signatures, playbills, prints, a theatrical scrapbook, a prompt book from an 1878 production of Macbeth featuring “Miss Lewis” as Donalbain, and a core collection devoted to Charlotte Cushman, the first internationally renowned American actress, who was celebrated for her breeches roles: 

“I wanted to collect items [Cushman] had touched in order to closely feel the history of her career. This manifested through collecting ephemeral items such as a manuscript letter by her and a signature card, but also books, including an 1868 first edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s New England Tragedies, which bears her inscription to one of her lovers. As I collected more Cushman items, I grew more ambitious, seeking out wholly unique and thus more special and valuable items that documented her career, such as a grangerized first edition copy of Emma Stebbins’s 1878 biography of Cushman, featuring extra illustrations and materials tipped in throughout, an undated playbill featuring Cushman in the role of Romeo at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, and even a carte-de-visite photograph portrait of her costumed in the role of Romeo.”

A digital humanist, LaGrand has created a public database, Points Like A Man, to compile historical records of genderfluid Shakespearean performance. We were impressed by the energy that LaGrand brought to the material side of her project: her bibliography describes a suspenseful, unfolding process of discovery, as each chance find in a bookstore or at auction or online opens up new paths of inquiry, highlighting the way that digital and archival resources enrich and expand each other. 

You can read LaGrand’s winning essay and bibliography here. 

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We are also awarding five honorable mentions of $250 each:

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Ashleigh McConnell, 29, (she/her) of Washington State, a recent master’s graduate in Emergency Management pursuing a career in disaster preparedness and recovery, for “My Journey with Jane: A Tale of Discovery and the Birth of a Collector.”

McConnell has collected over three hundred editions and variants of her favorite book, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, with the goal of owning “a Jane Eyre edition from every year from 1847 to the present.”

McConnell began collecting during a study abroad trip to Europe, where she sought out copies of Jane Eyre in the native language of each country she visited. Over time, her collection became a memoir on the shelf, a tangible reminder of places she traveled, people she met, and bookshops she explored. She sought out a fresh edition of Jane Eyre in each of the lower 48 United States: “I discovered small town bookstores, library sales, antiques alleys, and used book stores of all sizes and shapes. Each new copy I found had its own character and its own story.” 

Single title collections are popular in the book world because they create opportunities for collectors to explore a favorite book from multiple angles. McConnell eventually pursued not only copies of Jane Eyre, but prequels, sequels, pastiches, retellings, screen adaptations, the script for a theatrical performance, and even a “choose your own adventure” version of Brontë’s classic. We enjoyed the energy and creativity McConnell brought to her quest. 

Nat McGartland, 30, (she/her), a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland and instructor at UMD BookLab, for “Quhare scant wes Scottis: A Political History of the Scots Language.”

McGartland collects books that document Scots as a language of its own, a distinct historical and political mode of expression, rather than simply a regional dialect of English. 

McGartland’s collection includes dictionaries, glossaries, and appendices in Scots, as well as landmark publications like the 1790 first printed edition of The Brus, the oldest work in Scots, and Gawin Douglas’s Scots translation of the Aeneid, which predates the first English translation. The renewal of interest in an independent Scotland, reflected in the highly contested 2014 referendum on the question, inspired McGartland to redirect her collecting focus: “I’ve found myself moving from the historical to the contemporary. I’m interested in Scottish women poets, fiction writers, speakers of the language in the present day . . . [and] the revival of Scots in literature particularly since the 1980s.” 

McGartland uses her historical collection of Scots classics to inform and contextualize her emerging collection of Scots writing in the present: a pivot that strengthens both collections.

Bella Savignano, 24, (she/her), an administrator at Swann Galleries in New York City, for “Flashbang: Amplifying a Revisionist History of Glam Rock.”

Savignano’s collection began with a fluke gift: an old box of photographs, film negatives, and “assorted pieces of paper” from Jumpin’ Jack Flash, the NYC clothing and custom shoe store that defined the emerging “glam” aesthetic for rock stars, local musicians, and fans in the 1970s. 

“I was curious about the mutant style that emerged when British glam fashion touched down in New York City […], the boutique’s role within it, and how it pertained to the local scene. As I devoted my free time to investigating my newly acquired archive, I was shocked to find very little. The brands that the boutique sold were iconic and are held within many important collections, but the store itself was lost to time.” Inspired by Jumpin’ Jack Flash’s advertising maquettes, footwear guides (one with a note to call Bootsy Collins’s agent), and snapshots of employees and patrons in full regalia, Savignano set out to fill in the archival gaps of that moment in all its feathered and sequined glory. 

The result is a kaleidoscopic picture of the New York glam rock scene, as Savignano tracks down magazines, posters, concert tickets, even a manila folder of clippings about the New York Dolls collected by a contemporary fan. We appreciated Savignano’s focused attention to the material castoffs of a subculture, both to reconstruct its atmosphere and to weigh its impact. 

Amalia V., 29, (she/her), a professional dominatrix (and self-described “archivatrix”) in New York City, for “Collecting Sex,” a collection of over 150 books, magazines, zines, and pulps “at the intersection of one or more of the following categories: sex work, queer BDSM, and Female Domination (FemDomme.)” 

Often printed and distributed outside mainstream publishing channels, these historical materials constitute “a form of cultural preservation for communities who are often ignored, reviled, and even punished for simply existing.” Amalia V. understands her collection as “a critical intervention in this blatant censorship of erotic laborers in our sex-phobic American cultural landscape. I might get kicked off of social media, but Mark Zuckerberg can’t pry my collection of kinky books from me.” We were struck by the rare and often ephemeral titles she managed to track down, including publications from the House of Milan (the only 1970s fetish publishing house headed by a woman), Mama Vi, Patrick Califia, and the leatherdyke collective Samois.

In lieu of a headshot, Amalia V. has provided an illustrated portrait in the style of the “tart cards” created by London sex workers in the late twentieth century, a graphic tradition well-represented in her collection. We were impressed by the nuanced view of contemporary sex workers that her collection offers, illuminating their identities as parents, activists, and community members.

Jaeden Yoshikawa, 30, (she/they) of Mankato, Minnesota, a professional archivist enthusiastic for new career opportunities, for “A Trip Down Lover’s Lane: A Collection of Lover’s Real Photo Post Cards.”

Yoshikawa collects scenic ephemera depicting local “lover’s” tourist sites (Lover’s Lanes, Lover’s Leaps, Lover’s Retreats), aiming to explore “what defines a space for lovers, and how the histories and legends tied to these places might offer deeper insight into human relationships and sexuality.” 

Yoshikawa focuses primarily on real photo post cards (RPPCs), “small-batch” postcards created directly by vernacular photographers from film negatives, rather than mass-produced printed images. RPPCs of lover’s locations have a special poignance, since the images often feature people known to the photographers, perhaps even lovers themselves. She also considers the iconography of lover’s sites on vintage ephemera, including sheet music: “The markers we’ve established for Lover’s Lanes are present even in these artistic renditions, showing tree-lined paths and shaded places for lovers to promenade. . . . I’d love to find a Lover’s Lane with a sandy beach path, or in a flowering garden, or in a desert somewhere to act as an outlier to the collection.”

We admired the depth and originality of Yoshikawa’s project, and soon began seeing images of woodsy “lover’s” tourist attractions everywhere, drawn into the cultural phenomenon her collection explores.

To see last year’s winners, click here.

The co-founders of the Honey & Wax Prize, Heather O’Donnell of Honey & Wax Booksellers and Rebecca Romney of Type Punch Matrix, would like to thank the 2025 prize sponsors: Biblio, Bibliopolis, The Caxton Club, Christie’s, and Ellen A. Michelson. 

The post Meet the Winners of the 2025 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize appeared first on The Millions.

The Millions is, alas, still on hiatus, but we’re determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim (if, at times, a bit belatedly). 

—Sophia Stewart, editor

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July

I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman (Ecco)

Kreizman’s writing captures that distinctly millennial brand of malaise with refreshing wit and vigor, and her always-correct book world takes are informed by a deep love of literature. I’m looking forward to seeing these chops and more on display in her debut essay collection. —Sophia M. Stewart

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn (Catapult)

Nguyen’s debut is a subversive satire and romantic romp rolled into one, following two Asian American trans women’s scheme to join a men’s pro indoor volleyball league. —SMS

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House)

Shteyngart returns with the story of a precocious little girl as she searches for her birth mother, navigates her imploding family, and strives toward unending love. —Eva M. Baron

Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloombsury)

Savas’s followup to her brilliant novel The Anthropologists is a collection of stories that deconstruct contemporary life through the lenses of desire, loss, and intimacy. —SMS

A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart by Nishant Batsha (Ecco)

The sophomore novel from Batsha, inspired by the real-life romance of 20th-century radicals M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, tells the love story of an Indian revolutionary and Stanford grad student who fall for one another in 1917. —SMS

Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie (Doubleday)

A ruthless theater critic meets his match in a struggling actress, who sets off the unraveling of his reputation after a one-night stand in Runcie’s clever tale, which also offers a piercing critique of power games and misogyny. —Sam L. Spratford

Putafeminista by Monique Prada, tr. Amanda De Lisio (Feminist Press)

Brazilian sex worker and activist Prada calls for a working class women’s movement that rejects “whorephobia” and critiques current feminist discourse around sex work in this bracing manifesto. —SMS

Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth (Melville House)

Howarth’s queer coming-of-age novel set in small-town Ireland in the early 1990s mines the intensity of first love (and first heartbreak) as well as the pain of being queer in a small, conservative community. —SMS

Fools for Love by Helen Schulman (Knopf)

Following her 2023 novel Lucky Dogs, Schulman offers up a smart short story collection complete with a cast of characters including an East Village playwright, a precocious baby, and an American mother and French Orthodox rabbi who become lovers. —EMB

The Feather Detective by Chris Sweeney (Avid Reader)

In the 1960s, Roxie Laybourne pioneered the field of forensic ornithology, which is exactly what it sounds like—using feathers to solve bird-related mysteries and crimes, from plane crashes to a racist tarring-and-feathering. Sweeney’s biography must be read to be believed. —SMS

A Return to Self by Aatish Taseer (Catapult)