Illustration by Chris Gash

The 2026 edition of LJ’s Prepub Alert Preview highlights a year’s worth of forthcoming titles to know, share, and buy. There is much to note, including 16 different ways of thinking about fiction and 10 for nonfiction, plus spotlights on genre fiction and poetry. All told, nearly 400 suggestions await readers. A downloadable list of the titles in this preview is available online.

FICTION

TURNING POINTS

In Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine (Doubleday, Jul.), Harlem Shuffle’s Carney leaves retirement to save his cousin’s son. Douglas Stuart’s John of John (Grove, May) sees tensions arise when a fumbling art student slinks back to his Hebridean island home. T. C. Boyle’s No Way Home (Liveright, Apr.) features a young doctor trapped in a dissolute life after returning home following his mother’s death, while Ayad Akhtar’s The Radiance (Summit, Sept.) opens with a consequential accident on a college campus. Old secrets upend the life of a megapastor’s wife in Deesha Philyaw’s True Confessions of First Lady Freeman (Mariner, Sept.). In Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins (Grand Central, Mar.), an archaeologist searching for a lost empire instead must face herself. In Shannon Sanders’s The Great Wherever (Holt, Jul.), life looks different for aimless Amber after an unexpected inheritance. Patrick DeWitt’s Dodge City (Ecco, Oct.) sees a young American man evade the Vietnam War draft by fleeing to Canada, the first serious political decision of his life. Chris Bohjalian’s The Amateur (Doubleday, Aug.) features talented 18-year-old golfer Mira, whose hard-driven ball kills a person, shattering her own life (and raising suspicions). In Laura Kasischke’s The Lifeguard (Red Hen, May), a child drowns at a Midwestern pool, and the community turns on the teenage girl who was supposed to save her.

ISSUES

Marlon James’s The Disappearers (Riverhead, Sept.) plumbs the aftermath of a brutal attack on eight gay men rehearsing a play in Jamaica, while April Reynolds’s The Shape of Dreams (Knopf, Feb.) limns community response to the murder of a Black child in 1980s East Harlem. Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Bassem Khandaqji’s A Mask the Color of the Sky (Europa, Mar.; tr. from Arabic by Addie Leak) follows the life of a Palestinian refugee who assumes an Israeli identity, while Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17 (Knopf, Mar.) follows the shifting path of a Palestinian man forced from his homeland in 1948. Hernán Diaz’s futuristic Ply (Riverhead, Sept.) examines technological impact in a story featuring an orphan who steals electricity. In Emily Austin’s Is This a Cry for Help? (Atria, Jan.), a librarian faces book bans upon returning to work after an emotional crisis, while the heroine in Imani Thompson’s Honey (Random, May) has her own crisis: should she stop killing bad men in the name of feminism? Finally, murder forces a Black policeman to question his allegiances in T. Geronimo Johnson’s The Occidental Book of the Dead (Morrow, Sept.).

ECOFICTION

In Jonathan Miles’s Eradication: A Fable (Doubleday, Feb.), a schoolteacher agrees, riskily, to spend time on an isolated Pacific island to help set right its ecological balance, while in 2084: A Novel of the Climate War (Penguin Pr., May), Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis envision a climate change–stricken world where devastated equatorial countries stand ready to battle rich, complacent nations like the United States. Deb Olin Unferth’s Earth 7 (Graywolf, Jun.) features a glimmer of hope on a depopulated, nearly dead Earth.

THE WORLD REIMAGINED

In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2031-set Exit Party (Knopf, Sept.), a woman tracks her lover over space and time after he disappears from the raucous party he’s hosting to celebrate California’s split from the United States. A phantom horse brings together two estranged sisters in Ali Smith’s Glyph (Pantheon, May), while a Turkish refugee in Italy discovers that her bathroom has become a Turkish prison cell in Kenan Orhan’s The Renovation (Farrar, Feb.). Other examples of redirected reality include Keith Ridgway’s Dooneen (New Directions, Jun.), with Bartholomew striding straight from a London park to a reconfigured Dublin; Tomás Q. Morin’s Cat Love (Pantheon, Jun.), in which an exemplar of Schrödinger’s famed feline contemplates humans outside its box; Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water (Graywolf, Mar.), where people in a vanishing city are being turned to statues or absorbed by the TV; and Vicente Luis Mora’s Centroeuropa (Bellevue, Mar.; tr. from Spanish by Rahul Bery), set in an 1800s European village where the frozen corpses of past—and then future—wars are discovered. Plus, three debuts: Emily McBride’s Queen Mab (Farrar, Aug.), with a young mother suspecting that either her baby or herself is a changeling; Tessa Yang’s folklore-infused The Jellyfish Problem (Berkley, Jun.), set on a Maine island threatened by a giant sea creature; and Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear (Knopf, Apr.), in which a present-day trad wife awakens in a grim 1855 that could be a hoax or something worse.

CLASS/WORK

In Frank Huyler’s The Red Dress (Bellevue Literary, Oct.), a man who signs up to work on a luxury yacht discovers the brutal differences between himself and the superrich. In Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco (Doubleday, Jun.), “our young man” (as the protagonist is called) takes on the job of do-whatever’s-asked assistant at an Italian villa. Daniel Poppick’s The Copywriter (Scribner, Feb.) stars a poet contemplating questions of life and art while working by day at a retail start-up. Rebecca Kauffman’s The Reservation (Counterpoint, Feb.) visits a group of high-aspiring employees at a famous restaurant. Sarah Anderson’s Fallow (MCD, Sept.) tracks desperate Natalie from dead-end work to a hotshot job that is suddenly threatened. Kayla Rae Whitaker’s Returns and Exchanges (Random, May) reveals how the Taylors rise and fall with their family business in 1980s Kentucky.

MEDITATIONS

With Arendal (Penguin Bks., Nov.; tr. from Norwegian by Martin Aitken), Karl Ove Knausgaard continues unknotting the complexities of love and life. In Julie Orringer’s Luna, Phoenix, Queen (Knopf, Oct.), two married professors find their lives blighted by infidelity, artistic theft, and eventually the loss of control brought on by early-onset Alzheimer’s. In Dorthe Nors’s Range (Graywolf, Aug.; tr. from Danish by Caroline Waight), an astrophysicist joyously tracks gamma-ray bursts in the night sky but stumbles over human relationships. Expect surprises from Ben Reeves’s Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt (Avid Reader, Jul.), as the narrator is Death itself. Niall Williams’s O Now! (Bloomsbury, Nov.) stages an exploration of life’s meaning in a small Irish town. Naomi Alderman’s The Strangers (Little, Brown, Sept.) blends fiction and memoir to explore the speaker’s grief even as a new species is being discovered.

END OF LIFE

George Saunders’s Vigil (Random, Jan.) visits the bedside of an ailing oil company CEO about to be ferried into the next life. In Elizabeth Berg’s Life: A Love Story (Random, Mar.), 90-year-old Flo’s letter about possessions she’s bequeathing to a former neighbor reveals an entire life. Jay McInerney’s See You on the Other Side (Knopf, Apr.) wraps up his tetralogy about married couple Russell and Corrinne Calloway, now in their sixties. In Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn (One World, Mar.), a dying mother spills all her disappointments with her family, particularly a trans son. As her friends die of AIDS in 1980s New York, a woman who can see ghosts awaits the one person who won’t come in Natalie Adler’s Waiting on a Friend (Hogarth, May).

FAMILY

In Daniel Mason’s Country People (Random, Jul.), at-odds Miles Krzelewski decamps with his family for a professorship in the Vermont woods, where he discovers new friends and a hoary but intriguing local legend. In Karan Mahajan’s The Complex (Viking, Mar.), the family of influential politician SP Chopra struggles with his legacy. An Israeli peace activist’s alleged embezzlement upends her high-profile Jerusalem family and Israel’s elite Ashkenazi circles in Noa Yedlin’s House Arrest (New Vessel, Oct.; tr. from Hebrew by Shira Atik and Evan Fallenberg). Debuter Ryan Effgen’s Make Nice (Knopf, Jul.) is a comedy of manners tracking three wacky generations. In Kanako Nishi’s internationally bestselling Sakura (HarperVia, Mar.; tr. from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell), a family rediscovers happiness with the help of a dog. Agathe returns to France after 15 years in The Old Fire (Summit, Jan.; tr. from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins) by National Book Award winner Elisa Shua Dusapin, while Sarah Damoff’s The Burning Side (S&S, Jun.) features a family whose house has gone up in flames. A young Anishinaabe woman risks investigating when her sister vanishes in Amber Blaeser-Wardzala’s Another Name for Red (Pantheon, Oct.). In Melissa Albert’s The Children (Morrow, Jun.), the adult children of a fantasy author who wrote them into her books remain incensed.

COMING OF AGE

Walter Mosley’s Ghalen: A Romance in Black (Amistad, May) follows a young Black man making his way with the help of disparate but loving parents. In Chang-rae Lee’s A Tender Age (Riverhead, Aug.), a culture-torn young Korean American is diverted by a dangerous series of events, while R. F. Kuang’s Taipei Story (Morrow, Sept.) features a student abroad wrestling with her heritage. The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks (New Directions, Mar.; tr. from Indonesian by Annie Tucker) by Eka Kurniawan (Beauty Is a Wound) features a boy resisting religious piety in a small Javanese town, while Uchenna Awoke’s A Siege of Owls (Catapult, May) follows a West African boy witnessing violence, discord, and a sister’s refusal to marry. In Tom Perrotta’s Ghost Town (Scribner, Apr.), a grieving eighth-grader starts running with the wrong crowd. On a lighter note, The Thoroughbreds (Little, Brown, Sept.) by Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham sidles up to seniors at a New England boarding school.

COMMUNITY

In the late Mario Vargas Llosa’s final novel, I Give You My Silence (Farrar, Feb.; tr. from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West), protagonist Toño Azpilcueta celebrates the vals—inspired by the European waltz but radically reshaped by Peruvian culture—as the heart and soul of his country. In Andrew Krivak’s Mule Boy (Bellevue Literary, Feb.), Ondro recalls how his Slovak community was impacted by the 1929 collapse of a mine where he worked at age 13. Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon (Grand Central, Sept.) examines issues of ambition and loyalty as she peers into the Korean phenomenon of private after-school education centers. Art critic Jed Perl’s We Never Called It Frisco (Coffee House, Sept.) limns a group of writers and artists chasing their dreams in 1960s San Francisco and New York. From Woody Brown, a nonspeaking autistic man, Upward Bound (Hogarth, Mar.) portrays life at an adult daycare center.

PERSONAL JOURNEYS

Already hyped in People, Emeline Atwood’s A Real Animal (Catapult, Jul.) follows a young woman in her twenties confronting sexual assault, romantic entanglements, and family friction. In Rachel Mills’s The Players Club (Atria, May), Beth Greenwood slips out of her decorous life by joining a club that allows her to try anything. In Egana Djabbarova’s My Dreadful Body (New Vessel, Apr.; tr. from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden), a mysterious neurological condition ultimately frees a young Russian Azerbaijani woman from community strictures. A Harvard student’s search for identity includes digging up her mother’s Cuban roots in NBC News anchor Morgan Radford’s Now Then (Amistad, May). Now the frontman of a celebrated band, Tyler Sinclair fatefully returns to the town he fled 18 years earlier in Richard Russo’s Under the Falls (Knopf, Aug.). Another runaway, Bailey Wester, finally returns to family and faces ghosts real or imagined in Sarah Addison Allen’s Paper Ghosts (St. Martin’s, Sept.). In Rainbow Rowell’s Cherry Baby (Morrow, Apr.), full-figured Cherry escapes her screenwriter husband’s public mockery by linking up with an old flame at a concert, while fiftyish Annie finds herself—and maybe a new partner—when she reluctantly boards a cruise featuring a 1990s boy band in Emma Straub’s American Fantasy (Riverhead, Apr.). In Nancy Lemann’s The Oyster Diaries (NYRB, Apr.), middle-aged Delery Anhalt locates herself by journaling as she steers between older-generation rigidities and younger-generation enthusiasms. Paul Yoon’s Etna (Scribner, Aug.) stars a former military dog making his way home after a terrible war. In Leila Slimani’s I’ll Take the Fire (Penguin Bks., Jun.; tr. from French by Sam Taylor), a writer whose memory is shredded by a virus must painfully reconstruct her past, including a struggle for personal and political freedom in 1980s Morocco, so that she can complete her novel.

FICTION AS BIOGRAPHY

Reimaginings of historical figures include Javier Moro’s The Architect of New York (Counterpoint, Jan.; tr. from Spanish by Peter J. Hearn), about Gilded Age architect Rafael Guastavino; Robert Harris’s Agrippa (Doubleday, Sept.), revisiting the Roman general and stateman; Robert Seethaler’s The Last Movement (Europa, Apr.; tr. from German by Charlotte Collins), on composter Gustav Mahler’s final years; Alexandra Lapierre’s The Very Secretive and Passionate Stella Miles Franklin (Europa, Jun.; tr. from French by Tina Kover), about the Australian feminist writer; John Boyne’s The Weight of Angels (Holt, Sept.), about Oscar Wilde; Allison Pataki’s It Girl (Ballantine, Mar.), about Evelyn Talbot; and two books on women pirates: Ariel Lawhon’s The Pirate Queen (Doubleday, Sept.), on Grace O’Malley, and Stephen Wright’s Black Moon (Little, Brown, Sept.), on Anne Bonny.

HISTORICAL

In Maggie O’Farrell’s Land (Knopf, Jun.), set directly after the Great Hunger, an Irishman and his son work with British soldiers on the Ordnance Survey mapping all Ireland. In Natalie Haynes’s No Friend to This House (Harper, Mar.), readers meet Medea as the witch/priestess helping Jason, while Philippa Gregory’s The Royal Witch (Morrow, Oct.) tracks the rise to power of lowborn Eleanor Cobham in 15th-century England. Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender (Riverhead, Mar.; tr. from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer) reconsiders the Mexico–U.S. border wars. Francine Prose’s Five Weeks in the Country (Harper, May) recreates Hans Christian Andersen’s awkward visit to Charles Dickens at a time of crisis in the Dickens household. Christina Baker Kline’s The Foursome (Mariner, May) recalls conjoined twins Eng and Chang Bunker and the sisters who married them. In Blair Palmer Yoxall’s 1885-set Treat Them as Buffalo (Algonquin, May), the Métis community must act on its own when its boys begin disappearing. In Victoria Christopher Murray and Marie Benedict’s A Pair of Aces (Berkley, Jun.), Manhattan’s first Black woman prosecutor joins forces with a notorious madame to bring down Lucky Luciano. In Stephen O’Connor’s We Want So Much To Be Ourselves (Bellevue Literary, Jun.), a German psychoanalyst, his Jewish wife, and their young daughter contend with rising fascism in Berlin. Set in 1938 Poland, Judy Batalion’s The Last Woman of Warsaw (Dutton, Apr.) follows two Jewish women, each searching for a missing friend. In Rachel Beanland’s The Half Life (S&S, Jul.), a navy wife begins questioning the U.S. atomic weapons program during the Cold War. Lisa See’s Daughters of the Sun and Moon (Scribner, Jun.) features three Chinese women in 1870s Los Angeles.

TIME LAPSE

In Téa Obreht’s Sunrise (Random, Aug.), Nina stumbles out of a plane crash to discover a deserted Old West town and stories dating to 2003 and 1902. In Florencia Etcheves’s Frida’s Cook (Atria: Primero Sueño, Mar.; tr. from Spanish by Beth Fowler), Paloma learns that her grandmother once worked for Frida Kahlo. Drawing on a 1934 novel depicting a cotton workers’ strike, Cristina Rivera Garza reconstructs her grandparents’ travels to the same cotton fields in Autobiography of Cotton (Graywolf, Feb.; tr. from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney). In Valérie Perrin’s Tata (Europa, May; tr. from French by Hildegarde Serle), the news that Aunt Colette has just passed away is shocking, as she’s been dead and buried for three years.

CONNECT/DISCONNECT

In Ann Patchett’s Whistler (Harper, Jun.), middle-aged Daphne reconnects with a stepfather she hasn’t seen for years. In Willy Vlautin’s The Left and the Lucky (Harper, Apr.), a lonely housepainter bonds with the troubled boy next door. Rebeca Lee Morales’s debut, Winter Song (Ecco, Dec.), plumbs the relationship between a police chief and a young man just out of prison, while a young woman forms a sort of family with two men in Kendra Allen’s Good Morning Means I Love You (Ecco, Jul.), the poet’s first novel. Bad Words (St. Martin’s, Oct.), YA author Rioghnach Robinson’s adult debut, brings together a still-aching novelist and the critic who panned his first book. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Jenny Tinghui Zhang sets up conflict between a pop star and one of his worshipers in Superfan (Flatiron, Feb.). In Allie Rowbottom’s Lovers XXX (Soho, Jun.), teenage friends Jude and Winnie seek freedom in 1980s Los Angeles but instead find porn. Acclaimed British Pakistani author Sarvat Hasin makes her U.S. debut with Strange Girls (Dutton, Mar.), about two friends—one more successful—gingerly reuniting. Amy Chozick’s With Friends Like You (Dutton, Jul.) reveals how new motherhood can disrupt friendship, while Wade Rouse’s That’s What Friends Are For (MIRA, Mar.) shows four aging gay friends (“the Golden Gays”) scrambling to adjust when an estranged sister arrives with her granddaughter.

LOVE AND DESIRE

Ayelet Waldman’s A Perfect Hand (Knopf, May) shows what a 19th-century English lady’s-maid who has heretofore rejected marriage will finally do to secure love. In Laura Moriarty’s Sunlight Finds You (Riverhead, Aug.), opening in 1949 Florida, lower-class teenager Nora faces a hard choice when she falls for transplanted New Yorker Leonard. In Jane Healey’s 1950s France–set Crescendo (Bloomsbury, Jun.), celebrated young pianist Max Kitson and Natasha, his twin sister and manager, compete for the attention of Henri, who is Max’s patron and Natasha’s secret lover. In Louise Kennedy’s Stations (Riverhead, Nov.), set in 1980s Ireland, Róisín tries to reconnect with the boy she’s been crushing on since they bonded as disaffected teens. In indie star Mark Haber’s Ada (Coffee House, Jul.), tyrannical French nationalist Gerard Desacroux IX will do anything to have the illusive Ada. In Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s Almost Life (Summit, Mar.), two young women bond forever after a steamy Paris encounter. Maria Semple’s Go Gentle (Putnam, Apr.) features self-contained intellectual Adora Hazzard, who is thrown off base by a handsome stranger. In Steven Rowley’s Take Me with You (Putnam, May), college professor Jesse del Ruth frets over the disappearance of his husband, apparently beamed up to somewhere one fine night. Bobuq Sayed’s No God but Us (Harper, May) features two gay Afghan men, Mansur and Delbar, who meet in Istanbul after fleeing Iran and Washington, DC, respectively. Set on Cape Cod, Kat Stoddard’s Wasp’s Nest (Celadon, Jun.) is a contemporary retelling of The Philadelphia Story.

THRILLERS

High-profile thrills include The Secrets We Hide (Morrow, Aug.) by Karin Slaughter, an Untitled John Grisham (Doubleday, Fall), Lisa Gardner’s You’ll Be Sorry (Grand Central, Aug.), Kate Atkinson’s Our Noble Selves (Doubleday, Sept.), Riley Sager’s 1920s Vermont–set The Unknown (Dutton, Aug.), Jane Harper’s Last One Out (Pine & Cedar, Apr.), Gillian McAllister’s Caller Unknown (Morrow, May)—her first work set in the United States—and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s The Beginning (Grand Central, Jan.), which relays Agent Pendergast’s origin story. Louise Penny joins forces with distinguished journalist Mellissa Fung to craft The Last Mandarin (Minotaur, May), in which China gives cause for panic. Debuts include award-winning screenwriter Matthew Aldrich’s Natural Order (Atria, Oct.), featuring a tech billionaire; Tiffany Crum’s big-print-run This Story Might Save Your Life (Pine & Cedar, Mar.), about a podcaster’s disappearance; Lisa Howells’s Wolf Point (Grand Central, Dec.), about a newly promoted officer’s first night on the job; and Alex Dekker’s Desert Heist (Atria/Emily Bestler, Jul.), with Green Beret turned archaeologist Nate Wilde seeking the lost city of Ubar in Saudi Arabia. More page-turners: lawyer Ben Crump’s Worse Than a Lie (Bantam, Feb.), about a Black former police officer in Chicago; David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Wisdom Corner (Ecco, Jul.), returning to the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota; Yuri Andrukhovych’s Radio Nights (NYRB, Nov.), with a musician chased by fascist operatives in pandemic-era Ukraine; Laura Sims’s The Man (Putnam, Jul.), with a woman fearing that the silhouette she spots in her photographs is a former attacker; Leah Rowan’s Marion (St. Martin’s, Jun.), a retelling of Hitchcock’s Psycho, with the victim triumphant; Taylor Brown’s Wolvers (St. Martin’s, Apr.), in which a man hired to kill a wolf finds himself targeted by an assassin when he backs out; and Raphael Montes’s internationally bestselling The Secret Dinner (Celadon, Aug.; tr. from Portuguese by Zoë Perry), featuring four Brazilian students who land in big trouble while trying to earn rent money.

MYSTERY

Big-name whodunits include Ann Cleeves’s The Dying Light (Minotaur, Sept.), Sara Paretsky’s Bad Company (Minotaur, Nov.), Charles Finch’s Midnight in the House of Commons (Minotaur, Nov.), William Kent Krueger’s God’s Country (Atria, Aug.), and an Untitled Richard Osman (Viking, Sept.), the next in his “We Solve Murders” series. Tim Sullivan’s The Tailor (Atlantic Crime, Aug.) is the latest installment in his DS George Cross series, well-known in the UK and now being released Stateside. More cases to solve: Andrey Kurkov’s The Lost Soldiers (HarperVia, May; tr. from Russian by Boris Dralyuk), about the inexplicable disappearance of a group of Russian soldiers from a Ukrainian bathhouse; cult-favorite James Sallis’s Backwater (Soho Crime, Aug.), a small-town procedural; Karen Odden’s Artful Dodge (Soho Crime, Jun.), about an all-women gang of thieves in Victorian London; children’s-to-adult author Ross Montgomery’s Murder at World’s End (Morrow, Jan.), a locked-room mystery set in 1910 at a sealed Cornwall manor; Elle Cosimano and Hannah Morrissey’s Home for the Homicides (Minotaur, Oct.), with a quaint town called Christmas rocked by crime; Con Lehane’s Murder in the Reading Room (Severn House, Feb.), with NYPL librarian Raymond Ambler investigating blood spatter close to home; Lucy Burdette’s A Delicious Deception (Crooked Lane, Jul.), the next “Key West Food Critic” mystery; and the late Anne Perry’s Death Times Seven (Ballantine, Apr.), the final mystery in the Daniel Pitt series, completed by Perry’s friend Victoria Zackheim.

ROMANCE

As historical romances mount something of a comeback, there are several titles to watch for, including The Last Lady B (Gallery, May) by Eloisa James, Mastermind (Avon, May) by Sarah MacLean, Game of Rogues (Avon, Jun.) by Julie Anne Long, and How To Fake It in Society (Bramble, Apr.) by KJ Charles. However, proving that modern-set stories are still very much the trend, 2026 sees several historical romance authors pivoting to contemporary, including Cat Sebastian with Star Shipped (Avon, Mar.) and Liana De la Rosa with Mutual Discord (Berkley). Other contemporary romance titles include The Night We Met (Forever, Mar.) by Abby Jimenez, The Romance Revival (Gallery, Jul.) by Christina Lauren, and The Missed Connection (Grand Central, Jun.) by Tia Williams.

SFF

Intriguing science fiction includes Martha Wells’s Platform Decay (Tor, May), the next in her “Murderbot Diaries” series; Ann Leckie’s Radiant Star (Orbit, May), a stand-alone set in the Imperial Radch world; Ray Nayler’s Palaces of the Crow (MCD, May), with remarkably intelligent crows protecting four teenagers during World War II; and Rebecca Roanhorse’s River of Bones and Other Stories (Saga, Mar.). Sci-fi debuts include Alexis Hall’s Hell’s Heart (Tor, Mar.), about hunting space monsters to survive, and Isabel Kim’s Sublimation (Tor, Jun.), in which immigrants leave behind a copy of themselves in their home country. Fantasy standouts include Gregory Maguire’s Galinda (Morrow, Sept.), Brandon Sanderson’s Isles of the Emberdark (Tor, Feb.), and Alan Moore’s I Hear a New World (Bloomsbury, May), the second in the “Long London” series. See also T. Kingfisher’s Swordheart-set Daggerbound (Bramble, Aug.); Taran Matharu’s Emperor’s Dragon (Harper Voyager, Nov.), concluding “The Southbound Saga”; Thea Guanzon’s This Shattered Tempest (Harper Voyager, Oct.), concluding “The Hurricane Wars” trilogy; and Amal El-Mohtar’s kaleidoscopic Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories (Tor.com, Mar.). In Akwaeke Emezi’s Eclipse & the Wolf (Harper Voyager, Sept.), rival clans upend a magical city, while a desperate woman and the leader of royal tyger warriors face off in Jean Kwok’s Dominion (Putnam, Jul.). Sunyi Dean’s The Girl with a Thousand Faces (Tor, May) takes readers to an ancient Hong Kong, Natalie Kikic’s The Haunting of Lavender House (Park Row, Oct.) to a spirit-haunted Croatia, Megan Jauregui Eccles’s Sing the Night (Grand Central, Mar.) to a competition of musical magicians, and Moorea Corrigan’s Thistlemarsh (Berkley, Apr.) to a crumbling manor a Faerie might help rebuild. The romantically inclined can try Kiersten White’s The Fox and the Devil (Del Rey, Mar.), Sarah Beth Durst’s Sea of Charms (Bramble, Jul.), Máire Roche’s Bromantasy (Putnam, May), and Bel Banta’s The Court of Venus (Tor, Sept.), with a setting that recalls the court of Henry VIII. For more bite, see Jesse Q. Sutanto’s An Edge Sharp Enough (Harper Voyager, Aug.), A. K. Mulford’s Dreamslayer (Harper Voyager, Dec.), or L. D. Land’s Year of the Mer (Saga, Apr.), a scary retelling of “The Little Mermaid” (Saga, Apr.).

HORROR

In Joe Hill’s Hunger (Morrow, Oct.), a country struggling to survive is threatened by a force that consumes souls. Set in 1899 North Carolina, T. Kingfisher’s Wolf Worm (Tor Nightfire, Mar.) features a scientific illustrator who discovers that the entomologist she works for has descended into evil. From the new Emily Bestler/Atria horror imprint 12:01, Marcus Kliewer’s The Caretaker (Apr.) has Macy Mullins taking a temporary job at an isolated Oregon estate where evil clearly lurks. In Claire Fuller’s Hunger and Thirst (Tin House, Jun.), a dare that Ursula took in adolescence is literally haunting her years later. Kat Dunn’s Rottenheart (Zando, Oct.) takes readers to Victorian London for gothic horror inspired by Hamlet. National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda’s Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun (Coffee House, May; tr. from Spanish by Sarah Booker) sends best friends Noa and Nicole to the drug-hazed Solar Noise Festival, where Nicole senses something ominous beneath the noise. Brian Evenson’s Phantom Limb (Coffee House, Oct.) wickedly blends horror and Continental philosophy. In Mother Is Watching (Dutton, Mar.), the horror debut of bestselling Karma Brown, a mysterious painting takes an art conservator on a wild ride. In Anna Kovatcheva’s She Made Herself a Monster (Mariner, Feb.), set in 1800s Bulgaria, the monster that a con artist dreamed up to help an orphan girl gets out of hand. In Gabrielle Sher’s Odessa (Mulholland, Apr.), a daughter who was killed in a pogrom, then brought back to life with half-remembered spells, is not as she once was. In Keith Rosson’s Crone (Random, Sept.), a father seeking answers about his daughter’s long-ago abduction encounters evil that isn’t always human.

NONFICTION

THE U.S. POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

Titles focusing on the politics of today include Raphael G. Warnock’s The Crooked Places Made Straight: Reflections on the Moral Meaning of America (Penguin Pr., Jun.), a secular sermon framed by Isaiah; The Fourth Branch: How State Government Can Save Our Union (Zando, Jun.), by Daniel Squadron, a former Chuck Schumer aide; legal authority Cass R. Sunstein’s Separation of Powers: How To Preserve Liberty in Troubled Times (MIT, Feb.); and Christopher Mathias’s To Catch a Fascist: The Fight To Expose the Radical Right (Atria, Feb.). There is also Anthony Scaramucci’s All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump (Holt, Sept.), David Corn’s How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Defeat of America (Harper, Aug.), Julia Ainsley’s Undue Process: The Inside Story of Trump’s Mass Deportation Program (Harper, May), Daisy Hernández’s Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth (Hogarth, Feb.), ex–National Guardsman Jacob Siegel’s The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control (Holt, Mar.), Eric Lichtblau’s American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate (Little, Brown, Jan.), and Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars (Bloomsbury, Jun.).

POLITICS GETS PERSONAL

Key political memoirs include California governor Gavin Newsom’s Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery (Penguin Pr., Feb.), former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’s The Rough Side of the Mountain (Mariner, Apr.), and Deb Haaland’s A Voice Like Mine: A Memoir (Holt, Jun.), from the former U.S. secretary of the interior and the first Indigenous cabinet member. For countrywide views, see Peter Santenello’s Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches from Across the Country We Call Home (S&S, Aug.), Lauren Hough’s Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America (Pantheon, Jun.), Beverly Gage’s This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History (S&S, Apr.), and Bill O’Reilly’s Confronting America (St. Martin’s, Sept.).

KEY WORLD PERSPECTIVES

Co-CEOs of InterAct International who have both lost family in the Middle East fighting, Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah and Israeli Maoz Inon reveal why they chose brotherhood over hate in The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land (Crown, Apr.). Youssef Rakha’s debut essay collection, Postmuslim (Graywolf, Sept.), examines the conflict between Islam and the West through his own life. See also Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East (Knopf, Aug.), Kim Ghattas’s The Best Kind of American: A Story of Murder, War, and America’s Undoing in the Middle East (Holt, Oct.), Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order (Viking, Apr.), Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad’s I Choose My Beginning: A Story of Courage and Activism (Summit, Sept.), and Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s Putin’s Presidents (Doubleday, Oct.), on how the Russian leader has dealt with five U.S. presidents over the years.

STORIES OF VIOLENCE

Justine van der Leun’s Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival (Ecco, Jun.) focuses on women criminalized for protecting themselves against abuse. Virginia Eubanks’s A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving (Farrar, Aug.) assays police disinterest, insurance issues, and her own PTSD after her partner was brutally attacked. Lawrence Wright’s Redemption (Knopf, Oct.) profiles cloistered nuns helping women on death row. Anand Giridharadas’s Man in the Mirror (Knopf, Sept.) examines the killing of Jordan Neely by former U.S. Marine Daniel Penny on a New York City subway in 2023. In The Black Shield (Farrar, Aug.), Wilbert L. Cooper weaves family memoir into his coverage of Black Cleveland cops who aligned with Black Lives Matter after George Floyd’s killing. See also Malcolm Gladwell’s The American Way of Killing (Little, Brown, Oct.), Harel Shapira’s Basic Pistol: Living and Dying by the Gun in America (Pantheon, Sept.), and Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve’s Crime Fictions: How Racist Lies Built a System of Mass Wrongful Conviction (Random, Apr.).

MORE ISSUES

Key titles range from No Contact: Writers on Estrangement (Catapult, Apr.), edited by Jenny Bartoy, to Joshua Bennett’s The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time (Little, Brown, Feb.), on being young, gifted, and Black. Masculinity is examined in Sean Hotchkiss’s Hating Women: A Memoir of Male Rage and Recovery (S&S, Jul.), Andrew McCarthy’s Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America (Grand Central, Mar.), Jordan Ritter Conn’s American Men: An Investigation (Grand Central, Apr.), and Jon Ronson’s The Castle (Riverhead, Sept.). Business gets its due with Noam Scheiber’s Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class (Farrar, Apr.), Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Harper, Apr.), Gabriel Sherman’s Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight To Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family—and the World (S&S, Feb.), and Chris Smalls’s When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class (Pantheon, Jun.), about the author’s crusade to create the first Amazon union in the country.

LITERARY VENTURES

TITLES BY AUTHORS Michael Cunningham’s Unsayable: A Life in Writing (Random, Jul.), Jayne Anne Phillips’s Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir (Knopf, Apr.), Anne Enright’s Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and the World (Norton, Apr.), Ed Park’s Three Tenses (Random, Aug.), Claudia Rankine’s Triage (Graywolf, Aug.), Jeanette Winterson’s One Aladdin Two Lamps (Grove, Jan.), Terry Tempest Williams’s The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary (Grove, Mar.), Patricia Cornwell’s True Crime: A Memoir (Grand Central, May), and David Sedaris’s The Land and Its People (Little, Brown, May). Plus National Book Award finalist Anna Badkhen’s To See Beyond (Bellevue Literary, Apr.), poet and activist Franny Choi’s We Radiant Things: On Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg (Ecco, Oct.), the James Laughlin Award–winning Chet’la Sebree’s I Turn Where: A Geography of Home (Dial, May), the NBCC award–winning Anne Fadiman’s Frog: And Other Essays (Farrar, Feb.), and Prix Marguerite Yourcenar–winning Patrice Nganang’s Scale Boy: An African Childhood (Farrar, Jan.). Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction (Farrar, Jun.), on trying to write about Stein. Eleni Sikelianos’s Memory Rehearsal (City Lights, May), about her famous great-grandmother Eva.

TITLES ABOUT AUTHORS Mark Oppenheimer’s Judy Blume: A Life (Putnam, Mar.), Tracy Daugherty’s Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited (St. Martin’s, Oct.), David Streitfeld’s Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry (Mariner, Mar.), Mary Helen Washington’s Paule Marshall: A Writer’s Life (Yale Univ., Feb.), and After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal (Europa, Apr.) by Oscar Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland.

TITLES ABOUT BOOKS Mac Barnett’s Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children (Little, Brown, May), Marjorie Garber’s A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare (Yale Univ., Mar.), Robert Hass’s A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry (Copper Canyon, May), and Lindsey Fitzharris’s Sleuth-Hound (Farrar, Nov.), about Victorian surgeon Joseph Bell, the model for Sherlock Holmes.

HISTORY

In U.S. history, David S. Reynolds’s Two Ships: Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America (Penguin Pr., Jun.); H. W. Brands’s American Patriarch (Doubleday, May), about George Washington; Jesse Wegman’s The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon, Jun.); Paul C. Rosier’s Indigenous Citizens: Native Americans’ Fight for Sovereignty, 1776–2025 (Norton, Mar.); Linford D. Fisher’s Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History (Liveright, Apr.); Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World (Viking, Oct.); Paul Richter’s The Distance Between Our Names: The Untold History of America’s War on Japanese Immigrants (S&S, Sept.); Azadeh Moaveni’s The East Wing: Power, Intrigue, and the Untold Story of America’s First Ladies (St. Martin’s, Oct.); Shane White’s A Moment in the Sun: Black Manhattan Before the Civil War (Liveright, Aug.); Jazmine Ulloa’s El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory (Dutton, Mar.); and FOX & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade’s Uniting the States (Morrow, Oct.). In world history, Simon Morrison’s A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow (Knopf, Mar.), Liaquat Ahamed’s 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World (Penguin Pr., Jun.), and Ian Buruma’s Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939–1945 (Penguin Pr., Mar.).

BIOGRAPHY

Women journalists get a boost with Eve Sneider’s The Absent Woman: The Genius of Janet Malcolm (Norton, Jul.) and Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World (Farrar, Feb.), about Rebecca West, Emily “Mickey” Hahn, and Martha Gellhorn. More life stories of note include Benedetta Craveri’s The Contessa (NYRB, Jun.; tr. from Italian by Alex Andriesse), about mid-1800s influencer Virginia Verasis, Contessa di Castiglione; Douglas Brunt’s The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel: Romanovs, Revolutionaries, and the Forgotten Titan Who Fueled the World (Atria, May), Lerone Martin’s Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. (Amistad, May), and Dan Chiasson’s Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician (Knopf, Feb.).

STEM

DOWN-TO-EARTH TITLES Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi’s The Ghost of the Mountains: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard (Riverhead, Aug.), James H. McCommons’s The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade To Save America’s Birds (St. Martin’s, Mar.), and Amy Waldman’s Snow (Ecco, Mar.). 

LOOKING TO THE HEAVENS  David Ariosto’s Open Space: From Earth to Eternity—the Global Race To Explore and Conquer the Cosmos (Knopf, Mar.), Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie (Pantheon, Apr.), and Sarah Alam Malik’s A Brief History of the Universe (and Our Place in It) (Morrow, May). 

PEERING INTO THE HUMAN MIND Antonio Damasio’s Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness (Pantheon, Sept.), Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (Penguin Pr., Feb.), and distinguished Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke’s Radical Surrender (Dutton, Dec.). 

FOR TECHIES AND WANNABES Robert Wright’s The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning (S&S, Jun.), Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (Penguin Pr., Mar.), Daniel Susskind’s What Should My Children Do?: A Human’s Guide to the Age of AI (Penguin Pr., Aug.), and Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI (MCD, Jun.).

DISABILITIES

New books featuring forthright discussions of disability include I Identify as Blind: A Brazen Celebration of Disability Culture, Identity, and Power (Tiny Reparations, Jan.) by singer and Grammy-nominated producer Lachi, I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth Telling (Counterpoint, May) by NYT-bestselling Emily Rapp Black, It Wasn’t Meant To Be Perfect: A Memoir (Algonquin, Apr.) by musician and Broadway composer Gaelynn Lea, and Great and Unfortunate: The Miraculous, Wild and Grit-Filled Story of How I Found My Voice (37 Ink, Aug.) by education scholar Jason Arday, about growing up as a nonspeaking autistic child.

POETRY

MEDITATIONS

Jorie Graham’s Killing Spree (Farrar, May) shows how to traverse tumultuous change. Victoria Chang’s Tree of Knowledge (Farrar, Jul.) reenvisions a sawn eucalyptus limb to assay art, language, and self. Carl Dennis’s Earthly Virtues (Penguin Poets, Jun.) considers how to take everyday virtues to the next level. Christian Wiman’s The Dance (Farrar, Jul.) uncovers the link between faith and morality. Benjamin Gucciardi’s Arguments (Persea, Sept.) contemplates how to behave ethically despite contemporary chaos, while Aleksandar Hemon’s Godspotting (Copper Canyon, Fall) wonders how to survive an essentially hostile world. In Wellwater (Farrar, May), Karen Solie addresses the idea of value, from socioeconomic stress to looming loss. Sean Hill’s The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures (Milkweed, Mar.) asks fundamental questions about past, present, and future. In Safe Rooms (Wesleyan Univ., Aug.), Rae Armantrout ponders a changing sense of what is known. Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Nothing but Time (Copper Canyon, Fall) reimagines Genesis, to rich, pungent, and timely effect.

HERITANCE

Amit Majmudar’s Things My Grandmother Said (Knopf, Apr.) and Philip Schultz’s Enormous Morning (Norton, Mar.) both celebrate powerful women forebears, while Diamond Forde calls on the King James Bible to portray her grandmother—a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South—in James Laughlin Award winner The Book of Alice (Scribner, Jan.). Molly Fisk’s Walking Wheel (Red Hen, Apr.) revisits struggling newlyweds traveling from Oregon to California in 1875. Abigail Chabitnoy’s Love Like a Body Carried to Shore (Wesleyan Univ., Fall) sees the continuity in history and inheritance despite tumult. Moving between poetics and history, prose and verse in Cantares (Wesleyan Univ., Apr.), Edgar Garcia limns the Indigenous and colonial Americas. In Heritance (Copper Canyon, Fall), Paisley Rekdal uses personal perspective as a biracial woman to assess the ongoing consequences of hateful actions, while Aldo Amparán’s The House Has Teeth (Alice James, Sept.) leans toward the supernatural to show how trauma painfully endures.

NEWSCASTS

Gregory Orr’s We Interrupt This Broadcast (Norton, Jun.) reveals what it’s like to live in a world that’s coming undone, while Marcus Wicker’s Dear Mothership (Ecco, Sept.) explores the complexities knotting together public and private trauma, capitalism, and race. Cynthia Cruz’s Twilight (Four Way, Sept.) focuses on how capitalism shapes and scrapes us. Mark Nowak’s …AGAIN (Coffee House, Apr.) challenges MAGA extremism, while Akhim Yuseff Cabéy’s Get Funky, Get Swoll (Black Lawrence, Apr.) challenges white supremacy. Recalling her brother’s self-inflicted death by gunshot in Amerigun (Persea, Mar.), Anne Marie Macari decries gun- and violence-worshipping American culture. Yona Harvey’s Season 1, Episode 7 (Four Way, Sept.) reflects on health and political issues raised by the pandemic, particularly for Black women. David Baker’s Transit (Norton. Jan.) and Christopher Kondrich’s Tread Upon (Copper Canyon, Apr.) deplore damage done to the natural world. Debuter Kyle Carrero Lopez’s Party Line (Graywolf, Jul.) calls up U.S.–Cuba tensions and issues of transnational Black identity. Ha Jin’s Running Away (Copper Canyon, Fall) introduces readers to migrants desperately fleeing toward sanctuary in the United States. Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, Daniel Moysaenko’s Overtakelessness (Graywolf, Apr.) highlights the horror of ongoing war in Ukraine from a Ukrainian American’s perspective.

PLACE/SPACE/TIME

Two Black poets offer portraits of the United States, with Joshua Bennett’s We (the People of the United States) (Penguin Poets, Mar.) embracing Gwendolyn Brooks, experimental physics, the Beach Boys, and the Jackson 5, and Camille T. Dungy’s America, a Love Story (Wesleyan Univ., Mar.) plumbing her life as a Black woman and mother. Jonathan Galassi’s The Vineyard: A Poem (Knopf, Mar.) visits a partly fictional home on Long Island, Aiden Heung’s Levis Prize–winning All There Is To Lose (Four Way, Mar.) resurrects a 10th-century Chinese village, and UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s New Cemetery (Knopf, Jan.) treads a cow field turned cemetery near his home; also see his verse translation of Gilgamesh (Liveright, Apr.). Brenda Hillman’s Still House (Wesleyan Univ., Sept.) opens a door to domestic spaces and the objects and creatures found therein. In The Next Sky (Copper Canyon, Fall), Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui engages intimately, almost spiritually, with the landscape, while Jake Skeets’s Horses (Milkweed, Mar.) offers a queer, Indigenous perspective also bound up with the land. Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Night Owl (Ecco, Mar.) plunges into the special powers of nighttime.

EXPRESSION

Next in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Isabel Neal’s Thrown Voice (Yale Univ., Mar.) reveals the difference between seen and unseen, while MacArthur Fellow Heather McHugh’s It Looks Like a Man (Wesleyan Univ., Jan.) reveals the distance between what one experiences and how one conveys it. Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa and emerging poet Laren McClung’s collaborative Trading Riffs To Slay Monsters (Farrar, Feb.) began as exchanges during the pandemic. In Universal Corner (Persea, Feb.), Mitchell L. H. Douglas grounds his take on the world in the sharp beat of punk and hip-hop, while Shara McCallum’s Behold (Alice James, Sept.) and debuter D. S. Waldman’s Atria (Liveright, Feb.) express a love of the visual arts. Patricia Lockwood’s Agate Head/Stone Soup (Penguin Poets, Oct.) vibrantly references gems, metals, fossils, and more. A new mode of visual poetry emerges when Carolina Ebeid explores her Cuban Palestinian heritage in Hide (Graywolf, Mar.). New York Times columnist David Orr’s The Marvels (Four Way, Sept.) walks the line between reader and critic as he examines the creative process.

MULTIGENRE

In WE (Graywolf, Oct.), Layli Long Soldier uses poems, essays, and her own art and photography to consider the confluence of the English first-person plural “we” and the Lakota word “wé,” meaning blood. A Guardian/BBC Book of the Year and 2020 publishing sensation in the UK, Caleb Femi’s Poor (MCD, Jan.) blends poems and photographs to portray young Black men in South London. Drawing from her anonymous blog, the NBCC award–winning Kim Hyesoon blends editorials, aphorisms, recipes, and more in Lady No (Ecco, Apr.; tr. from Korean by Jack Saebyok Jung). The libretto for an opera by Paolo Prestini, Brenda Shaughnessy’s Sensorium Ex: An Opera in Verse (Knopf, Jul.) features a scientist and her disabled son resisting the theft of their very selves in a near-future AI world.

COMING TO TERMS

In Nocturama (Milkweed, Feb.), Will Brewer confronts illness, a friend’s death, and environmental devastation while cherishing life’s little joys. Maria Nazos’s PULSE (Omnidawn, Apr.) considers personal loss and public tragedies, including the Pulse nightclub massacre, to show how we overcome suffering. In Star Power (Scribner, Jun.), Nicholas Goodly highlights sometimes-unsung Black and queer heroes who have helped their communities endure. Phillip B. Williams’s Lift Every Voice (Penguin Poets, Jul.) shows how personal and collective growth is rooted in understanding the past. Donna Masini’s Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? (Norton, May) insists that, in bumpy times, “survival is improvisational.” Jonah Mixon-Webster’s Promise/Threat (Knopf, Mar.) and Sébastien Luc Butler’s Sky Tongued Back with Light (Black Lawrence, Mar.) capture coming into one’s own. Written over 20 years, Elizabeth Rosner’s Gravity (Counterpoint, Mar.) recounts life as the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

IN THE WORLD

Laura Kasischke’s I Was Bonnie and Clyde (Copper Canyon, May) revels in connectedness, with every moment containing the world. Bob Hicok’s Breathe (Copper Canyon, Apr.) signals love and desire in a purposeful outreach to his surroundings. While Cole Swenson’s Veer (Alice James, May) studies the world from different angles, focusing on nature, Kelli Russell Agodon’s Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon, May) embraces fleeting moments both digital and corporeal. Daniel Halpern’s Air (Copper Canyon, May) and Mary Jo Salzer’s Cameo Appearance (Knopf, Oct.) celebrate the joys of the everyday, while Chase Twichell’s The World It Was (Copper Canyon, Fall) honors its ongoing toughness.

BODY AND SOUL

Maggie Smith’s A Suit or a Suitcase (Washington Square, Mar.) seeks to locate the self in time and space, while Asa Drake’s Maybe the Body (Tin House, Feb.) reveals how our very bodies are shaped by sociopolitical forces. Lisa Russ Spaar’s Soul Cake (Persea, May) plumbs the all-defining ecstasy that comes with desiring something larger, while Derrick Austin’s This Elegance (BOA, May) seeks to recapture the self in unsteady times, with a bid for joy and beauty. Referencing her native Romania, Mihaela Moscaliuc hopes to discover what anchors people amid harsh political realities in Heartmoor (Alice James, Aug.). Alex Lemon’s All Us Beautiful Monsters (Milkweed, Mar.) examines “the infinite ways a body can absorb/Pain,” while Theo LeGro shows how chronic illness clarifies the durable bond between body and soul in the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize–winning Don’t Let It Kill You (Persea, Jun.). In Future Tense (Alice James, Oct.), Kelly Grace Thomas mourns her mother’s death while also celebrating an adoption after infertility struggles. In Craig Morgan Teicher’s August, September, October (BOA, Apr.), the speaker sees his son through illness and hospitalization exacerbated by the COVID lockdown, calling on works by Ciaran Carson and Bernadette Mayer for clarity as he rediscovers poetry.

WRAPPING UP

Fanny Howe’s This Poor Book: A Poem (Graywolf, May), completed before her death in 2025, reconfigures selected older poems to create a new story. Franz Wright’s final work, Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments (Knopf, Jul.), finds the poet at peace. Dean Young’s posthumous Creature Feature (Copper Canyon, Apr.) effectively serves as an elegy. Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite ranges widely from the Middle Passage to Whitney Houston in Equinox (New Directions, Jul.), published six years after his death. V. R. Lang’s The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems (NYRB, Apr.) glimpses an influential but long-ignored early 20th-century U.S. poet, recently profiled in the New Yorker. Lucille Clifton’s At the Gate: Uncollected Poems 1987–2010 (BOA, Apr.) pulls together poems written in the last two decades of Clifton’s life, while Julia Alvarez offers her own uncollected poems in Visitations (Knopf, Apr). Wislawa Szymborska’s The Acrobat: Essential Poems (Ecco, Jul.; tr. from Polish by Clare Cavanagh) helps readers catch up on the Nobel Prize winner. Finally, Michael Ondaatje’s The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems (Knopf, Feb.) serves as poetic overview, while Devin Johnston’s Bright Thorn: Poems 2000–2026 (Farrar, May) offers the essence of his seven collections.

Barbara Hoffert is a former LJ editor and former president of the National Book Critics Circle.