THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1935, Edward Said is born.

• “Del Toro loves monsters—misunderstood, sympathetic monsters—and Shelley’s Creature is the primogenitor of this tradition.” Olivia Rutigliano praises Guillermo Del Toro’s new adaptation of Frankenstein. | Lit Hub Film
• Ron Rosenbaum breaks down Bob Dylan’s reaction to receiving his Nobel Prize. | Lit Hub Music
• Chelsea G. Summers and Jessica Stoya discuss John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, one of the earliest pieces of English prose erotica: “There is this strange writerly fixation on the very limits of trying to tell these kinds of stories and trying to do this narrative work without getting dirty.” | Lit Hub In Conversation
• Joseph J. Ellis explains how little faith America’s Founding Fathers had in democracy. | Lit Hub History
• “The scenario was incoherent. Yet it could not have happened differently on this earth. If it could have it would have.” Joy Williams on the last days of Gene Hackman. | Harper’s
• What can be done about the literacy crisis? Johanna Winant and Dan Sinykin weigh in: “Give them Hamlet. Give them My Antonía. Give them Sense and Sensibility. Give them Song of Solomon. Give them these books—unabridged!—time to read them, and space to confront difficulties.” | Slate
• How Marjorie Ingall learned to find joy in scary children’s books. | The New York Times
• “We are the testing ground. Every single state needs to be paying attention.” Jennifer Smith Richards reports on why the rise of Christian nationalism in Oklahoma schools models the far-right’s vision for education in America. | ProPublica
• Manvir Singh traces the modern history humanizing of monstrosity. | The New Yorker
• “What do all the fragments add up to, beyond fulfillment of the fantasy of publication?” Greta Rainbow on the state of the braided essay. | Dirt
• How Elon Musk’s AI-powered Wikipedia clone reveals the incredible humanity of the internet’s free encyclopedia. | 404 Media
• Rhian Sasseen considers Ron Padgett’s meditations on mortality. | The Nation
• “It’s easier to put your hand in the next guy’s pocket if he’s illiterate.” Noah McCormack on literacy and class. | The Baffler
• Jesmyn Ward explores her connection to hip-hop, and home: “We’ll make art that celebrates and insists on our being.” | Orion
• Jon Day explores the ghoulish appeal of haunted houses. | London Review of Books
• “In Notley’s work especially, punctuation gives shape to that self-awareness.” Will Harris meditates on The Descent of Alette.
• Adela Pinch considers Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, “a tour de force of child narration.” | Public Books
• Donald Quist considers Stone of Hope, (mis)representations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and standing in the shadow of a legacy. | AGNI
• Here’s something that should make authors feel better about their sparsely-attended readings: Elisabeth Bumiller reports on Karine Jean-Pierre’s nightmare of a book tour. | The New York Times

Also on Lit Hub:

A Pizza Margherita recipe fit for a queen • The wannabe pop star with a FarmVille-inspired Ponzi scheme • The kobold, an unclassifiable household creature of fantasy • Ann Tashi Slater on her grandmother’s Tibetan Buddhist funeral • Essential books for understanding choice • The 19th century scientist who connected solar storms to life on Earth • The dangerous fine print of creative contract law • Space warfare, spy satellites, and espionage’s new era • The dramatic twists of a 2008 whaling research expedition • An influential illustrated book and microscopic marine organisms • Audley Moore’s fight for reparations • Chronicling COVID in literature • Why writers should give their books away for free • What we can learn about tyranny from Henry VIII • Documentary poetics in the shadow of institutional power • Illustrated affirmations for the canines in your life •The woodsmen who watch over England’s Chiltern Hills • Life, death, and poverty in Alabama Village • Overthrowing the British Raj from America • October’s best book covers (and bonus covers from September!) • Why do so many book covers have sheep? • You’re still the asshole if you use AI to write your novel • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • Literary film and TV coming to a screen near you in November • The most anticipated audiobooks of the upcoming month • Happy Halloween from the Lit Hub Podcast! • The 80-year evolution of the iconic Wednesday Addams • Catherine Newman finds some humor in the unexpected • Anne Sexton’s “imperfect and thorny” rejected horror stories • When it comes to Jack the Ripper, how do we separate fact from fiction? • The bond between food and our memories of the dead • How the origin of zombies relates to historical anti-Blackness • Cultures that hold space for when the dead walk among us • October’s best reviewed books • Habitats of the blood-sucking (but not so fiendish) vampire bats • A human history of burial rituals

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For my book club, I read This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which has been on my TBR for years. Most of the other people in my book club didn’t love it, but I did! The writing is gorgeous, and I had just read Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots in September and also really liked that one, so I think I have a new favourite author.

Then I picked up the queer graphic novel retelling of Anne of Green Gables, Dan in Green Gables by Rey Terciero and illustrated by Claudia Aguirre. That one was okay, but it didn’t fully land with me. I think other readers will really like it, but do be prepared to read about homophobia and neglectful/abusive parents.

Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger doesn’t have a queer main character, but it’s the prequel to the asexual book Elatsoe, and it has two sapphic side characters. Like Elatsoe, this book had several lines so good that I had to stop and stare into the middle distance for a while. I really need to pick up her other books!

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Pizza Witch by Sarah Graley and Stef Purenins since it was first announced. A lesbian pizza witch graphic novel—need I saw more? If you like these sort of goofy YA fantasy comics, this should be on your radar. But be prepared that this seems to be setting up for a sequel.

Getting into the proper Halloween reads, I finished Queer Little Nightmares edited by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli. This is a mix of queer monster-themed poetry and short stories. I enjoyed it, but nothing particularly stood out.

In the sapphic gothic department, I really enjoyed My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen. It’s a blood-soaked, unexpected love story (but not a capital R romance).

Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle is a horror book that’s also about bisexual erasure and existential dread. This is my second Chuck Tingle horror novel, and they always surprise me and give me something to think about. I don’t always love the writing style, but the ideas are captivating enough that they keep pulling me back in.

The book that scared me the most was A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper, a lesbian erotic horror novel about losing touch with reality after reading the play The King in Yellow. I started to dread reading it because it was getting in my head too much, but I guess that means it succeeded at what it was trying to do!

In case you’re curious, I ended up reading five of the 15 books on my Halloween month TBR, which is honestly higher than I expected. A TBR cannot contain my Halloween reading moods! In my defense, a few of them didn’t come in from the library on time.

The post All the Queer Books I Read in October appeared first on Our Story Insight.

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1924, Frances Hodgson Burnett dies. 

• Shane Hinton explains why writers should consider giving their books away for free. | Lit Hub Craft
• “Del Toro loves monsters—misunderstood, sympathetic monsters—and Shelley’s Creature is the primogenitor of this tradition.” Olivia Rutigliano praises Guillermo Del Toro’s new adaptation of Frankenstein. | Lit Hub Film
• Philippa Gregory looks at what we can learn about standing up to tyranny from the rule of classic despot Henry VIII. | Lit Hub History
• Teresa Dzieglewicz considers documentary poetics in the shadow of smothering institutional power. | Lit Hub Politics
• Inspired by her dog Tobi, Andrea Cáceres shares some illustrated affirmations for the canines in your life. | Lit Hub Art
• On the thankless jobs of the woodsmen who watch over England’s Chiltern Hills. | Lit Hub Nature
• J. Malcolm Garcia documents life, death, and poverty in the neighborhood of Alabama Village: “The idea that someone would shoot him made no sense. Everyone liked him.” | Lit Hub Biography
• Scott Miller on the Indian revolutionaries who planned to overthrow the British Raj (from America). | Lit Hub History
• “I was twenty-eight years old and till then had held my nose to be, if not beautiful, at least wholly inoffensive, in keeping with the rest of me.” Read from Luigi Pirandello’s novel One, None, and a Hundred Grand, translated by Sean Wilsey. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Rhian Sasseen considers Ron Padgett’s meditations on mortality. | The Nation
• “What do all the fragments add up to, beyond fulfillment of the fantasy of publication?” Greta Rainbow on the state of the braided essay. | Dirt
• What would W.E.B. Du Bois have to say about the demolition of the East Wing? | Jacobin
• How Elon Musk’s AI-powered Wikipedia clone reveals the incredible humanity of the internet’s free encyclopedia. | 404 Media
• “Perhaps the most deliciously empowering scene of pushback, though, doesn’t appear in any of the versions of Gaslight that are currently accessible.” Nora Gilbert investigates a lost version of the play that eventually became the iconic movie. | Public Books
• Barry Schwabsky considers modernity in the context of translating Baudelaire. | The Point 

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The post » Lit Hub Daily: October 29, 2025 appeared first on Our Story Insight.

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1694, Jonathan Swift is ordained a deacon in the Church of Ireland.

• Steven J. Zipperstein explores the biographical underpinnings of Philip Roth’s iconic work of Jewish-American fiction, Portnoy’s Complaint. | Lit Hub Criticism
• What the fascist tech bros get wrong about Prometheus. (And yes, they do want to build a 450-foot statue on Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay). | Lit Hub Politics
• Ben Machell chronicles the life of Tony Cornell, the 20th century’s most prolific ghost hunter. | Lit Hub History
• How Ludwig Wittgenstein “came to think of philosophy as a never-ending form of therapy.” | Lit Hub Biography
• Lauren Hough goes looking for ghost towns (which is harder than it sounds). | Texas Highways
• Aida Alami reports on the status of Leqaa Kordia, “the last Columbia protester in ICE detention.” | The New Yorker
• Amber Tamblyn remembers Andrea Gibson, “that rare breed of writer whose deep compassion for the human condition was limitless, potent, and unequivocal.” | Poetry
• “Despite their sometimes shaggy-dog qualities, they have a centripetal force to them.” Gene Seymour considers Chester Himes’ Harlem noirs. | The Nation
• Michael Callahan considers the case of the Hardy Boys’ success. | Smithsonian Magazine
• Writers, musicians, and the Simpsons discuss their favorite Pynchon novels. | The New York Times
• “I’m surprised to find that, despite my vanguard pieties, I do think of writing as therapy. I think of it as cardiac rehab.” Ben Lerner on open-heart surgery. | New York Review of Books
• Meghan Racklin considers Fanny Howe’s pseudonymous romance novels, and their “anticipation of [her] later spiritual seeking.” | The New Republic
• How a cryptic Substack edgelord exerted influence over New York’s most reactionary art and literature scene from across the Atlantic. | The Cut
• Xiaolu Guo on disrupting and reinventing works in the Western canon, and “writing [as] a form of semiotic sabotage.” | Words Without Borders
• Tita Chico examines the radical power of Black global cinema. | Public Books
• Another reason not to use AI? Turns out, LLMs get brain rot, too. | Wired
• “My brain is not immune to the realities of history. The heart, though, is a machine that can be more easily fueled by mythology, by invention.” Hanif Abdurraqib on the possibilities of the song “Groove Theory.” | Longreads
• Zadie Smith makes the case for (serious) glamour. | Vogue
• Stefania Heim and Ara H. Merjian explore the often overlooked writing of Giorgio de Chirico. | Public Books

Also on Lit Hub:

Stephen King reflects on the numerous adaptations of his work • The impact of Black labor unions on poetry • Read John Updike’s letters to his editor, William Maxwell • Why we should “move slow and make things” • Jane Ciabattari interviews Adam Johnson • The sweet spot between memoir and fiction • Yaron Weitzman recommends books for basketball lovers • The horrors of the troubled teen industry • The influence of Welsh culture on Fleetwood Mac and more • The folklore behind natural history • When Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth went to the United Nations • On loving the Lithuanian language and being trapped by it • Sewing as a way to look forward • The trailblazing career of Paulette Nardal • Amy Gallo Ryan considers monogamous writing • The mysteries behind words of unknown origins • Is your small town the center of the universe? • Five essential books for understanding Haitian history • What her mother’s past as an inventor taught Coco McCracken • On school lunches (also, a chicken soup recipe!) •  Hedi El Kholti and Dan Simon remember their friend Gary Indiana • Six essential texts on the German Peasants’ War • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • How Christopher Columbus wreaked havoc in the Caribbean • Maris Kreizman suggests you go easy on yourself • Evan Dando the beginning of his sobriety • The race to develop nuclear weapons in Germany, the USSR, and Japan • The finalists for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize answer our questions • Cynthia Zarin remembers her late friend, writer Alison Rose • How processing trauma helped push Gabriel Urza’s novel forward • The best reviewed books of the week • The relationship between documentary filmmaking and memoir • Why do humans fixate on flying? • Grant Chemidlin recalls how shame drove him away from writing • The impact of climate change on global food production

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THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1948, Ntozake Shange is born. 

• Why don’t Americans talk about the Spanish-American War? “Not until the conflict in Cuba and the Philippines did America’s love of war become so bold that one can track the transformation.” | Lit Hub History
• Remembering Courtney Kampa through a posthumous collection capturing her vibrant life and creative ethos. | Lit Hub Craft
• “But you are making plans / without a future and my now / is twisted into your crying.” Read “Entanglements,” a poem by Ursula K. Le Guin about cats. | Lit Hub Poetry
• Matthew Restall looks at the facts, myths, and familiar political battleground of Christopher Columbus. | Lit Hub Politics
• Colm Tóibín on why he established a press to publish László Krasznahorkai. | The Guardian
• Anna E. Clark explores Trump’s disastrous impact on American education—and what can be done. | Public Books
• “So, what these platforms aspire to is their own demise, right?” Cory Doctorow talks to Amy Goodman about Enshittification. | Democracy Now!
• “Somehow Violet Lang barely seems to have been real; one can picture her passing into legend.” Anthony Lane explores the life and work of a debutant turned poet. | The New Yorker
• “Lexicographers can only document change in the language. What people do with the language is out of their hands.” Stefan Fatsis documents the history of a slur. | Defector
• Examining the Portland Frog as a surreal symbol of protest: “I got maced in the air vent. Essentially, I coughed a little. Noticed a small hint of peppermint and just continued to be in my frog costume for another hour.” | 404 Media
• David Trotter on Mrs. Dalloway and what Virginia Woolf owes to Jane Austen. | London Review of Books
• “Art, and speculation more generally, can commandeer the structures of the sensible, even when these are being actively produced to sustain bordering and racialized repression.” Kalindi Vora considers the border as a technology, and art as a disruptive force. | Public Books
• Hilton Als revisits Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy, “a systematic study of existence, values, dread, the universe.” | The Paris Review
• In the era of AI, how do we decide what is and is not intelligence? Patrick House meditates on the question. | Los Angeles Review of Books
• “While it doesn’t require a great leap of the imagination to suspect that Bellow shaped the novel to depict himself in a favorable light, for decades, it was the only version of the story that readers were likely to see.” On reevaluating Saul Bellow. | Slate
• Talia Bhatt looks at the present and future of the internet’s trans fiction writers. | The Verge

Also on Lit Hub:

58 books you need to read • Lukas Gage recommends his favorite celebrity memoirs • On Peter Matthiessen’s moral ambiguity • Quan Barry talks about writing a horror story set in Antarctica • Authors answer our burning questions • The physical and mental trauma of the Second World War • How learning Latin can help untangle history from the present • How Silicon Valley became a center of American authoritarianism • Satirizing a character who reminds you of yourself • On translating Terao Tetsuya’s Spent Bullets • Eli Rallo explores pretending to be okay • Chris Kraus on researching the the Nagamo Trail Murder • Hester Kaplan looks for her father on Mark Twain’s farm • Hot take! You don’t need AI to be good at writing • Susan Orlean’s TBR •  A notorious case of white supremacist violence in Owensboro, Kentucky • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • The overlooked role of photography in fiction • On the 30-year legacy of His Dark Materials • Toni Morrison on the photography of James Van Der Zee • Mai Serhan searches for connection with her homeland of Palestine • This week on the Lit Hub Podcast • Books to feed your inner teenage weirdo • Sue Monk Kidd on finding a flow state • The best reviewed books of the week • The art and artifice of a dollhouse’s miniature world •  How those fleeing slavery found new lives in the North

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THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1923, Italo Calvino is born. 

• “But you are making plans / without a future and my now / is twisted into your crying.” Read “Entanglements,” a poem by Ursula K. Le Guin about cats. | Lit Hub Poetry
• Anna North explores literature of the Roman Empire (and how learning Latin can help untangle history from the present). | Lit Hub Craft
• How Silicon Valley became a center of American authoritarianism: “Some of the tech leaders presented themselves as moderates, but they politicked and spoke like right-wing reactionaries, especially on social media.” | Lit Hub Politics
• Why don’t Americans talk about the Spanish-American War? “Not until the conflict in Cuba and the Philippines did America’s love of war become so bold that one can track the transformation.” | Lit Hub History
• Sonora Jha considers the challenges of satirizing a character who reminds her of herself. | Lit Hub Craft
• Kevin Wang on translating Terao Tetsuya’s Spent Bullets and the legacy of Taiwan. | Lit Hub On Translation
• Eli Rallo writes about avoiding the OB-GYN, OCD obsessions, and pretending to be okay. | Lit Hub Memoir
• “When Teresa first arrived, about a year back, she’d tried to smuggle in cocaine stuffed inside a ball of knitting yarn.” Read from Delaney Nolan’s new novel, Happy Bad. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Philipp Seuferling considers the deadly relationship between technology and borders. | Public Books 
• On attending Lviv’s BookForum, the biggest book festival in Ukraine, amid Russian attacks. | The Guardian
• “Somehow Violet Lang barely seems to have been real; one can picture her passing into legend.” Anthony Lane explores the life and work of a debutant turned poet. | The New Yorker
• Examining the Portland Frog as a surreal symbol of protest: “I got maced in the air vent. Essentially, I coughed a little. Noticed a small hint of peppermint and just continued to be in my frog costume for another hour.” | 404 Media
• Cornell has dropped its discrimination case against a pro-Palestine professor, after being widely condemned by other faculty members. | The Nation
• “Lexicographers can only document change in the language. What people do with the language is out of their hands.” Stefan Fatsis documents the history of a slur. | Defector

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The post » Lit Hub Daily: October 15, 2025 appeared first on Our Story Insight.

THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET

TODAY: In 1963, French writer, playwright, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau dies.   

• What a 1977 Czech writers’ manifesto can teach us about “America’s decades-long drift into authoritarianism.” | Lit Hub Politics
• “Pynchon’s United States is never black and white… It’s in the struggle against the cops, it’s in the fight between boss and the workers.” Thomas Pynchon has been warning us about American fascism the whole time. | Lit Hub Criticism
• “There’s something cathartic about reading about the end of the world.” When dystopian fiction gets a little too real. | Lit Hub Craft
• Ed Simon explores Americanism in Edgar Allan Poe’s work (and the abject horrors of being buried alive). | Lit Hub Criticism
• “If the world cannot stop the genocide against us, then at least let it carry our stories. We may not be able to protect our lives, but we can fight to ensure that our story is told.” Mohammed al-Sawwaf on the impossible choice of leaving Gaza or staying to tell his people’s stories. | The Nation
• Elisa Gabbert writes a postmortem for Best American Poetry. | The New York Times
• Matthew Wills examines the history of the Soviet dissident memoir. | JSTOR Daily
• A few things that feel like writing but aren’t, from detangling hair to opening a lobster. | Dirt
• “Do such memoirs succeed where other efforts have failed, or do they only further mystify the animal–human connection?” Rebecca Van Laer on the limits of animal memoirs. | Orion
• Jo Livingstone revisits the “anarchic and surreal vengeance” of Diane DiMassa’s lesbian comic classic, Hothead Paisan. | The New Yorker
• Philip Oltermann untangles the story of the “Pushkin Job”—an international rare book heist. | The Guardian
• Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi reflects on enduring two years of genocide in Gaza. | The Nation
• Orisanmi Burton considers Assata Shakur’s legacy. | Protean Magazine
• “Mallon isn’t always the protagonist you might want, or expect, him to be. Such is the messiness of our diaries.” Sheila McClear on Thomas Mallon’s diaries of the AIDS era, and what happens when private documents become historical sources. | The Nation
• Sloane Crosley considers “Fitzgerald’s prose alcohol content” and the ambivalence of American drinking culture. | The Yale Review
• Angelica Frey explores Nazi occultism and what it can teach us about the nature of fascism. | JSTOR Daily
• David Berry breaks down the financial reality of writing a book without going entirely broke (and yes, it involves finding $100 outside the library). | The Walrus
• “No comedian is in danger of going to jail—or even taken off Netflix—for racist or homophobic material. Suggesting that Charlie Kirk’s killer voted for Trump? That’s another story.” A deep dive into the weird world of “anti-woke” comedy. | The Baffler
• Read from Joe Sacco’s accounts of a history of violence in Uttar Pradesh. | The New Yorker

Also on Lit Hub:

How Ikram Talaat Ahmed transformed Gaza’s displacement tents into schools •  Michelle Gurule on writing about sex work • Why it’s okay that Mira Ptacin’s son doesn’t like to read • On returning to a once-abandoned story • Growing older and forging connection through poetry •  The fight to save a medieval Palestinian library • How the collapse of local journalism can decimate community trust • On Proust, the search for models of translation, and Charlotte Mandell • How corporate tech enshittifies apps to skirt the law • The possibilities of a liberated future for Palestine • Gertrude Stein’s “desire to wring every ounce of meaning from a limited set of words” • Politics, art, and why we write the extra details • The art of getting inside a despicable character’s head • How democracy erodes into fascism • Caren Beilin’s TBR • On motherhood, food, and acts of care • How learning Italian might help your writing in English • Georgiann Davis explains why she isn’t like JD Vance • Maris Kreizman sets the record about censorship straight • The past and present of violence against Indigenous people in California • Raharimanana on Madagascar’s revolutions • When the songwriter behind “I Fought the Law” is your dad • 5 book reviews you need to read this week • New York art world clout at Max’s Kansas City in the 70’s • The sensationalist journalism of Richard Harding Davis • The first English language review of László Krasznahorkai • This week on the Lit Hub Podcast! • Hannah Bonner talks to director Nia DaCosta about Hedda • Why Trump can’t erase the abolitionist history of Harpers Ferry • The best reviewed books of the week • Lessons (and hope!) in the writing of Maria Janion • It’s a miracle that Beowulf survived the Middle Ages • Why it’s okay to embrace your trash first drafts • Gilbert King introduces the case of Leo Schofield

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Erica Ezeifedi, Associate Editor, is a transplant from Nashville, TN that has settled in the North East. In addition to being a writer, she has worked as a victim advocate and in public libraries, where she has focused on creating safe spaces for queer teens, mentorship, and providing test prep instruction free to students. Outside of work, much of her free time is spent looking for her next great read and planning her next snack.

Find her on Twitter at @Erica_Eze_.

View All posts by Erica Ezeifedi

The book world just got shook up with some wonderful news: the iconic Reading Rainbow is coming back! Not only that, it’s going to be hosted by literal ray of sunshine, Mychal the Librarian. When I tell you this filled my heart! The original LaVar Burton-hosted show is deeply embedded in the foundation of who I am as a person, and I can’t think of anyone better to be at the new iteration’s helm than Mychal.

Keeping the good times rolling, there are new books to discuss. This week, we’re highlighting some of the best new books out this month from different genres.

Unsurprisingly, it was hard to narrow down which books to highlight, and I found it especially hard to whittle down the sci-fi/fantasy selections. This was because, 1.) these are two of my favorite genres, and 2.) there were books like: epic fantasy Queen Demon: The Rising World, Book 2 by Martha Wells, fantasy novella A Mouthful of Dust (The Singing Hills Cycle Book 6) by Nghi Vo, and the historical Southern Gothic Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce. There are also a couple of Cinderella-inspired fantasies: Never Ever After by Sue Lynn Tan and the queer, gothic Cinder House by Freya Marske. Whew.

As for the books I featured below, there is an otherworldly sci-fi set in the heart of Oklahoma’s Cherokee Nation, a 1950s Hong Kong haunting, a steamy and satirical romance, a sapphic fantasy with a cursed knight/witch pairing, and more.

New Books

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Sci-Fi

Hole in the Sky by Daniel H. Wilson

Historical Fiction

The Hong Kong Widow by Kristen Loesch

A massacre that the police say never took place. A woman haunted by the past. In 1950s Hong Kong, a young Chinese refugee still trying to put her past behind her is recruited into a strange seance competition in a notoriously haunted house. She’s not the only one. Six mediums are invited to take part in six seances over six nights. But on the last night, police are called in to handle the aftermath of a brutal massacre—one they find absolutely no proof of. — Rachel Brittain

Nonfiction

We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat

Julian Brave NoiseCat grew up with a Secwépemc and St’at’imc father and a non-Native mother. But when his father disappeared, NoiseCat threw himself into studying Native history. Now in We Survived the Night, NoiseCat presents the history of First Peoples across the centuries as they face ongoing colonization and press forward for a better future. — Kendra Winchester

Romance

Female Fantasy by Iman Hariri-Kia

Equal parts satirical, steamy, and swoony, Female Fantasy is a romance novel tailor-made for book lovers who can’t resist a meta twist. Joonie, a copywriter by day and fanfic writer by night, knows no real guy can measure up to her ultimate book boyfriend—a merman hero named Ryke. But when she learns Ryke is based on a real person, she sets off to track him down, dragging along her brother’s infuriating best friend as an unwilling road-trip companion. What follows is a hilariously chaotic, self-aware journey through romance tropes that doubles as a genuine story about finding love where you least expect it. This is a joyful reminder of why readers fall in love with the genre in the first place. — Nikki DeMarco

Graphic Novel/Manga

Angelica and the Bear Prince by Trung Le Nguye

When Angelica’s perfect life comes crashing down around her ears, she has Peri, the bear mascot of a local theater, to provide encouragement and support. But who is Peri behind the mask? Angelica takes a job at the theater to find out! — Eileen Gonzalez

Fantasy

The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri

Here’s a new sapphic fantasy from the award-winning author of the Burning Kingdoms series! A witch and a knight fated to fall in love and be torn apart over and over must find a way to halt the cycle of their story. Meanwhile, a mysterious assassin is on the prowl, looking to permanently destroy anyone with a story like theirs. — Liberty Hardy

Literary Fiction

Capitalists Must Starve by Seolyeon Park, translated by Anton Hur

Capitalists Must Starve tells the fictionalized story of a real-life labor activist who led a strike for workers’ rights in 1930s Pyongyang. The novel, set in Japanese-occupied Korea, follows a woman willing to risk everything to fight for better conditions for working-class women in a world determined not to hear what they have to say. It’s a story that can find comparisons the world over through the struggle for humane working conditions within the unrelenting capitalist machine. — Rachel Brittain

Horror

The Unveiling by Quan Barry

The Unveiling is a literary survival horror novel that takes place on a luxury Antarctic cruise. Striker is a Black film scout who has joined the cruise in the hopes of capturing locations for a big-budget movie. But nothing about the cruise goes according to plan, and when an excursion goes terribly wrong, Striker and a small group of survivors find themselves stranded in the middle of the Antarctic. As things grow more dire, hostilities and people’s true nature come to the surface. — Emily Martin

Young Adult

Blood & Breath by Qurratulayn

Children’s/Middle Grade

The Beasts Beneath the Winds: Tales of Southeast Asia’s Mythical Creatures by Hanna Alkaf

This illustrated anthology is perfect for young mythology lovers! In each chapter, children encounter cryptids from Southeast Asian folklore and find both danger and adventure in their midst. — Andy Minshew

Mystery, Thriller, or True Crime

Boom Town by Nic Stone

For fans of noir, missing person cases, and Atlanta-set crime novels!

After Michah “Lyriq” Johanssen’s former partner and dancer at Boom Town disappeared, another dancer, Damaris “Charm” Wilburn, didn’t show up for her shift. Lyriq finds no help in finding the women and is plunged into the underworld of Atlanta as she narrows in on a wealthy man with an obsession. — Jamie Canaves

More New Releases Mentioned Today on All The Books! Podcast:

Other Book Riot New Releases Resources:

• All the Books, our weekly new book releases podcast, where Liberty and a cast of co-hosts talk about eight books out that week that we’ve read and loved.
• The New Books Newsletter, where we send you an email of the books out this week that are getting buzz.
• Finally, if you want the real inside scoop on new releases, you have to check out Book Riot’s New Release Index! That’s where I find 90% of new releases, and you can filter by trending books, Rioters’ picks, and even LGBTQ new releases!

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