After the year we’ve had, there’s no predicting anything about the year that’s to come. But whatever else might be fated to happen (to us) in 2026, there will definitely be books, and a lot of them will be good. So in a spirit of hope and joy, here are the works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that the Lit Hub staff is most excited to pick up in the (first half of the) year ahead. Happy New Year, friends. Fingers crossed for a good one.
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Eric Lichtblau, American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate
Little, Brown, January 6
You could pick a county in just about any state in the union and do a terrifying deep dive into resurgent white nationalism but Orange County California—ancestral homeland of the country club Nazi—might be one of the scariest. While Eric Lichtblau’s American Reich focuses on the murder of Blaze Bernstein—a gay, Jewish Ivy League student who was killed by a former high school classmate who’d become part of a neo-Nazi group—it goes much deeper in examining the far right fringes of California conservatism and its influence on white nationalism all over America. –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief
Val McDermid, Winter: The Story of a Season
Atlantic Monthly Press, January 6
As the token “person from Alaska” on staff at Lit Hub, I’m very much looking forward to this book about WINTER! McDermid’s nonfiction meditation on the winter season and all its accompanying traditions and accoutrements sounds like the perfect book to curl up with on a snowy day. Winter is a tough season, but it’s also the perfect time to rest and reflect and gather yourself up after a long year, or prepare yourself for the year ahead. McDermid’s book promises to reflect on all the things that make winter such a strange, difficult, beautiful time of year. –McKayla Coyle, Publishing Coordinator
Jean-Baptiste Andrea, tr. Frank Wynne, Watching Over Her
Simon & Schuster, January 6
Andrea’s latest novel Watching Over Her (Veiller sur elle), in which a sculptor dying in an Italian monastery tells the “ribald and hilarious” story of his life, won the 2023 Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize; Frank Wynne’s English translation was published in the UK in 2025 and is finally making its way to the US this year. Read it before it becomes a movie. –Emily Temple, Managing Editor
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The School of Night
Penguin Press, January 13
Knausgaard continues his sprawling “Morning Star” epic—which started as a trilogy but now expands to a fourth, with a fifth book already out in Sweden. It’s perhaps his most mystically-inclined novel yet: a riff on Faust that jumps from London in the 80s to the late 00s, following an ambitious photographer who makes a deal with a maybe-devil, an older artist of mysterious intentions. –Drew Broussard, Podcast Editor
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Daniyal Mueenuddin, This Is Where the Serpent Lives
Knopf, January 13
It’s been 17 years since Daniyal Mueenuddin’s debut, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and won the Story Prize. At last, he is back, and with a novel that follows a Pakistani family and their employees through six decades. Sure to be a knockout. –ET
Senaa Ahmad, The Age of Calamities
Henry Holt, January 13
I absolutely loved Senaa Ahmad’s deranged Anne Boleyn story “Let’s Play Dead,” in which Anne Boleyn simply will not die, so I was thrilled to learn that her full collection—which Claire Oshetsky calls “wild, incantatory, upending”—will be coming out this year. I am very much looking forward to seeing where else Ahmad’s bizarre, brilliant imagination might take me next. –ET
Madeline Cash, Lost Lambs
FSG, January 13
Picking up this book the other day, I meant to simply flip through the first pages to get a quick sense of its tone, and instead found myself reading and reading, utterly absorbed. It reads like a quirked-up Jonathan Franzen or Paul Murray, drilling into each of its characters, the five members of the Flynn family, as they each deal with their own specific, incongruous, very odd personal dilemmas. The dad thinks seriously of driving the minivan into the sea. Because the mother is thinking seriously of sleeping with their neighbor. The eldest daughter, Abigail, just off an affair with a teacher at her high school, is now dating another older man named “War Crimes Wes.” The youngest daughter, Harriet, a genius who can’t seem to stay out of trouble, is desperately trying to evade being shipped off to a wilderness-reform-boarding school. And the middle child, Louise, well, it’s easy to be forgotten about when you’re the middle child. Unfortunately, she’s up to the most disturbing thing of all, corresponding secretly with an online terrorist. Oh well. That’s life in the Flynn family! The plot itself is surprising and wild, but you’ll stay for the extremely specific people that make up this family and town. I was laughing immediately, couldn’t help turning the page over and over again: I didn’t want to be apart from these funny little weirdos even for a minute. –Julia Hass, Book Marks Associate Editor
Elisa Shua Dusapin, The Old Fire
Summit Books, January 13
Agathe returns to her family home in the French countryside after fifteen years away. Her father has died, and she and her sister Véra have nine days to clean and empty the home—during which a lifetime’s worth of memories resurface. It’s a really beautiful, quiet novel. A story of secrets and family, asking and answering the question if one can ever really can go home again. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor
Kathleen Boland, Scavengers
Viking, January 13
A hectic and rowdy ride, Scavengers is many things at once: a treasure hunt, a road-trip novel, and a poignant character study of a mother and daughter who have, both as a family, and as individuals, lost their way. Bea is realistic and practical: she had to be, she’s the daughter of Christy, who’s just about as whimsical and head-in-the-clouds as a person can get. Ever since Bea was little, she’s been taking care of her mother: thinking ahead, being the person in charge. But she was fired from her lucrative job in New York, and is forced to move back in with her mother, who lives in Utah in a house that Bea pays for. They clash and collide, trying to reckon with one another, with the unruly chaos that family can wreak on each other’s lives and emotions. Bea incredulously finds out that Christy has been involved in a treasure hunt for years now, believing that there is a million dollars hidden somewhere in the state, planning and plotting her methods of finding it, and Christy is finally setting her plan in motion. She and Bea set off, Christy, to find her fortune, and Bea, to prove her mother is wrong and insane, yet again. Come for the eccentric mother-daughter duo, for the realistic and often frustrating depictions of trying to love one’s family, and stay for the beautiful and desolate scene setting of desert country, the stories of the desperate seekers out there in this hopeless land, and for the gold one can find in this dirt, if you really believe in it. –JH
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Gayle Feldman, Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built
Random House, January 13
When we think of the glory days of American publishing, with its domineering, swashbuckling editors and (very) well paid superstar novelists making $2 a word for short stories, we are thinking of a world built by Bennett Cerf. Having co-founded Random House in 1927 Cerf was largely responsible for bringing modernism to the masses, putting the likes of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and William Faulkner in front of millions of American readers. But not only does Gayle Feldman’s definitive biography highlight Cerf’s literary instincts it also reveals a canny businessman who understood how to make books a part of America’s burgeoning, mid-century celebrity culture, making the likes of Truman Capote and James Michener into household names. – JD
Ian Frazier, The Snakes That Ate Florida: Reporting, Essays, and Criticism
FSG, January 13
Ian Frazier has had an enviable career, forging a seemingly old-school path of humor writing, essays, and long form magazine writing. What bridges all of his work is an attention to jokes and memorably phrased specifics, combined with a keen nose for a funny premise. This new collection coming out at the top of the year gathers writing from across 50 years of curious, funny nonfiction work for The New Yorker. We get to see many corners of the world through Frazier’s eyes, from the personalities behind maraschino cherries, monstrously destructive wildfires, and the titular Everglades-devouring Burmese pythons. –James Folta, Staff Writer
Melissa Faliveno, Hemlock
Little, Brown, January 20
Queer gothic is my favorite genre and Hemlock looks like a particularly cool work of queer gothic! Sam’s finally found some stability in her life when she decides to visit her family’s cabin deep in the woods of Wisconsin—the cabin where her mother vanished years ago. Sam slips back into her addiction and as her alcoholism worsens, so do the visions and apparitions that seem to be haunting the forest. As Sam spirals, it becomes clear that whatever’s in the woods with her is more sinister than she thought. –MC
Emanuela Anechoum, tr. Lucy Rand, Tangerinn
Europa, January 20
Mina has been living in London for ten years, but when her father dies she finally returns to the Calabrian coast to help her sister run her family’s bar. But of course, it’s not just a bar—it’s a gathering place, a safe place, a place where outsiders can build a community. As Mina and her sister try to keep the bar running, Mina reexamines her relationship with the place she once called home. Tangerinn is an honest, vulnerable story of home, family, and what it means to find your place in the world. –MC
Julian Barnes, Departure(s)
Knopf, January 20
A great novelist of our time, Julian Barnes will celebrate his 80th birthday this year. With 25 books under his belt already, he makes it look easy: spinning out meditative tales with precision and grace, each still hitting just as much as the last. This new venture, entitled Departure(s) may be just that, a “departure,” but probably not too much. He’s written memoirs, and he’s written novels, and now we have a ideal-sounding blend between the two. A narrator named Julian is reckoning with getting older: with illness, with the specter of death, and, as ever, the fallibility of memory, relationships, and time. Barnes is nothing if not consistent: we can trust that we’ll be swept away, both seen and surprised, in this new and evocative work. –JH
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Jennette McCurdy, Half His Age
Ballantine, January 20
Jennette McCurdy blew the literary world away with her bracing and revelatory memoir about her mother, I’m Glad My Mom Died, in 2022. She proved herself, with biting grace, to be more than just a celebrity writing a run of the mill memoir. She led with vulnerability and nuance, revealing an abusive past with her mother, and a shockingly wise approach to getting through her traumas. All to say, McCurdy has earned the title of Writer now, not just a celebrity who writes. This year welcomes her first novel, a story of girl teenagedom and yearning, and an older male professor that takes up the centrality of the protagonist’s obsession. It’s an old story that’s constantly made new again: let’s see how McCurdy wields this knife. –JH
Chuck Klosterman, Football
Penguin Press, January 20
It is not a controversial thing to say that football is America’s game: it is violent, martial, and tribal; it makes billions of dollars and exploits thousands of people; it is brash and jingoistic, clinging all the while to an antiquated paternalism that fetishizes hierarchy and patriarchy. Yes, indeed, it is America’s game. And if you have any doubts, there is no better writer alive than Chuck Klosterman to walk you through all of the above… and much, much more. –JD
Alia Hanna Habib, Take It from Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch
Pantheon, January 20
Habib is a literary agent to some of today’s most notable nonfiction writers including Hanif Abdurraqib, Judy Batalion, Merve Emre, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Clint Smith. She also has a popular Substack, Delivery & Acceptance, that provides wonderful behind the scenes information on the publishing industry for insiders and outsiders alike. If you’re a nonfiction writer trying to get your book published, this book will no doubt be an essential resource. –EF
Nina McConigley, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder
Pantheon, January 20
Twelve years after her magnificent debut short story collection Cowboys & East Indians—which explores the immigrant experience in the contemporary American West—won the PEN/Open Book Award, Nina McConigley is back with a 1980s-set murder-mystery novel about two Wyoming-based, Indian American sisters who decide to do away with their uncle. As a Wyomingite, 80s nostalgic, and long-time McConigley fan, I’ve been looking forward to this one for months. –Daniel Sheehan, Book Marks Editor in Chief
Gabriel Tallent, Crux
Riverhead, January 20
In Tallent’s second novel—after the bestselling My Absolute Darling—two teenagers, unlike in every way except in the difficulty of their home lives, forge a deep bond while rock climbing in the Mojave Desert, but soon must face the real world, which barrels down upon them. I love a good friendship novel, and I particularly love novels that tell me something about the world through an unfamiliar lens (I saw Free Solo but that’s about it), so I’m looking forward to this one. –ET
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Larissa Pham, Discipline
Random House, January 20
I loved this erudite and surprisingly elegiac novel, in which a woman on a book tour confronts the life—and the person—she thought she had escaped, or perhaps lost. Pham is an art writer—her debut work of nonfiction, Pop Song, was wonderful, and it’s exciting to see her turn her hand and sensibility to fiction, especially fiction this lovely and smart about artmaking, love, ambition, and loneliness. –ET
Jeanette Winterson, One Aladdin Two Lamps
Grove Press, January 20
Is it fiction? Is it essay? Is it myth? The latest from Winterson is, fittingly, a little of everything. Loosely using The Thousand and One Nights as framing device, Winterson once again blends genres and modes to deliver an omnivoracious look at modern life through the lens of story. –DB
Rachel Eliza Griffiths, The Flower Bearers: A Memoir
Random House, January 20
On the day that Rachel Eliza Griffiths married Salman Rushdie, her closest friend, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, died suddenly. Less than a year later, Rushdie was attacked onstage and severely injured. In her memoir, Griffiths writes with deep wisdom and tenderness about both relationships, and about the ways in which grief is inextricably linked with our greatest loves. This is a precise and beautiful portrait of the moments, both excruciating and wonderful, that give life its meaning. –Jessie Gaynor, Senior Editor
The Friends of Attention, Attensity!
Crown, January 20
If you, like me, are haunted every day by Annie Dillard’s koan/threat “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” then you already understand why a book about how to salvage our besieged attention spans is appealing. Plus, I’m a sucker for collective authorship, especially when the group calls itself something resonant of 19th century utopian movements like “The Friends of Attention.” The tech backlash section of my TBR list is growing precariously tall, but this one seems like it deserves a spot anyway. –Calvin Kasulke, Associate Publisher
Jim Butcher, Twelve Months
Ace, January 20
Jim Butcher is the granddaddy of modern urban fantasy and he returns to his legendary Harry Dresden series with an unexpected entry, one that serves as much an exercise in grief and healing for the author as it does Dresden and his allies. On the one hand, it’s a big ol’ fantasy novel, following the clean-up after a massive magic battle destroys much of Chicago—but on the other, it is way more interested in how people process grief and depression than you’d expect from book eighteen of a long-running series. Rare is the series that can pull this kind of thing off, this late in the game. –DB
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Ed Simon, Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling
Bloomsbury Academic, January 22
Lit Hub columnist Ed Simon writes often about the apocalypse, always with an eye to what writers can and should do when the world is suffering, whether that threat is rising authoritarianism, war, or climate change. In his new book, Simon “addresses the wider question of what it’s like to write during what could be the last decades of human civilization, arguing that to craft imaginative spaces through the magic of words isn’t superfluous.” Why would anyone write when the world is on fire? Looking at books from the Bible to Stephen King, this one has an answer. –EF
William J. Mann, Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood
Simon & Schuster, January 27
While I’m not much of a true crime guy, I appreciate that a splashy Hollywood murder is an attention-grabbing narrative upon which to hang a history of societal changes in the immediate aftermath of World War II. (It’s certainly catchier than titling a book, say, A History of Societal Changes in the Immediate Aftermath of World War II.) If a better understanding of postwar America comes with sifting through a notorious but misunderstood cold case, I’m happy to go along for the ride. –CK
Emi Yagi, tr. Yuki Tejima, When the Museum is Closed
Soft Skull, January 27
I loved Emi Yagi’s surreal office story Diary of a Void, where a woman pretends to be pregnant for nine months to get out of doing annoying tasks in her office. When the Museum is Closed is about a part-time, lonely museum worker, Rika Horauchi, whose job is to converse with a statue of Venus—in Latin—on Mondays, when the museum is closed. A fun and (metaphysical) sexy queer love story, Yagi’s latest tackles love, loneliness, and the role of women’s beauty in society. –EF
Aoife Josie Clements, Persona
LittlePuss Press, January 27
I pre-ordered this book a few months ago after stumbling on LittlePuss’s excellent social media campaign. What’s the deal with this weird company? How does it tie into the travails of a trans woman who discovers porn of herself that she doesn’t remember making? I don’t know but I’m expecting capitalism is involved, but also terror. Either way, I’m stoked to find out. –DB
Stephen Fishbach, Escape!
Dutton, January 27
Reality competition shows always transport me to this place of hyperreality and uncannyness, and there’s something so specific about a novel written by a former Survivor contestant about the drama and terror of appearing on a Survivor-esque series, especially when it considers the experiences and motivations of not only of the contestants, but everyone on location. As someone who also used to spend a lot of time behind a camera, I’m such a sucker for anything that takes me back into the weird, often cruel world of production. –Oliver Scialdone, Community Editor
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Alice Evelyn Yang, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing
William Morrow, January 27
This debut is a magical realist family saga of a daughter’s fraught reunion with her father, refracted with the history of 20th century China and the mythical beasts that stalk it. Thao Thai writes that it “sings with artful prose and unforgettable storytelling, reminding us of the promise of redemption, even amid the dark consequences of violence.” Plus, it’s an early contender for the best title of the year. –ET
George Saunders, Vigil
Random House, January 27
Is it a long (192 pages) George Saunders story? Is it a short (192 pages) George Saunders novel? It doesn’t really matter—fans of the writer will be pleased to find his irreverent, gee-shucks-with-a-sharp-edge, butt-jokes-with-a-heart-of-gold voice intact in his latest missive (192 pages), which concerns a ghost tasked with “comforting” an oil tycoon on his deathbed—that is, if the other ghosts, both “real” and of the tycoon’s invention, don’t get in the way, and force him to confront the consequences of his actions (read: climate change). Like so much of Saunders’s work, it’s goofy, it’s absurd, and it’s also reaching toward the unfathomable, asking The Big Questions about morality, fate, and what it means to die (and thus, of course, to live). –ET
Fatima Bhutto, The Hour of the Wolf
Scribner, January 27
The Hour of the Wolf is a memoir about one of my favorite things in the world: dogs. Technically this book is about just one dog, the little Jack Russell terrier that became Bhutto’s closest companion during one of the most difficult times of her life. It’s in the company of this loyal dog that Bhutto is finally able to examine some of her most profound personal tragedies and the complex relationships that have shaped her life. The Hour of the Wolf is a far-ranging memoir about motherhood, art, family, and the way that a dog’s unconditional love can offer a rare opportunity for healing. –MC
