Monthly Book Lists
Books We Like the Looks Of: New Releases in September 2026
It's September and book award season rolls on. We recommend seven new books coming out this month, plus one celebrity memoir from 1994.
Elisabeth Cook
Elisabeth Cook is a book and cultural critic, a fiction writer, and the lead editor of The BookBrowse Review. She has written for Book Riot, Dorkaholics, The Spool, and other publications.
Stories in the World
Just "melt everything together": We Try the Sigrid Nunez "Crookie" Technique
Can you really combine two finished, flour-based products using only heat? If Jo in Nunez's "Mother-Daughter Story" is skeptical of the concept of the crookie to begin with, we were skeptical of the feat she performs with the toaster oven, though impressed by her confidence.
Reviews
"Better than the best reality TV": Shannon Sanders' The Great Wherever and Its Lingering, Gossiping Dead
The Great Wherever centers the pleasures of reading and stories, the pleasures that family and community can create and preserve, and the ordinary, apparently forever-tempting pleasures of messy human drama and gossip.
Monthly Book Lists
Books We Like the Looks Of: New Releases in August 2026
We have great taste and you should subscribe to Who Even Reads to discover the Next Big Thing before the Booker people get their grubby hands all over everything. Here are the Books We Like the Looks Of coming out this August.
Reviews
Names Have Been Changed by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow Explores One Woman's Lonely Version of "Be Gay, Do Crime"
Balasingamchow’s novel speaks to realities of queerness, marginalization, criminality and criminalization, of what not being able to live openly or straightforwardly does to a person and perhaps can’t be—or doesn’t need to be—undone.
Monthly Book Lists
Books We Like the Looks Of: New Releases in July 2026
This month, in the midst of deodorant-testing heat and confused displays of patriotism, we bring you an all-fiction batch of July books, including Colson Whitehead's appealingly named Cool Machine.
Reading Lists
Paperbacks for Pride: 14 Banger Contemporary Books by QTBIPOC
This June, we celebrate Pride with contemporary books by QTBIPOC, including those with identities beyond Western conceptions of queerness. They are transformative, culture-shifting forces, capable of making and unmaking worlds.
Monthly Book Lists
Books We Like the Looks Of: New Releases in June 2026
This month's upcoming books include several debuts, including an enticing fable that draws from Minnesota's racial history, a nonlinear story of queer rural Florida, and a television-ready immigration narrative (at least one).
Reviews
A Double Exclamation in the Greater Milwaukee Area: Patrick Cottrell's Afternoon Hours of a Hermit
The other reviews and accounts of this novel I read before reading the book itself, which rightly suggested a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the proceedings, did nothing to prepare me for the several gut-punch revelations that occur near the end, revelations that hinge on specificity.
Features
Indie Bookstores Promoting Masking and Covid Consciousness in 2026
The trajectory of Covid awareness may not go exactly as many expect, and in the meantime, bookstores are one of the community spaces that can offer a transition point to a different possible future.
Reviews
Review: A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna and the Precarity of the Social Climb
If A Splintering is in some ways a morality tale, it isn’t one that suggests Tara is wrong for wanting more than life has given her. Rather, it shows that by defining her happiness only through the oppression of others, only through ascending from oppressed to oppressor, she remains oppressed.
Monthly Book Lists
Books We Like the Looks Of: New Releases in May 2026
Our monthly book list for May includes nonfiction from Jesmyn Ward, a speculative novel by Tom Lin following Chinese immigrants in South Dakota who encounter a secret government program, and more.