Monthly Book Lists
Books We Like the Looks Of: New Releases in October 2026
It's fall! We look at new releases from friend-of-the-site Patricia Lockwood, Franny Choi, Jane Schoenbrun, and more.
Lisa Butts
Lisa Butts is a book critic and an editor in academic publishing. She studied poetry and creative nonfiction at the New School and Sarah Lawrence College.
Features
(Gay) Quotes from My Life and Other Unfinished Business: Queering Dolly Parton's 1994 Memoir
I bring you here ten of my favorite quotes and anecdotes from this remarkably funny and moving story of Dolly’s life, as she chose to tell it. She is magnanimous and generous, and she gives away exactly as much as she wants to and no more.
Reviews
A Time to Wail: Female Life on Planet Earth by Laleh Khadivi
In her fourth novel, Khadivi asks, what does one do with these questions we can no longer ask, hidden stories that can never be unraveled, which the dead have taken with them to their graves?
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.
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
A Little Less Greek Tragedy, a Little More Genesis: The Book of Chuck by LaToya Watkins
With The Book of Chuck, Watkins cements her place as an essential storyteller of Black life in America and one of Toni Morrison’s heir apparents.
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
“I want to throw myself in front of a speeding car”: Claudia Rankine's Triage and the Toomuchness of It All
How can one live like this, Triage asks, at the same time it declares the question beside the point. What is the alternative?
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.
Reviews
Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim and Wild Speculation on Universal's TV Adaptation
Every detail and plot turn in Sublimation is clearly part of a meticulously well-considered arc. I’m very curious what the adaptation will be like. Whitewashing would be a disaster in this scenario, given the significance of instancing as metaphor for diaspora.
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).