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.
Latest
A Song of Solomon Woman's "Virgo Shit": Deesha Philyaw's The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman
There is something infectiously appealing in Schar’s self-interest, in her daring to dream of what the church can do for her, and in the frankness and self-awareness she brings to the role of First Lady. Schar is so mesmerizing, so alluring, complex to the point of being unpredictable.
(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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
“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?
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.
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).
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.
Reviews
Review: A Shot of Urgent Hope in Deb Olin Unferth's Earth 7
Earth 7 really sings in small moments that show deep respect for life, for its remarkable diversity, its endurance and durability. Unferth’s admiration for the inhabitants of Earth, its many creatures large and small, is infectious, at times exhilarating—a shot of urgent hope.
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.
Reviews
Review: No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed and the Refugee Liminal State
No God But Us vividly illuminates what life is like for the many queer refugees who live in liminal space for years, whose only home is the state of uncertainty.
Stories in the World
I Am the Ghost Here: Kim Samek and the Ghost of Pandemic Present
Given that many of the stories in Kim Samek’s debut story collection I Am the Ghost Here feature surreal elements, borrowing tropes from science fiction and fantasy, I was surprised to find honest, genuine explorations of the pandemic as a mass disabling event in its fourth and fifth stories.
Features
Polyamory & Polyassery: Lindy West's Adult Braces and Her Many Haters
What wave of feminism is it where we tell a woman she is too clueless to understand what is going on in her own marriage?
Reviews
Review: Camonghne Felix's Let the Poets Govern and the Scam of Representation
Felix stresses that real, substantial change isn’t instant, nor does it happen without us—without people. But real change is happening, will happen, must happen despite the liberal cynicism and fear that will tell you it isn’t, won’t, can’t.