Each year when I compile this list of new books from Chicago authors, I’m in awe of the beauty and breadth that the city’s literary community has to offer. In fact, it feels like there are more books to celebrate than ever before!
No matter your taste or interest as a reader, you’re sure to find a book to delight you. Also, as always, if we missed anything, please let us know! We’ll be happy to add it.
Stay tuned in the summer for Part II of the list and happy reading!
January
Wreck Your Heart
By Lori Rader-Day
Minotaur Books
January 6, 2026
Dahlia “Doll” Devine had the kind of hardscrabble beginning that could launch a thousand broken-hearted country songs, but now she’s the star of her own stage at McPhee’s Tavern. As part of Chicago’s—yes, Chicago’s—country music scene, Dahlia is an up-and-coming singer in spangles and boots of classic country tunes. Up and coming, that is, until her boyfriend Joey up and went, taking the rent money with him.
So Dahlia is back to square one, relying on Alex McPhee—again. Alex helped her out of a bad situation when she was a kid living rough with her mother. Now he’s part landlord, part band booster, all-around rescuer. It’s just that Dahlia wishes she didn’t keep giving him reasons to have to do it.
What Boys Learn
By Andromeda Romano-Lax
Soho Crime
January 6, 2026
Over one terrible weekend, two teenage girls are found dead in a wealthy Chicago suburb. As the community mourns, Abby Rosso, the girls’ high school counselor, begins to suspect that her son was secretly involved in their lives—and possibly, their deaths.
No More Mediocre: A Call to Reimagine our Relationships and Demand More
By Laura Danger
Plume
January 6, 2026
From licensed educator and TikTok phenom Laura Danger, an insightful and practical guide that will teach you how to recognize unproductive dynamics at home, transform your relationships, find your community—and break free from a life of mediocrity.
Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan
By Theodore J. Karamanski
University of Michigan Regional
January 6, 2026
Great Lake is a comprehensive survey of the manifold ways Americans, from the first Native American communities to the present age, have abused, nurtured, loved, and neglected this massive freshwater resource. Extending 307 miles from north to south, the lake cuts across climatic, environmental, and physiographic zones, from the prairies of Illinois to the boreal forests of the north. Bordered by large cities like Chicago and Milwaukee as well as smaller Wisconsin resorts and northern Michigan mines and mill towns, the lake touches people in urban centers and countryside. Thus, the history of Lake Michigan combines the history of frontier resource extraction, agricultural abundance, industrialization, and dense urbanization in the American heartland. Great Lake is the story of the ever-escalating and divergent demands Americans have placed on Lake Michigan, how the lake’s ecosystem responded to those changes, and how together they have shaped the modern American Midwest.
E
By Noa Micaela Fields
Nightboat Books
January 13, 2026
Like a game of telephone gone haywire, these mischievous mishearings and homophonic translations remix a classic of 20th Century American poetry. C’mon, take the E pill (is it estrogen? ecstasy? something else entirely?). E practices mishearing as a bodily reworking of language alongside the poet’s hormonal transition, stretching the upper limits of homophonic translation to unleash the unexpected queer resonances of Louis Zukofsky’s “A.” E alchemizes mishearing into a political possibility of glitching, noncompliance, and protest. Not a translation, but maximally trans, mishearing transmutes language to generate new possibilities: how hormones change the body; how relationships evolve, multiply, and implode over time.
Almost One Night Stand
By A.J. Pine
Sourcebooks Casablanca
January 13, 2026
Craving a fresh start, Haddie Martin trades life in Chicago for a teaching gig in the quirky small town of Summertown, IL. But when she stops in a hotel to rest for the night, she locks eyes with a painfully handsome, nameless stranger who would make the perfect one-night stand. Only…she chickens out at the last minute and disappears. Never expecting to see the man again, Haddie leaves her embarrassing exit in the rear view and drives straight to her new home. She arrives only to find out, thanks to her new landlord, that her apartment has been double rented, and of course, the other tenant is none other than Levi Rourke, the gorgeous man Haddie bailed on just the night before.
The Hitch
By Sara Levine
Roxane Gay Books
January 13, 2026
Rose Cutler defines herself by her exacting standards. As an anti-racist, Jewish secular feminist eco-warrior, she is convinced she knows the right way to do everything, including parent her six-year-old nephew Nathan. When Rose offers to look after him while his parents visit Mexico for a week, her brother and sister-in-law reluctantly agree, provided she understands the rules–routine, bedtime, homework–and doesn’t overstep. But when Rose’s Newfoundland attacks and kills a corgi at the park, Nathan starts acting strangely: barking, overeating, talking to himself. Rose mistakes this behavior as repressed grief over the corgi’s death, but Nathan insists he isn’t grieving, and the dog isn’t dead. Her soul leaped into his body, and now she’s living inside him. Now Rose must banish the corgi from her nephew before the week ends and his parents return to collect their child.
Slut Lullabies
By Gina Frangello
Northwestern University Press
January 15, 2026
Through beauty, horror, humor, and chaos, Gina Frangello’s electric stories mine the human experience. A gay Latino man whose pious relatives are boycotting his commitment ceremony becomes caught up in hypocrisy and splendor when his lover’s Waspy mother hires a glitzy wedding coordinator. A desperate teen “seduces” her teacher in order to blackmail him into funding her young stepmother’s escape from their violent home. A wife turns to infidelity and drugs to distract her from chronic pain following an accident. A teenage boy attempts atonement in Amsterdam after having exploited and betrayed his naive girlfriend at home. A socialite must confront her dark past as her husband’s deteriorating illness erodes both her bank account and social standing.
Intimate and raw, this new edition of Frangello’s short fiction includes two previously unpublished stories. A foreword by Rebecca Makkai explains how Frangello’s incendiary work has opened the door for writing about deeply flawed and fascinating women.
My Sister’s Continent
By Gina Frangello
Northwestern University Press
January 15, 2026
Kirby is a young woman attempting to come to terms with a failed bout of therapy and the truth about her identical twin, Kendra. Since girlhood, Kirby both idolized and envied Kendra, a fearless and charismatic ballet dancer who commanded the attention of everyone in their orbit. In the aftermath of tragedy, Kirby is sent a case study by a former psychiatrist intent on publishing a distorted version of her family’s secrets. She responds by using Kendra’s private and revealing journals to reconstruct their final months together, as well as her own “disastrous” time in therapy, to voice her own truth.
Freud’s “Dora,” a young woman whose mysterious symptoms he contentiously chalked up to “hysteria,” appears at turns in the faces of each twin as they navigate a world of sexuality, familial dysfunction, and possibly-psychosomatic ailments. Reissued with a new foreword by Lidia Yuknavitch, Frangello’s groundbreaking early novel brings “Dora” into a new era.
Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago
By David Omotoso Stovall
Haymarket Books
January 20, 2026
A hard-hitting exploration of how state policy displaces and isolates Black communities and how collective resistance creates spaces for working-class people of color to identify the true cause of conflict as capitalism and white supremacy. Looking at the many ways Black communities have resisted state violence and the work of local organizations to address marginalization, Engineered Conflict calls for a powerful movement against the displacement, disinvestment, and disposability of Chicago’s Black population.
A Black Queer History of the United States
By C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost
Beacon Press
January 20, 2026
In this latest book in Beacon’s award-winning ReVisioning History series, Professors C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost unearth the often overlooked history of the Black queer community in the United States. Arguing that both gender and sexual expression have been an intimate and intricate part of Black freedom struggle, Snorton and Bost present historical contributions of Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming Americans from slavery to the present day to highlight how the fight against racial injustice has always been linked to that of sexual and gender justice.
One Sun Only
By Camille Bordas
Random House
January 27, 2026
A young woman takes stock after the burglary of her apartment. A teenager becomes obsessed with the obituaries in a weekly magazine. Grandchildren mourn the grandparents who loved them and the grandparents who didn’t. Painters and almost-painters try to distinguish Good Art from Bad Art. People grapple with life-altering illness, unrequited love, and promises they have every intention of keeping. Some win the lottery. Others don’t.
In these sinewy, thoughtful stories, celebrated New Yorker contributor Camille Bordas delves into the mysteries of life, death, and all that happens in between. At once darkly funny and poignantly self-aware, Bordas’s writing offers a window into our shared, flawed humanity without insisting on a perfect understanding of our experiences.
I Love You Too Much
By Jessica N. Watkins
Black Odyssey Media
January 27, 2026
Damar Scott is a man with everything to lose—and even more to hide. To the world, he’s a devoted husband and father, but behind closed doors, he’s keeping an explosive secret: an affair that ends in tragedy. Now, he’s desperate to erase the evidence, bury the truth, and preserve the illusion of a perfect life . . . no matter the cost.
The Case of the Murdered Muckraker
By Rob Osler
Kensington
January 27, 2026
Harriet Morrow, a spunky, bike-riding, independent, lesbian P.I. in turn-of-the-20th century Chicago, is back on the case in this brilliant historical mystery inspired by a real-life Windy City detective – from the acclaimed author of the Anthony, Agatha, Macavity, and Lefty Award-nominated Devil’s Chew Toy.
February
Mass Mothering
By Sarah Bruni
Henry Holt and Co.
February 3, 2026
A. is an amateur translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. Adrift and burdened by debt following a medical trauma, she makes rent caring for a young boy who is not and could never be her own. Her nights are spent on the dance floor, chasing spontaneous connection. There, she encounters N., who shares her numbed state and sometimes her bed.
Among N.’s meager possessions, A. comes across a slim book about an unnamed foreign town of disappearing boys. The book, Field Notes, documents the stories of a community of mothers who assemble to mourn their missing sons together. A. is transfixed by this collective chorus of primal grief, the mothers’ preternatural strength, and their intuitive care for one another. When a near-assault stuns A. out of her inertia, she takes off for the city where Field Notes was written in search of its author and the end of the story. But A.’s digging leads her instead to the traces of a murdered poet, a mysterious woman whose legacy will intersect unexpectedly and pivotally with A.’s own life.
Every Exit Brings You Home
By Naeem Murr
W.W. Norton & Company
February 3, 2026
As a financial crisis looms, Jamal “Jack” Shaban is trying to save his neighbors from bankruptcy. But who is Jack, really? For his flight attendant colleagues, he’s an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Birdy knows nothing about Dimra, Jack’s traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Nor does Dimra know about Jack’s attraction to Marcia: an angry single mom new to the building. The resulting tangle of love, desire, and conflict returns Jack to the violence of 1980s Gaza, where a taboo affair nearly destroyed his life.
It’s Not Her
By Mary Kubica
Park Row
February 3, 2026
Courtney Gray’s peaceful vacation turns into a nightmare when she discovers her brother and sister-in-law dead in their lakeside cottage. Her niece Reese is missing. Her nephew Wyatt is asleep upstairs—unharmed. As police swarm the quiet resort, dark truths about Courtney’s family—and the town itself—begin to surface. Is Reese a victim… or the killer?
Good Intentions
By Marisa Walz
St. Martin’s Press
February 3, 2026
On the surface, Cady has the perfect life. She has a thriving luxury event-planning business, the man she’s loved since she was seventeen, and a social calendar she can barely keep up with. She also has Dana, her identical twin, her most trusted confidante. But when Dana dies suddenly, before Cady can say goodbye, everything shatters.
Yet to her family’s alarm, it isn’t grief for Dana that consumes her. It’s Morgan, a stranger Cady meets in the hospital waiting room that same day—a grieving mother whose tragedy mirrors her own. Cady doesn’t believe in coincidences. She becomes convinced that helping Morgan is the key to facing her sister’s death.
The Chicago Way: An Oral History of Chicago Dining
By Michael Gebert
Agate Midway
February 3, 2026
The Chicago Way traces Chicago’s growth as a dining capital over the past fifty-plus years through an oral history made up of the voices of those who led, drove, and otherwise took part in that transformation. Readers will learn how the city’s diners (and millions of happily sated visitors) grew to love new and more adventurous ways of eating, from hot dogs with foie gras to molecular gastronomy. These first-person accounts show how restaurants played a key role in transforming the city’s culture, creating hot new neighborhoods—before sometimes getting priced out of them—and driving economic growth not just downtown, but increasingly into its kaleidoscopically diverse neighborhoods.
Bertram Cope’s Year
By Henry Blake Fuller
Forward by Bryan Washington
Union Square & Co.
February 3, 2026
Originally published in 1919, Bertram Cope’s Year is a clever character study following a handsome young academic who has taken a teaching position at a Midwestern university. As Bertram navigates his new environment, he quickly becomes the object of intrigue for both women and men in the ivy-covered college town. However, Bertram’s only emotional attachment is to his best friend and housemate, Arthur Lemoyne. After a series of comedic mishaps, including an inadvertent marriage proposal, Bertram realizes that being true to himself is more important than playing the role others ascribe to him.
Often regarded as one of the first American gay novels that avoids the common “bury your gays” ending, Bertram Cope’s Year is a witty, comedic portrait of one man’s journey to live authentically.
Past the Pain: How to Emerge from Trauma with Purpose
By Anjanette L. Young
Lawrence Hill Books
February 3, 2026
Forty minutes on February 21, 2019, changed Anjanette Young’s life forever. Her story made national news for months after it broke: A forty-eight-year-old social worker was winding down at home after a long day of work when police broke into her apartment with a faulty warrant and incorrect information. With guns drawn and flashlights shining, twelve cops converged in her home, demanding that Anjanette put her hands up, despite the fact that she was in the middle of changing her clothes. Naked and terrified, she watched as men in tactical gear ransacked her home.
In Past the Pain, Anjanette tells her story—of what happened that night, what came next, and most important, how others who experience trauma can draw on these lessons to move forward in their own stories. She shares advice from her beloved and respected therapist, Alicia Troff-Meade, designed to bridge the gap between simply reading about healing and actively engaging in it. And Anjanette details how, through the support of her church and her community, and by reconnecting with her legacy as the granddaughter of a civil rights activist who marched with Dr. King, she realized that God was truly with her, and she began to forge a future that is not dictated by trauma but empowered by resilience.
The Bronze Arms
By Richie Hofmann
Knopf
February 10, 2026
Following his captivating and popular A Hundred Lovers, Hofmann’s new collection is a queer coming-of-age, tinged with myth: poems that bring us into a fever dream of antiquity and desire at its limits. A triumphant follow-up to the fetching catalog of lovers in Hofmann’s last book, this collection thrills with its archaeology of self, its notes of austerity and decadence.
It’s No Wonder: The Life and Times of Motown’s Legendary Songwriter Sylvia Moy
By Margena Christian
Da Capo
Published February 10, 2026
It’s No Wonder examines the groundbreaking career of the pioneer who battled sexism and broke down barriers to become Motown’s first certified female in-house songwriter and producer. As the lone woman in a room full of men, the odds were stacked against Moy from the start. Amidst racial strife at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, most African American women who were allowed into the music industry could only dream of a career as a singer. Nevertheless, the Detroit native found unprecedented success as both a songwriter and producer. In addition to single-handedly saving Stevie Wonder’s early career at Motown, Moy solidified herself as one of the label’s most prolific composers, penning many of Wonder’s classic hits as well as songs for other Motown acts like “Honey Chile,” “It Takes Two,” “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak For You),” “My Baby Loves Me,” “(We’ve Got) Honey Love,” “Forget Me Not,” “With a Child’s Heart,” and countless others.
And the Crowd Went Wild: A Chicago Stars Novel
By Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Avon
February 10, 2026
#1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips is back with the latest novel in her beloved Chicago Stars series, featuring a romance between a star quarterback and one of the country’s most beautiful—and misunderstood—actresses.
Murder Will Out
By Jennifer K. Breedlove
Minotaur Books
February 17, 2026
Little North Island, off the coast of Maine, is so beautiful it could be a postcard. Organist Willow Stone cherishes her memories of childhood summers spent on the island with her godmother Sue… even though her visits ended abruptly, and she hasn’t seen or heard from her godmother in over fifteen years. Until a letter from Sue—and word of Sue’s death—brings Willow back to the picturesque island.
The islanders rarely mention Sue without also bringing up Cameron House, and the controversy around Sue’s unexpected inheritance of the sprawling mansion. When Willow overhears someone threatening the next heir to the property, she starts to question whether Sue’s death was really an accident, and can’t help but wonder whether someone on this sleepy island is willing to stop at nothing—even murder—to claim Cameron House for their own.
Our Diaries, Ourselves: How Diarists Chronicle Their Lives and Document our World
By Betsy Rubiner
Beacon Press
February 24, 2026
We know what it was like to be an out lesbian in 19th-century England, what the inner world of a young girl in hiding looks like, and what the earliest internet users’ favorite websites were, in part, because of diaries. Our Diaries, Ourselves is a joyful deep dive into this time-honored tradition of preserving who we are.
From Marie Curie to Taylor Swift, this book illustrates how keeping a diary helps us to understand ourselves and our world. Tour Italy’s “City of the Diary,” Pieve Santo Stefano, which boasts a diary archive, museum, and annual festival. Discover how women have used diaries for centuries as canvases for self-expression and self-care and as tools of resistance in a patriarchal society. Travel through time and across cultures, from renowned figures to ordinary people, for glimpses of their lives—different yet comfortingly familiar.
March
And You Will Call It Fate
By Timothy J. Hillegonds
University of Nebraska Press
March 1, 2026
In And You Will Call It Fate, Timothy J. Hillegonds explores an eight-year relationship with Sean Dempsey, a charismatic yet volatile former NFL player turned entrepreneur who profoundly reshaped the trajectory of Hillegonds’s life. Set against the backdrop of Chicago’s financial district, the memoir follows Hillegonds—a high school dropout, struggling addict, and estranged father—as he unexpectedly enters the high-stakes world of finance under Dempsey’s intense mentorship.
When I Was Death
By Alexis Henderson
G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers
March 3, 2026
Roslyn isn’t herself anymore. It’s been a year since her sister, Adeline, died under mysterious circumstances, and Roslyn is still tormented by her absence. So when the elusive caravan of girls that Adeline spent her last summer with rolls back into town, Roslyn joins them to finally figure out what happened to her sister. Strange, beautiful, and intriguing, the girls are closed off from the world. And as it turns out, they’re brought together by a force more sinister than Roslyn’s nightmares could’ve conjured up: Death himself.
I Did Not Kill My Husband
By Linda Keir
Blackstone Publishing
March 3, 2026
LA lifestyle influencer Cara Campbell is living the rags-to-riches dream with her plastic surgeon husband, Karl, and posting all about it on social media. But her happily ever after evaporates when she’s given a life sentence for murdering Karl during a romantic getaway. All evidence points to her, and her platform–as an unabashed gold digger–makes her look guilty as hell. Karl’s struggling business and million-dollar life insurance policy add plenty of motive. But the one thing Cara knows for sure is she didn’t do it.
En route to the maximum-security prison where she’ll begin serving her sentence, the armored transport vehicle is torn apart in a horrific collision that sparks a wildfire at the scene. Desperately seizing this unexpected chance at freedom, Cara flees into the Sierra Nevada Mountains armed only with a cracked phone she found on the highway.
On an Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes
Edited by Michael Welch
Belt Publishing
March 10, 2026
The thirty-three writers in this collection grapple with the vastness of the lakes—and the vastness of experience living alongside them. Gabriel Bump explores how his relationship with Lake Michigan changed after losing a friend. For another writer, the water provided the freedom to explore a romance that would have been too complicated on land. Come dive for shipwrecks, harvest manoomin, and visit the disappearing ice caves. Witness the chickadees, smelt, and cattails, but also zebra mussels, factory runoff, and algae. Each writer’s relationship with the lakes is personal and unique, but that relationship to the water is also one shared by so many of us.
Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World
By Daniel Kraus
Counterpoint
March 10, 2026
Daniel Kraus first saw George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead when he was five years old. Through watching it approximately three hundred times since, Kraus discovered the many ways the film is tied to his childhood trauma and how its influence has carried into his adulthood. He couldn’t help but wonder: Are there other admirers of the film out there who feel the same?
Partially Devoured uses a frame-by-frame deep dive into Night of the Living Dead to produce a kaleidoscopic cultural investigation of the film’s importance and to examine the author’s early life of rural isolation and local violence.
Second Chance Duet
By Ana Holguin
Forever
March 10, 2026
Celia García has always had one goal: to compose film scores. But after a decade of advertising jingles, that dream couldn’t be further out of reach—until an old college friend presents her with a life-changing opportunity. A big-name director so desperately needs a composer for his TV debut that he’ll take a chance on someone new. There’s only one catch. Celia has to work—and live—with her college nemesis, Oliver Barlowe.
Celia remembers Oliver as arrogant, rude, and entitled—the picture-perfect scion of Hollywood royalty. Soon, though, late nights and long days together reveal how much Oliver’s changed, sparking new feelings and the discovery that their rivalry wasn’t quite as mutual as she thought. But in an industry where she needs to work twice as hard to be seen as half as good, a romance with Oliver could end Celia’s career just as it’s starting.
Hard Times
By Jeff Boyd
Flatiron Books
March 17, 2026
As an English teacher at a South Side, Chicago, high school lauded for its football team, but at risk in every other way, Buddy Mack tries to instill a love of literature. While all of his students face challenges, he’s especially concerned with a trio of boys who test him to no end but are full of promise and heart: Zeke, the football star; Truth, the sweet-talking charmer; and Dontell, Buddy’s most promising student. At home, his wife, Chrissy, a successful corporate lawyer, is ready to upgrade to a big house on the North Side and start a family, but Buddy’s torn over the implications. And the closest person he has in his life to talk to is Chrissy’s little brother, Curtis, a corrupt Chicago cop.
When the two worlds collide in a shocking moment that rocks the school, Buddy has to choose a side and fight for all he holds dear. Hard Times takes stock of what it means to be there for your people whether you want to or not and unflinchingly confronts the American Dream—a moving, engrossing, and necessary read.
The Grand Allusion
By Roy Christopher
Repeater
March 17, 2026
The use of allusions represents an important way we employ our cultural artifacts to form relationships and build community. Noticed or not, allusions traffic in cultural cargo, smuggling in information from other sources. By situating the lyrical allusions of Jay-Z and Wu-Tang Clan and the pop-cultural references of Family Guy and South Park in the same frame as those of Shakespeare and Melville, The Grand Allusion illustrates the historical pedigree and the instructive power of allusion. The references in all of these works serve the same function: a higher meaning for the audience.
Life: A Love Story
By Elizabeth Berg
Random House
March 17, 2026
As ninety-two-year-old Florence “Flo” Greene nears the end of her life, she writes a letter to Ruthie, the woman who grew up next door to her, describing the items Flo is leaving Ruthie in her will. But as it goes on, telling surprising stories about those “little” things Flo will leave behind (What could possibly be the worth of a rubber band kept in a matchbox tied up in red ribbon?), an unforgettable portrait of the life she has lived emerges.
The Young Lords Speak: Building Revolution on the Streets of Chicago
Edited by Jacqueline Lazú
Haymarket Books
March 17, 2026
In their field jackets and signature purple berets, using militant tactics like building takeovers and mass education, the Young Lords mobilized their community for liberation and against gentrification, poverty, racism, and police brutality. Forging a Rainbow Coalition with Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords expanded from their Chicago headquarters into the Puerto Rican and Latino barrios of New York City and elsewhere, demanding an end to the US occupation of Puerto Rico and self-determination for oppressed communities everywhere.
With a foreword by founder José “Cha Cha” Jiménez, written just before his passing, The Young Lords Speak tells the story of Chicago’s Young Lords in their own words through articles, essays, interviews, and speeches.
Replica
By Lisa Low
University of Wisconsin Press
March 24, 2026
Stand-up comedy, a celebrity non-apology, observations of racism, and the slipperiness of nostalgia underpin Replica. In poignant, witty poems, Lisa Low navigates the tensions of solidarity and hostility in white spaces as she sets out to write differently about race.
“The problem of being with a white man is also a problem of writing,” Low says in a prose poem that turns writing about identity on its head. She peers in from outside the poem, as if through an open ceiling. The poem itself becomes a site of investigation—a counterpoint to constricting narratives about Asian American identity—reimagined as a dollhouse, a stage with props, an image the speaker wears like a bodysuit. Replica asks what it means to represent yourself and your experiences in a world where you are indistinguishable from others.
Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy
By Jo Walton and Ada Palmer
Tor Books
March 24, 2026
In Trace Elements, Walton and Palmer have come together to write a book-length and supremely entertaining look at modern science fiction and fantasy, at how our genre is written and how it is read, that will join nonfiction works like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night, Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud on the short shelf of titles essential to all readers of our genre. Subjects covered include the nature of genre itself, the history of SF publishing, the implicit contract between author and reader, the ways SF and fantasy disguise themselves as one another, what SF&F can learn from outside influences ranging from Shakespeare to Diderot to anime, the role of complicity in reading, the need to expand our “sphere of empathy,” and finally the need for optimism, the importance of rejecting “purity” culture, and the fact that the human story for centuries to come will be composed of hard work.
The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru
By Olesya Salnikova Gilmore
Berkley
March 24, 2026
In The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru, a fearless fortune teller in 1920s Paris must use her powers to divine who she can trust when an exiled Romanov princess and her brother come to her seeking answers about a decades-old mystery.
Unsettling Territory: The Resurgence of the Oneida Nation in the Face of Settler Backlash
By Douglas Metoxen Kiel
Yale University Press
March 24, 2026
Doug Kiel traces the journey of resurgence, adaptation, and nation rebuilding of the Oneida people, who navigated federal policies and socioeconomic shifts to chart their own future, transforming adversity into opportunity. Kiel shows how Oneidas harnessed New Deal programs to advance their goals of self-determination; how urban migration, often seen as a marker of Indigenous displacement, became a tool of community empowerment; and how the Nation has reclaimed land and authority despite predictable backlash from neighboring towns. Drawing on extensive archival records, family photographs, and oral histories—including stories from his grandmother—Kiel highlights the everyday acts that have sustained the Oneida Nation across generations and offers vital insights into the broader fight for Indigenous nationhood in twenty-first-century America.
Be Easy
By Adrian Matejka
Liveright
March 31, 2026
A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Adrian Matejka has been a mainstay of contemporary American poetry for over two decades. Collecting hits from six extraordinary collections, Be Easy showcases Matejka’s singular sonics and narrative vision in fresh, dynamic poems that lyrically complicate place, race, and identity in contemporary America. New poems explore the twitchy unease of unintentional migration and economic instability as the country faces a future every bit as unsettling and circuslike as the parking lot carnivals in the Midwest. Selections from Mixology (2008)—”a post-soul tour de force” (Kevin Young)—shapeshift before our eyes; while “revelatory” (Gabrielle Calvocoressi) odes from The Big Smoke (2013) reimagine the legacy of prizefighter Jack Johnson; and transcendent poems from Map to the Stars (2017) brim with cosmic jazz. From a “rocket-powered” writer (Campbell McGrath), Be Easy affirms Adrian Matejka as one of the most revelatory and exciting voices of our times.
April
The Book of Marys and Glaciers
By Carrie Olivia Adams
Tupelo Press
April 1, 2026
The poems collected in The Book of Marys and Glaciers traverse both the psychological and physical landscape to explore the too-muchness and overwhelm that categorizes our demand-driven age. The longest series, “Dust Cover,” is a meditation on deserts of all kinds—geographic, urban, celestial, domestic, and linguistic. The poems themselves enact their own ideas of space and emptiness, building to a work that grain after grain becomes heavy as a whole. In contrast, the title sequence “The Book of Marys and Glaciers” is an expansive work of feminist ecopoetics that asks questions about the role of women as mothers, religious figures, friends, and lovers in a society that rarely makes room for quietude anymore.
Catching an Orange
By Amy Crider
Garrett County Press
April 7, 2026
In this unconventional memoir, author and playwright Amy Crider writes thirty years of letters to a psychiatrist who treated her for just three days—and never wrote back. What emerges is far more than a mental health narrative: it’s a mystery story, a love letter to a man in a necktie with scientific formulas, and a meditation on the complex ways we construct our lives.
Cantares
By Edgar Garcia
Wesleyan University Press
April 7, 2026
Cantares is a multipart engagement with the poetics and history of the colonial and Indigenous Americas, oscillating between poetry and essay in a structure of repetitions derived from Mesoamerican poetics. Edgar Garcia reimagines the Cantares Mexicanos, a sixteenth-century anthology of Nahuatl songs from Central Mexico, and brings these songs to life not just as historical documents, but as music, to give presence of thought to their historical layers and complexities. His adaptations evoke the sound and texture of the sixteenth century, blending Indigenous and Baroque traditions, exploring themes of translation, adaptation, race, and historical memory. The collection moves between poetry and scholarship—between poems and micro-essays. The essays provide commentary and historical context about the colonial soundscape of Central Mexico. At the same time, the poems emphasize the songs’ sonic, spiritual, and poetic dimensions.
Leave Your Mess at Home
By Tolani Akinola
Pamela Dorman Books
April 14, 2026
Sola Longe, eldest daughter, estranged from the family, is secretly back home in Chicago for the first time in a decade. She’s a newly single and recently disgraced influencer trying to quietly put her life back together again. The other three Longe siblings aren’t doing much better. Anjola is in love with her best friend, who just got engaged to someone else; Karen, a college junior and the baby of the family, is grappling with her sexuality and self-image; and Ola, the golden child with a baby of his own on the way, is questioning his marriage and how to raise a Black son in America.
Sola’s unexpected return sets them on a crash course towards each other, and when the four siblings find themselves together again at their Nigerian immigrant parents’ Thanksgiving table, a decade’s worth of secrets and a lifetime of resentments explode to the fore.
Vivian’s Decision
By Della Leavitt
She Writes Press
April 14, 2026
Vivian Jacobson is distraught to be pregnant again. Already drowning in the demands of her four young children, she can’t imagine adding a fifth to her brood. Her husband, Mel, is a devoted partner, but he works long days in his family’s Maxwell Street tavern—leaving Vivian isolated and overwhelmed in their suburban Chicago home.
When Vivian pleads with Mel to let her ask her trusted obstetrician for an abortion, Mel reluctantly agrees. Her doctor won’t risk his license, but refers her to someone who will. Once she finds herself in the sleazy abortionist’s disgusting makeshift flat, she can’t go through with the procedure. As she flees, the man warns her that the clock is ticking: If she wants this abortion, she must return within one week.
Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene
By Lorraine Boissoneault
Beacon Press
April 21, 2026
Science writer Lorraine Boissoneault has been in pain for most of her adult life. Unable to control or make sense of her chronic illness diagnoses, she began describing the ebb and flow of her symptoms as “body weather.” At first an imaginative approach to coping with flare-ups, the phrase has become a waypoint in Lorraine’s explorations of the intimate relationship between our fragile bodies and the world around us. Body Weather is a lyrical exploration that reimagines the cloudy stages of grief and challenges us to reexamine universal questions lodged deep within: how do we find comfort and meaning in a fevered world?
Concert Black
By Michael O’Donnell
Blackstone Publishing
April 21, 2026
Ellen Wroe, a celebrated biographer known for her piercing insight, sets her sights on Cecil Woodbridge, the legendary conductor whose name reverberates through concert halls and conservatories. But Woodbridge, imperious and elusive, rebuffs her approach and conspires to thwart her efforts. Undeterred, Wroe embarks on a relentless pursuit, trailing the maestro across continents—through the archives of his correspondence, into the confidences of his colleagues, and deeper still into the long shadow of his past.
Les Portes
By Meredith Nnoka
Autumn House Press
April 28, 2026
Unfolding in three movements—Le Début, Le Passé, and Le Présent—all of which rupture conventional domestic abuse narratives, and drawing heavily from zuihitsu, ekphrasis, erasure, and found forms to mirror the fractured experience of living through and after harm, these poems serve as radical meditations on the power to reflect as resistance. A queer woman caught in an abusive marriage begins to reimagine justice not as punishment but as something restorative, collective, and deeply non-carceral.
In her debut book, Nnoka poses the question that propels the collection: “Where is the path forward / that ensures no recurrence?” Rather than gesture toward resolution, Les Portes dwells inside this question, and what emerges is not consolation but an immense reckoning.
Fire and Clay: How Bricks Reveal the Hidden History of Chicago
By Will Quam
University of Chicago Press
April 30, 2026
In Fire and Clay, Quam takes us on journeys to experience the beauty and mystery of Chicago’s buildings. He also explores how developers, architects, and masons followed changing fashions as they designed and built the city, creating connections across disparate neighborhoods. The red bricks that make up Lincoln Park mansions, for example, are the same as those found on Pullman row homes and Pilsen workers’ cottages, just as Rogers Park’s colorful bricks can also be found far across the city in South Shore. Known for his popular walking tours, Quam has built his life around the appreciation, study, and evangelizing of this most humble building block’s many wonders. Here, he pours all his knowledge into the first book of its kind, beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred of his own full-color photographs.
Your Place in This World
By Jake La Botz
Cornerstone Press
April 2026
A quirky Chicago kid raised by his junkie dad stumbles upon an unusual Maxwell Street bluesman; a Twelve-Step wannabe swaps addictions to match the support groups that meet in his favorite recovery room; a case of mistaken identity shines a bright light on a city-dweller’s dark past; a self-help seeking couple discover the help is more maddening than their “issues”; a tchotchke thief is overtaken by a force inside a stolen object. What does it mean to find your place in this world? Jake La Botz burrows his way deep into the challenges of revelation, showing how change can bless us and curse us, and ultimately save us.
May
Doorways of Chicago
By Roonie Frey
Trope Publishing Co.
May 5, 2026
With more than 100 photographs of Chicago’s most iconic and unique doorways from Ronnie Frey, creator of the popular Instagram account of the same name, Doorways of Chicago presents an entirely new way to explore the city. With a keen eye for detail and a deep love for Chicago’s layered architectural history, Ronnie sees the city differently, and his photos highlight more than just doors and buildings—he captures atmosphere, memory, and soul. His photographs feature doorways, cornices, arches, and façades-details many overlook.
Orange
By Noel Quiñones
CavanKerry Press
May 5, 2026
Through narrative poems and innovative forms inspired by color theory and elementary school, Orange explores the ripple effects of queerness, lies, and finding yourself in a family. In this visceral new collection, however, the scope of “family” expands well beyond the nuclear unit; Noel Quiñones’s poems center relationships between friends, cousins, partners, and many other family members. Painting a vivid and fraught portrait of the North Bronx, Quiñones unflinchingly confronts the contradictions at the heart of love, divorce, gender, religion, and community, unpacking the complexities of coming out, divorced parents, and generational trauma. Orange ultimately argues that truth resembles color: something real, yet elusive, and impossible to prove.
Black Designers in Chicago: Culture and Community in the Twentieth Century
By Chris Dingwall, David Hartt, and Daniel Schulman
University of Chicago Press
May 7, 2026
Black Designers in Chicago is a richly illustrated book focused on Black designers, how they shaped the history of modern design, and how their designs in turn influenced modern Black life. This book is the first to chronicle their collective history while also celebrating their influence on design as well as African American culture more broadly. Based on extensive archival research and building on a major 2018 exhibition, Black Designers in Chicago presents essays by experts in African American history and design. The book features illustrations of a stunning variety of works—from graphic design to screenprints to textiles and household wares—placing African Americans at the center of modern design history, while highlighting the role of design in the cultural history of Black Chicago.
Seek the Traitor’s Son
By Veronica Roth
Tor Books
May 12, 2026
Elegy Ahn did not ask for destiny to find her. She is happy with her life as a soldier, defending her small country from the Talusar, a powerful nation who worships a deadly Fever. A fever that blesses half of its victims with mysterious gifts. But then she’s summoned to hear a prophecy—her, and the most ruthless of Talusar generals, Rava Vidar. Brought face to face, they learn that one of them will lead their people to victory over the other…but they don’t know which. And at the center of both of their fates: a man. A man that, Elegy is told, she will fall in love with.
Frank Buck: Chicago Hitman
By Joseph G. Peterson
Tortoise Books
May 12, 2026
Frank Buck is a fat f*ck. A slob, a middle-aged loser, he’s living in Chicagoland with his mother and collecting disability checks, drinking Svedka vodka and driving aimlessly through the nighttime city in the one thing in his life that brings him joy and freedom—a 1989 Cadillac Brougham D’Elegance.
Unfortunately he also has a talent. His great weight, his ballast, makes him a remarkable shot with all manner of weapons. And this eventually draws him into the orbit of a local gangster and psychopath, a Polaroid-toting maniac named Rodger. In short order Frank is trapped in a seemingly endless and cartoonish routine of bloodshed and gore, a criminal Sisyphus pushing a soul-wearying boulder—or perhaps a biblical figure blundering towards an improbable Golgotha.
Beloved Disciples
By Mario Elias
Bywater Books
May 12, 2026
With tension and heart in equal measure, Mario Elías’s Beloved Disciples is a luminous, haunting portrait of grief, devotion, and the blurred edges of memory. In a sun-bleached Caribbean town, Simón is haunted by the ghost of his lover Albi, by the weight of family, and by a faith that no longer comforts. Once bound together by whispered prayers and saltwater kisses, Simón and Albi carved a secret world from the shadows. But when Albi dies unexpectedly, that world begins to unravel.
How We See the Gray
By Rachel León
Curbstone Books
May 15, 2026
Foster care is a disaster in Rockford, Illinois. Meredith, a social worker and single mom, is stretched beyond thin but determined to protect her kids: not only her son, but those on her caseload too. When the stress of the job has her breaking her sobriety, the foundations of her life begin to tremble. After drinking too much, she makes a mistake that puts her preschooler in jeopardy, and Meredith finds herself in a situation that mirrors her clients’ as she loses custody of her son. In her fight to get him back, Meredith experiences the system from the outside—while still working for the kids inside of it. Set over the course of a year, this riveting documentary-esque novel is told from multiple perspectives, including those of case workers, birth parents, foster parents, and foster children. Written with the working-class humor and heart that defines the Midwest, How We See the Gray is a story about mistakes, second chances, and trying to do better in a system that seems doomed to fail.
The Conviction Machine: Prosecutors, Politicians, and Police Violence in Chicago
By Flint Taylor
Haymarket Books
May 19, 2026
In December 1969, the FBI, the Chicago Police Department, and the office of States Attorney, led by rising political star Edward V. Hanrahan, conspired to assassinate Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, and then flagrantly covered up their misconduct. Thirteen years later, Jackie Wilson was tortured by the same police department and wrongfully incarcerated for thirty-six years.
Drawing on unique insights from his role as a leading opposition lawyer in both cases, award-winning author Flint Taylor details the vast political corruption uncovered in the Hampton case and the twists and turns of Wilson’s forty-year effort to win his freedom. With blistering clarity and righteous indignation, The Conviction Machine shines a penetrating light on the sordid world of prosecutorial misconduct and police violence.
