It’s been a busy year for Chicago authors, but there’s plenty more to look forward to. In fact, there’s so much to keep your eye out for that we had to create a whole second half of the list!
From your perfect beach read to captivating books that will carry you into the New Year, our Chicago writing community is bringing you something to enjoy through the rest of 2026 and beyond. Here’s to a great second half of the year for readers everywhere!
Check out Part I of our list here.
June
Where You’ll Find Us
By Jen St. Jude
Bloomsbury YA
June 2, 2026
Calla Quick has no future. At least, that’s how it feels. Her parents disowned her via text message, and now she can’t afford to go to an all-women’s college with her girlfriend Ramona like they planned. But Calla wonders if maybe that’s for the best—because even though Calla told Ramona her parents disowned her because they found out she’s gay, the truth is, Calla has been questioning whether she’s a girl at all.
Calla wishes she had more time to figure everything out, and one night, her wish is seemingly granted. When Calla and Ramona stumble upon a mysterious farmhouse the woods, they meet five teens who claim they’ve lived there for decades. The land, which they call Amaranth, acts as a safe haven for queer kids throughout history—a place free of hate, free of violence, free of time itself. Here, Calla can be Cal, and they feel instantly accepted. They don’t have to worry about the future because at Amaranth, it will never come—until one night when the clock strikes twelve. Now under a literal ticking clock, the housemates must find a way to stop time again or face going back to their harsh realities, but as Cal learns everyone’s story, they begin to wonder what queer people lose when their history is lost to time.
It Came from Neverland
By Cynthia Pelayo
Crooked Lane Books
June 9, 2026
1914, Wendy Darling works by day as a school teacher, and by night, she assists soldiers who have returned home from the Western Front. There is one mysterious patient who, despite all the care they’ve given him, is in a deep sleep, unable to wake up. One night, when he murmurs the words “Peter Pan,” Wendy is thrown back to a darker time, one that she wishes she could forget.
When one of her students goes missing, it brings back memories of when children went missing and were later found murdered in London many years ago. Wendy is convinced that Peter Pan, the entity that she believes killed those children, is back. She and her brothers had a close encounter with Peter Pan, after all. But her brothers only remember Peter Pan and Neverland as a fantasy of childhood games. When another child goes missing and signs start to point to Wendy, Scotland Yard digs into old reports, finding that Wendy knew the names of all the children who had been killed. As Wendy tries to prove her innocence, she also has to find a way to stop Peter Pan once and for all.
Strangers Behind Closed Doors
By Catherine Adel West
Park Row
June 9, 2026
Giovanni Mason worked hard to become the first Black head concierge at Chicago’s exclusive and glamorous Ivory Hotel. It’s a job that requires patience, perfection, and, above all, self-control. But when Giovanni reunites with her former best friend, makeup influencer Natalie Moore, things get heated as a mending of fences morphs into a public argument in the hotel restaurant, and Giovanni loses her cool. Hours later, Natalie is missing. Evidence piles against Giovanni—a ransacked, blood-spattered hotel room, fresh bruises on her body, and a troubling gap in her memory from the last twelve hours.
Detective Redding Stark is the only one unconvinced of Giovanni’s guilt. She sees disturbing parallels to a series of disappearances targeting Black women and believes Natalie’s case is part of something bigger. Together, she and Giovanni are pulled into a dangerous web of privilege, power, and betrayal inside—and far beyond—the walls of the Ivory Hotel. Will Giovanni and Detective Stark find Natalie or join the missing?
Brahms Comes to Dinner
By Boman Desai
Schaffner Press
June 9, 2026
The passion of unrequited love propels this lovingly drawn novel set in mid-19th century Germany, depicting a complex emotional relationship among giants of classical music. Robert and Clara Schumann, recognizing his genius, champion Johannes Brahms at the onset of his career and nurture his ascendance to its pinnacle, where he joins Bach and Beethoven as the third B of the genre’s immortals.
Author Boman Desai brings to life the complex relationship between Brahms and the Schumanns, the most influential people in his life, as the story circles around the intimate dinners Brahms enjoyed over the years as a guest in their country home. Following the descent into madness and tragic death of maestro Robert Schumann, widowed Clara and Brahms continue their passionate yet uneasy relationship. Clara devotes her career as a brilliant pianist to performing her deceased husband’s music, memorializing Robert’s music at the expense of her own, while Brahms tries but never succeeds in finding a wife.
The Very Unremarkable Life of Mrs. Etty Bloom
By Talya Jankovits
Running Wild Press
June 15, 2026
In the insulated Hasidic community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, tradition and cultural norms are as sacred as religion. So when Etty Greenberger, a headstrong redhead and the only child of Holocaust survivors, commits one ugly and thoughtless act, she believes she has sabotaged her opportunity to secure a desirable match. Reluctantly, she agrees to marry Benji Bloom, a fishmonger’s son far below her marital aspirations, becoming Mrs. Etty Bloom. As she grapples with loss, grief, and the challenges of motherhood, she also discovers friendship, love, and joy in the most unexpected places.
No Lace Fronts in Iowa City
By Meghan Malachi
Madville Publishing LLC
June 16, 2026
In her debut collection, No Lace Fronts in Iowa City, Meghan Malachi explores how community, desirability, and notions of home influence the journeys by which girls come of age. These poems celebrate a South Bronx childhood and navigate a complicated womanhood in the Midwest through confessional musings on Black Latinx identity and intimate epistolary interludes. Favorite wigs, main character moments, and reimagined anti-heroines are all vessels for exploring girlhood in this love letter to female kinship. No Lace Fronts in Iowa City is ultimately a testament to the desires for belonging and tenderness that we all harbor.
The Sixth Nik
By Daniel Kraus
S&S/Saga Press
June 23, 2026
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus comes a new galaxy spanning adventure in the vein of Ursula K. Le Guin. Deep into space, far past the triworld outposts, beyond range of the lethal trollbot internet, soars The Sickness: a ship woven from biomatter and capable of reacting to every need of its human crew. Sisilla, a nine-year-old cultist with a brain enhanced by arcane tech known as “niks,” has boarded to investigate the enigma of Fém—a plague-riddled planet that has abruptly gone rogue.
The mysterious crew includes a faceless assassin, a beautiful engineer jigsawed by plastic surgery, a peyote-addicted medic, and—most lethal of all—a rugged, NonModded captain with a score to settle with Sisilla. Other dangers abound. A hacked robot begins to believe Sisilla is its daughter. The Sickness itself is mutating, possibly even pregnant. And the secret of Fém is more horrific than anyone could have imagined. To survive, Sisilla will need to forsake her predetermined fate and embrace the unknown.
Isis of Egypt: Goddess of Thrones
By Malayna Evans
Alcove Press
June 23, 2026
Isis, goddess of thrones and magic, steals the crown of Egypt and hands the power to her husband, Osiris. Together, Isis and Osiris live an idyllic life, ruling justly until the god of chaos, set on revenge for a crime Isis knows nothing about, traps Osiris in a box—a box that quickly vanishes.
Driven by rage and desperation, Isis spends decades disguised as a human woman, isolated from home and family as she searches for her lost love. When she finally uncovers the box, what she finds will change her life—and the fate of gods and mortals—forever. Unless Isis can right the wrongs of a betrayal she didn’t commit and deliver Egypt into the hands of a worthy leader, Egypt will fall into chaos.
Keep Them Close
By David Ellis
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
June 30, 2026
Siblings Allison and Luke have been through a lot together and have always stood by each other. When Allison’s husband, Finley, is murdered, the investigation threatens to expose the siblings’ darkest secrets. An illicit affair. A decades-old accident. A stunning deception. How do these events explain Finley’s death? How far will Allison and Luke go to keep their secrets buried? And can the siblings even trust one another anymore? As the investigation winds tighter and past and present collide, the most shocking betrayal might lie a little too close to home…
July
Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist
By John D’Emilio
Duke University Press
July 7, 2026
Making Gay History continues John D’Emilio’s story, following his memoir of his early years, Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood. Here, D’Emilio recounts his career as a public historian, activist, and academic, relating his own queer history alongside the development of the LGBTQ movement in the United States. D’Emilio was part of the first burgeoning period of LGBTQ studies while still a graduate student in New York City. From there, he takes readers through his experiences as an out professor at UNC Greensboro, his activism in Washington, DC, and finally, his employment at the University of Illinois as an LGBTQ historian, a position that was unimaginable at the start of his career. At the same time, he narrates his own coming out, his successes and struggles with LGBTQ advocacy, and the loves and losses faced throughout his adult life, telling an intertwined personal and national history of queer hearts and minds.
Man Overboard!
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books
July 7, 2026
Patrick “Kick” Kilpatrick hates the ocean. Has always been terrified of it. And now he’s in a real pickle. Drifting alone in the sea after falling (or jumping? He can’t remember as the all-inclusive drinks on the cruise he was taking with his extended family were, well, inclusive) Kick must survive. Breath by breath, hour by hour in the lonely sea.
As the waves crash over him, so too do the thoughts and memories of just how he got there. A Thanksgiving cruise with an obnoxious brother-in-law he has to bite his tongue to keep from screaming at. A father who gives the Great Santini a run for his money. And a mother, who already left the family boat, so to speak, a long time ago. His family may be complicated, and the pains of life may seem unbearable—infuriating enough to leap from the deck—but maybe the will to survive is stronger.
Man Overboard! is an inventive, slyly hilarious, and inspiring novel about what it means to be alive, stay alive, and what keeps us going no matter how choppy the waves of our journey become. Hold on for dear life!
Should the Waters Take Us
By Stephanie Soileau
Doubleday
July 14, 2026
In the shifting bayous of coastal Louisiana, on a rapidly disappearing spit of land, generations of Acadians have kept their heads above water any way they can. When an offshore rig explodes and unleashes a catastrophic spill, the people of Pelerin Parish face a reckoning that tests the bonds of family and the survival of their way of life.
As the toxic plume of oil advances across the Gulf, Boy Broussard, already living hand to mouth off another man’s land, finds himself raising a daughter he barely knows. His dying aunt, Rosa Terrebonne, tries to right the misdeeds of the past yet finds herself thwarted by her husband, Jacot, a retired landman for big oil who refuses to give up claim to the plot of ground where Boy makes his living. Meanwhile, the parish priest, Father Fabian, far from his home in the Niger Delta, lends his assistance to Boy’s all-but-motherless daughter, only to be met with suspicion and hostility from the insular community. When a powerful hurricane threatens to turn an already dire situation into a total cataclysm, this sharp-edged cast of characters collides in a thunderclap of resentment and violence. Throughout all this, Soileau unfolds a sweeping tapestry of loss, resilience, and the fragile miracle of hope.
The Last Pirouette: A Novel in Three Acts
By Janette DeFelice
She Writes Press
July 14, 2026
When Delia lands a coveted spot with a prestigious New York ballet company, she steps into a world of beauty, betrayal, and brutal ambition—while her mother, Victoria, is left behind to confront the wreckage of her own unrealized dreams and long-buried trauma. A cryptic prophecy shadows their lives and as Delia’s path toward womanhood is marred by injury and manipulation, Victoria embarks on a tender, midlife metamorphosis—rekindling her own desire and learning, too late, that letting go is not the same as giving up.
Tenderness
By Rowan Beaird
Flatiron Books
July 21, 2026
On a remote island off the coast of Virginia, family and friends gather to celebrate the wedding of Shay O’Connor and Andrew Pruitt. From the moment the guests arrive, all they can whisper about is the bride, who recently left the headline-making cult Synanon. Why would someone like Shay, an Ivy League graduate with a wealthy, doting fiancée, join Synanon? And has she really escaped their grasp?
Told from the interwoven perspectives of Shay’s brother William, her longtime friend Joel, and Shay herself, Tenderness is a slow-burn mystery that excavates dark family histories and romantic regrets. As the wedding day approaches, Joel and William pull at the loose threads of Shay’s story, and it becomes clear there is an even greater threat on the island than the secrets each character is keeping from one another.
Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade
By Jeremy A Simmons
Princeton University Press
July 21, 2026
The ancient world was a far more interconnected place than is often assumed. Maritime routes across the Indian Ocean, by no means peripheral, made these connections possible. In Sea of Treasures, Jeremy Simmons puts forth an entirely new perspective on Indian Ocean commerce, starting with commodities of trade and the patterns of consumption that resulted from their importation. Looking beyond the mechanics of long-distance travel or the economics of “Indo-Roman” exchange, Simmons considers the consequences of objects in motion: how Indian Ocean imports shaped the lives of humans throughout the wider ancient world. In his exploration of textual and archaeological sources from both the Mediterranean basin and the Indian subcontinent, he traces a series of sensuous and intellectual engagements that entangled people and things both tangible and intangible, from spices, coins, and gemstones to information and artistic style.
The New People
By Andrea Uptmor
Little, Brown and Company
July 21, 2026
Months after the housing bubble bursts, newlywed Chicagoans Emma and Rachel move into a charming little house in a conservative Indiana college town, hoping for a fresh start after a painful miscarriage. As Rachel immerses herself in her new role as a tenure-track professor and bestselling novelist, adjunct Emma struggles in the shadow of her wife’s success. Desperate to build something of her own, Emma secretly pursues IVF, even as Rachel insists they wait to have children. The house, initially a symbol of new beginnings, becomes a refuge for Emma from the town she’s convinced is set against her–until strange occurrences make her question whether she and her wife are truly alone.
They aren’t. Charlotte and Dirk, the former homeowners, are secretly living in the attic above Emma and Rachel’s attached garage. Dispossessed by the recession and anxious about her husband’s declining health, Charlotte listens to the interlopers below, and her resentment steadily grows. What starts as small acts of defiance–missing food, flipped breakers in the fuse box, subtle scratches in the furniture–soon becomes sabotage. But when her campaign to drive out the couple goes too far, Charlotte’s and Emma’s stories converge in an explosive climax that will reveal the lengths people will go to reclaim what they’ve lost.
The Architecture of Chicago’s Beverly Hills/Morgan Park
By Mati Maldre
Belt Publishing
July 28, 2026
The Architecture of Chicago’s Beverly Hills/Morgan Park is the first complete large-format visual record published of these Southwest Side twin communities in Chicago. The historic and significant architecture and distinctive landscape of these neighborhoods is gorgeously captured by Mati Maldre in hundreds of photographic plates, maps, and illustrations, supplemented by essays by Timothy Barton, Harold Wolff, Robert Wagner, and Paul Sprague.
The Felicity Complex
By August Clarke
Erewhon Books
July 28, 2026
Annie Bot meets Fallout in this dystopian satire: six women created in a lab, designed to serve the billionaires of the future in a luxury fallout shelter, rebel against their programming after the end times arrive. A sendup of traditional womanhood and lampooning the paranoias of the elite, The Felicity Complex questions the ambitions behind the entitled few who plan for the end times—and who truly survives them.
August
Majestic Hills
By Dawn Turner
Scribner
August 4, 2026
Tired of the daily drama in his emergency room, Dr. Langdon Blaque is in search of a place where he can leave the world behind. He loves his job and has no delusions about the suburbs being perfect, but he wants peace and quiet. His wife Josephine, a lawyer, grew up listening to her father’s stories about the Jim Crow South, and sundown towns. She prefers the city. Still, she agrees to move with the caveat that they stay for a year and reassess.
The tight-knit, predominantly white group of neighbors in Majestic Hills initially welcomes them with open arms. But beneath the veneer of privileged harmony, tensions simmer. When a horrifying crime rocks the community, the illusion of safety is shattered, and Josephine and Langdon find themselves at the heart of a brewing storm that pits neighbor against neighbor, exposes deeply ingrained prejudices, and threatens to implode into violence.
Meat Bees
By Dane Erbach
Clash Books
August 4, 2026
By the time Scarlett Sutton arrives at her dad’s cabin in the Smoky Mountains, two locals have already been eaten alive by wasps. Of course, she doesn’t know this yet. All Scarlett knows is her mom finally checked herself into a hospital to take care of her mental health, leaving Scarlett alone with her dad all summer.
The local sheriff’s department is so overwhelmed by these unsolved deaths that when one of the Stovetop Outfitters employees disappears next, Scarlett and her co-workers set out to find him on their own. They discover something much more horrifying: a swarm of yellow jackets stripping the meat off his body. Scarlett never signed up to solve a disgusting mystery, but in order to protect her friends and family, she must defeat the mountain’s darkness and all these godforsaken wasps.
Black Designers in Chicago: Culture and Community in the Twentieth Century
By Chris Dingwall, David Hartt, Daniel Schulman
University of Chicago Press
August 14, 2026
In twentieth-century Chicago, generations of Black artisans, craftspeople, art educators, clothing makers, commercial illustrators, sign painters, furniture makers, beauticians, graphic designers, art directors, and screen printers made and remade the city into an energetic center for modern design. Ambitious, enterprising, and resolutely modern, these Black designers were workers and intellectuals, activists and entrepreneurs. They created works for commercial and everyday use and helped to build community institutions such as the South Side Community Art Center and businesses like the Johnson Publishing Company. Their works ranged from branding and housewares for major corporations to pamphlets and posters made in the name of civil rights and Black Power. Together, they made Black Chicago into a dynamic design scene, working against racism in their professions while embracing the possibilities of design as a medium of social change.
Bisquick: An American Seance
By C. Russell Price
Triquarterly Books
August 15, 2026
Grief is a rodeo filled with ghost clowns. In Bisquick: An American Seance, C. Russell Price explores spiritualism and the fetishization of the Midwest cowboy aesthetic, creating a vibrant world inhabited by three unforgettable characters: the speaker, a traumatized eco-anarchist working through grief; Ghost Cowboy, a ghost dream boyfriend hell-bent on hunting predators of the poor; and Bisquick, a blue ghost horse who just wants to dance. This spectral trio boogies, copulates, and fights against a system that ghosted them long before the demise of their physical bodies, determined to stay saddled to their dreams. Price gallops through the widths of time, the geography of the United States, the spectral plane, and the leather BDSM scene as they attempt to answer this provocative collection’s central question: If the dead could talk, wouldn’t they have something better to say?
The Book of the Jaguar
By Victor Ladis Schultz
Fairwood Press LLC
August 25, 2026
The legions of New Serraña have a sacred custom: when a legionnaire falls in battle, a member of their company must bear the body home to the dead soldier’s family. Álbaro Ceynos is the only surviving member of his company. He’d been garrisoned at Presidio Los Primos, known as the realm’s safest assignment, until a fabled monster emerged from legend, crept down from the mountains, and laid waste to the old fortress.
Now, with one horse, one wagon, one sword, and all his slain brethren, Álbaro the bonebearer roams a decaying empire, bringing home his comrades’ remains. As he meets an array of mourners who move him to question past choices and future commitments, he’ll reveal how the tragedy unfolded, death by death, and how it is that he yet lives.
September
Sleepers
By Molly Sturdevant
Regal House Publishing
September 1, 2026
July 1893. In the lofty terrain of America’s highest silver-mining town, Congress’s sudden gold standard sends silver—and the lives tied to it—plummeting. Frances Byrne, a woman of fierce independence, labors in her print shop with the quiet conviction that steady work will secure her home, her family, and her place in an unraveling world.
As her mostly Irish-immigrant neighborhood edges toward unionization, Frances keeps her head down, resisting the clamor of political action. When her home and shop fall under the watchful eyes of Pinkerton spies, her convictions are tested, and her attachment to the idea of rugged individualism begins to crack.
Can I Get a Witness!: Faith, Family, and Chicago Gospel Music
By Susan B. Dolins with Gregory Donald Gay
University of Chicago Press
September 8, 2026
The Gay Sisters—Evelyn, Geraldine, and Mildred—were key figures in gospel’s Golden Age, and their youngest brother had a front-row seat. Evelyn and Geraldine each innovated singular approaches to gospel piano, while Mildred sang. Together, they toured and performed on a series of influential gospel recordings from 1948 to 1973, playing the Apollo Theatre and crossing paths with musical luminaries like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, Pops Staples, and Dizzy Gillespie. But despite a hit record and prodigious talent, the Gay Sisters faded from the limelight. In the ensuing years, they weathered personal trials while their mother, Fannie, devoted her attention to another family undertaking: starting a church.
Can I Get a Witness! is a call-and-response between Steven B. Dolins, founder of The Sirens Records, and Donald Gay, who vividly describes his boyhood in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood, his family’s remarkable place in gospel history, his mother’s work as a faith leader, and his own calling as a pastor. The book spotlights the rich contributions of a family remembered not only for the songs they recorded but also for their unwavering kindness to others, a legacy that the legendary Sonny Rollins recounts in a moving foreword.
Passing the Baton: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra & The Music Directors Who Shaped Its Greatness
By Phillip Huscher
University of Chicago Press
September 28, 2026
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra boasts a tradition and staying power that few cultural institutions can rival—a legacy that is tested each time one music director passes the conductor’s baton to another. In this first narrative account of the orchestra’s 135-year history, music critic and historian Phillip Huscher delivers a passionate description of how an upstart ensemble rose to international prominence and established itself as the premier symphony orchestra in the United States.
With a scholar’s care for detail and a novelist’s attention to drama, Huscher invites us into the tangled machinations behind the success or failure of each chapter in the orchestra’s storied past. We see how legendary directors such as Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, and Riccardo Muti carried the orchestra to new heights of technical perfection and sonic brilliance, but also how others provoked public outcry, caved to insider hostility, or fell to cruel press. The result is a vivid portrait of an orchestra fighting to sustain its identity amid the constant contest between past and present, supporters and critics, and artistic and financial vision.
Something Followed Us Home: Tales of Latiné Horror
By Cynthia Pelayo
Atria/Primero Sueno Press
September 29, 2026
Gathering chilling work from some of today’s most acclaimed Latiné voices, this anthology moves through haunted households, brutal landscapes, sacred spaces turned dangerous, and bodies claimed by forces both ancient and intimate. The dead murmur behind locked doors. Bones rebuild themselves under merciless suns. Love becomes a doorway for demonic hunger. Prayers summon answers that arrive too late…or too fully. Blood, devotion, and memory intertwine as the past presses back with teeth.
Something Followed Us Home is a landmark anthology of Latiné horror. These stories remind us that the past is never gone, the dead are never silent, and the places we come from will always find their way back to us.
October
Public House
By Dylan Weir
Trio House Press
October 1, 2026
Public House maps the delirious landscapes of addiction. In poem after poem, Weir chronicles the mix of memory and mythology concocted between last call and first light. Between oblivion and sobriety. Between the pull of the bottle and the harder seductions of hope. Part dive bar karoake part confession booth breakdown, Weir writes with the rhythm of someone who’s counted days, lost count, and started over too many times to count, who has learned recovery isn’t a straight line but a mobius strip, a roundabout on which one must meet and lose many different versions of one’s self.
Life Out of Order
By Audrey Niffenegger
Hanover Square Press
October 6, 2026
Discover the highly anticipated new novel from Audrey Niffenegger, which can be read on its own or as a companion to her multi-million copy bestseller The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Alba DeTamble has never lived a life in order. Born with the same rare Chrono-Displacement Disorder as her father, Henry DeTamble, Alba is an involuntary time traveler: she slips unpredictably through decades, carrying the weight of a future she can witness but cannot change. Yet she strives to maintain a normal life: as a gifted violinist, Alba finds refuge in her music, as well as her tight-knit community of artists and activists who fight to take care of each other in an increasingly unstable world.
As she dips in and out of time, Alba is haunted by secrets she must keep from those she loves most, including Zach, her safe, supportive anchor in the chaos. Her journey takes her from the riot-torn Chicago streets, to the eerie, timeless “Yellow House”—where she meets Oliver, a handsome fellow time traveler—to the digital corridors of the Museum of Lost Souls, a virtual sanctuary of forgotten memories and lost artifacts. Curating the museum is Isadora, Alba’s mysterious stepsister and an increasingly unsettling presence in their family—whose fate may be intertwined with Alba’s in more dangerous ways than she knows.
The Majesty of Chicago Jazz: Twenty-Five Visionaries Who Define the City’s Sound
By Howard Reich
University of Chicago Press
October 6, 2026
Author and Chicago native Howard Reich gives readers a front-row seat to the history of Chicago jazz as it roared forth in jazz clubs, concert halls, and festivals. Reich covered Chicago jazz for more than thirty years as the Chicago Tribune‘s staff critic, and in this collection, he argues that jazz as an art form is inconceivable without Chicago. Carefully choosing from among his thousands of articles on jazz, Reich highlights twenty-five of the most important Chicago jazz artists who pushed the art form forward.
Her Kind
By Sophie Lefens
Mariner Books
October 13, 2026
When Ada is left to raise her young son alone, she retreats to her otherworldly aunt Leigh’s crumbling lakeside home, seeking solace for herself and stability for Lenny. Yet, among the wildflowers and the hum of the water, Ada can’t escape the nagging feeling she might not have much time left. Sensing death grow nearer, she invites her three closest friends—a brash, unemployed seamstress; a gentle, disillusioned violinist; and a serious painter—to the house over a long weekend to determine which of them might take on the impossible: raising Lenny if she no longer can.
Amidst strange animal activity and Leigh’s mysterious late-night visits to her dead husband’s grave, the women find comfort and purpose in one another’s company as their stay extends into winter. Meanwhile, Leigh’s memory is fading fast, and Ada must confront past and present truths she’s spent a lifetime avoiding.
Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America
By Lauren Michele Jackson
Amistad
October 13, 2026
Acclaimed New Yorker contributor Lauren Michele Jackson delivers an essay collection devoted to the back—and the conflicting ideas we load upon it. Moving across literature, film, sport, visual art, and U.S. history, Jackson probes how the back carries powerful ideas about beauty, gender, labor, race, and political solidarity. Here the back emerges as a site of vulnerability and desire, embodiment and rhetoric, dependence and resistance.
Jackson’s prose effortlessly shifts between conversational and intellectual, inviting readers into digressions that illuminate rather than distract in a set of ranging essays, alighting upon subjects such as bodybuilding, ballet, portrait photography, Gone With the Wind, horse racing, copyright law, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Back opens a broad door onto the body as both structure and metaphor, linking artistic and political representation through a mutual attention to what—and who—is made to bear weight.
Chicago’s Art Deco Skyscrapers
By Joseph Gustaitis
University of Chicago Press
October 19, 2026
Chicago is America’s premier showcase for both historic and modern architecture. Even so, many of its finest buildings remain little known to visitors, and even to Chicagoans. In Chicago’s Art Deco Skyscrapers, Joseph Gustaitis showcases nearly two dozen Art Deco towers that were built during the exhilarating years of the Jazz Age, from 1927 to 1933. These skyscrapers exemplify a state of mind from the time–an optimistic, forward-looking aesthetic that has been called the “last of the total styles,” as well as the first American style that spread across the globe. In the time between the Great War and the Great Depression, cities and their architects embraced industrial modernity and the exciting new possibilities of scale. Exploring places like the Board of Trade Building, the Merchandise Mart, and the Carbide & Carbon tower, Gustaitis tells the stories of their creation, the architects and developers, construction and financing, zoning and engineering, and so much more.
Monster in the Mirror
By Janasha Prabhu
Sourcebooks Landmark
October 20, 2026
On the night Jiah Rai was found cradling her girlfriend Georgia’s dead body at the bottom of Wailing Cliff, everyone suspected her. There wasn’t enough evidence to charge her, but the town refuses to forget. Murder must run in the family. Jiah’s uncle was a convicted serial killer, and while he died behind bars, his legacy lives on in Jiah and her sister. It doesn’t matter that they’ve lived in Dumont their whole lives—they have never fit into the insular white community, and perhaps they never will.
But legacy isn’t done with Jiah just yet. A few years later, a threat from Georgia’s brother threatens to crumble the shaky peace Jiah has rebuilt. Desperate to feel safe again, Jiah decides to take matters into her own hands and seeks support from her best friend, Estrella. After all, Estrella has been there for Jiah ever since they met after Georgia’s death. But when Estrella never shows up to a dinner party, a series of texts lead Jiah to the beach below, where she finds a body positioned exactly how her uncle displayed his victims over a decade ago. The killer mocks Jiah, hinting they know about her secrets, too. But is Jiah really the monster Dumont thinks she is? As Jiah hunts the killer, she begins to realize she might be unable to save the next victim…and that she may not want to.
Scream! Bleed! Take Off Your Clothes!: Stuart Gordon and Chicago’s Organic Theater Company
By Mary Griswold, Cordis Heard, Jim Rinnert, & Mike Saad
University of Chicago Press
October 23, 2026
When the founder of the Organic Theater Company died in 2020, the Chicago Tribune asked, “Did one person invent Chicago theater? If so, it was Stuart Gordon.” And yet, this iconic theater group is arguably the most influential Chicago company whose story has never been fully told.
In its heyday, from 1969 through 1985, the Organic’s high-spirited, gutsy, and close-knit company created more than thirty idiosyncratic works. A springboard for playwright David Mamet and for the television series ER, it also was formative in the careers of many well-known actors, including Joe Mantegna, André De Shields, Meshach Taylor, and Dennis Franz. Scream! Bleed! Take Off Your Clothes! is the story of a young theater company that always pushed boundaries with an anarchic exuberance. Drawing on extensive interviews and archival research, this insiders’ account, assembled by three Organic members and an artistic associate, details those exciting productions and the company’s complicated internal dynamics, while also positioning the group within Chicago’s vibrant theater scene and the larger culture of the time.
November
Not Everything Burns
By Carri Karuhn
She Writes Press
November 10, 2026
Amber Mettle, a Chicago journalist with a rescue reflex, moves to Los Angeles for her husband’s fresh start. Instead, she’s left with betrayal, no job, and no safety net. Then a catastrophic wildfire takes what’s left: her home, her animals, her sense of control.
In the ruins, Amber meets the next disaster in the form of insurers, mortgage lenders, and opportunist grifters circling for profit. Haunted by signs she can’t quite explain, and driven by the pets she couldn’t save, she turns grief into a mission. She refuses to be a victim twice. Fueled by love, anger, and an unwavering sense of justice, she fights to hold the people responsible accountable—and discovers that even in devastation, hope can take root. Loosely based on the author’s own experiences, this story is about what rebuilding really means when the system is built to wear you down.
Crossing the Gap: Healing Epidemics and Inequalities in a Divided City
By David A. Ansell, MD
University of Chicago Press
November 10, 2026
Two girls are born in the same Chicago hospital. Their neighborhoods, only seven train stops apart, carve their destinies and their life spans. One will live to eighty-five; the other will not reach sixty-five. Crossing the Gap asks how a city that boasts world-class hospitals can tolerate an epidemic of early death–and what it would take to end it.
With his landmark book, The Death Gap, physician and health equity leader David A. Ansell exposed how structural racism and poverty drive people to an early grave. In Crossing the Gap, he goes beyond diagnosis to show what happens when a major medical center decides that the real disease is disinvestment—and that the cure must be jobs, wealth-building, and power-sharing. As chief health equity officer at Rush University Medical Center, Ansell joins pastors, organizers, and young leaders on Chicago’s West Side to flip the script on what a hospital owes its neighbors. He powerfully argues that everyone should have the chance to be healthy and shows that closing America’s death gap is not only about health, but about the future of our democracy itself.
Run-On: Fragments of a Cold Morning
By Phillip Garland
Tortoise Books
November 17, 2026
Run-On is a remarkable literary work set in one night and morning in the life of a young father. It deftly captures the quiet moments of drama inherent in even the most tranquil domestic scenes—particularly the angst a new father must face when torn between the gentle but unforgiving bonds of love and the normal human desire to get away from it all, just for a little bit.
The Last Words of Jack Ruby
By Joshua Corey
Tortoise Books
November 24, 2026
Late 1966. A sharp young FBI agent finds himself summoned to J. Edgar Hoover’s office for an extremely important and highly confidential assignment: to fly to Dallas and interview a dying man who might just know the secrets behind one of the greatest crimes in American history. A dying man who’s also a murderer—indeed, whose own guilt was never in doubt, because his crime was committed in front of journalists and policemen, broadcast on live TV, and plastered on the front page of newspapers across the globe. A dying man, and an infamous one: Jack Ruby.
But Special Agent Bergman soon finds himself enmeshed in intrigue and suspicion, mayhem and paranoia. The turbulent decade that started careening into chaos three years before in Dealey Plaza has now crashed; the pillars of society are crumbling. An ex-partner just happens to be in town, drowning in drink and regret, possibly keeping an eye on Bergman but maybe simply nursing himself through a shady assignment called COINTELPRO. There’s a beautiful and elusive woman who once danced for Jack Ruby, and who may know more about his dark, paranoid world than she lets on. Meanwhile a prosecutor in nearby New Orleans is embarking on a quixotic crusade to upend everything the Bureau thinks it knows about that November weekend in 1963. To top it all off, his hospitalized interviewee is drugged and dazed, sometimes lucid and sometimes muddled by morphine; he’s babbling about Judaism and history, about the Holocaust and Al Capone. And he’s also obsessed with a world-champion Jewish boxer and decorated World War II hero who also just happens to be a loyal lifelong friend: one who grew up running gangster errands with Ruby on the cacophonous streets of Chicago, one who might be a distraction for Bergman and might also be the key to everything—a man named Barney Ross.
