I’m back! Did you miss me? Here is my list of most anticipated books for the first half of 2026. I love sifting through publishing catalogs and polling my communities online and IRL to find out what is coming in the new year. I spend a whole lot of time crafting this list that reflects my taste in books – think narrative nonfiction, high drama fiction, satire, memoir, and history. My list notably will be lacking some of the buzziest 2026 releases, because I don’t really care about those books (no shade to Ann Patchett, that is just not my ministry). I try my best to only share with you the books I genuinely want to read next year.
For accountability’s sake, last year’s list featured 41 books. I read (or DNF’d) 23 of them and featured nine on The Stacks podcast. So believe me when I say this is a list of books I am planning to read.
This list has 39 books on it and they’re organized by pub date. I can’t wait to hear what you think of my picks. Please share your thoughts and most anticipated books in the comments.
Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster by Jacob Soboroff
I think I speak for most Angeleno’s when I say the fires of last January rocked this city to its core. I am really looking forward to Jacob Soboroff’s account of these events not only because he is a stellar journalist who was reporting on the front lines but also because he is a child of the Palisades. I trust his skill as a professional to tell a compelling story and to do it with care.
Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Storm at the Capitol: An Oral History of January 6th by Mary Clare Jalonick
An oral history of the January 6th riots released on January 6th? 2026 is starting off strong.
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Miracle Children: Race, Education, and a True Story of False Promises by Erica L. Green & Katie Benner
The story of a Louisiana high school that boasted 100% college acceptance rates and subsequently became a cultural phenomenon. It was only later discovered that it was all a lie. This nonfiction book uncovers the forgeries and obfuscation that made this scam possible and ties it to the education system and the social inequities that are at the root of the fraud.
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P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance by Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau
Did somebody say a book about Bad Bunny? And right before his half-time performance at the Super Bowl? Yes please. An examination of Benito and both his performance of politics and his politics as performance. This is the kind of cultural analysis that makes my heart sing. Well anything that has to do with Bad Bunny makes my heart sing.
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Vigil by George Saunders
I have never read anything by George Sauunders, and 2026 feels like the year to remedy that. His latest novel is about a spirit guide that ushers people from the world of the living into the world of the dead. Her latest assignment is a corrupt billionaire who has to take stock of his life and all he’s wrought before transitioning.
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Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon by Toni Morrison
Anytime we get more Toni Morrison, even old writing collected in new ways, I am going to be excited. As the subtitle indicates, this collection is Morrison’s musings on literature and how the American canon has shaped our society.
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Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage by Heather Ann Thompson
Heather Ann Thompson’s previous book Blood in the Water was such an influential book for me it is the reason I started The Stacks podcast. And now, she is back with an in-depth look at the Bernie Goetz case, which is the story of a man on the NYC subway who shot four Black teens after they asked him for five dollars. This shooting from 1980’s New York was a flashpoint in the city and around the country because of what it illuminated about race and power, and those echoes are still heard today.
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In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America’s Caregiving Crisis by Laura Mauldin
This book explores the world of unpaid care work that is taken up by the loved ones of the chronically ill and disabled as told through both memoir and research. In addition to her own story, Mauldin talks to couples around the country who are navigating this precarious terrain.
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The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family by Dorothy Roberts
Dorothy Roberts is a nonfiction icon known for her work around the child welfare system and the Black American experience. In her new book, her family takes center stage as she focuses on her parents’ interracial marriage and growing up mixed in 1960’s Chicago.
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Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack
A female sex worker is recruited by government agents to assassinate a far right politician called “Meat Neck.” I mean hello?!? Amazing premise, right?
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A War within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home by Wil Haygood
This new work of nonfiction “explores how the Vietnam War became a mirror for the struggle of Black Americans—fighting for freedom abroad while demanding equality at home…” I look forward to having a better understanding of what these soldiers went through and also how it reverberates today.
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Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth by Daisy Hernandez
Maybe one of the most topical books on this list, Citizenship, asks the question, who is and should be a citizen? Hernandez uses memoir, cultural criticism, and history to probe this question and try and make sense of it all.
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On Morrison by Namwali Serpell
The brilliant critic and writer Namwali Serpell is taking on the writer of our time, Toni Morrison in this new essay collection. Serpell analyzes Morrison’s work and its impact on the literary landscape and culture more broadly.
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Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution by Anand Gopal
The story of six men and women who led the remarkable struggle for revolution in Syria in 2011 from a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist. I know so little about this moment in recent history but look forward to learning more.
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Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV by Jack Balderrama Morley
A book all about how the architecture on our favorite reality shows is impacting our own culture desires when it comes to dwellings, and how that doesn’t always align with the political and socio-economic beliefs we claim to hold.
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El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory by Jazmine Ulloa
The story of the city of El Paso, a contentious border town in today’s highly charged immigration landscape, as told through the stories of five families. I always love this narrative style (multiple individuals or families to frame a larger issue) and think illuminating the history that brought the United States and El Paso to this moment, will be well served by the form.
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Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird by Keith O’Brien
Confession time. I am a sports fan who does not care one lick about Larry Bird. Sorry, it’s true. However, after reading O’Brien’s fantastic Pete Rose biography, I’m willing to give this one a try. That’s how good Charlie Hustle was. So, I guess you could say Keith O’Brien is the Larry Bird of sports biographies.
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Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom by Camonghe Felix
I read and loved Felix’s last book, Dycalculia, and am looking forward to this new one even more. With her background in politics and her skills as a poet and writer, this polemic that argues that the Black radical poetic tradition is a model for a better way at governing is truly exciting to me.
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Black. Single. Mother.: Real Life Tales of Longing and Belonging by Jamilah Lemieux
I started following Jamilah Lemieux on social media years ago and have always sort of hoped she would write a book, and now here we are. This book mixes essays and interviews to celebrate and center Black single mothers, some of the most maligned people in the American consciousness.
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Kin by Tayari Jones
I am going to be very real with you, I have no idea what this book is about, I have not read a single sentence of a synopsis or jacket copy. All I know is that Tayari Jones has a new book out, her first since 2018’s An American Marriage and I will be reading it.
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Whidbey by T. Kira Madden
Three women’s lives converge after the murder of a man they all have in common. This premise is intriguing enough that I don’t want to know more, I just want to read the book.
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Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team by A. M. Gittlitz
Baseball, New York City, and class discourse all in one book? I don’t know that I ever thought I needed (or wanted) a history of the Mets, but then I saw this book was coming out and immediately felt like this was the only book I maybe ever needed (or wanted).
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The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
I do not pretend to understand science, and yet, when Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is writing about it, I think maybe, just maybe I do get it. She is one of the only people I’ve read who writes about hard science in a way that feels expansive and urgent to daily life. I look forward to seeing how she subverts our preconceived notions of what it means to write in this space.
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London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe
This is not a drill, new PRK! This one is about a teenaged boy who dies suddenly, and only in his death is his secret life amidst shady figures and oligarchs revealed. So like, that’s what London Falling is about, or whatever, but all you actually need to know is we are getting new Patrick Radden Keefe. HELLO!
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Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town by Michael Edison Hayden
What happens when a white nationalist group moves to town? This book answers that question through the story of a West Virginia town that became home to VDARE, a white nationalist group that focuses on the “great replacement” theory.
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Don’t Tell Me How It Ends by Adrienne Thurman
I am not much of a romance girlie, but the premise of this book is sparking something in me. It’s about a woman who is done with love (aren’t they always) who gets pulled into her sister’s matchmaking business and you know, sparks fly. This sounds like there just might be enough mess to hold my attention, and also I sorta loved Patti Stanger’s show.
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Honey by Imani Thompson
Now, speaking of mess, this novel feels a little more my speed. It promises a grad student who murders bad men in the name of feminism.
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Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov
I’m extremely curious about this book by an Israeli-American scholar of the Holocaust “explores and explains his native country’s intensifying turn toward violence and exclusion.” I look forward to seeing what he presents as the cause and effect of the nation’s shifting identity.
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Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg
I love to read Emma Copley Eisenberg’s writing on bodies and fatness in her Substack, so I’m extra excited to dive into her new collection of interconnected short stories about a group of friends exploring bodies, queerness, and sex.
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Questions 27 & 28 by Karen Tei Yamashita
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt ordered thousands of Japanese-Americans to be rounded up and locked away. While being held captive they were asked questions about their allegiances – to the US or to Japan. This book uses creative nonfiction to reach “backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived in its aftermath.”
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Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto by MJ Corey
MJ Corey is best known for her “Kardashian Kolloquium” on TikTok which uses media theory and cultural analysis to explain what the Kardashians are doing and how it is impacting media and society. This book promises more of the same and a bigger history of the infamous internet family.
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Death of the Soccer God by Dimitry Elias Legér
In case you can’t tell, I am a sucker for a sports book. Fiction or nonfiction, it doesn’t matter. Not to mention in 2026 we’ve got a World Cup (anyone have a hook up on tickets?), so I’ll be extra primed for a soccer novel. This one is about a beloved soccer star who is about to die.
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On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward
I told you a lot of big names had books coming out in 2026. I do not lie about these things. This collection of essays includes some of Jesmyn Ward’s nonfiction greatest hits, speeches, and a new introduction. New Jesmyn is always a good thing.
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No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed
A novel about two gay Afghan men who leave their home countries and find one another in Istanbul after a Pride march is busted up by the police. The book explores freedom and authoritarianism from a new voice in fiction.
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Monique Escapes by Édouard Louis; Translated by John Lambert
A super slim novel about a mother and son who must escape the mother’s abusive relationship. I’ve never read anything by Édouard Louis but I know he is a young beloved queer French novelist.
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There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood by Rasheed Newson
A closested gay Black actor in 1950s Hollywood dies under suspicious circumstances, the studio’s fixer has to get involved. I loved Newsome’s debut novel My Government Means to Kill Me because it hit all the beats I look for in historical fiction, so I’m hopeful this book will do the same.
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Pool House by Mary H. K. Choi
Mary H. K. Choi does it for me. I’ve read and loved all of her books, and this one, Pool House, is her first foray into the adult space. She’s writing about a mother daughter relationship and it’s set in Hollywood, and there is grief (which Mary does so so well), so you know I’m here for it!
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The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers by Carlos Barragán
This narrative nonfiction book takes us into the world of “romance scammers” in Lagos, Nigeria. Who are the people behind the screen and how did they get wrapped up in these scams? I’ve always wanted to know more about this world that has mostly been relegated to off-handed jokes.
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The Missed Connection by Tia Williams
My favorite romance author is back with the story of a woman who is searching for her “missed connection,” the hot guy next to her on a European flight. I’m sure this book will be filled with the meet cute goodness I need and the depth Williams is known for.
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