J Brooke’s I Can Tell You the Version That Will Make You Take My Side begins in a rich and specific New York City childhood full of binaries, then catapults into a fully realized, self-aware adulthood where the speaker experiences parenting, a breast cancer scare and the complicated questioning of top-surgery.

A dazzlingly inventive account of kinship and dispossession by a two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author

In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance. He grapples with the question of how to know and mourn the kin he was never able to meet.

webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother and moments with his own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors’ lives to those of several historical Black figures — Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry “Box” Brown and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.

Attempting to exhaust the possibilities of the sentence and the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach. Part elegy, part archival detective story and part visual poem, Without Terminus is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss.

Scrap Book, the debut collection from Nick Martino, is a lyric, hybrid exploration of his father’s prison sentence and its aftermath — an inherited history marked by silence, fracture, shame and addiction. Weaving poems with invented forms, familial documents and fragmented memory, Martino constructs an autoethnographic study of carceral trauma and its reverberations across generations.

Set within a Midwestern family home along the shores of Lake Michigan, Scrap Book draws on Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory: “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their birth but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply.” Interwoven with poems grounded in a familial archive, such as journal entries and Polaroids of Martino’s father in prison. The collection uses the idea of photographic development as a framework for exploring how insight into family history can emerge gradually, like an image appearing in a darkroom.

Through its use of ekphrasis and archival fragments, Scrap Book creates a textural interior landscape in which the speaker wrestles with how they see themselves and how they are seen by others. Ultimately, Scrap Book is a work of gathering and repair, a lyrical stitching-together of fragments in search of meaning. In reassembling the family archive, Martino opens a space for readers to do the same: to sift through memory, injury, and ego, and fashion from their own “scraps” a deeper understanding of what they carry.

“Do you identify with any of the above terminology? Occasionally. Some days they feel appropriate. Others, I resent these tools of our language. I reject and embrace, synchronously.”

Bloodroom is a howling, scorching debut collection of deftly formatted poetry-circling and delicately probing themes of familial debt, legacy, obligation and the matriline. Through an index of past wounds and inherited scars, the speaker bleeds their histories together with the slow erosion of nostalgia.

These poems offer an incisive and scalding interrogation of gender, yet are often unbearably tender-a swirling emulsion of grief and anger poured into an intricately technical and beautifully challenging mold. Each piece draws out a tragic, cyclical song of love and loss, resentment and admiration, as though drawing poison from a wound.

Bancroft’s writing is meditative, cleansing and compulsively readable: recounting a feminine childhood transformed into something monstrous until seen through a new lens. Bloodroom is a plea to identity, to the process of searching for purpose and of seeking certainty in a broken world.

From Skins and Games of Thrones star Hannah Murray, a deeply intimate, shockingly honest memoir about fame, mental illness, and the struggle to leave a shadowy wellness organization whose belief in magic shattered her reality. “Extraordinary — propulsive, immersive; like nothing I have ever read.”– Dolly Alderton

“A remarkable book about the cost of wanting to be saved.”– Ruth WarinerI lost my mind. I lost my self. I got them back. But they are different. … From her breakout role as a teen actor on the cult TV show Skins, to critically acclaimed movies, to the smash hit Game of Thrones, Hannah Murray built a career in Hollywood cracking open her own psychological foundations and pushing her body to its limits. But one day, the line between make-believe and reality disappeared, and she found herself confined to a psych ward, dangerously in love with the leader of a shadowy wellness organization, and believing in magic. How she got there — and how she managed to rebuild her life — is the heart of this gripping, powerful memoir that asks: How far would you go to find enlightenment?For Hannah, it was deceptively easy to fall down the rabbit hole. As she struggled with her mental health, she sought help in the form of wellness and self-care. After an eye-opening session with an energy healer, Hannah was introduced to an organization that she was told would bring her further spiritual rewards. Enthralled by its charismatic leader and his teachings of a world filled with magic and meaning, Hannah found herself sucked into a rigorous practice involving high control and financial outlay. And as her sense of reality began to slip, eventually resulting in her hospitalization and diagnosis with bipolar disorder, she realized she had fully ceded control of her life to this mysterious organization. And, she thought, as she reckoned with the Hollywood career that conditioned her to give her body and soul over to others, maybe she’d been doing that her whole life.Both a cautionary tale and a cry for radical empathy, Hannah’s story of learning to trust herself will resonate with anyone who has struggled to find agency. The Make-Believe is a probing exploration of womanhood and mental health and a search for the healing that comes when we reclaim our own narratives.

Discover nature-based devotional practices for rekindling humanity’s ancient covenant with the living world — one rooted in reverence and love — and restoring our sacred bond with Earth.

Drawing from decades of Sufi teaching, a deep relationship with nature and the transformative power of story, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee guides us beyond today’s ecological and cultural crises to the heart of the matter: our collective forgetfulness and the severing of our primordial bond with Earth. Following the entwined threads of grief and love, he explains how this moment of crisis holds within it the seeds of transformation and regrowth.

Remembering Earth blends reflection with practical guidance, exploring how remembrance, prayer, praise and intimacy with Earth can restore our sacred relationship with the living world. Through a variety of practices in six key areas (Breath, Heart, Step, Listening, Time and Prayer), the book guides you to an experience of radical belonging. Each practice is a doorway, inviting you from concept to communion, from observer to participant in the sacred web of life, offering an embodied spiritual ecology that moves beyond ideas into lived experience.

In a time of great unraveling, Remembering Earth offers an embodied, spiritual path of remembrance and kinship, guiding us back to the sacredness of creation and our place within the more-than-human world.

From the Emmy-nominated comedian who created “the best segment in late night” (Vulture) comes this hilarious and practical collection of advice for how to live your best life in love, at work and in comedy.

You’d think with a résumé like Jenny Hagel’s — being a writer/performer for Late Night with Seth Meyers and head writer/EP of The Amber Ruffin Show — she would describe her greatest accomplishment as something like sharing the stage with Hillary Clinton, or the six times she was nominated for an Emmy. Yet, for Jenny, landing a joke or going to a fancy award show pales in comparison to her true passion: giving people advice.

Jenny is so obsessed with (addicted to?) offering unsolicited wisdom that she runs a sold-out live show in New York City called, appropriately, Jenny Hagel Gives Advice. With her debut essay collection, Jenny sets out to backseat drive for as many unwitting strangers as possible. The result is a heartfelt and funny journey through a list of life-changing recommendations, like: wear black when you travel, buy an analog watch and just because you can go into the monkey enclosure while visiting Honduras, it doesn’t mean that you should.

An instant classic of nature writing and breathtaking blueprint for a more expansive view of animalkind, inspired by the profound sense of awe that accompanies an expedition into unknown lands“Shatters the notion that humanity holds a monopoly on civilization.” — Joaquin Phoenix

“This book will leave you feeling like a vital member of the broader world of animals — a cosmopolitan citizen of the zoopolis.” — Robert Moor

From far-flung forest settlements in Canada’s “beaver belt” to disputed territories of clashing Argentine ant armies, Ryan Huling’s around-the-world odyssey takes us to places most people don’t even know exist. Along the way, we meet renowned ecologists, anthropologists, geographers and historians whose work has uncovered vast sub-Saharan tunnel complexes, booming animal metropolises nestled within the urban sprawl of the American Southwest and ancient Silk Road-style migration routes that traverse the Eurasian Steppe.

When humans settle in an area, it is deemed, by definition, populated. By contrast, the millions of other species we share this planet with have long been viewed as fleeting ephemera, living brief and transitory lives in “uninhabited” wilderness. Over the course of a year, Huling investigates how technology is rapidly changing that perception by deepening humanity’s understanding of our fellow animals and their unique relationships with the land, air and sea. His immersive account fuses with vivid full-color maps and hand-drawn sketches by award-winning cartographer Oliver Uberti, revealing a radically reimagined version of our world and illuminating its true contours for the first time.

ONE OF LIT HUB‘S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2026

“Incredibly perceptive … A stunning testimony from a talented writer who strips off false facades with honesty and vulnerability and leaves us with a searing question: ‘Can you build a nation based on love?'”– Mónica Teresa Ortiz, BookPage (starred review)

A radically vulnerable and virtuosic inquiry into the pursuit of freedom and the interminable nature of struggle, from the award-winning author of What We Lose

Weaving personal reflections with piercing insight and expansive vision across nine brilliant essays, Zinzi Clemmons explores the complexities of the elusive concept of freedom. As the daughter of a South African mother and a Trinidadian America father, she recounts growing up in the largely white, affluent town of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and her frequent travels to Johannesburg, where the lofty promise of freedom was all around her. Coming of age amidst the euphoria of South Africa’s first all-race elections, she grapples with the legacy of Nelson Mandela and the shattered hope in the wake of the Obama era. Clemmons critiques the entrenched inequalities that haunt both countries, from the tragic loss of a childhood friend to the violence that often befalls women who have the audacity to be free.

In a deft mix of memoir, family history, criticism and reportage, drawing on a vast range of material from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, political analysis and history to Clemmons’s own experiences across the globe, Freedom is an incendiary exploration of race, sex, class and inheritance. In elegiac prose, Clemmons trains her discerning eye on American institutions and mythologies, probing the bounds of liberation and autonomy to interrogate our most enduring quest: the relentless pursuit of freedom for all.

From New York Times bestselling author Sarah Wilson comes a deeply moving, wise guide to finding joy and meaning in a world that seems to be falling apart

It’s hard to escape the feeling that something is deeply wrong … that life has become precariously off-balance. We are hit hourly with headlines about catastrophic wildfires, unprecedented flooding, record heat waves, collapsing democracies, AI and nuclear threat, rising economic inequality, widespread unrest and more. In I Eat the Stars, Sarah Wilson argues we are undergoing what every complex civilization before us has: systemic collapse.

So how do we continue to live as sensitive humans amidst such a tumultuous shift? What does life look like when the systems we rely on deteriorate? Should we be having kids? How do we make financial decisions? Should we be prepping? And, most importantly, how do we avoid succumbing to doom and despair?

In I Eat the Stars, Sarah Wilson delves into these pressing questions. Drawing on many years of research and wisdom gained from more than 200 conversations with philosophers, poets, game theorists and spiritual leaders, Wilson takes readers on an intimate journey as she lays out a path for living fully, meaningfully and beautifully through these troubled times. Our predicament, she argues, is ultimately an urgent call to us all to relish what is valuable to us — to eat the stars — and to return to our humanity once again.

I Eat the Stars empowers readers to move beyond panic, doom and despair. With her warm, incisively intelligent, wise and down-to-earth voice, Wilson creates a space for readers to confront their fears and anxieties about an uncertain future, guiding them toward one rooted in truth, hope, justice, creativity, community, and to step up as “warriors” and meet the moment. We are in what we were warned about for decades. But from a crisis comes stunning possibility.

An irresistible delight, this hilarious and heartwarming essay collection gathers essential tales about growing up in the South, the pitfalls of date night and why no one should ever tell a Black girl how to Black Girl.

Black women always find a place to meet: in the natural hair aisle, at Beyoncé concerts, even online in memes and catchphrases. This book is one of those places: a living room where readers can contemplate how a well-picked afro can defy the laws of physics and why boob sweat has to exist in the first place. Here, Black Girl is a verb. Here, Black women can Black Girl in every way we want to.

Amena Brown’s book Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl blends storytelling, humor and pop culture commentary to traverse the magic and wisdom she’s gleaned from being raised by Southern Black women and supported by the community of Black women who hold her down today. After graduating from the International Black Girl Headquarters (the renowned HBCU Spelman College), Amena has built a career telling stories and celebrating Black womanhood.

In her book, she shares stories of dancing in Janelle Monae’s “Tightrope” music video and partnering with Tracee Ellis Ross to compose odes to natural hair. She imparts essential life lessons from the Real Housewives of Atlanta and tells hair tales, including wisdom on the ideal style for her first speaking gig at Essence Fest (box braids, 100%). In the end, Brown shares that Black women are a whole world. A galaxy of customs, language, code and unspoken understandings, all explored with humor and heart in this unforgettable book.