Goliath’s Curse surveys five millennia of societal collapse, drawing on archaeology and anthropology to examine patterns across more than 440 past societies—from early Egypt to the modern era. Luke Kemp identifies recurring causes and systemic risks (including environmental stress and high interdependence), explores what collapse can look like, and highlights how resilience often depends on social and political choices.

Built in Sweden in 1979 and known by many names, one barge serves as troop barracks, a floating jail, and temporary factory housing as it moves through shifting jurisdictions. Following the Vessel’s changing roles and registrations, Empty Vessel uses this single object to explore offshore flags, modular shipping, and market-driven policies that reshape labor, law, and everyday lives across borders—offering a compact, spoiler-free look at globalization’s human and legal effects.

How to Be Well is a journalistic investigation of the modern wellness industry and its impact on how people think about health and self-care. Amy Larocca explores popular trends and communities, assesses the science behind common practices, and examines how wellness is shaped by gender, class, race, commerce, and long-standing beauty and fashion marketing—showing why alternative remedies persist and how the industry profits from health anxieties.

Historian Danielle Leavitt, an American who grew up in Ukraine, uses online diaries and reporting to follow a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Through intimate, character-focused portraits—a would-be café owner, a young woman whose plans and relationships are upended, and a fashion insider who returns to help—Leavitt reveals how war reshapes everyday life, community, and national identity without focusing on battlefield rhetoric.

Part memoir and part conceptual art project, Lana Lin’s The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam retells her partner Lan Thao’s life from Việt Nam during the war alongside Lin’s own experiences as a gender-queer Taiwanese American. Using an experimental, dialogic approach inspired by Gertrude Stein, the book examines queer love and artistic collaboration while probing race, gender, memory, and everyday subjects like photography, illness, food, and life in New York in an intimate, reflective voice.

Art Work is Sally Mann’s reflective exploration of creativity and artistic practice. Using personal stories, photographs, journal entries, and letters, she offers candid lessons on work, risk-taking, rejection, luck, and the persistence required to make art, all delivered in a direct, personal voice.

Vi Liu, a twenty-three-year-old of Taiwanese and white heritage, is drifting through life in a Midwestern college town when she rescues a mysterious sentient blob outside a bar. As the creature becomes part of her life, Vi tries to shape it into her ideal partner and is compelled to confront loneliness, past relationships, and the role of race and identity in her search for belonging. The story blends humor and tenderness as Vi navigates love, control, and self-discovery.

Decades in the future under the authoritarian state of Qin, citizens use implanted Mindbanks to record and transfer memories, creating a new market and new ways to control perception. When a man inherits his late mother’s Mindbank—containing memories from before, during, and after the war that made Qin dominant—he suspects the Party may have altered them and decides to risk everything to reveal what they contain. The novel examines memory, history, and the ways power shapes collective truth.

Authority is a collection of essays by Andrea Long Chu that examines what authority means in contemporary criticism and culture. Chu reads novels, television, theater, and video games, revisiting works such as The Phantom of the Opera and the reception of Octavia Butler, while critiquing the habits of literary critics. She traces the history of criticism from the eighteenth century to the social-media era and argues for a form of criticism fit to respond to real political crises.

Bibliophobia is a memoir in which Sarah Chihaya examines her intense, sometimes fraught relationship with books — the “Life Ruiners” that have shaped her sense of self as a Japanese American and a literary critic. After a hospitalization for a nervous breakdown, she reflects on whether the stories that governed her life can be rewritten, using readings of works like The Bluest Eye, Anne of Green Gables, and The Last Samurai to explore cultural identity, depression, and recovery with candor and dark humor.

Six, a 6'7" player fighting to reclaim a starting spot, and Green, a 6'1" social-media savvy competitor, are lovers and rivals who break barriers as Asian American trans women playing in the men’s pro indoor volleyball league. As they navigate team politics, long-distance schedules, fandom, and public scrutiny, a pandemic-era championship bubble and a sudden public crisis test their relationship, careers, and capacity to grieve—without revealing how it ends.

Over seven days at the Grand Paloma Resort in the Dominican Republic, a local healer named Vida is drawn into a crisis when a guest child is harmed. Laura, a resort manager striving for a promotion, and her troubled sister Elena, a babysitter whose night of poor choices has consequences, must confront secrets and responsibilities as a disappearance escalates tensions. The novel explores class, family, community, and how far people will go to protect those they love.

Mitch Caddo, a young law graduate and political fixer, helps run the government and casino of the Passage Rouge Nation alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck. When a high-profile challenger enters the election and Mack’s estranged sister, Layla Beck—Mitch’s former love—becomes involved, old wounds and loyalties are tested. As tensions rise, Mitch and Layla must navigate power, family ties, and the community’s future while trying to keep political conflict from spilling into violence.

In 1999 New York, best friends Sal and Charo struggle to keep their dreams alive: Sal, a bookish science lover haunted by his past in Santo Domingo, and Charo, a young mother trapped in a controlling relationship and a dead-end job. When Sal finds connection in a vibrant queer social circle, both their worlds expand and force them to confront their identities, pasts, and what they owe to themselves and to each other. The novel explores migration, belonging, and the ways friendship can become a chosen home.

In 1967, Izzy Gently is orphaned when the doomsday cult she was born into clashes with the sheriff in the New Mexico desert. Taken in by a struggling rancher as NASA rocket tests alter the landscape, she grows into a life marked by loss, addiction, and a long search for faith. Moving from the Southwest through Texas to New Orleans, Izzy’s encounters with eccentric characters and her efforts to help others reclaim a sense of wonder become a personal journey about belief and meaning in the Space Age.

Middle Spoon follows a narrator who seems to have it all—a devoted husband, two children, and a younger boyfriend—until the boyfriend unexpectedly leaves. Grappling with his first intense heartbreak, he confronts social judgment and the limits of how relationships and family can be arranged while searching for a way to hold love and responsibility together. Witty and empathetic, the novel examines modern intimacy, polyamory, and the messy work of wanting and belonging.

Fulfillment follows two half-brothers who reunite at their family home in Kentucky: Joel, a successful academic whose marriage is unraveling, and Emmett, a factory worker stalled by indecision. Joel’s wife Alice, restless and longing for connection, becomes entangled with Emmett, and their tensions force each character to confront class, desire, and the cost of escape. The novel examines family, shame, and the difficult choices people make in search of meaning.

When 30-something queer Brooklynite Wilder suddenly gains the ability to understand every language, they are taken in by a small coven of trans witches — Quibble, a portal traveler; Artemis, the seer and caretaker; and Mary Margaret, a teen with telekinetic powers. As Wilder learns to live with magic and find belonging, the group must face a hostile artificial intelligence that upends their sense of safety and forces them to reckon with questions of consciousness, identity, and embodiment. A character-driven, spoiler-free story about community, transformation, and what it means to belong.

Aggregated Discontent is a collection of sixteen essays that blend memoir, cultural criticism, and reporting to examine twenty‑first‑century womanhood. Harron Walker uses personal stories to explore work, relationships, fertility and embodiment, corporate pinkwashing, pressures to conform (including whiteness), and how institutions and intimate dynamics limit agency. Sharp, candid, and often darkly funny, the essays probe how women navigate labor, healthcare, identity, and desire without revealing specific plot details.

Goblin Mode blends memoir and fable as a version of Caroline Hagood undertakes a surreal three-day odyssey across plague-era Brooklyn and Puerto Rico. Parenting two spirited children amid a possibly haunted apartment, encounters with talking parrots and other strange figures, and the presence of a mischievous goblin push her toward bolder, wilder ways of being, leaving it unclear whether the weirdness is metaphorical or literal.

Nightshining follows Jennifer Kabat’s first year in Margaretville, New York, where a rain-swollen stream and a flooded basement prompt an investigation into the region’s environmental past. As she traces floods, Cold War weather experiments, and contested land histories affecting the Mohawk Nation, Kabat blends personal grief and family memory with reportage. The book is a lyrical, spoiler-free exploration of how place, history, and human efforts to control nature intersect.

Aiden Arata's You Have a New Memory is a short collection of personal essays that examines life online—identity, girlhood, and the ways digital platforms shape feeling and behavior. Mixing memoir and cultural criticism, Arata reflects on forums, fan fiction, TikTok, and influencer culture to question how we become creators, consumers, and commodities in the internet age.