Readers who enjoy the imaginative yet unsettling horror of John Langan and Ananda Lima should bask in the uncanny visions of Compton’s haunting tales. It is a solid collection with no weak stories. Read more
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Too often, lyrics collections can be little more than keepsakes for fans, easily thrown together and presented without any context or new material. That was never going to be the case for Darnielle—the indie folk musician has always had a strong literary bent, as evidenced by his three well-received novels, Wolf in White Van (2014), Universal Harvester (2017), and Devil House (2022). His new book, which shares its title with one of his most well-known songs, is structured as a book of days, with a song for each one. He writes, “Some are accompanied by detailed explications, and some by autobiographical reflections; some get elliptical glosses and some get extended question marks.” The lyrics are brilliant; Darnielle is one of the best songwriters of his generation, and his words are achingly beautiful, sometimes angry and triumphant… Read more
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Novelist, essayist, and critic Wideman delivers a profound, career-spanning collection of essays on literature, sports, and culture … Incisive and enthralling, the collection puts Wideman’s keen critical eye and cultural awareness on full display. The result is an essential chronicle of the American experience. Read more
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Religion, technology, power, and the rise and fall of entire empires are tied up with economics and commerce in McWilliams’ excellent whistle-stop tour of the way money has shaped world history. Covering centuries of innovations—from an ancient baboon femur called the Ishango Bone, possibly used for accounting, to digital-age solutions like M-Pesa, a service in Africa that turns mobile-phone credit into money—it’s a blast of a book. Read more
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Speculative fiction and the funkier corners of digital culture go together like chocolate and peanut butter—see Ryan North’s crowdsourced Machine of Death series or the novels based on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale for prime examples. Here, qntm (aka British author Sam Hughes) offers a legally sanitized but fantastically composed take on the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction project that blends horror and SF tropes with satire and literary experimentation. Read more
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While obviously appealing to word nerds and writers, Fatsis’s narrative is more broadly relevant to anyone who speaks, reads, and writes in American English. It provides a thorough, thoughtful history of dictionaries and the language they both shape and record, while championing the dictionary’s continued relevance in the 21st century. Lively, well-researched, and often entertaining, Unabridged is an essential resource for anyone interested in understanding how language evolves. Read more
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Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment. “Enshittification,” coined by the prolific technology critic and author Cory Doctorow, is one of these. Doctorow came up with the phrase, in 2022, to describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominated our daily lives seemed to be getting worse at the same time. Read more
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[Frances] Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam – and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject … A brilliant book … There is an uncanny closeness between biographer and subject at play here, and I find myself wondering whether Wilson didn’t feel at times as if her manuscript wasn’t a form of automatic writing. Read more
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Rosson, who put a fresh spin on the zombie apocalypse trope in the Fever House duology, is equally creative with vampires in this brilliant horror novel set in 1970s Oregon … Rosson expertly balances action and character development to craft an edge of the seat thrill ride. Readers will be hooked. Read more
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Samanta Schweblin is the master of dread. Her stories are part of the growing literary movement that mixes psychological and social realism with touches of horror and suspense; releases such as 2014’s Fever Dream have enchanted and haunted readers. This new collection, Good and Evil and Other Stories, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, will pull in readers and leave them, shivering, in the dark. Read more
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