New Pages: Summer 2026

July Sun: Stories [fiction]
Riverhead, June 30 [book launch with Professor V. V. Ganeshananthan]
From Kirkus Reviews: “Ahmad excels at swiftly drawing readers into her characters’ unique internal landscapes, so that each story feels lived in, more expansive than its page count. The specificity of each character’s inner turmoil propels these narratives toward weighty questions rather than easy answers.” 

What I Made for Dinner [memoir]
Catapult, June 9 [book launch with Professor Aamina Ahmad]
From Publishers Weekly: “Belc (The Natural Mother of the Child) uses his Covid-era obsession with semi famous internet chefs as a springboard for a charming reflection on food and identity. ‘I am cooking to save my life,’ Belc writes, acknowledging the intensity of his relationship with food influencers after Covid isolated him at home with his wife and three children (then ages seven, six, and four). Eventually, Belc’s adventures in the kitchen spin off into musings on his childhood, gender transition, and fertility troubles. Through it all, Belc proves a funny, generous guide who remains self-aware about his obsessions without undermining their sincerity. There’s plenty of sustenance in these pages.”

Through Arab Eyes: Protestantism and Tridentine Catholicism in the Islamic Mediterranean, 1517-1798
Palgrave Macmillan, June 29
From the publisher: “The first book based exclusively on Arabic sources in the study of the early modern religious encounters between Western Europe and the Islamic Mediterranean, this volume elucidates the impact of the Protestant and Catholic reformations on the Islamic Mediterranean. Through contemporaneous debates, disputations, autobiographies, correspondence, and histories, it analyzes the missionary efforts to convert Eastern Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Druzes to the new Christianities of Western Europe and the resulting consequences on the Arab East, thereby calling attention to the differences in the ideologies of conversion between Christianity and Islam.”

Anne Shakespeare’s Epitaph: Elements in Shakespeare and Text
Cambridge University Press, 2026
From the publisher: “The Shakespeare family occupies five gravesites on the chancel steps at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. Anne Shakespeare's grave is the only one commemorated with a brass plaque and an epitaph in original Latin poetry, eulogizing her as a beloved mother, pious woman, and ‘so great a gift.’ For nearly 400 years, this epitaph has remained largely unreadable to visitors, enabling a long history of undervaluing Anne's significant maternal role in the Shakespeare family. Anne Shakespeare's Epitaph offers a new reading of the content and the related material conditions and interpersonal connections behind this text. It reclaims it as an important Shakespearean text that offers traces of a lost documentary record.”

Patient, Female: Stories [fiction]
Milkweed Books, 2026
From Library Journal starred review: “Schumacher (Dear Committee Members) was the first woman to receive the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2015. Her talent shines in this masterly collection…a delightfully humorous collection of 13 expertly written short stories. Each centers on everyday people and situations, but the stories are told in strikingly original ways, whether written as a syllabus or a board game. The characters are struggling to survive a culture with increasing expectations. Schumacher’s talent is to fully capture the range of human emotions. Her wry humor and writing skills concisely render the mundane beautiful. Readers will be thinking about these well-drawn stories and characters long after they close the book.”

This Ground Beneath Our Feet [poetry]
Holy Cow! 2026
From author Ed Bok Lee: “In This Ground Beneath Our Feet, delight and labor organically entwine to become equally precious. Here, sea mammals, with their own language, ‘are weaving poetry in web and water’; a daughter carves in wood her craving to become; human border crossings have been occurring for centuries; a boy in North Dakota unearths a dinosaur; Emily Dickinson bakes a cake; incarcerated young poets describe an ash tree’s ‘fur.’ In the timeless tradition of poetry’s yearning to both belong and yet always be somewhere else, Bright gorgeously illuminates the ‘wild goodness’ of being alive.”

The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars
Bloomsbury, June 23
From Kirkus: “Theater historian Butler (The Method) recasts the battles for artistic freedom of speech fought in the late-20th century, ‘the World War I of American arts and letters,’ as a sobering prelude to today’s gloves-off assault on the arts. Concerns about obscenity helped the indignant impresarios of the self-described ‘New Right’ imagine a common enemy. And that enemy had a government office, the National Endowment of the Arts. The legal wrangling between the holier-than-thou opponents of controversial art and its stalwart defenders makes for exasperating reading. But from the miasma of manufactured outrage also arose some unlikely heroes. A richly detailed genealogy of the continuing battle for artistic freedom in the US.”

Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter—and What Really Does
Johns Hopkins, 2025
From Inside Higher Ed: “Laff and Carlson note that students’ interests—what they call ‘hidden intellectualism’—don’t always align with majors as they exist. They note that students often have a sense of a ‘wicked problem’ that they’d like to solve, but that wicked problems tend to lend themselves to interdisciplinary solutions rather than siloed ones. The authors instead offer a more institutionally porous vision of college…that involves students interviewing people who have the jobs they want and finding out how they got there and what’s missing in the field. Then the students return to campus, aligning their electives and majors to get them where they want to go.”

Northwoods Lullaby [children’s picture book]
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
From Quetico Superior Wilderness News: “An adult and young child wander through the richly colored pages of Northwoods Lullaby, searching for signs of spring. The two wanderers start out in a large, colorful span of woods where they quickly discover animals moving about. As the lullaby unfolds, the reader begins to understand that a new cycle of life has begun. Trees, flowers, and ferns are unfurling their leaves as well. Flowers are beginning to bloom. The wanderers stop in the dense woods and pause. It’s a sweet reminder that we discover more when we slow down and look. The story ends with the wanderers returning home. A loved one gently tucks the child into bed and sings a soothing song over them.”

What Hunger [fiction]
Simon & Schuster, 2025
From Publishers Weekly starred review: “In Dang’s incendiary sophomore novel (after Nice Girls), a Midwestern teen grapples with grief and a generational divide with her Vietnamese immigrant parents while discovering an insatiable appetite for raw meat. As the story opens, 14-year-old 'Ronny' Nguyen attends her older brother Tommy’s high school graduation, where he’s honored as valedictorian. Their parents fete him with a lavish party, but tension brews between the siblings and their parents. After a bitter argument, Tommy stays out late and is struck by a car and killed. Dang keenly captures her narrator’s alienation and anger, and the intergenerational tale concludes with a powerful revelation about the parents’ unspoken trauma from the Vietnam War. This one hits hard.”

A Lesser Light [fiction]
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
From Publishers Weekly starred review: “Geye (The Ski Jumper) sets this masterful tale about the limits of faith and fidelity on the rugged shore of Lake Superior. After Radcliffe student Willa Brandt’s father dies by suicide in 1910, her mother insists she return home. Willa reluctantly weds Theodulf Sauer, the rigid Catholic son of a leading Duluth family. Willa defies Theodulf’s demands for wifely obedience. Instead, she bonds with their fisherman neighbor, Mats Braaten, and finds glimmers of a more authentic and satisfying life when they become lovers. Geye eschews a simple black-and-white story of marital conflict for something much more surprising and complex. This bittersweet narrative astounds.”

Struggle, Resistance and Decolonization in African American Literature after 1960
Anthem Press, 2026
From author E. Lâle Demirtürk: “The book examines six African American writers―Richard Wright (Native Son), James Baldwin (Another Country), Ishmael Reed (Flight to Canada), Paule Marshall (Praisesong for the Widow), Toni Cade Bambara (The Salt Eaters), and Ntozake Shange (Liliane). Employing a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, Hogue examines how the past cultural beliefs and practices converge to create a life of wholeness, addressing the current issues in the 21st-century context of challenging white supremacy. The book makes an excellent assessment of decolonization of the African American mind and offers a unique contribution to the field of African American literature.”

Self-Portrait as Chimera in a Convex Mirror [poetry chapbook]
Gasher Press, 2026
From author Sarah Sala: "Self-Portrait as Chimera in a Convex Mirror is a meteor shower of luscious verse steeped in the Oulipian tradition. In a series of dynamic centos, Ketner brilliantly interlocks found language from literary muses to wrestle with and ultimately redefine our assumptions about identity, perception vs. reality, and the body. In the titular poem, Ketner injects the syntactical footprint of Ashbery’s groundbreaking poem with verbs, nouns, and adjectives from literary ancestors, resulting in a tour de force that reconfigures our literary DNA." 

An Unstable Container [essay chapbook]
Bull City Press, 2025
From author Charles Jensen: “An Unstable Container is anything but: these sturdy, well-formed essays peel back the layers of self and lived experience to determine what masculinity is, both physically and as a set of cultural signifiers. Through his lenses as a queer person of color, LaPine documents his shifting relationship with masculinity through the reconstructions of puberty, his queer sexual development, relationships with alcohol and drugs, and even the blood in his veins. An Unstable Container aptly takes as its jumping off point the relationship LaPine has with his physical body, looking outward from embodiment toward being seen and desired as himself. This is a collection of deep vulnerability and masterful restraint. I couldn’t put it down.”

From the publisher: "The Art of Falling Apart is told through the alternating perspectives of Minneapolis artist William Link and his enigmatic deceased mother. William is unraveling as he prepares for his first major gallery exhibition. He lives next to an unstable electric guitar virtuoso and has recently been dumped by his girlfriend. Amid this turmoil, William is haunted by disturbing visions of his mother meddling with his artwork. As William struggles to meet his artistic deadlines, he faces a haunting dilemma: Are these visions genuine supernatural encounters, or has he inherited his mother’s troubling hallucinations? Through the intertwined perspectives of William and his mother, the narrative plumbs the depths of love, loss, and redemption."

All Us Beautiful Monsters [poetry]
Milkweed Editions, 2025
From author Wayne Miller: "For the past 20 years, Alex Lemon has been our great expressionist poet, splashing the page with assertions and images—sometimes minutely observational, sometimes wildly visionary—through which we access the speaker’s very core as he filters the sociocultural reality that surrounds him. All Us Beautiful Monsters brilliantly furthers this approach, offering a dizzying entanglement of wonder, rage, hope, terror, beauty, and delight at this planet—where 'the entire world wants / to be an oldster with Alzheimer’s / In a big-box store,' but where also there is 'so much / Salvageable magic' and where love can make the speaker’s chest whip 'electric like / A downed power line.'”

A Wasp in the Beehive: A Brigid Reardon Mystery [fiction]
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
From Kirkus Reviews: “Leaving her brother and her love in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Brigid arrives in Salt Lake City in 1881 seeking something better than a remote sod house on the cattle ranch where she solved an earlier murder. She applies for a position at the Deseret Bookstore, which is owned by wealthy Mr. Cutter, a mainstay of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He not only hires her but provides a small room in his house. Adjusting to living with his five wives takes some time…. At the bookstore, Brigid meets Dr. Kohler, the coroner, who shares her interest in detective stories. When Cutter is found in the sewing room with a fatal head wound, Brigid suspects it’s not an accidental death. A clever mystery much enhanced by many historic details.”

Dreki: My Icelandic Dragon [middle grade fiction]
Christy Ottaviano Books, 2025
From Kirkus Reviews: “When his parents win a vacation for two, 12-year-old Johan gets to visit small-town Wisconsin, where he’ll stay with his immigrant grandfather, a delightfully good-natured troublemaker. Grandpa has one important rule: Don’t go in the basement. But when Grandpa suffers a fall, he needs Johan’s help with his secret. Grandpa has hidden Dreki, a tiny dragon, in the basement ever since he hatched from an egg he’d brought to America. Grandpa knows it’s time to smuggle the dragon back to Iceland. While Johan loves getting to connect with Grandpa in exploring Icelandic culture, too soon Grandpa’s health takes a bad turn, leaving Johan to complete the mission on his own.”

Tasting Religious Thought and Experience in Late-Medieval English Literature
Bloomsbury, 2026
From author George Shuffelton: “This careful study of alimentary metaphor touches on a wide range of vital questions for later medieval English literature, and reminds us that these questions have renewed urgency. These questions involve the ethics of agricultural labor and food distribution, the spiritual (and not merely physical) dangers of overconsumption, and the idea of proper eating as moral hygiene. Molstad’s attentive, well-grounded argument shows how the flexible metaphors of reading as eating serve Hilton and Love, and how food structures the social and spiritual orders of Piers Plowman. As Molstad rightly observes of the 14th century as well as the 21st, ‘One never truly eats alone.’”

Black Dirt, Bright Stars (The Haugen Saga) [fiction]
Calumet Editions, 2025
From the publisher: “Following his award-winning novel Power & Light, Weaver’s sequel finds the close-knit Haugen family at their low point. They have lost their quest for justice within the law. They have lost their farm home to arson by powerful enemies. ‘Now we have work,’ Jenny says. Not yet 20, the youngest of four siblings, she takes a position as a typist at a county courthouse. With calculation, independence, and tenacity, she carves out agency and power for herself and her family. However, when an opportunity for revenge on an enemy turns tragic, she chooses secrecy over honesty. The years pass, and at the Haugens’ pinnacle of success the truth catches up with them—and threatens everything.”

Without Terminus: Untraining an Archive [memoir]
Graywolf, 2026 [book launch]
From Kirkus starred review: “A genre-hopping exploration of language, history, social justice, and family lore…blending photography, collage, drawings, charts, and surrealist typography with prose. The train is both metaphor and a very real thing in the poet’s meditation: Many members of Webster’s family worked on the railroad as porters, in the case of a grandfather ‘robbed of time and dignity and pension,’ meeting the terminus of the title as both the final stop of a train and of death. The train, by Webster’s account, is a constant in Black lives and Black deaths. There is no train, Webster wishes us to understand, that was not born of theft and blood, and each page builds on that haunting truth. A virtuoso work of literary experimentation in the service of a forgotten history.”