🍿 The exception to the slowdown

June 23, 2026View Online | Join All Access | Listen

 Manuscript burning a hole in your desk drawer? If it’s a horror story, here’s your shot: The Black List and Zando have teamed up to create the Evil Twin Manuscript Initiative. Submit your unpublished or self-published horror novel, and you just might win a $25,000 publishing deal with Zando’s Evil Twin imprint. Submissions are accepted through November 20.

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THE HEADLINE

Fan favorites get the greenlight

Adaptations are the exception to the summer news slowdown.

Matt Dinniman’s viral LitRPG Dungeon Crawler Carl has been ordered straight to series at Peacock.

The live-action adaptation from Seth McFarlane’s Fuzzy Door and Universal Global Productions will be written by Chris Yost (Cowboy Bebop, Thor: Ragnarok).

Daisy Edgar-Jones is set to star in Paramount’s adaptation of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

The film directed, written, and produced by Siân Heder (CODA) will hit theaters November 12, 2027, right in the middle of Oscars season.

For less-delayed gratification:

 Whalefall, based on the novel by newly-crowned Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Kraus, looks amazing. We’ll hold our questions about the physics of being swallowed by a whale until the experts have had time to weigh in.

烙 The trailer for Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro dropped yesterday, and…we’re still not sure.

CHECK YOUR SHELF

Fall is about to be lit

2026 is an embarrassingly good year for literary fiction. The first half of the year brought new releases from many of the greats, Tayari Jones, George Saunders, Douglas Stuart, Louise Erdrich, Maria Semple, and Ben Lerner, to name a few, and the fall’s Big Book Season is looking to be b-a-n-a-n-a-s.

Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies won the LA Times Book Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. An incredible feat for a debut short story collection!

Philyaw returns September 29 with her first full-length novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, about the wife of a mega-church pastor whose secret past comes to light. Sexy, gossipy satire? Say less.

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko swept book clubs and best-of lists and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2017. It also inspired one of the best TV adaptations we’ve ever seen.

In American Hagwon, also hitting shelves September 29, Lee delivers another doorstopper (656 pages!), this time exploring ambition and the tension between personal dreams and familial duty.

Emily St. John Mandel isn’t afraid to wonder about life, the universe, and everything. The reigning queen of spec fic, best known for Station Eleven, is back September 15 with Exit Party.

We know better than to try to guess what happens in it based on the synopsis. Mandel stays surprising.

 Want something you can read right now? Don’t miss this sharp, and sharply funny, novel about a wildlife photographer whose life falls apart when he moves to LA to become a paparazzo.*

See more new releases.

*A message from our sponsor

TOGETHER WITH SLOWBURN

The Regency romp of the season.

Bridgerton meets Emily Henry in The Very Definition of Love by Sophia Benoit as a wallflower writing a dictionary of bawdy slang arranges her own marriage to the ultimate instructor: the town rake.

This clever, sexy, fun read is guaranteed to fix your Bridgerton blues in every way. Can love be redefined? This lady and rake are about to find out!

ZERO TO WELL-READ

The man, the myth, the legend

Do you know that you shouldn’t order fish on Monday? Have you enjoyed The Bear, the collected works of David Chang, or food memoirs like Blood, Bones, and Butter and Crying in H Mart? If so, you owe a debt of gratitude to Anthony Bourdain.

Bourdain wasn’t trying to change restaurant culture when he wrote the viral essay that would become the basis for his bestselling debut memoir Kitchen Confidential, but change it he did.

This week, on the occasion of what would have been Bourdain’s 70th birthday, we’re rolling up our sleeves to revisit the book that revolutionized food culture and the man who changed how we think about eating and travel.

 Hear our conversation about Kitchen Confidential on Zero to Well-Read, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you list.

LISTS

Books that will have you asking, “Where are the parents?”

photo credit: Emma Raynor

T. Clark is the author of All This Want (and I Can’t Get None), out today from One World. Below, they recommend three books with missing parental figures.

My debut collection, All This Want (and I Can’t Get None), features 12 stories of protagonists chasing desires. The desires can be complicated; characters want things that are dangerous, counterintuitive, illogical, and strange. They are products of their circumstances, and for a myriad of reasons, their parents are physically absent and almost always unavailable to give wisdom or offer an inkling of common sense. Here are three books that might also make you ask, “Where are the parents?”

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi: Susan Choi’s novel is told in three parts, with the first chunk set in a southern high school for performing arts. The students are ambitious, overachieving actors who spend a good deal of their free time rehearsing and trying to keep their reputations (and hormones) in check. Adult guidance comes not in the form of parents but in charismatic teachers, overseas visitors, and friends’ parents, forcing the characters to determine who they can really trust.

Gorilla My Love by Toni Cade Bambara: This short story collection features protagonists of all ages and family structures, but the title story, “Gorilla, My Love,” is a swift lesson in the disillusionment of youthful innocence. The story plays out completely in the narrator’s mind, save for the blips of conversation she has with the adults in the car. She learns, in innocent yet heartbreaking ways, that adults are hypocrites and are not to be trusted. Left with her own conclusions, she leans into caring for her little brother, Baby Jason, hoping she can shield him from the truth a bit longer.

A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet: In this novel, we know exactly where the parents are: getting wasted in the next room. The children of Lydia Millet’s novel are forced to reckon with their hedonistic, wealthy, ill-prepared parents’ inability to care for them in the face of climate catastrophe. The kids collaborate and problem solve while their parents drink and party their way deeper into depression.

TOGETHER WITH THRIFTBOOKS

Hot Summer Bonus Days are here at ThriftBooks

All ReadingRewards® members get 2x points sitewide, right now! Shop now to earn double points.

READ THE RAINBOW

The most popular queer memoirs on Libby

They’re here, they’re queer, and everybody is reading them. We found several Book Riot house faves among the queer memoirs trending with users of the Libby library reading app.

 Actress of a Certain Age by Jeff Hiller (#1)

 Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (#4)

️‍⚧️ Pageboy by Elliot Page (#5)

藍 Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby (#10)

 The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos (#11)

️‍ Subscribe to Our Queerest Shelves to get LGBTQ+ recommendations in your inbox all year long.

SPECULATIVE FICTION

Novels about extraterrestrial contact, real and imagined

photographer credit: Jessie Casey

Meg Charlton is the author of Voyagers, out now from Harper.

My novel Voyagers follows Alex and Ana, who, as six-year-olds, experience what may (or may not) have been an alien abduction. The two friends have a falling out over their different beliefs about what happened to them, but reconnect in their thirties, when the world seems to be on the precipice of global first contact. Voyagers is about aliens, both real and make-believe, and the sometimes-thin line between the two. In that spirit, here are three books about extraterrestrial contact, from “realest” to most ambiguously imaginary:

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin: Le Guin’s masterpiece centers on Genly Ai, an emissary from Earth (or Terra, as it’s called here) on a mission to the planet Gethen, who hopes to bring this new world into the fold of an interplanetary coalition. This novel gets the most attention for the Gethenians’ gender-fluid nature. But the real magic of the book is Le Guin’s rendering of a truly alien society, founded on a different set of urges and assumptions, and the slow unfolding of a deep friendship across that cultural gap.

Beings by Ilana Masad: A delicate, deeply human interweaving of three stories about aliens: The first follows Betty and Barney Hill, the first and most famous American abductees as they rise to national fame and infamy; the second tracks an aspiring science fiction writer in the 1960s as she learns to own her voice and her sexuality; and the third inhabits the consciousness of a present-day archivist, grappling with their own childhood contact experience.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata: A young girl and her cousin, intensely bonded, believe they might be aliens. But after a terrible crime and a transgressive reaction to it, the children are separated. When they reunite in adulthood, they strip themselves down to their most shocking, alien selves. Trigger warnings abound, but if you can stomach Murata’s harrowing plot turns, you’ll be rewarded with an astonishing book about trauma and taboos.

TOGETHER WITH ALL ACCESS

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Join now to explore our entire archive, save your favorite books to your very own Collections, and get the scoop on the best new reads with our curated book discovery tool, The New Release Index.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Markus Zusak, born June 23, 1975

Did you know? None other than John Williams composed the score for the film adaptation of Zusak’s international bestseller, The Book Thief.

CRITICAL LINKING

You are now free to roam about the internet

 Escape into these quiet cozy fantasy books for kids.

 Test your knowledge of legendary libraries around the world.

 Plan your deep dive with a ranking of George Orwell’s best books.

 Check the latest stats on Americans’ reading habits.

 Keep up with the best new queer book releases by signing up for Our Queerest Shelves.

END NOTES

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Danika Ellis, and Jeff O’Neal. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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