Burned By Books

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book of 2018, and the story collection Cool for America, longlisted for the 2020 Story Prize. His essays and stories have appeared frequently in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's, as well as in The Yale Review, The Atlantic, ...

In this debut story collection Patchwork Dolls (Blair, 2026), Ysabelle Cheung weaves an eerie fabulism with tales that cross continents, technology, and time. Set in Hong Kong and America--between the present day and an uncannily altered future--this story collection warps the familiar rules of our world to ask: what does it mean to be Asian and a woman--living under the specter of state and tech...

Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places. Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any lo...

From Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist Anand Gopal, an epic and enthralling account of six Syrians fighting for a better world, in the tradition of classic works by Philip Gourevitch and Katherine Boo. In 2011, in a northern Syrian city, a small group of men and women began a movement that overthrew a brutal dictatorship. For the next eighteen months, many of the citizens of Manbij carried...

In Canon (Viking, 2026), two unlikely heroes embark on quests to win God’s favor in this outrageously entertaining, profoundly heartfelt novel that announces an ingenious new voice in the tradition of Chain-Gang All-Stars, No One Is Talking About This, and Martyr! Yara can’t comprehend why God has chosen them to slay Dominic, the ruthless leader of the army of Bad Guys. Cast out by their family a...

Sarah Jean Grimm is the author of Soft Focus (Metatron, 2017) and the chapbook Hog Lagoon (blush, 2023). She was a founding editor of Powder Keg Magazine (2014-2019) and currently edits the small poetry press After Hours Editions. She lives in upstate New York and works as a book publicist with Broadside PR. Book Recommendations: Niina Pollari Paths of Totality Song Cave Press, Emily Skillings, Ta...

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, Jane Kim and her brother, Kevin, dutifully embodied the model minority myth as their parents demanded: both stellar tennis players and academically gifted, they worked hard to make their parents proud. Jane went on to law school. Kevin came close to becoming a professional tennis player. But where they started is nowhere near where they have e...

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black female writer—and her work is highly complex.” In On Morrison (Hogarth, 2026), Serpell brings her unique experience as both an awar...

Daniel Poppick is a poet and novelist. He is the author of the poetry collections Fear of Description, selected for the National Poetry Series, and The Police. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Drift, Harper's, BOMB, The New Republic, Chicago Review, and other journals. The recipient of awards from MacDowell and Yaddo and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he h...

It starts with an itch. In homes across the country, women ages eighteen to thirty-five begin to slow down. Tired. Blank. Restless. Drawn to the Pacific Ocean like it’s calling them home. They abandon their lives—jobs, families, their very selves. And once they reach the West, they vanish forever. At the center of the story are three young women caught in the pull of something unstoppable. Aimee f...

Joe Mungo Reed is the author of the novels Hammer and We Begin Our Ascent, one of the best novels about sport that I’ve ever read. He Teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and lives in London. Recommended Books: Flesh, David Szalay Tokyo These Days, Taiyo Matsumoto White River Crossing, Ian McGuire Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. H...

Eliot and his wife Claire have been happily married for nearly four decades. They’ve raised two children in their sleepy Connecticut town and have weathered the inevitable ups and downs of a long life spent together. But eight years after Claire was diagnosed with cancer, the end is near, and it's time to gather loved ones and prepare for the inevitable. Over the years of Claire’s illness, Eliot h...

In Crux (Riverhead Books, 2025), Dan and Tamma are two teenagers in their last year of high school in the southern Mojave Desert. One is a gifted golden child, the other a mouthy burnout. Climbing boulders in trash-strewn parking lots during cold desert nights, they seal their unique bond and dream of a life of adventure. As the year progresses and adult reality looms, they are rocked by chang...

Jenny Mustard is a writer and content creator, born in Sweden but living in London. Jenny and her work have featured in the Observer, the Independent, Vogue, Stylist, the Evening Standard and elsewhere. She has over 600k followers, and more than 50 million views on YouTube. Her acclaimed debut novel, OKAY DAYS, was published in 2023 and her novels have been translated to ten languages. What a Tim...

Iida Turpeinen is a literary scholar writing a dissertation on the intersection of the natural sciences and literature. Her short stories exploring the relationship between humans and animals won the J. H. Erkko Young Writers’ Competition in 2014. Her 2023 debut novel, Beasts of the Sea (Little, Brown, 2025), was published in Finland to wide acclaim, won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for...

Ben Ratliff is the author of Every Song Ever and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening (Graywolf Press, 2025) was longlisted for the National Book Award, and the 2026 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A former music critic for the New York Times, he lives in Ne...

“You are correct: something is seriously wrong.” So begins Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown, 2026) written by members of the friends of attention collective. That something is that our attention, and it is being captured and commodified by corporate entities that see our attention as a precious resource, perhaps as fundamental as water, that can be mined and extr...

Lisa Swayze has been the General Manager at Buffalo Street Books for 8 years and will transition to becoming the Executive Director of the bookstore’s new literary nonprofit in 2025. Lisa is on the board of directors of the American Booksellers Association and the Downtown Ithaca Alliance. Laura Larson is the owner of Odyssey Bookstore. In 2019 Laura decided to return to her hometown of Ithaca NY...

At Frost, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the runners on the women’s cross country team have their sights set on the 1992 New England Division Three Championships and will push themselves through every punishing workout and skipped meal to achieve their goal. But Kristin, the team’s star, is hiding a secret about what happened over the summer, and her unpredictable behavior jeopardi...

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled t...

Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends—an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stands for everything she detests—Happiness and Love (Scribner, 2025) is a piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites. Years after esca...

In Lonely Crowds (Little, Brown and Co., 2025) Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl's school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is draw...

Paula Bomer is the author of The Stalker (Soho Books, 2025), which received a starred Publisher’s Weekly, calling it “dark and twisted fun”. She is also the author of Tante Eva and Nine Months, the story collections Inside Madeleine and Baby and other Stories, and the essay collection, Mystery and Mortality. Her work has appeared in Bomb Magazine, The Mississippi Review, Fiction Magazine, Los Ange...

When Cora meets Sam at a baby group in their small town, the chemistry between them is undeniable. Both are happily married young parents with two kids, and neither sees themselves as the type to engage in an affair. Yet their connection grows stronger, and as their lives continue to intertwine, the romantic tension between them becomes all-consuming—until their worlds unravel into two parallel ti...

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Hurricane Girl, Very Nice, The Red Car, Bad Marie, and Twins. She has received fellowships from McDowell and the Edward F Albee Foundation. She lives with her daughter in Montclair, NJ. Today we are discussing Hot Air (Knopf, 2025) Recommended Books: Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory Jessica Francis King, Fonseca Chris Holmes is Chair...