In the 2000s, you couldn’t walk into a bookstore without seeing Life of Pi face-out near the cash registers. The Barnes & Noble logo may as well have been a Bengal tiger on a lifeboat. Even before Ang Lee’s film adaptation put it back on the bestseller list, Yann Martel’s earnestly spiritual novel about a boy’s search for God sold nearly 10 million copies.

But despite a $3 million advance from Random House, Martel’s next book, Beatrice and Virgil, a Holocaust allegory starring a taxidermied donkey and monkey, flopped with critics and readers. The High Mountains of Portugal, a novel in stories about three widowers, didn’t fare much better.

Could Martel’s new novel, Son of Nobody, be another big hit?

Subscribe now

The premise is irresistible. After leaving his wife and daughter behind in Canada, a Homeric scholar named Harlow Donne discovers The Psoad, a lost epic poem about the Trojan War, scribbled on ancient papyrus leaves. It retells the events of The Iliad through the eyes of a common soldier, Psoas, as opposed to the kings, heroes, and gods who dominate Homer’s version.

Instead of a traditional novel, Son of Nobody is formatted like a publisher’s translation of epic poetry. The top half of each page is reserved for lines from The Psoad and the bottom half for Donne’s footnotes, which alternate, sometimes awkwardly, between illuminating the text and telling a personal story to his daughter, Helen.

If you’ve ever read The Iliad, or even just watched Wolfgang Petersen’s woefully underappreciated popcorn adaptation, The Psoad is occasionally fascinating. Martel’s description of the city of Troy, for instance, is more detailed and evocative than Homer’s.

The walls of Troy, so high, so bright, so final,
built by the hands of Apollo and Poseidon,
they say. The godly touch was plain to see.
Most impressive of all were the mosaics,
vaster than the sails that had brought us to Troy.
Such beautiful images on so grand a scale
were unknown to us, showing gods and kings of such
proportions that had they deigned to reach down,
they could have picked up one of our warships.
Those facing water stood proud and martial,
set for war, while those facing land lay in gardens,
garlanded with flowers, cups of wine in hand,
reposing to the music of lutes and lyres,
or hunting stags and lions, arrows flying.

We never really get the “People’s Iliad” promised by the novel’s setup, but there are new working-class characters, new battle tactics, and a surprisingly prominent role for Hades, who barely appears in The Iliad. There is also the mystery of The Psoad’s authorship, for which Martel offers a clever solution. If you’re a Homer nerd who devoured Emily Wilson’s new translations, this kind of stuff is catnip.

But in the end I think Emily Wilson (forgive me for presuming) would throw this book across the room. As a writer of fiction, Martel has always been more interested in answering questions than asking them. Like other fast-food philosophical novels for the undiscerning masses — Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, and Life of Pi — Son of Nobody tries to simulate spiritual enlightenment through a hero’s journey that culminates in quotable truisms and eye-rolling clichés.

In the text of The Psoad, when Hades witnesses the death and destruction of the Trojan War for the first time, he says — I kid you not — “Why can’t we all just get along?” A few lines later, the Lord of the Underworld teaches Psoas about the mental health benefits of regular exercise. “My body, after spending / so much, finds itself with even more to spend. / And my mind is refreshed, having taken a rest / from its driven ways.”

In the footnotes, Harlow Donne frequently slips into Coelho mode. “Gail was a book I never wanted to close,” he croons. “I loved Gail like a scribe loves a bard, like a candle loves a flame, like history loves the past, like a tongue loves speech, like a baby loves a honey-dipped finger.”

I won’t spoil Son of Nobody’s twists, but both stories — ancient and contemporary — are saturated with death and loss, including a sudden tragedy that Martel wields as a didactic cudgel to bonk readers on the head. Eventually, the parallels between The Psoad and Harlow Donne’s life become irritatingly symmetrical, even after Martel’s attempt to lampshade them, and everything leads to an undercooked Intro to Comp Lit connection between The Iliad and The Bible that you’ll see coming for 300 pages if you give more than a moment’s thought to the novel’s title. If Son of Nobody is a big hit, it’ll be because the publishing industry, like McDonald’s, is really good at selling empty calories.

More than 3,000 years ago, Ramesses II reigned over an empire of three to four million people and believed himself to be a god. An obsessive builder, he filled the Nile Valley with new temples, obelisks, and statues — all emblazoned with his cartouche or made in his image — by wielding a brutal corvée system of forced labor over immigrants, peasants, farmers, and prisoners of war.

In 1798, Napoleon’s troops tried to steal a fallen statue of Ramesses II from the pharaoh’s mortuary temple in Thebes, but even the disembodied head and torso were too massive to cart all the way back to France.

In 1817, Percy Bysshe Shelley was just 24 years old when he heard the statue was on its way to the British Museum. Inspired by the “shattered visage” of a pharaoh who thought his kingdom would last forever, Shelley wrote one of the most quoted poems of the Romantic era — “Ozymandias,” after the Greek name for Ramesses II.

Reading it always gives me chills.

Subscribe now

Ozymandias

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

In the 21st century, capitalism has replaced our kings with centibillionaires — one of whom is already attempting to reach the stars by standing on the backs of his wage slaves. But as good science fiction often asks:

What if we extrapolate that by a few hundred years?

Last year, Bungie, the Seattle-based video game studio behind the Halo and Destiny franchises, shared a “reveal cinematic” (above) for a new extraction shooter based on its old Marathon trilogy from the ‘90s. Marketing aside, the cinematic is a stunning sci-fi short film about an exoplanet colony gone wrong that incorporates a haunting version of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” I generally prefer video games without competitive player-vs.-player dynamics, but narratively, my interest was piqued, and I’ve since spent around 30 hours in the early-access builds of the game.

Marathon is set in the 29th century, when CEOs have all but exhausted our solar system’s profitable resources and begun looking further afield. Using Mars’s moon Deimos as a structural foundation, the Unified Earth Space Council constructed an interstellar ship (the titular Marathon, below) and sent thousands of people 12 light years away to the Tau Ceti system — a setting you may recognize from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed or Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora.

After humans establish a colony on Tau Ceti IV, something goes horrifically wrong. When Marathon begins, you play as a “runner”: an independent contractor whose consciousness has been digitized and uploaded to a server, where it can be downloaded into a synthetic, humanoid “shell.”

Armed with new cybernetic abilities, you’re tasked with investigating the abandoned colony on Tau Ceti IV and the Marathon ghost ship in orbit. As a freelancer, you can accept contract work from several conglomerates: CyberAcme (think, IBM + OpenAI), NuCaloric (Amazon + Monsanto), Traxus (Lockheed Martin + Halliburton), and Sekiguchi Genetics (Boston Dynamics + Neuralink). There’s also MIDA, an anarchist faction of UESC-resistant freedom fighters, and Arachne, a religious death cult.

The worldbuilding is fascinating. The combat is thrilling. But where Marathon really excels is its corporate satire. When Traxus offers you a contract, it deploys a devastatingly familiar dialect of legalese.

As a “runner,” your primary goals are to “extract” resources from the ruined colony of New Cascadia and kill other “runners” before they beat you to the loot — just as 21st-century corporations turn employees against each other for better wages and healthcare while CEOs make 284 times more money.

There is also some nice environmental storytelling here, from the subtle (What happened to this building?) to the explicit, like messages scrawled on the walls by long-dead colonists. In the original trilogy, Marathon’s story was largely told through MS-DOS-like computer terminals hidden throughout the maps; now, completing various challenges rewards you with a similarly styled lore entry in your runner’s “codex.” Fans of cinematic storytelling a la Baldur’s Gate 3 may find this old-fashioned, but Myst, Riven, and Elden Ring are on my personal Mount Rushmore of gaming; clearly, I enjoy reading in-game prose.

Like Destiny and Destiny 2 before it, Marathon is a “live service” game that will evolve each month. Bungie says we’ll unlock “secrets” and new areas to investigate. Thus far, my favorite experiences with the game aren’t combat-related; they’re when I feel like an exoplanetary archaeologist, trying to piece the puzzle together, or when I’m smashing windows as a MIDA-aligned anarchist, sticking it to the future Man who exploits the runners.

While I’ve enjoyed my time with the game so far, whether I continue playing Marathon depends on how committed Bungie is to telling a compelling story. The epic science fiction mystery they’ve teased so far — and their tongue-in-cheek indictments of hypercapitalism — will keep me coming back more than new weapons or runner shells.

When the original Marathon debuted in 1994, its militarized cyberpunk vision of the future felt dark and dystopian. In 2026, the new Marathon feels downright chipper, and not just because of all the bright colors; it imagines a future where we survive another 900 years — and uncountable Ramesses IIs — on Earth.

Elsewhere

• For Esquire, I picked the most-anticipated books of 2026.

• Also at Esquire, I spoke with George Saunders about Vigil, life, and death.

First of all, I’m sorry.

The Frontlist has been dormant since this summer for several reasons, chief among them the news that Substack not only recommitted to monetizing white nationalists and neo-Nazis, but also sent push notifications to promote them.

It was such a depressing string of events that I still, six months later, haven’t decided what to do with this newsletter. I’ll sort it out over the holidays, but today, I’m writing about something else.

My first book pubs today: A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature. It’s a narrative biography of the queer woman who was arrested and put on trial in 1921 for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses before anyone else. It received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and here’s some early press:

• NewCity, Margaret C. Anderson’s Brilliant and Beleaguered Journey (thank you, Keir Graff)

• Chicago mag, The Golden Girl of the Avant-Garde (thank you, Robert Loerzel)

• Chicago Review of Books, Adam Morgan on Literary Pioneer Margaret C. Anderson (thank you, Michael Welch)

• Unruly Figures Podcast, Adam Morgan on Margaret C. Anderson (thank you, Valorie Castellanos Clark)

• Publishers Weekly, Adam Morgan on Six Suppressed Women Writers (thank you, Dana Snitzky)

If everyone reading this could please purchase 100 copies I would really appreciate it.

Hitting pub day is a strange experience. You feel an intense sense of urgency, but also helplessness: There is nothing you as the author can do at this point — you’ve already done it! Pub day is really just like any other day, except for the fact that your book is in stores. Which is amazing! But also oddly distant from your own experience.

I do have a few events for the book coming up in January and February. If you live in New York, Chicago, North Carolina, or South Carolina, I’d love to see you!

JAN 8
6:00PM
Flyleaf Books with Shelbi Polk
Chapel Hill, NC

JAN 15
7:00PM
Women & Children First with Julia Fine
Chicago, IL

JAN 27
6:30PM
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library with Gayle Feldman
New York, NY

FEB 19
6:00PM
Hub City Bookshop
Spartanburg, SC

Like all writers, I have no idea how many copies this book needs to sell in order to be considered a success by my publisher — my only hope is that it does well enough to let me write the next book! It has been a grueling but wonderful experience.

Huge thank yous to my agent, Natalie Edwards, my editor, Nick Ciani, all the wonderful people at Simon & Schuster, Atria Books, and One Signal Publishers, and all of my generous blurbers, Rebecca Romney, Ling Ma, Kevin Kwan, Michelle Duster, Sarah Rose Etter, and Audrey Clare Farley. It takes a village.

Thank you for supporting my work. I’ll see you in the new year.

As ChatGPT and other generative AI tools continue “disrupting” journalism, criticism, and the publishing industry, the first biography of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future — hits bookshelves today.

Keach Hagey’s reporting at the Wall Street Journal has already helped lift the silicon curtain of secrecy around the billionaire, and I’m happy to report her clear-sighted investigation of Altman’s life avoids the hagiographic lens Walter Isaacson put to work in his biography of Elon Musk. It’s also a quick, compelling look at how Altman has convinced so many people to give him money despite his long-distance relationship with the truth. On some pages, it made me more optimistic about the future. On others, it scared me.

For The Frontlist, I asked Hagey about how writing The Optimist changed her perspective on Altman and AI.

Subscribe now

What drew you to Altman as the subject of your second book?

I was assigned a profile of Altman for the Wall Street Journal not long after ChatGPT went viral. I found it very strange that his father was almost never mentioned in the press about him, so that’s where I started digging.

What surprised you most during your research and reporting?

How ground zero for this entire story seems to be the listserv run in the 1990s by a group of techno-utopian libertarians called the Extropians — who also knew how to throw a pretty killer house party.

Did the process of writing this book make you more or less optimistic about Altman's ability to deliver AGI in the near-future?

It made me more confident in Altman’s fundraising ability. He is truly a generational talent when it comes to convincing people that he can see the future and so they should give him money. While I was writing, I was somewhat skeptical about AGI. But since shipping the manuscript, the tools have continued to improve and there have been some eerie moments.

Did it make you more or less optimistic about the future in general? Why?

OpenAI and generative AI generally are the first thing in my adult life to truly give Google a run for their money. That suggests that no monopoly — as the U.S. government called Google — is forever, which does make me optimistic.

It remains to be seen whether the AI companies will be better stewards of intellectual property than their predecessors. So far, the indications aren’t great, but there’s still time to build a fair system.

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press)

• Behind the book with Lincoln Michel, author of Metallic Realms (Atria Books)

• Summer book preview

Three years ago, on a whim, I picked up a copy of Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao in the McNally Jackson Seaport (a Lower Manhattan neighborhood which, I must say, feels like a studio backlot). It was one of the best novels I’ve read since 2020, and now, Vauhini’s new nonfiction book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, is one of my picks for the best books of 2025 so far at Esquire.

A few years ago, Vara experimented with GPT-3 while writing stories about the death of her sister, and the results went viral. Searches is a book-length exploration of humankind’s relationship with technology at this particularly fraught moment in time. It’s moving, fascinating, and alarming.

For The Frontlist, I spoke with Vara about generative AI, Google, online “content,” and what she learned from writing Searches.

Subscribe now

What was the most surprising thing you discovered during your research for Searches?

A lot of the time, we describe the internet as having started, in the mid-90s, as this open, almost anarchic space — one that was corrupted only later by big technology companies’ rapaciousness. I became a technology reporter only in the mid-2000s, and I shared that vague sentiment. What surprised me was realizing, through my reporting, that big technology companies and their interest in amassing wealth and power were bound up in the internet and its rise from almost the very start. The first commercial website appeared in 1993; the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was using his money to influence politics in Seattle by 1995.

How different would our digital lives be today if Google had kept its "don't be evil" ethos?

It’s so hard for me to imagine that counterfactual, because I think that slogan — to the extent that Google ever actually held this as a top priority — is fundamentally at odds with the capitalist structure in which Google was born and grew. Here’s how I can work my way toward imagining it. These academics at Stanford decide to create a search engine that is meant to provide information more effectively and broadly. It’s important to them not to be evil — and they define in specific terms what that means to them. Is it that they prioritize communal benefit above all else? If so, how do they define that benefit?

They work out those questions and write down the answers — that is, a set of specific goals meant to ensure non-evilness. The idea is that the search engine will be meant to meet those goals. It's expensive to build, which means they need funding — so they seek it from people or institutions who share their goals. Depending on what the goals are, maybe the funders are government entities (the Library of Congress, or some such? is that a thing?) or maybe they’re foundations (that eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar — I bet he'd get behind it?). Or something else entirely: an enormous ragtag group of collectively minded individuals each pitching in a little? Then they go forth from there — with a search engine whose goal, from the start, is not to make a return on investors’ investment.

What happens next, then? Does that change the course of internet and world history — setting the groundwork for a world in which the internet is generally oriented toward collective good? Or does some other startup come along — funded by venture capitalists who need a return on investment and have much more money to spend — and put Google out of business? That is: Do we eventually end up with something like what we ended up with in the real world?

This is to say: To what extent is Google at fault for what it became, and to what extent are we all at fault for having created systems for sustaining human inventiveness that define the value of inventions in financial terms? If there’s an extent to which we’re all at fault, does that open up space for us to consider other, better systems?

Should writers and editors be concerned that AI will soon make them unemployable?

Yes! And, therefore, we should exercise our agency and respond to that concern, individually and collectively.

If Google Search depends on high-quality content from publications, but its AI features starve those publications of traffic, where will the high-quality content come from?

I mean, I think even “high-quality content,” as a concept, is situated inside a framework in which financial gain is the highest value: It characterizes human self-expression and communication just as material — which can have meaning or not — to fill monetizable space; it assumes that some objective assessment of quality is possible. As a human being, I don't want content, high-quality or not. I want to be in communion with other life, with my planet, with the universe beyond my planet. One way in which I want to do that is through words and images that help us describe ourselves and the universe to one another. I think this is a value that is really widely held — and so I feel confident that, no matter what, we're going to keep doing it and keep doing it in ways that are beautiful and original and that resist the totalizing impulses of big technology companies.

What was the most difficult part about writing Searches?

The form is so unusual — including the use of big technology companies’ products to express, through form, a meta-critique of those companies and their products — that I knew readers wouldn’t really have a frame of reference for it. So I had to figure out how to balance the expository writing about these companies and their totalizing influence (and our complicity in it) so that readers would have some context with letting some of the more experimental material speak for itself and having faith that readers will see how it’s working in conversation with the argument I make more more conventionally.

You weave personal memoir sections with reporting so deftly in Searches. How do you structure that balance so effectively?

I'm glad you thought I did! I don't think of the book as being primarily a memoir of my life, which allowed me to write only about those parts of my life that served the broader narrative at hand. I think of that narrative as being about big technology companies' rise and our complicity (including mine) in it, and so I used myself as a kind of character — thinking about my role almost journalistically — to show how that dynamic operates.

There’s so much in this book that’s unconventional in form, so, honestly, when it came to blending memoiristic sections with reporting, I tried to take a somewhat conventional approach, using chronological narrative to organize the material. It turns out that big technology companies’ influence has been so pervasive that it wasn't hard to show how my own sense of self and of the world developed in the context of big technology companies’ rise.

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press)

• Behind the book with , author of Metallic Realms (Atria Books, May 13)

• June book preview

According to Cat Boyd, Saga Press will publish a new sci-fi thriller called All That We See or Seem on October 14, 2025, from Ken Liu.

“I've been doing a lot of experimenting with and thinking about AI, especially the future of human art in the age of AI,” Liu tells me. “A lot of these speculations play out in this book.”

All That We See or Seem — apparently titled after Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “A Dream Within a Dream” — follows “former orphan hacker Julia Z as she is thrust into a high-stakes adventure where she must use her AI-whispering skills to unravel a virtual reality mystery, rescue a kidnapped dream artist, and confront the blurred lines between technology, selfhood, and the power of shared dreams.”

Best known for his Dandelion Dynasty fantasy series that began with The Grace of Kings — and for translating Cixin Liu’s science fiction into English, including The Three-Body Problem — Ken Liu says he’s always enjoyed reading thrillers, and figured it was time to try to write one. “Of course, this is still going to be a very Ken Liu sort of book, with all the characteristic digressions and technical deep dives my readers have come to expect from me,” he says. “I think everyone will enjoy getting to know Julia Z.”

Here’s the full description from Saga:

Julia Z is leading a life of digital obscurity in a quiet Boston suburb. But when a lawyer named Piers—whose famous artist wife, Elli, has been kidnapped by dangerous criminals—barges into her life, Julia decides to put the solitary life she has painstakingly created at risk as she can’t walk away from helping Piers and Elli, nor step away from the challenge of this digital puzzle. Elli is an oneirofex, a dream artist, who can weave the dreams of an audience together through a shared virtual landscape, live, in a concert-like experience by tapping into each attendee’s memories and providing an emotionally resonant narrative experience. While these collective dreams are anonymous, Julia discovers that Elli was also dreaming one-on-one with the head of an international criminal enterprise, and he’s demanding the return of his dreams in exchange for Elli. Unraveling the real and unreal leads Julia on an adventure that takes her across the country and deep into the shadows of her psyche.

Liu lives near Boston himself, where he attended Harvard. “The story in All That We See or Seem depends on a lot of specifics in Boston and its suburbs: the geography, the infrastructure, the culture, the seasons, the history,” he says.

How many more Julia Z books will follow? Liu isn’t sure yet. “Unlike the Dandelion Dynasty, which told one story over four volumes, each book in the Julia Z series is its own independent adventure, and the books can be read in any order. Julia will have to let me know how long she wants to share her stories.”

Subscribe now

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press)

• Behind the book with Vauhini Vara, author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon)

• Behind the book with Lincoln Michel, author of Metallic Realms (Atria)

• May book preview

Fresh off the success of last summer’s Trap, M. Night Shyamalan has co-written a novel with Nicholas Sparks, Remain, which Random House will publish on October 7, 2025 — the same day Thomas Pynchon’s new novel comes out.

Remain is a “supernatural thriller love story” about a New York architect who falls in love with a woman (who has a secret) while designing a house in Cape Cod. Shyamalan’s film adaptation of the novel (which doesn’t have a release date yet) will reportedly star Jake Gyllenhaal as the architect and Phoebe Dynevor (Bridgerton, Fair Play) as the woman, who may or may not run a bed-and-breakfast (the publicity description is vague):

When New York architect Tate Donovan arrives in Cape Cod to design his best friend’s summer home, he is hoping to make a fresh start. Recently discharged from an upscale psychiatric facility where he was treated for acute depression, he is still wrestling with the pain of losing his beloved sister. Sylvia’s deathbed revelation—that she can see spirits who are still tethered to the living world, a gift that runs in their family—sits uneasily with Tate, who struggles to believe in more than what reason can explain. But when he takes up residence at a historic bed-and-breakfast on the Cape, he encounters a beautiful young woman named Wren who will challenge every assumption he has about his logical and controlled world.

Tate and Wren find themselves forging an immediate connection, one that neither has ever experienced before. But Tate gradually discovers that below the surface of Wren’s idyllic small-town life, hatred, jealousy, and greed are festering, threatening their fragile relationship just as it begins to blossom. Tate realizes that in order to free Wren from an increasingly desperate fate, he will need to unearth the truth about her past before time runs out . . . a quest that will make him doubt whether we can ever believe the stories we tell about ourselves, and the laws that govern our existence. Love—while transformative—can sometimes be frightening.

A story about the power of transcendent emotion, Remain asks us all: Can love set us free not only from our greatest sorrows, but even from the boundaries of life and death?

This is not the first time Shyamalan has written a book. In 2006, Little, Brown published his Lady in the Water: A Bedtime Story, illustrated by Crash McCreery, and in 2018, Simon & Schuster pubbed his “five keys to transforming America’s underperforming schools,” I Got Schooled.

I’m a little surprised Remain is set in Cape Cod, given Shyamalan’s tendency to film and set his movies in Philadelphia, and Sparks’s affinity for the North Carolina coast. But maybe there’s a plot reason that ties into the history of Massachusetts —Shyamalan’s done ghosts, superheroes, aliens, water nymphs, and serial killers, but he hasn’t told a story about witches.

Subscribe now

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press)

• Behind the book with Vauhini Vara, author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon)

• Behind the book with , author of Metallic Realms (Atria)

• May book preview

After three years of archival research, I finally finished writing my book, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, a few weeks ago, and my brain needed a break from words. Thus, a very late April preview.

I’ve also come to a bit of a crossroads with The Frontlist. I’m rethinking my current approach (monthly previews + behind-the-book interviews) to experiment with more kinds of coverage (like breaking news of big forthcoming books), but I haven’t quite landed on what works yet. In general, I think I need to spend more time sharing my own thoughts and experiences as a writer and a reader here. Thanks for your patience as I figure this out, and I’d love to hear from you, my esteemed audience, about what you’d like to see in The Frontlist as a beloved subscriber. (Just reply to this email or leave a comment on the web post. What do you care about most when it comes to new and upcoming books?)

Subscribe now

My 10 most-anticipated books of April 2025

Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler (MCD, April 1)

Nayler’s debut novel The Mountain in the Sea is one of my favorite works of science fiction of the decade so far. Needless to say, I’m anxiously awaiting Where the Axe Is Buried, which sounds like a mix between Apple TV+’s Foundation and Slow Horses adaptations. In the not-too-distant future, the president of the Federation keeps downloading his mind into “a succession of new bodies,” the AI-driven government of Western Europe is working out about as poorly as today’s ChatGPT users would expect, and a team of crack spies and scientists is trying to fight back.

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (April 1, Del Rey)

RJB is one of the most consistent fantasy writers working today. He’s smart, makes bold narrative decisions, and I loved his two previous trilogies, Divine Cities and Founders. This book is the second in a duology, following up on The Tainted Cup — a fantasy detective story set in one of Bennett’s most interesting secondary worlds.

Our City That Year by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell (HarperVia, April 1)

Shree won the International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand back in 2022, but Our City That Year is a new translation of a much earlier novel, first published in Hindi in 1998. It’s about a writer and two academics in an unnamed city in India that explodes with sectarian violence — “loosely based on the gathering violence that eventuated in the demolition of the Babri Mosque by religious extremists in 1992.”

Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara (Pantheon, April 8)

Vara wrote one of my favorite novels of the decade so far, The Immortal King Rao, so I’m excited to see her tackle the most controversial technology of that very same decade—the advent of ChatGPT and other LLM-based AI—in a work of nonfiction. A few years ago, Vara asked GPT-3 to co-write stories with her about the death of her sister, and the results went viral. Searches is a book-length exploration of humankind’s relationship with technology at this particularly fraught moment in time.

Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed (Norton, April 8)

As unlikely as it is in reality, I can’t resist science fiction novels about humanity leaving our celestial cradle for another planet. I also loved the short story Joe Mungo Reed published in Esquire a few years ago — “Islanders,” about the cost of immortality. In his new book, Terrestrial History, a scientist in Scotland meets a man who claims to be from the future: specifically, a future colony on Mars that he’s here to ensure happens.

Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books, April 8)

Katie Kitamura only writes intense and fascinating novels. Her last two, Intimacies and A Separation, absolutely blew me away with how she uses voice, tone, and a careful attention to detail to build suspense. In Audition, the setup is fairly simple: a woman and a significantly younger man meet for lunch at a restaurant in New York. But figuring out who they really are—and discovering how Kitamura will structure their stories—will make this another addictive puzzle box.

Mỹ Documents by Kevin Nguyen (OneWorld, April 8)

I’ve been following Kevin’s writing since he was an editor at The Verge, and he’s always a compelling read. In his second novel, “a series of violent, senseless attacks across America creates a national panic, prompting a government policy that pushes Vietnamese Americans into internment camps.” I really enjoyed his conversation with earlier this week at , and I can’t wait to read this book.

Cold Eternity by S. A. Barnes (Tordotcom, April 8)

Barnes has been cornering the market in space horror thrillers over the last few years. I thought last year’s Ghost Station was a blast, and Cold Eternity is about a woman trapped on an interstellar barge filled with the bodies of cryogenically frozen billionaires — and something else. Here’s hoping she blows the whole thing up.

Big Chief by John Hickey (Simon & Schuster, April 8)

First of all, love this cover. Second, Big Chief sounds like Three Days of the Condor set on a Native American reservation in Wisconsin. I haven’t read a good political novel in years (because real-life politics is more than enough for me), but Hickey’s is getting rave reviews.

The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia (Coffee House Press, April 22)

I’ve never read a Coffee House Press book I didn’t like. This short novel is about Hannah, an Eritrean refugee in London who “grapples with her own agency in a strange country,” while “her sexual encounters become an unapologetic expression of self — a defiant cry against the endless bureaucracy of immigration.”

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press)

• May book preview

If you’ve ever confused Thomas Pynchon with Philip Roth, you may be surprised to hear that the former is in fact still alive, much less still writing novels. Today, Penguin Press announced it will publish Pynchon’s ninth novel, Shadow Ticket, on October 7, 2025.

The most surprising part of this might be Shadow Ticket’s Midwestern setting, considering Pynchon’s earlier work “criticized the region as a cultural wasteland.” Here’s the full synopsis (it’s a doozy):

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

Born in 1937, the reclusive Pynchon’s last novel, Bleeding Edge (2013), was a NYT Notable, but he is of course best known for The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Inherent Vice (2009).

Most Pynchon-heads assumed Bleeding Edge would be his last book, including Alex Shepherd, a staff writer at The New Republic. “Five years ago, the National Enquirer stalked Thomas Pynchon for weeks and finally caught him walking to go vote in the fall of 2020,” Shepherd tells me. “The Pynchon in those photographs was then a spritely 82 (maybe 83?) and he looked a bit like Richard Harris did when he played Dumbledore—wizened, sure, but mostly decayed and more than a bit on death's door. I don't know why the National Enquirer did a stakeout of Pynchon, but it's funny and, well, a bit Pynchon-esque. The result wasn't really a scoop: It was just a reminder that Pynchon is extremely old and pretty frail.”

“That's a long way of saying that I had at that point already assumed that Bleeding Edge was his last book, which was a bit disappointing—it's a good novel and I enjoy that it has a reference to Yu-Gi-Oh (or maybe Dragon Ball Z, I don't remember) but it didn't really have the feel of finality. It wasn't a sign-off. This new book may not be that either but honestly who gives a fuck? Everything is so awful right now and we're getting a new Thomas Pynchon novel.”

“Like Lynchian, Pynchonesque is a funny descriptor because the reference point is art that is inimitable. You can give characters funny names and write 800-page novels with zany plots and dozens of characters but no one who has ever tried to write a Pynchonesque book has come close. Getting another one is a gift. Best of all, we're going to get dozens of dumb little songs.”

Shepherd has already emailed Polymarket to “add a tab for us to bet on the length of the book,” but they haven’t responded yet. When the news broke about Shadow Ticket this morning, he and other Pynchon-heads blew up Twitter and BlueSky.

Meanwhile, Paul Thomas Anderson’s next movie, One Battle After Another — which is based on Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) — hits theaters September 26, a couple weeks before Shadow Ticket hits shelves.

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press)

• April book preview (rather late, I’m afraid)

In the 1990s, I fell in love with books for two reasons: the Myst franchise and the science fiction thrillers of Michael Crichton.

Nicholas Binge shares at least one of those reasons. “I think I was in my teens when I first read Michael Crichton and something just clicked,” he tells me. “For a while, I didn’t want to read anything else.”

Subscribe now

Two years ago, Binge’s US debut, Ascension, was about a team of scientists sent to explore a massive mountain that appears in the middle of the Pacific Ocean overnight. Ascension earned rave reviews — including this praise in The New York Times from — and I devoured it in 48 hours with the same fervor I experienced reading Crichton’s Sphere for the first time. Binge has a propulsive prose style and a great talent for structure and pacing alongside his high-concept ideas.

Today, his next novel hits shelves — Dissolution, about an elderly woman who tries to save her husband’s memories from being stolen. I won’t say anything more than that, as one of the book’s greatest joys is discovering what’s actually happening and why. I picked Dissolution as one of Esquire’s most anticipated books of 2025, and it did not disappoint.

Binge lives in Edinburgh, where he lectures in creative writing at Edinburgh Napier University and is co-host of the Binge Reading Book Club podcast. Dissolution is already being adapted by the screenwriter of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, while Binge’s next novel, Extremity, a pulpy police procedural at the end of the world, is set for November. For The Frontlist, we spoke about how Dissolution came to be.

Did you grow up reading science fiction thrillers? What drew you to the genre as a writer?

The first book I remember really engaging with was The Lord of the Rings, which I probably read too young to fully get it, but it absolutely captured my imagination. Cue a slew of classic fantasy fiction over the next few years that I picked out myself from school libraries and charity bookshops. At the same time, my dad was feeding me a steady diet of golden age science-fiction: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and then onto Philip K Dick.

I think I was in my teens when I first read Michael Crichton and something just clicked — the bold, inventive speculative concept mixed with the pacing and twists of an unputdownable thriller? For a while, I didn’t want to read anything else.

Speculative fiction has always been part of my identity, of the way I see the world, and I’m so happy to have joined that playground and get to play with my own crazy ideas.

What drew you to memory as a concept for a sci-fi thriller?

I’ve watched two of my grandparents (on different sides of the family) succumb to dementia and memory loss. Over time, two things really stuck out to me. The first was seeing the way in which my Gran didn’t just lose her memories, but her entire identity. It was less that she couldn’t recognize her family, but more that she no longer exhibited the traits and behaviours that made her uniquely her. I found that terrifying — the idea that your identity could be scooped out of your body in that way — and it has haunted me ever since.

The second pivotal moment came with my Grannie on the other side, and the impact her illness had on my Grandpa. They’d been together for decades and had the most loving relationship, but watching the emotional toll that caring for her took was heartbreaking. Though physically taxing to a man in his mid-nineties, it was never an option for him to have someone else take care of her. She was no longer the woman he married, and yet, there was the constant and persistent hope that she might return to him. Seeing this mixture of duty, hope, and guilt that he couldn’t do more to help her was tragic. It left me with so many feelings that I wanted to explore about the human capacity for love in the face of tragedy, and how we can salvage hope in situations that feel inevitable. This was the start of my deep dive into memory.

I’ve read a lot about memory over the years — from academic studies into memory formation and distortion to more personal accounts of memory loss or, on the other end of the scale, extreme memory “athletes” who push their memories as far as they can take them. Some of the more horror-inspired moments in the book are literalisations of the horrors associated with losing your memories and how destabilizing that must be.

I suppose I’ve always been fascinated by memory: its unreliability, the ways we construct and reconstruct it, and the way we rely on it to create our identities and realities. There’s a baked-in contradiction there — we recognize our memories are subjective and yet they’re often all we have to build the objective realities we live in. This is the basis of the novel’s technological intrigue: if you could explore someone else’s memory of events, what would it do to your reality? How would that change? Once I started down that path, everything started falling into place.

Why did you open this book with an interview transcript? What made that the right move, form-wise?

There are a variety of post-hoc reasons that I could point to that made a lot of sense to me once I’d finished the book: for a book about memory, it makes sense for the narrative to be a type of forced recollection; I love the immediacy it brings to the narrative and the way the interrogative structure builds an implicit tension between characters, and a sense of distrust between what we’re being told and what we’re seeing elsewhere.

But my process is so nebulous and subconscious, and if I’m being honest, when I started writing the book in that format, I had no idea exactly why I was doing it other than it felt like an interesting narrative challenge. I find this happens a lot in my writing: something subconscious in my brain will want to tell a story in a particular way, but I won’t be able to consciously identify why until I’m near the end of the book.

There are some specific structural elements I intended from the beginning though: the “dissolution” countdown is meant to approximately match the average reading speed of a book, creating an eerie verisimilitude, which I always strive for in my work.

Where did you write most of this book, and why?

I’m a very nomadic writer. I don’t have one specific place. Bits get written on the sofa, in cafes, in bed. Years ago I set up a fancy writing desk for myself that I bought from an antique shop in Edinburgh and made it look all sophisticated and I... just never ended up writing at it. Wherever I have a laptop and am comfortable, that’s where writing happens.

Recently, I've been going full Trumbo and writing in the bath, which is just a delightful experience. Though it's worth mentioning that I think a lot of the “writing” of this book happens when I'm away from the keyboard. One of my favourite things to do is move my body — whether on a long walk or a session at the gym — because it allows my mind to run free, and those are usually the times when the ideas and scenes coalesce in my head. When I sit down to write, I’m just transcribing the work I did when I was out moving.

What was the hardest part about writing Dissolution?

Honestly, some of the structural and technical aspects of the way the story is told and holding that timeline together in my head. I’m not a very visual person, so graphing timelines and using post-it notes and all the other things some other writers do just doesn’t work for me. I have to be able to hold the whole thing in my brain, and with Dissolution that was tricky at points.

It also caused stumbling blocks in some basic elements of the prose. Due to the structure of the narrative, with characters recalling events of them diving into other people’s memories, it was easy to lose my place in the POV and which pronouns I’m talking about.

There’s a chapter where my main character, Maggie, is recalling an event where she dived into her husband’s memory of a much earlier event, where she saw herself meeting her younger husband for the first time and is comparing it to her own memory of that moment… Do I use she, or you, or I? Do I use past or present? Oh, she’s recounting this to an interviewer in the second person, too. I don’t know why I do this to myself.

The real truth is never happy unless the book feels like a bit of a stretch: thematically, narratively, structurally. It’s how I learn and grow as a writer, and it’s the challenge that makes the end result worth it.

As a sci-fi writer, you spend more time than most people thinking about the future. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the next 50 years?

On the surface, there’s so much to be pessimistic about: the climate crisis, the increasing grip of late-stage capitalism, the isolation of human beings behind screens and the manipulation by big tech companies. I have two wonderful children and it is hard to look at the world they're entering into and not feel a sense of despair. But part of the reason that I write is that I have an unshakable faith in the audacity and strength of the human spirit.

We are supremely adaptable creatures (which is not always a good thing! Ask the frog in the boiling pot about the merits of adaptability!) but we’re also furiously stubborn and wildly inventive. If nothing else, I have to have faith that the next generation will find a path through, and the way we do that is by telling stories, by sharing experiences, by building and rebuilding communities. Fiction is such a huge part of that, and it’s part of why I write.

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press, March 18)

• Behind the book with Vauhini Vara, author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, April 8)

• April book preview

Where were you when Bigolas Dickolas tweeted the Book Recommendation Heard ‘round the World?

I was in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. When I saw this tweet on my phone, I went straight into Barbara’s Bookstore to buy a copy.

Thousands of people did the same thing, and This Is How You Lose the Time War — a short, clever epistolary novel where science fiction and fantasy collide — became a bestseller four years after it had been published.

I read the whole thing on my flight and loved it.

Subscribe now

Now, one of the co-authors — Amal El-Mohtar, whose reviews I’ve always enjoyed at NPR and the NYT — is back with her solo debut. The River Has Roots is a gorgeous, prosaic fantasy adventure about Esther and Ysabel Hawthorne, two sisters who care for ancient trees in the town of Thistleford, which sits near the borders of Faerie. When one of the sisters gets romantically involved with a Faerie suitor, things take a turn for the worse.

El-Mohtar is one of our finest crafters of sentences, and this book features a magic system called Grammar, inspired by her own love of words.

The River Has Roots was one of my most anticipated books of 2025 over at Esquire, and for good reason — it’s fantastic. If you like concise speculative fiction with a strong sense of style, atmosphere, and world-suggesting, you’ll love it, too.

I spoke with Amal El-Mohtar and one of my new favorite cover designers, Spencer Fuller, about bringing this book to life.

Amal El-Mohtar

Where did you write most of this book?

I’ve moved house twice since I started writing it, and since moving I found myself mostly writing it in goblin-esque positions on a couch or dining room table. But this is the desk where it was begun, though it’s in a space three homes ago.

Does the process of writing feel like wielding a system of magic to you? Did that inspire the nature of grammar in the book?

Honestly it does feel like wielding a system of magic! What are we doing, in books, if not casting a spell on a reader and provoking them into hallucinating vividly some part of another world?

Something I've often said in workshops is that if poetry breaks language into meaning (my deliberate mangling paraphrase of T. S. Eliot), fantasy breaks reality into truth. So, grammar is a means of ordering or organizing thought and communication; but that ordering can be programmatic or it can be playful, denotative or evocative, comforting or provoking.

What was the hardest part about writing this book?

There were two big prongs of difficulty: the first was in getting started, and the second was in revision. My harp teacher, Hoda Nassim, to whom the book is partly dedicated, passed away while I was outlining it, and I’d been so looking forward to sharing it with her that it just knocked the wind out of me.

Then when I was invited to expand the story to novella length, the revision involved trying to hold on to the story’s essence while transforming its body significantly — thematically appropriate, but very hard to do!

My husband found the key to it, though, by telling me to take the advice I usually give to students, and read it all out loud. Once I did that, the possibilities for developing layers and dimension in the story while preserving its tone and focus really emerged.

Was The River Has Roots always the title? What made it a perfect fit in the end?

In fact no — my working title was Two Sisters, and then briefly Harp Swan Sister, but once I had a full draft, I was brainstorming with my agent (DongWon Song) and editor (Ali Fisher), and somewhere between them they landed on The River Has Roots, which just made my heart sing.

In fact once the title was in place, I ended up revising the text to include it, because it already felt like so much a part of the texture of the story that I just wanted to bring it into sharper relief.

Spencer Fuller, cover designer

Can you share some alternate cover designs and explain why they didn't make the cut?

I wasn’t the original designer working on this project but the title caught my eye and I asked about the book and he tried to describe it as mythological and pastoral which sold me and I asked to throw in on the presentation.

Most of the initial covers we presented were representational but felt a little like classical mythology. The artwork was very specific to the story in most cases and definitely carried the folklore feel of the book but in some ways felt limited by their tone. My design was the one honed in on and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to make something beautiful.

What did you want the cover art to convey about the book?

What initially drew me to the project was the title itself and the imagery that it evokes; I wanted to somehow capture that feeling in the cover design. This idea of a far-reaching and deep river, with all of its tributaries and offshoots felt like looking at a hydrological map in my head. I set out to represent this idea as simply as I could and then pair it with floral elements to connect it more to the imagery in the book as well as drawing the eye in with a slightly overstimulating look.

Why was the final cover art the right choice?

What I really like about the approved cover is how difficult it is to place it in a specific setting, leaving a few visual hints to make the viewer curious to know more. I love design that leaves something to be discovered, both in the cover itself but also because of the content the cover represents and I think this cover ended up doing a really good job of that. I ended up with one of the best covers I think I’ve made to date and I need to thank the author for such a unique platform to design from!

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press, March 18)

• Behind the book with Nicholas Binge, author of Dissolution (Riverhead, March 25)

• Behind the book with Vauhini Vara, author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, April 8)

• April book preview

According to Carla Bruce-Eddings, One World (a Random House imprint) will publish a new science fiction novel called Mountains South in 2027 from Kali Fajardo-Anstine, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, as part of a two-book deal.

“The initial idea for Mountains South came to me over a decade ago on a wind-blasted morning as I walked outside of the library at the University of Wyoming,” Fajardo-Anstine tells me. “I grew up a reader and that included science fiction and fantasy. But I didn’t separate my reading into categories. After spending years working on Woman of Light, which is set in the past, I found pivoting to the future complementary to imaging a historical world.”

Subscribe now

Set in 2045, Mountains South follows “two sisters — one whose childhood involvement in a biogenetics experiment seeking immortality comes to a head, and the other a prominent smuggler in the new American West — as they navigate the aftermath of a war-torn America where invasive technologies control every aspect of human life, from reproductive rights to natural resources.”

Some of Mountains South is set in Denver, a city that features prominently in Fajardo-Anstine’s two previous works of fiction, 2019’s Sabrina & Corina, which was a finalist for that year’s National Book Awards, and 2022’s Woman of Light. It’s also where Fajardo-Anstine was born and raised — I spoke with her for Longreads back in 2019 about working at West Side Books and how Denver’s gentrification has impacted the city’s Indigenous communities.

“There are other locations” in Mountains South, Fajardo-Anstine says, “including Texas. This is the region many of my ancestors are from and this is the land that calls me to storytelling.”

This will be Fajardo-Anstine’s first work of science fiction. “My bookshelf has quite a few additions since I started writing Mountains South — titles like The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil, or Sam Sternberg and Jennifer Doudna’s A Crack in Creation,” she says. “Growing up, I was always told by teachers that I was ‘bad at math’ or I should stick to the humanities. It was a fascinating and pleasurable experience to conduct research in fields that I had originally thought were off limits to a learner like me.”

One World (not to be confused with Oneworld Publications in the UK) published Fajardo-Anstine’s two previous books, and also one of my favorite books of 2025, Original Sins by Eve L. Ewing. They’re no strangers to speculative fiction, having brought out Victor LaValle’s The Changeling and Lone Women, as well as Mat Johnson’s Invisible Cities.

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Amal El-Mohtar, author of The River Has Roots (Tordotcom, March 4), and her cover designer Spencer Fuller.

• Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press, March 18)

• Behind the book with Nicholas Binge, author of Dissolution (Riverhead, March 25)

• Behind the book with Vauhini Vara, author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, April 8)

• April book preview

Apologies for the recent lack of monthly previews; I’ve been hyper-focused on finishing my book since last fall. Speaking of, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls is now set for release on December 9!

Over at Esquire, I picked the 20 most anticipated books of 2025 (though it’s very much focused on the first half of the year). Some of those picks are featured below (as well as my reused blurbs), but I’ve expanded this March list to include more books I’m excited about.

Subscribe now

My 12 most anticipated books of March 2025

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom, March 4)

As I said in Esquire: El-Mohtar’s last novel This Is How You Lose the Time War (co-written with Max Gladstone), is one of the only books to ever hit the bestseller lists four years after publication thanks to a viral tweet. Her new book, a concise fantasy adventure called The River Has Roots, is about Esther and Ysabel Hawthorne, two sisters who care for ancient trees in the town of Thistleford, which sits near the borders of Faerie. When one of the sisters gets romantically involved with a Faerie suitor, things take a turn for the worse. El-Mohtar is one of our finest crafters of sentences, and this book features a magic system called Grammar, so The River Has Roots automatically earns a spot on my nightstand.

Primordial by Mai Der Vang (Graywolf, March 4)

I love poetry with a strong sense of place, so I was blown away by Mai Der Vang’s Aftermath back in 2016. I’m eagerly awaiting this new collection, which “addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam.”

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Pantheon, March 4)

Lalami’s (The Other Americans) new novel has one of the best high-concept hooks of the year: a museum archivist is abducted by federal agents and taken to a detention center for observation after an algorithm predicts she will murder her husband in the near-future. During her monthslong stay in the facility, her dreams are monitored for evidence of homicidal intent. It feels like a mix between Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Wim Wender’s Until the End of the World, written in Lalami’s silky and celebrated prose.

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses (Scribner, March 4)

The Argentine author of Tender Is the Flesh and her translator return with a literary horror novel about a woman trapped in “a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.”

Luminous by Silvia Park (Simon & Schuster, March 11)

Set in a reunified near-future Korea, Luminous follows a human girl who discovers a robot boy in a junkyard. What follows sounds like a mix between Klara and the Sun and Altered Carbon.

The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf, March 11)

Who can forget Karen Russell’s debut novel Swamplandia!, the Florida-set story of alligator wranglers that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction back in 2012? Her new novel focuses on the other side of the country, where dust storms and the Great Depression have devastated a small town called Uz, Nebraska, where a “prairie witch” that can receive and preserve your memories, a camera that can see into the past and the future, and a farm that seems to be supernaturally unaffected by the drought.

Unusual Fragments edited by Sarah Coolidge (Two Lines Press, March 11)

I’m an absolute sucker for the Calico Series of international anthologies in translation from Two Lines Press. Their latest features Japanese short stories “of alienation with surprising humor and imagination.”

Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett (Riverhead, March 18)

Kristen is hilarious and this Orlando-set comedy will put a huge smile on your face every time you read it.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press, March 18)

“I like to write novels that, to me, are broken at the level of conception, and then see if I can pull it off,” Graham Jones told Esquire two years ago. In Mongrels and The Only Good Indians, he took werewolves and ghost stories in exciting new directions. In the Indian Lake trilogy (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Don’t Fear the Reaper, and The Angel of Indian Lake), he subverted our expectations for slasher horror. Now, he’s tackling the vampire mythos from a unique point of view: the lost 1912 diary of a Montana priest that records the life of a Blackfoot man named Good Stab.

Firstborn by Lauren Christensen (Penguin Press, March 18)

Weeks before her wedding, Christensen learned that her first child, a girl named Simone, was dying in the womb. In crystalline prose, this memoir from the editor at The New York Times Book Review asks, “How do we live when everyone who makes up our world will someday be gone?”

Dissolution by Nicholas Binge (Riverhead Books, March 25)

“Binge” is exactly what I did (sorry) over the course of 48 hours with Nicholas’s last novel, Ascension, a suspenseful sci-fi thriller about a mountain that suddenly appears in the Pacific ocean. His new book, Dissolution, is about an elderly woman being interrogated by a stranger about her memories because someone is stealing the memories of her husband. I won’t go further in the plot than that, because putting together what’s happening is one of the novel’s pleasures.

Twist by Colum McCann (Random House, March 25)

I’ve never read McCann but this is about an Irish journalist who embeds with an underwater cable repair ship off the coast of Africa, and that sounds fascinating to me in a Michael Mann industry-exposé kind of way.

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Amal El-Mohtar, author of The River Has Roots (March 4, Tordotcom), and her cover designer Spencer Fuller.

• Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press, March 18)

According to Ellen Wright, Orbit will publish a new standalone novel in The Witcher series called Crossroads of Ravens on September 30, 2025. It will be Andrzej Sapkowski’s ninth fantasy book centered on the character of Geralt of Rivia, and his first in seven years.

It sounds like a prequel in the vein of Batman Begins: “In [Crossroads of Ravens], I return to the roots of Geralt’s journey — not the fearless monster slayer we know, but a young Witcher just beginning to understand the burden of his destiny,” says Andrzej Sapkowski.

“Imagine Geralt, but younger, with fewer scars and a bit more haughtiness. This is a story of growth, of idealism meeting harsh reality, and of choices that forge a legend. It’s about finding your place in a world that’s constantly challenging you to be more than you thought you could be. As this new story finds its way to readers across the globe this year, I can’t wait for them to walk alongside a younger Geralt — experiencing the trials that forged him and the journey that set him on the road to his destiny.”

Wright describes the book as “a perfect entry point for new readers, and an unmissable must-read for longtime fans.” Written in Polish, the novel will be translated by David French, who has translated six of the eight previous Witcher books. His translations of the first two books, The Last Wish and Blood of Elves, are coming out sometime in 2026.

“We're very proud at Hachette to be the global English language publisher, at Gollancz and Orbit, for this landmark publication,” says David Shelley, CEO of Hachette. “The Witcher is one of the most loved and most successful literary creations, and its millions of fans will be thrilled by this long-awaited new installment.”

The reclusive 76-year-old Sapkowski, who has been called (fairly or not) “the Polish Tolkien,” made headlines in 2018 when he asked for $16 million in unpaid royalties from the developers of The Witcher video games, and again in 2023 when he alleged Netflix executives “never listened” to his ideas for their TV adaptation starring Henry Cavill.

Subscribe now

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Amal El-Mohtar, author of The River Has Roots (March 4, Tordotcom), and her cover designer Spencer Fuller.

• March book preview

According to an email from publicist Demetri Papadimitropoulos, Pantheon Books will publish a new untitled novel by Mark Z. Danielewski three days before Halloween on October 28, 2025 while celebrating the 25^th anniversary of House of Leaves, which was one of the most harrowing reading experiences of my young life.

House of Leaves started as a 100-page short story called Redwood, written over three “sleepless days and nights” with a fountain pen in 1990, before Danielewski transformed it into an experimental novel between 1993 and 1999. After finding an agent who fell in love with it, 32 publishers turned the bizarre manuscript down before Pantheon editor Edward Kastenmeier scooped it up.

In the decades since, House of Leaves has become a cult classic for its unusual form and subtle horror. Ostensibly, it’s about a fictional documentary film, The Navidson Record, which is itself about a house in rural Virginia that’s (much) larger on the inside than it is on the outside. But the main draws of the book are its stylistic departures from a novel’s typical form, including footnotes, highlighted text, typeface changes, handwritten passages, and more that I won’t spoil.

Details about Danielewski’s new novel are under wraps beyond the pub date, though October 28 may hint at another horror-infused book.

Born in NYC and now based in LA, Danielewski followed the 700-page House of Leaves (2000) with a much shorter novel, Only Revolutions (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award that year despite polarized reviews. Between 2015 and 2017, he published five of 27 (!) planned volumes of The Familiar before abandoning the series to become the literary equivalent of Sufjan Steven’s albums for all fifty states.

Subscribe now

In other news

ICYMI my new book, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls (Atria / One Signal Publishers, December 9, 2025), is available for preorder now. As we face new book bans in our own time, this is “the definitive biography of overlooked queer icon Margaret C. Anderson, whose fight to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses led to her arrest and trial for obscenity.”

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Amal El-Mohtar, author of The River Has Roots (March 4, Tordotcom), and her cover designer Spencer Fuller.

  Subscribe now

The explosion of ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and other consumer AI tools has impacted just about every profession on Earth — but perhaps none more so than writers. Tech companies, C-suites, publishers, and writing students around the world have become obsessed with the idea that software can do all your writing for you — an idea that’s already disrupted everything from web publishing to college classrooms.

In More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, John Warner argues that AI “not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don't challenge students to do the real work of writing.” It’s a timely and fascinating look at why teachers and administrators should embrace the fact that reading and “writing is thinking,” not something an LLM can do for you in a few clicks.

For The Frontlist, I spoke with John about his book, which pubs today. As “the Biblioracle,” is a weekly columnist at the Chicago Tribune and writes the newsletter The Biblioracle Recommends. He’s also an affiliate faculty member at the College of Charleston and lives in Folly Beach, South Carolina.

Subscribe now

Can you share a photo of your writing space?

This is the desk in my home office, and I was sorely tempted to tidy things up for this feature, but why not just give into reality? Every couple of months I reset the surface to zero and get rid of all the loose paper, objects, unfiled mail, and move the TBR books somewhere more discretely out of sight, but this is a pretty good rendering of what the desk would've looked like while working on the book.

I am ashamed of the clutter, but this is simply the reality of what my workspace looks like when I'm in the midst of something, which is pretty much always. We've moved to this house with a view of a coastal salt marsh two and a half years ago, and the change I've enjoyed most is that my office is now a room with a view. I can look out and see the light change as the day moves along, and when the tide is up a group of kayakers may paddle by. All kinds of shore birds go swooping past. It's nice.

I like that the desk is big so I have places to put any materials I might be referencing and the large monitor where I can have both a full screen of a document page and an open browser is pretty much a necessity for book writing.

One of my consistent messages about writing in both this book and others is that writing is a "practice" and part of one's practice is the space and manner of how they go about their work. I don't know what this says about my practice other than it is definitely mine.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered during your research?

This is strange to say, but writing the book I was surprised to see how much more important my reading practice is to me than I'd truly appreciated. I think I'd come to take the fact that I can read in a myriad of different ways — skimming, deeply, like a writer, etc. — for granted.

Reading isn't a superpower since that conveys something that is rare or inaccessible, but it is the chief source of my agency in both work and life. It made me even more despairing about the ways reading has been reduced in school contexts and how students are often deprived of the pleasure of power of truly being able to read.

The fact that LLMs can summarize lots of text nearly instantly only makes reading critically, deeply, etc., more important, not less, but I fear that lots of folks are drawing the opposite conclusion. More Than Words is my attempt to say, "Let's hold on here!"

What was the hardest part about writing this book?

Given the nature of the topic, there was a bit of a time crunch to get it done as quickly as possible. I was worried about what I had to say being obviated by some kind of technological development. Making sure to stay reasonably on top of developments was important, and much of my mornings involved with reading that day's new news about generative AI and LLMs. There are gazillions of people with more expertise about those things than me, but I got increasingly proficient at taking in new information and seeing how it related to what I was trying to say.

Truth be told, over time, I became less worried about my message being obviated, as I realized that what I was writing was not primarily about shifting technology, but instead about enduring human processes.

The challenge then shifted, and I had to try to bring these processes of reading and writing to life in a way that illustrates their importance to the individuals doing those things. I was fortunate to have lots of years of teaching where I'd seen the shifts in student attitudes and orientations happen when they're truly turned on to the power of reading deeply and writing with intention, and I drew much more heavily on those experience than I initially anticipated.

Was More Than Words always the title? What made it a perfect fit in the end?

Is it the perfect title? I like the title, but titles are hard. The title on the original book proposal was Writing with Robots: Staying Human in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, which I knew from the beginning was a better title for a book proposal trying to interest publishers than the book I was ultimately going to write.

I don't remember what other titles were knocked around between my editor and I, but I think when More Than Words came up it felt good. It captures the key sentiment of the book, that there are important differences between the syntax generation of large language models and what happens when people read and write. The initial awe triggered by the appearance of ChatGPT has, I think, obscured this reality.

Or maybe it's that the ways we've allowed what is now a couple of generations of students to become alienated from the deep challenges and pleasures of reading and writing that have obscured this reality. Either way, it's something I want to reawaken in the audience.

I also like the subtitle "how to think about writing in the age of AI," because I intend the book to demonstrate my thinking as an inducement for others to do their own thinking. It's an example, not a prescription.

My only worry was that every time readers of a certain generation — the generation I belong to — saw the title, they would not be able to get this song out of their heads.

Preorder my book?

A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature is now available to preorder if that’s something you’d like to do! Here’s what One Signal / Atria Books has to say about it:

Already under fire for publishing the literary avant-garde into a world not ready for it, Margaret C. Anderson’s cutting-edge magazine The Little Review was a bastion of progressive politics and boundary-pushing writing from then-unknowns like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Djuna Barnes. And as its publisher, Anderson was a target. From Chicago to New York and Paris, this fearless agitator helmed a woman-led publication that pushed American culture forward and challenged the sensibilities of early 20th century Americans dismayed by its salacious writing and advocacy for supposed extremism like women’s suffrage, access to birth control, and LBGTQ rights.”

But then it went too far. In 1921, Anderson found herself on trial and labeled “a danger to the minds of young girls” by a government seeking to shut her down. Guilty of having serialized James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses in her magazine, Anderson was now not just a publisher but also a scapegoat for regressives seeking to impose their will on a world on the brink of modernization.

Author, journalist, and literary critic Adam Morgan brings Anderson and her journal to life anew in A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, capturing a moment of cultural acceleration and backlash all too familiar today while shining light on an unsung heroine of American arts and letters. Bringing a fresh eye to a woman and a movement misunderstood in their time, this biography highlights a feminist counterculture that audaciously pushed for more during a time of extreme social conservatism and changed the face of American literature and culture forever.

Subscribe now

I first discovered Erika Swyler because of her third novel, Light from Other Stars, an intimate and nuanced look at an astronaut’s interior life aboard an interstellar spacecraft. Her new book, a stunning literary sci-fi murder mystery called We Lived on the Horizon, hits bookshelves today, January 14, 2025.

Books about AI are flooding Edelweiss this year, but Swyler’s novel is a prescient and masterfully written exploration of the costs of technologies that are powerful enough to change cultures. In the walled city of Bulwark, a last bastion of civilization in a desert ravaged by apocalypse, Enita Malovis is building a body for Nix, her household AI, when she discovers that the murder of one of her wealthy peers has been seemingly erased from the memory of Parallax, the city’s own AI. The plot escalates and compounds from there, but I won’t give anything else away.

For the Frontlist, I spoke with Swyler and her editor at Atria Books, Loan Le, about bringing We Lived on the Horizon to life. A quick disclaimer: Erika and I share an agency (Trellis) and a publisher (Atria/One Signal Publishers).

Erika Swyler

What was the original seed idea for this book that captivated you?

While driving some years back, I listened to a piece about altruism on NPR. It was specifically about altruists of the extreme variety: people who donate kidneys to strangers. It’s something they’ve revisited on a few occasions. At that time, I was feeling real anger around political upheaval in the US and what it meant for everyone. I started thinking about the way governments rely on and even exploit altruists to keep societies functioning.

Around that same time, public interest in Large Language Models and AI was picking up, and that got me wondering what altruism might look like to a machine consciousness, and how that might be exploited. I kept thinking, “Tech leaders aren’t going to like a true Artificial Intelligence’s answer to the trolley problem.” That led me to want to pick at who is capable of doing good for others, and how that plays out in stratified societies. So, anger, and an interesting NPR story are to blame. Oddly enough, every time I start a project from a place of real anger, I end up in a place of deep caring.

What was the hardest part about writing this book?

It took a long time and several drafts to settle on how to write Nix’s voice. As an AI, they needed to think in a way that wasn’t human but was approachable, if not relatable. I focused on how machines and networks work, all those things that are so different from human thought and communication. I had to find a way to create that without alienating readers.

At one point I’d built a whole machine religion that dictated social structure among the book’s computer systems. Ultimately, I knew that was too much, and that Nix themself needed to do the lifting. I settled on using colors as a layer in their communication. It touched on synesthesia, but also instantly signaled a different kind of thought process.

I wound up relying pretty heavily on style choices in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Nix’s chapters are in the present tense because their experience of time is different. They’re a plural voice because their thinking and consciousness is plural.

We Lived on the Horizon earned starred reviews from PW, Kirkus, and Bookpage. What impact does that make on you as we approach pub day?

These are some of the kindest reviews I’ve ever received, so I feel quite lucky. It’s shock and a relief, to be sure. My creative process is solitary, so it’s hard to know if I’m touching on something readers need, or if I wrote a book that only I can enjoy. When a great review hits, it opens up that door just a crack to the possibility that a book isn’t a flight of fancy, but a needed story.

It’s hard to process praise, perhaps even more difficult than processing negative feedback. As writers, we steel ourselves for rejection, harsh comments, and all the weird friction points that happen if a book reaches outside its intended audience. There’s very little preparation for when things go right. So, I find myself a little shaky, a lot scared, but already profoundly grateful.

Loan Le, editor at Atria Books

What drew you to Erika's writing in general and to this manuscript in particular?

I have followed Erika's career since The Book of Speculation. I loved Light From Other Stars, and I was always vocal about my love for Erika. The manuscript landed in my mailbox, and I couldn't put it down. The language drew me in first — I can call it sophisticated, smart, gripping, etc., but I also think it's specific. Erika thinks about every word in her sentences, and it's as if these words only exist in and for this book. I had no trouble picturing Bulwark, Nix, and the details of Enita’s house, even though they don't exist here and now.

What made We Lived on the Horizon a great fit for Atria Books?

Overall, I think Atria Books is associated with book club novels. You have to talk to someone about the book. While this is more in the spec-fic/sci-fi territory, its themes and topics — AI, for example — are perfect for book clubs.

How did the book evolve during the editing process?

Honestly, I don't think we changed it that much! Style-wise, I had no reason to touch it! Erika's just that good. I might have asked her to elaborate on details about Bulwark and Parallax so that readers can feel more grounded. I loved Enita and Nix's relationship so much that I wanted more in the novel. I hope Erika thought the process was painless.

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• My most anticipated books of the year

• More Behind the Books

Last fall, when I was rummaging through Edelweiss for forthcoming books, I was struck by the cover of The Stone Home, Crystal Hana Kim’s second novel on the heels of 2018’s If You Leave Me: A figure crouches at the bottom of what appears to be a stone-block well, where flowering plants climb up the masonry while birds soar across a sunset above.

At first, I thought it was a fantasy novel. “How did this heroine fall into an ancient well, and how will she get out?” I wondered. But then I read the blurb: The Stone Home is a historical novel inspired by real-life internment camps in South Korea — and not in the distant past, but as recently as the 1980s.

The figure on the cover wasn’t a fantasy character who fell into a well — she was a South Korean woman trapped in a modern-day prison.

I read The Stone Home in a breathless two-day sprint a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t put it down. It’s a fascinating look at one of the darkest secrets in history, written in Kim’s melodic and otherworldly prose.

To understand more about how the novel came together, I spoke with Kim, her editor at William Morrow Jessica Williams, and the art director behind the cover, Ploy Siripant.

Subscribe now

Crystal Hana Kim, author

How and when did this book begin for you? Was it inspired by history?

In some ways, the book began in 2016, when I came across an Associated Press article about “reformatory centers” in 1980s South Korea. These institutions were secretly sanctioned by the government to clean up the country’s image in the lead up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Children were unceremoniously taken off the streets and used for labor. After reading the exposé, I studied the accompanying photos — a boy in a blue shirt jumping off the back of a paddy wagon, a room full of girls bent over sewing machines. I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

I didn’t know I was going to write a novel right at that instant, of course. I only knew that this was a story I couldn’t get out of my head. I kept wondering about the lives of those imprisoned, the limits of our humanity, how you survive in even the most desperate circumstances. Then, in 2018, I met Han Jong Sun, a survivor of one of these institutions. After our day-long conversation, I knew that I would devote the next few years to writing this book.

What was the hardest thing about writing The Stone Home?

I thought for a long time about how best to write this novel in a way that treats the subject matter with care and respect. I’m part of the Korean diaspora, and I want to tell our stories because I believe we can learn from our past. At the same time, the survivors of these 1980s South Korean institutions are still alive now. I didn’t want to speak for them. This is where character and story comes in.

In writing The Stone Home, I added layers of fictionalization to make the institution its own physical space. I created characters that would carry us through — fierce, spiky Eunju who will go to any lengths to protect her mother and guarded, stubborn Sangchul, who is devoted to his idealistic older brother. Their friends — Jae, Taeho, Mina. Through their specific stories, I created a universal story.

How has writing this novel changed you?

This may come as a surprise, but writing this novel has taught me so much about hope, collective care, and community. Without each other, we cannot survive. Writing fiction reminds me again and again of the power of story to create empathy.

Jessica Williams, VP, Editorial Director at William Morrow

What drew you to this manuscript, and to Crystal's writing in general?

I love Crystal’s writing; the power of the images she uses, her lyricism, and character work, especially her choice to focus on ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances — and I published her debut novel, If You Leave Me (2018). So, as soon as the early draft of The Stone Home landed, there was never a question in my mind about whether I’d want to publish it.

What made it a great fit for William Morrow?

We’re able to showcase a wide range of fiction on our list and, like a lot of readers, I love learning about history through a historical novel, especially when it also manages to shine a light on contemporary issues. On top of that, the ending made me cry. As an editor, I always try to listen to that powerful of an emotional response to a book.

How did the book evolve during the editing process?

Crystal and I focused a lot on pacing and character development; we wanted the novel to feel as tightly constructed as possible while still rich in texture and detail. The writing is poetic and spare, and we both felt it was important not to linger over any of the more violent scenes unnecessarily. Because while the story is a wrenching exploration of the effects of colonialism and the psychology of power, it’s also meant to be a hopeful tribute to the extraordinary acts of devotion and friendship that can arise in the darkness.

Ploy Siripant, Senior Director, Art

What did you want the cover to convey about the novel?

The Stone Home is encased by a high stone wall. The young girl at the center of the novel longs to escape and studies this stone wall, so we knew from the beginning that we wanted to feature them both on the cover. I immediately thought of the incredibly talented illustrator Hokyoung Kim to execute our vision.

We told Hokyoung we wanted the cover to be elegant, beautiful, and literary.  Though it delves into a dark historical moment and difficult themes, it is about the power of human connection to find hope and community in the midst of suffering. So while we want a sense of tension, we don’t want the cover to look dark or scary.

Why was the final cover the right choice?

Hokyoung sent us these sketches and we were all immediately drawn to #4. The contrast of light and dark along with the yellow forsythia flowers evoke the feeling of hope and oppression. We took some of the elements we loved form the other sketches, like the two birds, making the wall look more man-made, and showing more of the sky. Hokyoung combined everything so beautifully with color. I added typography that was elegant yet understated to let the art shine through. The final cover perfectly captures the tone and mood of the novel, and everyone on the team loved where we landed.

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Caroline Crampton (A Body Made of Glass)

• May book preview

Sorry this is so late — I took a New England trip to see the eclipse!

In case you missed it, “the small press world is about to fall apart” this month thanks to the sudden collapse of Small Press Distribution, which more than 400 small presses relied on to fulfill online orders and ship books to retail outlets.

For Literary Hub, I spoke with independent presses about why this is a disaster, how much money they’re owed (up to $17,000!), and where they go from here.

Meanwhile, if you’re a video game enthusiast (or even if you just played literary PC games in the 1990s), my longform print feature on the reimagining-in-progress of 1997’s RIVEN: THE SEQUEL TO MYST is now online (without a paywall) at Game Informer.

And now, the reason you opened this email.

Subscribe now

My 15 most-anticipated books of April 2024

The Stone Home by Crystal Hana Kim (William Morrow, April 2). A fascinating novel that looks back at an underreported tragedy in the history of South Korea.

The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso, translated by Leonard Mades (New Directions, April 2). Another premise I’ll let speak for itself: “The mute caretaker of the crumbling former abbey [is] hounded by a coven of ancient witches who are bent on transforming him, bit by bit, into the terrifying imbunche: a twisted monster with all of its orifices sewn up, buried alive in its own body.”

You Are Here edited by Ada Limón (Milkweed, April 2). Limón is a national treasure and all of her books are must-buys for me.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez (Algonquin, April 2). A woman literally builds a graveyard to bury her abandoned manuscript drafts in the Dominican Republic.

We Loved It All by Lydia Millet (Norton, April 2). Millet is a brilliant fiction writer, so I’m excited to read her first nonfiction book, an account of her “quarter century of wildlife and climate advocacy.”

A View From the Stars by Cixin Liu (Tor, April 2). I really enjoyed the Three-Body Problem trilogy (though admittedly more as thought experiments than novels), so I’m interested in these essays and short stories from Liu.

Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie (Orbit, April 2). Leckie’s Imperial Radch series was fun, and I keep meaning to read The Raven Tower. This short story collection has pieces set in both of those universes and others.

The Weight of Nature by Clayton Page Aldern (Dutton, April 9). A bracing look at how the climate crisis is affecting our brains (it’s definitely affecting mine!).

The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell (One Signal, April 9). This looks like a fascinating investigation of why, in the (dis)information age, we’re growing less and less rational.

A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke (Avid Reader, April 9). Read a few pages of this the other day and was really interested in the premise: it’s basically a 19th-century version of SPEED (1994), about a woman who wanders the earth because she’ll die if she stops moving.

We Are the Culture by Arionne Nettles (Lawrence Hill, April 16). Nettles is one of Chicago’s finest journalists, so I can’t wait to dig in to this history of the cultural impact of Black Chicago.

The Sky Was Ours by Joe Fassler (Penguin, April 23). A clever reimagining of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, set in 2005, about an upstate New York recluse building a pair of human wings.

A Body Made of Glass by Caroline Crampton (Ecco, April 23). A cultural history of hypochondria, written by a woman who has suffered from health anxiety ever since suffering through a scary diagnosis when she was a teenager.

Real Americans by Rachel Khong (Knopf, April 30). The author of Goodbye, Vitamin returns with a mutligenerational romantic dramedy / coming-of-age novel set in New York and coastal Washington State.

Exit Wounds by Ieva Jusionyte (UC Press, April TBD). An insightful look at how American guns wind up killing men, women, and children in Mexico, and why our insufficient gun laws cause chaos across our borders.

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• Behind the book with Crystal Hana Kim (The Stone Home) and Caroline Crampton (A Body Made of Glass)

• May book preview

Last year, as soon as I finished reading Nathan Ballingrud’s debut novel, The Strange, I knew it had become my all-time favorite Mars novel, ahead of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, and Dan Simmons’ Ilium.

But even more than those older novels, The Strange is a genre hybrid between fantasy, science fiction, horror, western, historical fiction, alternate history, and planetary romance. I genuinely don’t know where I would shelve it as a bookseller — and I think that’s one of its greatest strengths, alongside classics like Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun.

The Strange is set in the town of New Galveston in 1931, when Anabelle Crisp, the teenage daughter of a diner-owner, ventures out into the Martian frontier to retrieve the last recordings of her late mother, and discovers haunting truths about humankind’s history on the red planet.

I spoke with Nathan Ballingrud — also known for his short fiction collected in North American Lake Monsters and Wounds (recently re-pubbed in a gorgeous special edition called The Atlas of Hell) — about writing The Strange.

Subscribe now

When and how did The Strange begin for you?

It began a few years ago, when I was playing around with the idea of making a podcast modeled after old fashioned radio serials. I had the idea of the show centering around a small, rural community on Mars in the 1930s. I was thinking of something like a cross between Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. (I still really like this idea.)

Some of the characters from that early form are in the novel — Sheriff Bakersfield, Jeremiah Shank, Widow Kessler — but once Anabelle came onto the scene, her story took over. I decided it had to be a novel.

I set it on Mars because, for me, Mars has always been as much a fantasy setting as Middle-earth or Narnia. Ever since I was a little kid, staring at that little pink star, it’s been a place for dreams to run free. That’s why there is no believable science in the book. Despite what they’re calling it, it isn’t science fiction. It’s fantasy. It’s a planetary romance.

Why set this in 1931 instead of the future, like most novels set on Mars?

The story was set in the past as soon as I conceived it. It wasn’t a decision; it was just there. I’m sure it had something to do with a number of factors: the influence of Ray Bradbury and Charles Portis, the fact that I had just read a book called The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, which made me think of sandstorms on Mars.

How did you approach writing a novel differently than your short stories?

I let myself breathe. I allowed myself to spend time with characters, get to know them by their conversations with other characters, let them reveal themselves to me in stages.

Short stories are so much about focus and concision. While those elements are important in a novel too, there is room for digression, there is time to sit by a fire and just talk. Spending time with characters who bump against each other and even themselves is my favorite thing to do as a writer, and I got to do that with three of them in this novel. I really enjoyed that. So to answer your question more succinctly, I relaxed. I let the characters go.

What was the most difficult thing about writing The Strange?

Plot. By a long shot. I tried teaching myself to work with plot with some of the stories I’d written before jumping into the novel, but it was still a challenge. Getting all the elements to cohere and come to a satisfying conclusion without getting in the way of the emotional payoff of Anabelle’s internal arc, which is for me far more important, was a challenge. I’m not sure I lived up to it. I hope I came close.

Do you have any routines or rituals that help you get in the right mindset to write horror? Especially when it’s set somewhere so different from your daily life?

I don’t, really. I prefer silence when I write. That lets me get to where ever I need to go. I avoid reading or watching anything remotely similar once the actual writing begins, for fear of it pulling me off course. If I need inspiration, I’ll look at art. For The Strange I looked at art depicting desert landscapes and scenes from the Old West, as well as pulp art about Mars. Other than that, I just try to find some quiet, some isolation, and let my imagination take over.

Do you plot out your stories and novels before you start writing them, or do you begin with a premise and see where the writing takes you?

As much as I can, I try to avoid plotting too much. I really enjoy wandering through the jungle, stumbling on things I hadn’t expected. With a short story, I like to have the end in mind; not firmly, but a rough sense. A distant light to guide me through the forest. With the novel, I found I needed a rough map. Certain key way stations before the end. But I allowed myself to wander and get lost in between them. I’m a slow writer and I’d probably be a lot faster if I outlined more thoroughly, but I think I’d lose a lot of joy in the process. Getting lost in the dark wood is too rewarding.

Forthcoming in The Frontlist

• April book preview

• Behind the book with Crystal Hana Kim (The Stone Home) and Caroline Crampton (A Body Made of Glass)