Books

 Kirkus Most Anticipated YA Books of Spring 2026

This stunning anthology of favorite poems about our relationship with the natural world, visually interpreted by acclaimed comic artist Julian Peters, breathes new life into some of the greatest poems of all time.

These are poems that can change the way we see the environment, and encountering them in graphic form promises to change the way we read the poems. In an age of increasingly visual communication, this format helps unlock the world of poetry and literature for a new generation of reluctant readers and visual learners.

Following the seasons of the year and of life, Nature Poems to See By will also help young readers see themselves differently. A valuable teaching aid appropriate for middle school, high school, and college use, the collection includes favorites from the canon already taught in countless English classes.

This sequel to the artist’s award-winning anthology Poems to See By includes adaptations of poems by Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Mary Karr, Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Robert Burns, Rhina P. Espaillat, Joy Harjo, Alfred L. Tennyson, Matsuo Bashō, Gwendolyn Brooks, Stevie Smith, Li Po, Carl Sandburg, Ueda Chōshū, e. e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Christina Rosetti, and Philip Larkin.

This cyber-erotic romantic thriller, written by two queer icons in the 1990s, has been "rebooted" for today's readers.

In this rowdy cyber-romance originally written in the 1990s, two people meet online and fall in love in every guise they can manage. As Scratch and Winc go from anonymous lovers to accidental heroes and gender outlaws, they expose the shadowy Web stretched between technology and capitalist greed, nearly becoming roadkill on the internet superhighway. With a little help from their friends including a brave teenager and a mysterious hacker, these darling rebels fight government intervention and find chosen family in this eerily prescient tale.

The 30th anniversary “reboot” edition includes an updated lens for today’s readers, as GenZ investigative journalist Drew uncovers what just might be the greatest queer love story of all time. Like Octavia Butler's PARABLE OF THE SOWER, Margaret Atwood's A HANDMAID'S TALE, and George Orwell's 1984, the return of NEARLY ROADKILL is right on time with urgent lessons for our contemporary landscape.

The work of queer autistic scholar Nick Walker has played a key role in the evolving discourse on human neurodiversity.

Neuroqueer Heresies collects a decade's worth of Dr. Walker's most influential writings, along with new commentary by the author and new material on her radical conceptualization of Neuroqueer Theory.

This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the foundations, terminology, implications, and leading edges of the emerging neurodiversity paradigm.

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels

"[Nevada] is defiant, terse, not quite cynical, sometimes flip, addressed to people who think they know. It is, if you like, punk rock." ―The New Yorker

"Nevada is a book that changed my life: it shaped both my worldview and personhood, making me the writer I am. And it did so by the oldest of methods, by telling a wise, hilarious, and gripping story." ―Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

A beloved and blistering cult classic and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction finally back in print, Nevada follows a disaffected trans woman as she embarks on a cross-country road trip.

Maria Griffiths is almost thirty and works at a used bookstore in New York City while trying to stay true to her punk values. She’s in love with her bike but not with her girlfriend, Steph. She takes random pills and drinks more than is good for her, but doesn’t inject anything except, when she remembers, estrogen, because she’s trans. Everything is mostly fine until Maria and Steph break up, sending Maria into a tailspin, and then onto a cross-country trek in the car she steals from Steph. She ends up in the backwater town of Star City, Nevada, where she meets James, who is probably but not certainly trans, and who reminds Maria of her younger self. As Maria finds herself in the awkward position of trans role model, she realizes that she could become James’s savior―or his downfall.

One of the most beloved cult novels of our time and a landmark of trans literature, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is a blistering, heartfelt, and evergreen coming-of-age story, and a punk-smeared excavation of marginalized life under capitalism. Guided by an instantly memorable, terminally self-aware protagonist―and back in print featuring a new afterword by the author―Nevada is the great American road novel flipped on its head for a new generation.

From fan-favorite author Alexis Hall comes a story of faith, redemption, and love―a melancholic tale of queer romance set in nineteenth-century England.

On the grim streets of London, a young man succumbs to his demons. Discarded by his lover and left penniless and alone, Michael “Micha” Dashwood uses sex to pay the bills and opium to numb the pain.

When a sudden illness strikes, all seems lost. But hope finds Micha in the shape of the Reverend Thomas Mandeville. Haunted by grief of his own, Thomas cannot bear to ignore another man’s plight. He brings the ailing Micha home to heal in his parish at Nettlefield.

As Micha recovers under Thomas’s care, he begins to realize that some people in this world are worthy of trust. Thomas, in turn, learns the truth of his own needs and desires. Between the secrets of the past and the burdens of the present, their future together seems impossible. Questions of faith and the shadow of opium continue to haunt them both.

Yet possibilities, like miracles, can be found wherever you look for them.

By: Charlie Jane Anders (Author), 2021, Paperback

WINNER OF THE 2022 HUGO AWARD FOR BEST RELATED WORK
From Charlie Jane Anders, the award-winning author of novels such as All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night, this is one of the most practical guides to storytelling that you will ever read.

The world is on fire.
So tell your story.

Things are scary right now. We’re all being swept along by a tidal wave of history, and it’s easy to feel helpless. But we’re not helpless: we have minds, and imaginations, and the ability to visualize other worlds and valiant struggles. And writing can be an act of resistance that reminds us that other futures and other ways of living are possible.

Full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish during the present emergency, Never Say You Can’t Survive is the perfect manual for creativity in unprecedented times.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST EDITED ANTHOLOGY • BRAM STOKER AWARD NOMINEE FOR SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN AN ANTHOLOGY • LOCUS AWARD FINALIST

A bold, clever, and sublimely sinister collection that dares to ask the question: “Are you ready to be un-settled?”

“Never failed to surprise, delight, and shock.” —Nick Cutter, author of The Troop and Little Heaven

Featuring stories by:

Norris Black • Amber Blaeser-Wardzala • Phoenix Boudreau • Cherie Dimaline • Carson Faust • Kelli Jo Ford • Kate Hart • Shane Hawk • Brandon Hobson • Darcie Little Badger • Conley Lyons • Nick Medina • Tiffany Morris • Tommy Orange • Mona Susan Power • Marcie R. Rendon • Waubgeshig Rice • Rebecca Roanhorse • Andrea L. Rogers • Morgan Talty • D.H. Trujillo • Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. • Richard Van Camp • David Heska Wanbli Weiden • Royce K. Young Wolf • Mathilda Zeller

Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear—and even follow you home.

These wholly original and shiver-inducing tales introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.

A completely new edition of Robin Marty's bestselling manual on what to do now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned.

The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America is a comprehensive and user-friendly manual for understanding and preparing for the looming changes to reproductive rights law, and getting the health care you need. Activist and writer Robin Marty guides readers through various worst-case scenarios of a post-Roe America, and offers ways to fight back, including: how to acquire financial support, how to use existing networks and create new ones, and how to, when required, work outside existing legal systems. She details how to plan for your own emergencies, how to start organizing now, what to know about self-managed abortion care with pills and/or herbs, and how to avoid surveillance.

The only guidebook of its kind, The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America includes new chapters that cover the needs and tools available for pregnant people across the country. This new edition features extensively updated information on abortion legality and access in the United States, and approximately one hundred pages of new content, covering such topics as independent alternatives to Planned Parenthood, "auntie networks," taxpayer-funded abortions, and using social media wisely in the age of surveillance.

By Eli Sachse 

Zine / pamphlet. Published by Microcosm! Next-Level Ally: How to Support Your Queer and Transgender Friends If you've ever felt like you're not doing enough to support the queer and trans communities, this zine is a great way to learn how to do more. Be a supportive advocate and speak up even when it's hard, learn how not to overstep, and de-gender your day-to-day language.

From the mega-bestselling creator of Heartstopper, a must-have novella in which Heartstopper's lead characters, Nick and Charlie, face one of their biggest challenges yet.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder... right?

Everyone knows that Nick and Charlie love their nearly inseparable life together. But soon Nick will be leaving for university, and Charlie, a year younger, will be left behind. Everyone's asking if they're staying together, which is a stupid question... or at least that's what Nick and Charlie assume at first.

As the time to say goodbye gets inevitably closer, both Nick and Charlie start to question whether their love is strong enough to survive being apart. Charlie is sure he's holding Nick back... and Nick can't tell what Charlie's thinking.

Things spiral from there.

Everyone knows that first loves rarely last forever. What will it take for Nick and Charlie to defy the odds?

From the author of Confessions of the Fox comes a novel in which a yenta on her deathbed gives an unrepentant account of all her failures—including her child.

“From one of our most fearless living novelists comes this extraordinary book. No half measures here, just big ideas and living characters and metafictional panache and surprise after heart-stopping surprise.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: them, Literary Hub, BookPage, Library Journal, Electric Lit

In a cluttered rent-controlled apartment in the middle of Manhattan, Barbara Rosenberg is terminally ill, high on opioids, and writing the story of her life. She has opinions about her smutty late husband, her career as the receptionist for a disreputable plastic surgeon, her glory days as an accomplished jazzerciser, and her failed aspirations to be a film noir actress. But what she really wants to talk about are unhinged thoughts on gender, Karl Marx, Zionism, and her two great disappointing loves: an estranged trans son and a long-lost best friend whose betrayal haunts Barbara still. As she descends further into delirium and illness, Barbara finds herself in a nightmare from which she cannot escape, and her circumstances put her on a crash course with these intimates—or are they avenging nemeses?—once again.

Part novel, part someone’s mother’s unauthorized memoir—all diatribe, gutter schtick, and deranged manifesto, Night Night Fawn is a ferociously candid account of intergenerational conflict.