PROBLEMATIC FAVE d’Amber Clement

A speculative dark romance for those readers who think « I could fix him » when you know you really can’t. For fans of Bad Romance by Heather Demetrios and Undead Girl Gang by Lily Anderson, a perfect escapist read for those who have daydreamt of their favourite character appearing in real life.

PROBLEMATIC FAVE
by Amber Clement
on submission
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Like so many teens, fifteen-year-old Emilia Michaels just wants to be seen and loved by someone unconditionally. Even though her longtime crush Bryan Cook seems either cruelly aloof or hopelessly oblivious, Emilia knows she can always turn to her favorite fictional fave, Hayden Frost. Sure, Hayden is technically the villain of Boyfriend Academy, the dating simulation game that Emilia and her friend Darla are obsessed with, but who can blame her? Villains are hot, passionate, and Hayden only murders people around the playercharacter because he’s so madly in love with them.

But Emilia is devastated when she overhears Bryan calling her an “annoying bitch.” To console herself, and with Darla’s encouragement, she uses a newly-gifted drawing pen to illustrate a self-inserted webcomic in which Hayden transfers to her high school and falls in love with her. Rushing around at school the next day, Emilia nearly collides with a boy, and she can’t believe who she’s looking at. The boy is none other than Hayden Frost, himself. And just as she drew in her webcomic, he falls for her at first sight, and she finally has someone who cares only for her.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for Hayden’s murderous nature to emerge, leaving Emilia to rationalize his actions as his way of “protecting her.” What begins as a beautiful, fulfilling courtship quickly spirals into a dark romance with an ever-rising body count––and if Emilia doesn’t figure out how to stop Hayden, his jealous temper could lead him to kill anyone and everyone who stands in the way of his happily ever after with her.

Amber Clement is the author of Fortune’s Kiss (Union Square & Co., 2024). She is a dreamer and a gamer. She lives in Northwest Indiana with a Pomchi who loves to sploot. When she’s not writing, she may be spotted exploring the city in search of new inspiration. Her favourite stories are full of glitter, determined girls, and captivating villains.

EVERYTHING I NEVER WANTED de Meredith Tate

EVERYTHING I NEVER WANTED
by Meredith Tate
on submission
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Maggie Duncan wants three things: for her overprotective mom to stop micro-managing her life; for hot guitarist Brad Hayes to fall madly in love with her; and to be accepted into the prestigious film program at UCLA to follow her dream of becoming a famous director. With the help of her lifelong BFF, Camille, and her next-door neighbor, Caiden, Maggie’s been filming a documentary for the past year to use as a submission into the film program.

On Maggie’s seventeenth birthday, the unfathomable happens: Brad invites her to party at the quarry with his friends. Unfortunately, the even-more-unfathomable happens: Maggie’s mom says no. Desperate, Maggie convinces a reluctant Camille to sneak out anyway. But the night ends in disaster when Camille sustains a serious injury, they get caught, and the whole thing escalates into a blow-up fight between Maggie, Camille, and her parents. Furious, Maggie makes a birthday wish to be a legal adult—only to magically wake up a year later, on her eighteenth birthday.

Meredith Tate grew up in Concord, New Hampshire, where she fell in love with her two passions—writing and traveling. Meredith earned her master’s degree in social work before switching career paths to pursue her true dream of telling stories. She has lived in five states and three countries and currently resides in New Hampshire with her husband, son, and spoiled rescue dog.

FAMILY de Meredith F. Small

In the face of the current changes in the structure of the family in our culture, this book explains why family continues to be so central to our lives.

FAMILY: How the Human Need for Belonging Shapes Our Lives
by Meredith F. Small
Pegasus, Fall 2026
(via Harvey Klinger)

Family is the most ubiquitous and persistent human social group. Everyone across the world has a family, even if that family has been lost, broken, or transformed. And now, acclaimed anthropologist Meredith Small, author of Our Babies, Ourselves, examines the very roots of the family and why this particular type of connection is so fundamental to all cultures and all people.

Previous books about family are self-help books designed to start, build, or repair broken families. Family: How the Human Need for Connection Shapes Our Lives is something different. Small seeks to understand why this particular form of social organization is the bedrock of human interaction. Why do we form families? Why do people place such importance on their family relationships? And what is the reality of family life—does it live up to our expectations? What do families provide for each of us?

Small takes the reader on a journey from the evolutionary roots of family three million years ago to its present-day varied expression. We read that there is fossil evidence of human groups that could be called families, and extensive archaeological finds that when humans settled down and started to grow their own food and build villages and cities, they did so as families.

But within this common framework of a family, there are also complex iterations of the way families are formed and operate. Across the globe, various forms of marriage, parenting, and types of family differ from the Western template of a family of Mom+Dad+kids. People have developed families of all stripes, adapting the notion of family to their own worldview, religious beliefs, and economic necessities.

Meredith F. Small is a classically trained anthropologist, and Professor Emerita at Cornell University, where Small was an award-winning teacher for over thirty years. Small was hailed “the Margaret Mead of our generation” by the President of the American Anthropological Association, and has published numerous books for the popular audience, Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization, Here Begins the Dark Sea: How a 15th Century Venetian Monk Drew the Most Accurate Map of the World and Foresaw the Future, Our Babies, Ourselves, Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Children, and What’s Love Got to Do With It.

SUNRISE de Téa Obreht

Three lives, 100 years, one Western ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife.

SUNRISE: A Novel
by Téa Obreht
Random House, August 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old energy bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well-maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story 100 years in the making.

In 2003, Sunrise’s golden boy Coll begins to direct town’s annual historical reenactment when he is linked with a scandalous incident at a local bar. And when an upstart author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.

In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?

These three are strangers, separated by time. But Sunrise has secrets which lie in waiting like gunpowder: quiet, unassuming, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the places we lay claim to, and most of all, of our own lives.

Rooted in one place, yet traveling across three time periods, Téa explores: the complicated concept of people becoming legends big enough to support ticket sales in their own time, and how they perpetuate their own myths, even as they diverge from reality.  Our spooky fascination with ghost towns – imagining what once was in a place, or what could be again.  What it means to be truly lost and faced with back-to-survival basics in today’s uber connected world.  The novel comes together in a heart-in-mouth ending that I haven’t felt since watching Thelma & Louise, literary style. With its matryoshka doll structure and her signature command of language, this novel, brimming with wry humor, sharp observations and pure linguistic joy, is a triumph.  

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Esquire, Literary Hub, Today

“Téa Obreht never disappoints.”—Esquire

“As the novel goes on, Obreht weaves three timelines together . . . to unravel the mystery of Sunrise, the ghost town to end all ghost towns. Sorry to fangirl but: YAY.” —Literary Hub

Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, Inland and The Morningside. Her novels have won the Orange Prize for Fiction, been a finalist for the National Book Award, won the Southwest Book Award, and won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many other publications. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Obreht now resides in Wyoming.

KENNEDY JONES HAS A PROBLEM de Liz Kay

KENNEDY JONES HAS A PROBLEM
by Liz Kay
(via Writers House)

Kennedy Jones has a problem. She has a lot of problems actually. One, she has aphids in her garden again this year. Two, she has buried a lot of bodies under her garden, and after the last one, there is the distinct possibility that police are closing in. Three, the secluded property she lives on is being developed into an artists’ colony and the (admittedly hot) general contractor seems a little too interested in whether Kennedy had anything to do with his dead cousin.

Kennedy tries lying low and keeping tabs on the case by dating a sweet but dumb deputy, but when the police throw out the words “serial killer” and start connecting victims that aren’t even hers, Kennedy realizes she’s not the only murderer in town. Recruiting the help of one of the artists at the colony—a failing novelist turned true-crime writer, Kennedy races to uncover her competition before they can pin their crimes on her—or do something much worse.

The novel combines Liz’s trademark wit with a highly propulsive mystery and a darkly charismatic protagonist. It marries the hijinks of Finlay Donovan is Killing It and You’d Look Better As a Ghost with the darkly comic horror of Final Girl Support Group, This Girl’s a Killer, and My Sister, the Serial Killer.

Liz Kay holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska, where she was the recipient of both an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Wendy Fort Foundation Prize for exemplary work in poetry. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Nimrod, Willow Springs, The New York Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Redactions, and Sugar House Review. She is the author of the Something to Help Me Sleep {dancing girl press}, The Witch Tells The Story And Makes It True (Quarter Press), Monsters: A Love Story (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and Fallout (Red Hen Press, forthcoming). Liz teaches and directs the Creative Writing Program at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska.