I’m writing this on the last day of 2025, knowing it won’t run until early 2026—and it’s the weird limbo time, where everything is “Best of” looking backwards or predictions of what 2026 might bring, looking forward.
If the books on this list are any indication, novellas are having a bit of a moment, collections of short stories just keep getting better, and hybrid memoir needs a new name (anyone have an idea?) because it feels like it’s a genre completely unto its own rather than a mashup. What emerges as a theme is secrets: long-buried or exposed, obscured or open. Amnesia makes a man forget the secrets he is keeping from his wife; a war-time wife takes on boarders without telling her husband, reveling in the community and freedom; a morgue worker in Maoist China has a secret pet. We all know that secrets have a way, like water, of finding cracks to seep through. This is the case for many of the books below. No matter what we try to hide, information comes out.
In 2026, I have my own small-press published book coming out, and it has been a reminder of how many generous readers, writers, and editors work in this industry. Now more than ever, it feels vital to support the work of independent presses who operate in a media landscape driven by ideas and inquiry, rather than units sold.
If your New Year’s resolution is to read more books, the below is a great starting point.
Whiskey Tit: More Hell by Adam Al-Sirgany
A young woman plays French horn in the community college band, second chair to her abusive boyfriend; a machinist at the oat factory always has an open door for punk and jam-band loving twenty-somethings; a seven-year-old boy scrapes his hand against a family-friend’s lead painted siding. In More Hell, al-Sirgany does more than offer a tour of the Midwest: He makes the region real. These stories take place on dirt roads and in houses with rattling screen doors, in bars and apartments surrounded by farmland. Even if one is not from the rural nor the Midwest, these stories carry a sense of a homeplace, with all of the complications that come along with it. Compelling and written with both a twist-the-knife pain and compress-the-wound empathy.
Rescue Press: Hurricane Envy by Sara Jaffe
In this collection of short stories, Sara Jaffe quietly but powerfully explores music, longing, families, disasters. A mother brings her baby into a bar in the middle of the day to have seltzer and French fries and a brief respite from the isolation of motherhood; a young man is rejected from a college but moves to the town anyway, where he tries to connect with the music scene while figuring out what shape his life is going to take; a writer is assigned to write for a gallery and is relieved when it doesn’t work out. Her stories have range, but often come back to a pivotal moment. Hurricane Envy does what the best do, which is to leave readers satisfied with each story while still wanting more. Read one of the stories in Recommended Reading!
Tin House: The Salvage by Anbara Salam
Against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, elite diver and marine archeologist Marta Khoury is in Cairnroch, an isolated island in the frigid east coast of Scotland. While she is immensely suited to explore the wreckage of a Victorian-era ship captained by one of the island’s own, Marta also has a connection to the island and a tragic death that occurred on its shores. The Salvage strikes a balance between the specifics of Marta’s profession and the sometimes petty dramas of the island’s residents, while also exploring both her own personal stakes in salvaging items from the wreck and her certainty that she’s seen a shadowy figure lurking around the ship on her dives. The Salvage is an adventurous book with emotional resonance.
Cornerstone Press: Western Terminus by Michael Keefe
In this collection of stories and a novella, Michael Keefe takes readers through the cracked dry landscape of the American West and Southwest, riding in pickup trucks and station wagons in search of family, belonging, and answers. In one story, a family leaves their patriarch after a vacation gone wrong. In another, a man returns to his family home with a nagging suspicion his father was involved in a farm worker’s death, and his attempt to unearth old family secrets uncovers something new about himself—and a revelation about his father. The men of Keefe’s stories don’t always find what they are searching for, but they take the reader along for a glorious ride.
IG Publishing: A Complete Fiction by R.L. Maizes
Tapping into a deep fear for writers, aspiring-author P.J. Larkin is convinced editor George Dunn has stolen the novel she submitted to him and takes to social media to call him out. Soon, Dunn is snagged in what looks like a scandal, and Larkin and her manuscript are a hot commodity—but she’s beginning to face her own controversy around the content. A Complete Fiction captures the contemporary anxiety of what is private and what is public through a narrative that has its finger on the pulse of social media’s amplifying power. While this novel is asking big questions about cancel culture, appropriation of stories, and what it means to make art in the internet age, it’s also very funny. Maizes gives us a book that is compulsively readable.
SFWP: Bitter Over Sweet by Melissa Llanes Brownlee
Outside of the beachy resorts and tourist luaus, Hawaiian natives like Tita are living their actual lives, not vacation: there are bills to pay, abusive boyfriends, handsy bosses, uncles who beat a niece for kissing another girl. There are also cold beers overlooking Kona, drives along rocky lava-paved roads, poi made from scratch. In this collection of flash and short fictions, Llanes Brownlee writes with precision and deft contrast: the taste of salt could be from shear off of the sea, or from blood. The narrative has nuance, but also punch. Tita is in many ways more than just one person, and has more than just one story. Bitter Over Sweet is an excellent entry from a new voice in fiction.
Dzanc Books: Coydog by David Tromblay
After a long stint in the Army and a tour in Desert Storm, Moses Kincaid, of the Wisconsin Ho-Chunk tribe, becomes a bounty hunter based out of Kansas City who has found himself chasing a wanted man through Oklahoma. It’s not just the cops who want Eric Drumgoole, it’s also the members of a notorious motorcycle gang. When a diner waitress offers to help him, the two quickly become more than friends. Yet, Kincaid is in a rough trade, and he and the people around him are snared in violence. Coydog follows Kindcaid as he tries to do his job, which fundamentally means operating in a gray area. He’s as tough as they come, but his hypervigilance also belies the trauma of his past. Tromblay’s novel is just as heavy on plot as it is on the heart.
Eastover Press: A Stranger Comes to Town by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Joe Marzino, a well-known television actor, awakes in the hospital with no memory. Out jogging, he was knocked unconscious by a bicyclist. As he’s filled in about the details of the accident—and the life he was living—nothing sparks recognition. Yet, as Joe is discharged, with physically nothing wrong other than a nasty ankle sprain, amnesia has given him no context to know the family that surrounds him. With no reason to suspect anything other than what he is told, he plays the part of the loving husband and father. Yet, as fragments of memory return and living his day-to-day surfaces the man he was before the accident, the very obvious before and after of a penultimate life event takes on an ever deeper meaning. Lynne Sharon Schwartz brings her mastery of characterization to this new novel and offers a moving story of new beginnings.
Rose Metal Press: Fit Into Me by Molly Gaudry
Informed by the author’s own recovery from a traumatic brain injury, Fit Into Me is a hybrid memoir with a novel tucked into its center. The speaker swims, the speaker does voice therapy, the speaker writes, the speaker recovers. It’s meta-memoir, auto-fictional, and packed with literary allusions (many explained in footnotes). The structure—both fragmented and coherent, like a mosaic or a quilt—mirrors Gaudry’s own intellectual state. There are touchstones in this book that lovers of literature will relate to, like the pure joy of discovering wonderful sentences and challenging ideas while reading, and Gaudry offers many of her own. Fit Into Me ultimately emerges as less of an experiment in form and more of an inevitable outcome. Brilliantly nuanced and forcefully written.
OR Books: Hitler and My Mother-In-Law by Terese Svoboda
In this memoir, the inciting action is trying to confirm the authenticity of a photo where Svoboda’s mother-in-law, the trailblazing journalist Pat Lochridge, is pointing at Hitler’s ashes. Yet, the book is more than verifying one historical artifact. Svoboda and her husband, despite excavating their basement files, can’t find the original image, and alongside the story of the photograph is the story of how Lochridge ended up becoming part of Svoboda’s family. The book threads the mythology of Lochridge, the backdrops of war, and the writing work they share as a profession, with Svoboda’s own professional and personal history. There is a gentle distance between the women—not as rivalries, and nothing as boring as in-law conflict—but a nuance of generations and circumstances. The memoir is meticulously researched and thoughtful when looking at the past. This is Svoboda at the height of her power as a writer.
7.13 Books: The Morgue Keeper by Ruyan Meng
In 1966, during the Cultural Revolution in China, Qing Yuan works alongside his colleagues, others who have been conscripted as workers in a morgue. The delivery of dead bodies is constant, and the men become numb to violence. The work is gruesome, but they are fed, housed, and spared the so-called reeducation camps. Yet, when a badly beaten body, labeled #19, crosses Quin Yuan’s table and no one comes to claim her, he is thrust into a search to understand who she was. Searching for information about #19 defies the Mao regime, and it is in this defiance that Qing Yuan finds moments of joy and connection. The Morgue Keeper is a compelling story of compassion and quiet resistance.
Autumn House: The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe by Lauren D. Woods
Teenagers fantasize about moving into a neighborhood house while coyotes terrorize the surrounding area; a young man working at a rental car call center to provide for his young child gets fired; a woman goes through a year of managing a break-up. In this collection, Woods deeply explores loss and what it means in the moment and its immediate aftermath, the personally-specific ways we imbue meaning to the everyday as we search for answers, and how grief shapes the future. Magical realism and fluidity of form make the collection all the more poignant. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make Believe is one of those rare debut story collections that grabs the reader by the throat and does not let go.
Regal House: If You Leave by Margaret Hutton
Before he is shipped off to WWII, Audrey and Ben marry in a rush. She works a wartime job cataloging film in Washington D.C. and is called toward being a visual artist. He is a surgeon in the Navy living in his childhood home after the passing of his mother, and Audrey joins him there before his deployment, surrounded by the belongings of a dead woman and a man she hardly knows. While Ben is deployed, Audrey takes in two boarders—Lucille, pregnant and hiding it, and Daniel, who she feels drawn to—both of whom change her life in different ways. This is a novel split into befores and afters, with a deception at its center. Hutton writes deftly about how secrets find a way out into the light, with both relief and consequences jumbling together.
McSweeney’s: Martha’s Daughter by David Haynes
In these stories set across Texas, Missouri, Minnesota, and an unnamed city in the South, a young Black couple looks for the owner of a run-over cat in a white neighborhood; a woman chooses to marry a man she finds boring in order to avoid drama, only to have trouble stirred up years later; and in the title novella, Cynthia (Martha’s daughter) works through her complicated relationship to her mother with an overbearing co-worker in tow. While often somewhat situationally absurd, Hayne’s pinpointed prose keeps readers completely in the moment. A stunning, accomplished collection perfect for fans of Haynes or readers new to his oeuvre.
Sibylinne Press: The House of Cavanaugh by Polly Dugan
In 1989, as Joan Cavanaugh is dying from cancer at only forty-eight, she begins to recount and take stock of her life. At the center of her story is a secret she is determined to take to her grave: Twenty-five years earlier, she had an affair, and when it ended, she returned to her husband and three young daughters pregnant. Another twenty-five years later, though Joan has long been gone, a chance encounter and modern twist—the genetic test—exposes her. The House of Cavanaugh takes a fresh look at the age-old family concern of paternity, including tackling how families have been upended by easy-to-access DNA kits. Dugan turns the premise into an explosive and satisfying novel.
