The Hugo Awards are one of the biggest sci-fi and fantasy awards, and through the years, they’ve been plagued with controversy.

• Voted on by members, they fall somewhere between a typical literary award and a Goodreads Choice award: a popularity contest with a caveat.
• It also means they are susceptible to fraud and manipulation.

Despite all the scandals of recent years, the Hugo Awards are one of the longest-running SF/F literary awards, and they continue to work to try to prevent bad actors from taking over—which seems to be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

This year seems to have been smooth sailing, though, and they’ve just announced the winners of the 2026 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

The winners are:

• The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow—Best Novel
• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar—Best Novella
• Old Man’s War by Jon Scalzi—Best Series
•  A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel, written by Ursula K. Le Guin, adapted & art by Fred Fordham—Best Graphic Story or Comic
• Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee—Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book

See the full list of winners and finalists. — DE

Hold onto your butts, friends. Big Book Season is here.

Starting the season with a bang is Marlon James’s latest novel, which is big in every sense. Weighing in at 640 pages, the doorstopper follows a group of gay men in the aftermath of a violent attack in 1980s Kingston, Jamaica.

• Hailed as a masterpiece that puts James in line for the Nobel someday, it’s on the longlist for this year’s Booker Prize and will likely be high atop many best-of-2026 lists.

Also hitting shelves:

• Research-backed principles for finding—and creating—environments that foster success and happiness.
• Love and science collide in an epic novel about life’s biggest questions set in Antarctica
• A wild and unsettling trip down the rabbit hole into “a world of unraveling men“
• Family secrets come to light in the new novel from a past winner of Barnes & Noble’s Discover Prize

See more of this month’s most notable new releases.

Unlock our New Release Index for the best way to wrangle your TBR, available exclusively to All Access members.

R. F. Kuang is the bestselling author of Yellowface, The Poppy War, and Babel, to name a few, and today is the publication day for her newest novel: Taipei Story, out from William Morrow. Check out an excerpt below.

Was I an Ugly Human Being?

I had just read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place in a writing seminar that spring. It had made a great impression on me then, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it now. A tourist is an ugly human being, wrote Kincaid. An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.

But Kincaid was writing about British visitors to Antigua. By you, she meant the white European tourist descended from the enslaver. Our situation was different, surely. We did not have a colonial relationship with this place, did we? We had not come to gawk at natives, or dine at country clubs, or solicit the island girls, or enjoy private beaches inaccessible to the locals. We had come here to learn—to form a deeper relationship with this place. Surely Kincaid did not mean us.

But none of us were Taiwanese. None of us had family here. Most of us were here only because Taiwan right then was friendlier to American travelers than mainland China was, or we would have gone to Beijing, and in fact this was a source of great contention with my parents—that I had chosen the program farther from my extended family because I wanted to go where all my friends were going and I didn’t want to bother with downloading a VPN. I could go see my grandparents any other summer. I wanted to become Chinese here, on my own terms. The anonymity was the point—but that meant this place had nothing to do with me, that no cradle of belonging justified my missteps.

Read the full excerpt on Book Riot.

Excerpted from the book Taipei Story by R.F. Kuang. Copyright © 2026 by R.F. Kuang. From William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

Jonathan Franzen wasn’t right about everything, but he was right about enough things that the “Franzenfreude” era of the early aughts now looks more than a little overblown.

The first literary sensation of the 21st century, The Corrections was Franzen’s third novel and his first introduction to fame.

• Focused on the disastrous months that precede a painful and painfully hilarious family holiday, The Corrections is about the modern anxieties of plugging in, selling out, and turning into your parents.

Now underrated, it still hits, and on revisiting it, I realized this is the high I’ve been chasing in most of the lit fic reading of my adult life.

Join us and special guest Rob Harvilla, host of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, for a wild conversation about this modern classic. — RJS

On a recent episode of The Book Riot Podcast, I expressed both interest in and apprehension about talking to people in bookstores. Specifically, saying something to someone like “Oh, I really like that one” when I see someone clearly considering something that I did, in fact, like.

Do people like this sort of interaction? Why exactly do I feel compelled to chime in on a stranger’s book consideration? I asked listeners for their feedback and got more than I was expecting.

Here are three bits of advice for me (and others) distilled from the emails we got. 

1. People in bookstores generally enjoy having someone else say if they liked a book. Social proof is real and there are so many books. It was less clear that negative input (“I didn’t like that/that didn’t work for me”) was welcome. So I will sticking to yums and avoiding yucks. 
2. Keep it brief. A sentence or two is enough. If they don’t ask questions or otherwise indicate they are interested in further discussion, just smile and browse on. 
3. Be aware of gender dynamics. Most people digitally nodded their head to my sense that “don’t be creepy” is the higher-order requirement here. One bookseller said that they have their radar up for unwelcome attention by older men to younger women, but also said if you keep it brief and stick to books, it generally is a positive experience for everyone. — JO

Anna Heyward is the author of Living with Freddie: How a Dog Taught Me to Be Human, out September 8th from Random House. Below, she discusses the significance of dogs in literature.

I often find writing about the significance of dogs in literature to be difficult, because animals in literature are almost always used as a way of talking about the human beings around them.

I get it. Animals are lively and interesting, and, helpfully, they don’t speak for themselves, at least not in ways we tend to understand, so they’re great for providing useful metaphors or embodiments for ideas we want them to carry.

Most writing about animals is actually about how we experience our own observations of animals; what we think their behavior means, or how we might feel if similar things happened to us. It’s really hard to avoid, but it’s also deeply understandable. Our own experience is what we have to try to understand things.

To see animals discussed for the sake of themselves, we usually have to turn to the science books, and if you want to look at the other side of it completely, and think about how animals live their lives and what being alive is like for them, I recommend An Immense World by Ed Yong, in which the author encourages us to think about what happens outside of the narrow range of sensory perception that we possess…

Read more on Book Riot.

Did you know? Lakshmi co-founded the Endometriosis Society of America in 2009.

Dolly Parton, feminist icon.

Read these books before entering into the AI and social media debates.

Take yourself on a bookstore crawl through Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood.

The cast for the upcoming adaptation of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo is b-a-n-a-n-a-s.

Wake up your brain with great reads to help you get back to deep work.

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Danika Ellis, and Jeff O’Neal. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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