Nine titles with big secrets

Julia Cohen's latest book is Freak Lip (2026). She is the author of I Was Not Born (2014), a collection of lyric essays, which was translated into German and released by Literaturverlag Droschl. She’s also written two books of poetry, Collateral Light (2014) and Triggermoon Triggermoon (2011). Her nonfiction and poetry appear in issues of The Georgia Review, Southeast Review, The New England Review, Fugue, Heavy Feather Review, Boston Review, and BOMB.

Cohen has a BA from Wesleyan University, an MFA from The New School, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She’s an Associate Professor of English and Literature at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design. She teaches creative writing, literature, and composition courses. Cohen lives in Colorado Springs with her husband and fellow writer, Noel Black, and their kids.

At Lit Hub she tagged "nine books that guided my understanding of how holding or exposing long-kept secrets creates a palpable tension between regret and relief." One title on the list:

Latoya Watkins, Holler, Child: Stories

Watkins is a master of dialogue, dialect, and narrative intimacy. In this stunning collection, which centers Black women in West Texas, Watkins perfectly balances familial interactions with protagonists’ internal thoughts, creating immersive, local rhythms that invite you right into the living rooms of her characters. Their secrets manifest in different ways: infidelity, the truths hidden underneath the lies mothers tell children to protect them and the secrets children keep to shield their mothers from grief, the apologies never given.

In both “The Mother” and “Holler, Child” mothers keep from their sons their fathers’ identities to minimize potential pain and embarrassment, only to see the negative ripple effect this has on their sons’ choices as they grow. In “Vigil,” the protagonist has a simmering hatred for her childhood friend’s Muslim husband, whose gay relationship with his best friend is an indiscrete secret. She reflects on what no one will say aloud: “Thala and me ain’t close enough for me to tell her that her husband supposed to come home to her at night. Snuggle up to her at night. Not with his best friend, La Mare. La Mare who lived with them for the first three months of their marriage. La Mare who slept on their couch while Wale slept on the floor close to him.” These stories wrestle with the entanglement between desperate love and unknowability, what might be gained from speaking up, and why sometimes, we still can’t.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four bewitching books for fans of "Practical Magic"

At Book Riot Megan Mabee tagged "four beautifully written books for fans of Practical Magic." One title on the list:

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow

When it comes to authors like Alice Hoffman, Alix E. Harrow is an excellent readalike option. Like Hoffman, Harrow’s writing style includes lush world-building, intriguing magic systems enmeshed in the real world, and thoughtful reflections on deep topics. As with Practical Magic, this novel by Harrow explores themes of witches and the bonds between sisters. The story takes place in 1893 as the Eastwood sisters—James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna—join forces with the suffragettes of New Salem. Perhaps the women’s movement may also become the witches movement.

Read about the other titles on the list.

The Once and Future Witches is among Chelsea Iversen's five supernatural sister stories, Kim DeRose's seven top books about witches and badass covens, Mark Skinner's twenty top witch lit titles, Sarah Pinsker's five SFF books that showcase siblings at their core, and Heather Walter's five SFF books about wicked women.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five powerful horror books for animal lovers

Carrie Lee South earned her MFA at the Arkansas Writers Workshop where she served as the fiction editor for the literary magazine Arkana. She's currently the fiction editor at StoryBottle Co. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, F(r)iction, Iron Horse Literary Review, Tales to Terrify, and elsewhere. She is the author of In the Woods They Wait. When she's not reading and writing, she's spending time with birds: the ones outside and the four parrots that live in her house.

At CrimeReads South tagged five powerful horror novels in which "the animal characters are given agency." One title on the list:

Josh Malerman, Pearl

Pigs are highly intelligent, social animals. Their eyes look so human, and they always seem to be smiling. It’s not that much of a stretch to imagine that they could be telepathic, which is exactly what Malerman explores in this high-concept slasher. The story opens with a boy named Jeff beheading a pig on his grandfather’s farm. He’s horrified when he realizes what he’s done, because it wasn’t his idea–Pearl made him do it.

Pearl is an intimidating hog who sits like a human, and has avoided the axe for years by manipulating the farmer’s thoughts. Now that he’s tested and realized the strength of his influence, Pearl begins a gruesome murder spree. Why? “Time to kill the people who killed the pigs.” It should come as no surprise that Malerman is a vegetarian.

Read about the other novels on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fifteen of the best mystery titles of all time

Andy Minshew is an author and book reviewer who explores the intersections between queerness, faith, and neurodivergence in fiction and nonfiction.

At Book Riot he tagged fifteen of "the best mystery books of all time that have defined the genre in meaningful ways." One title on the list:

Bluebird, Bluebird (Highway 59 #1) by Attica Locke

Considered one of the best mystery-thrillers of all time, Bluebird, Bluebird follows Black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews who returns to his hometown Lark while on suspension and separated from his wife. Here he investigates the recent murders of a man and a woman that, despite what the local authorities say, he knows were racially motivated.

Read about the other mysteries on the list.

Bluebird, Bluebird is among Rebecca Joines Schinsky's seven pulse-pounding thrillers, Polly Stewart's seven new classics in Southern noir, L. Alison Heller's eight crime novels in which a small town is the perfect incubator, Janice Hallett's five gripping mysteries set in small towns, and Katie Tallo's top ten crime novels about returning home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten titles where the main character is, or may be, a psychopath

Hank Schwaeble is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of horror, suspense and thrillers.

He lives in Texas with his wife, fellow novelist Rhodi Hawk.

His latest novel is Normal for the Spider.

At CrimeReads Schwaeble tagged ten books where the main character is, or may be, a psychopath. One entry on the list:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

This critically praised but relatively low-profile novel about a young man lost in the sea of malaise that is his life who has a life-changing encounter with a self-proclaimed cultural terrorist named Tyler Durden catapulted seemingly out of nowhere to take the literary community by storm in the late 90s when the movie of the same name came out starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. It’s a book about manhood, maturity, responsibility, survival and the mental strain of living in a world where absent fathers are the norm and men hold contradictory and often dangerous ideas of what manhood means, and where pathologies of the mind run rampant.

Read about the other books on the list at CrimeReads.

Fight Club is among Adam Hamdy's ten popular literary antiheroes, Benjamin Buchholz's five top novels with devilishly unreliable narrators, Camilla Bruce's ten best books about imaginary friends, Catherine Steadman's six favorite books that feature unreliable narrators, Sarah Pinborough's top ten unreliable narrators, Richard Kadrey's top five books about awful, awful people, Chris Moss's top 19 books on how to be a man, E. Lockhart's seven favorite suspense novels, Joel Cunningham's top five books short enough to polish off in an afternoon, but deep enough to keep you thinking long into the night, Kathryn Williams's eight craziest unreliable narrators in fiction, Jessica Soffer's ten best book endings, Sebastian Beaumont's top ten books about psychological journeys, and Pauline Melville's top ten revolutionary tales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight edge-of-your-seat reality TV thriller titles

L.M. Chilton is a journalist with fifteen years of experience working on TV shows for the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 in the UK, as well as writing columns for magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour, and reporting for national newspapers across the world, everywhere from Doncaster to Delhi. He lives in London, procrastinating.

Chliton's new novel is I Think We Should Kill Other People.

At People magazine he tagged "eight of the best thrillers and mysteries set in the terrifying world of television," including:

The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey by Astrid Dahl is The Real Housewives meets Knives Out

This campy mystery follows the scandalous lives of the back-stabbing (sometimes literally) cast of Garden State Goddesses. When a murder occurs, the cast become suspects and a producer must turn detective. Every lead she follows is one she helped create.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven of the best twisty horror retellings

At Book Riot Kendra Winchester tagged seven titles that take a familiar story and reimagine it in the most delightfully gruesome way, including:

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

In this award-winning novella, Victor LaValle subverts Lovecraft’s Cthulhu story “The Horror at Red Hook,” this time telling the story from a new perspective. Charles Thomas Tester takes risky jobs to keep a roof over his head and take care of his father. But when he delivers a magical tome to a sorceress, he accidentally opens up a door to another world. This story is all-engrossing, so it’s no wonder that it won the Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award. When we’re talking about the best retellings, this novella has to make the list.

Read about the other titles on the list.

The Ballad of Black Tom is among Lyndsie Manusos’s six top horror retellings of well-known stories, Erica Ezeifedi's six books for fans of the movie Sinners, Brittany K. Allen's ten top books for fans of Sinners, Chase Dearinger's seven horror titles where the setting is a monster, and Colleen Kinder's ten titles about chance encounters with strangers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven experimental books that reimagine how trauma is told

Erik Fuhrer is a queer, nonbinary poet, playwright, and trauma writing teacher. They hold a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow, an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, and a PMP. They are the author of nine books, including Gellar Studies (2023) and the forthcoming hybrid memoir My Buffed Up Life (2026). They were the UCLA Extension Winter 2026 Writer in Residence.

At Electric Lit Fuhrer tagged seven books by "writers use form to convey the experience, emotions, and structure of trauma, keeping the gaps, the flaws, the inventions, scalping together image and sensation into something legible but messy and tangled and raw." One title on the list:

Nox by Anne Carson

Nox is an elegy for Carson’s brother, who was already partially ghost before he passed, as he left home and called rarely in his absence. In a way this elegy started years before his death, and the reproduced letters, family photographs, and sketches montaged into the book are a testament to the imprints of his presence in her life before and after death. Its accordion spine mimics an ancient scroll, log, and epic, its creased pages paralleling the fracturedness of grief. It cannot be viewed all at once, so sprawling that it would take up many rooms of feet, and therefore becomes like the history and the memory and the body lost to it: accessible in small unfoldings of time and space, but never quite tangible and accessible as a whole.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten essential Ukrainian reads

Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, journalist and founder of Index: Institute for Documentation and Exchange.

Her latest book is Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War.

At Lit Hub she shared a list "of books written by Ukrainians in English or translated from Ukrainian into English [that] sheds light on what has long been overshadowed by empires seeking Ukraine’s erasure: the country’s rich literary tradition and its tradition of resistance." One title on the list:

Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War (Harper Collins, 2025)

A novelist turned war crimes researcher, Victoria Amelina travelled her war-torn country photographing bomb craters in children’s playgrounds and recording survivors’ testimonies, standing alongside the women she called her sisters: lawyers, soldiers, journalists, museum workers fighting for justice. She did not survive to finish her telling of their stories—killed by a Russian missile strike in 2023, two-thirds through the manuscript of Looking at Women Looking at War. Assembled by her close friends and family, the book’s forced silences and empty pages become its own form of testimony: a verdict for Amelina’s killers, and eternity for her voice. The book received the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight of the best gothic mystery novels

Carolina Ciucci is a teacher, writer and reviewer based in the south of Argentina. She hoards books like they’re going out of style. In case of emergency, you can summon her by talking about Ireland, fictional witches, and the Brontë family. At Book Riot she tagged eight of the best gothic mystery novels. One title on the list:

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-García

No list of gothic mysteries would be complete without this instant classic: although it is mostly known as a horror, there’s a strong current of mystery underlying this novel.

When her cousin sends her a plea for help, Noemí embarks upon a journey to High Place. She’s determined not to be afraid of anything or anyone, not even of the house itself. But soon enough, she discovers that it’s not enough to not be afraid… she also has to resist the house’s pull on her.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Mexican Gothic is among Lucy Ashe's six titles that make us question those closest to us, C.J. Dotson's five novels featuring decaying settings, and Samsun Knight's seven horror novels about mysticism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top titles set in decadent locales

Alex Hay is a bestselling author whose debut novel The Housekeepers was a Waterstones Book of the Month and Paperback of the Year and won the Caledonia Novel Award 2022. He is also the author of The Queen of Fives and The Midnight Guests, both published to great acclaim.

Hay was born in London and now lives in Brighton, U.K. with his husband.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "six brilliant novels that thread the darkest psychology into rarefied settings to completely thrilling effect." One title on the list:

Tom Hindle, Death in the Arctic

Like Agatha Christie, Tom Hindle is a master at taking an intriguing, must-visit setting—a magnificent ocean liner, a fabulous wedding on Lake Garda, a hotel in the Costa Rican jungle—and unfurling a carefully-layered mystery within it. I thought this was such a distinctive and clever setup—a luxury airship on a specially-chartered trip to the North Pole—and when you read a Tom Hindle book you always know you are in safe hands.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books that show that the Great American Road Trip Novel isn’t just for white people

Winnie M Li is an American author and activist living in the UK with her partner and young son. A Harvard graduate, Li has written for travel guidebooks, produced independent feature films, programmed for film festivals, and developed eco-tourism projects. Her first novel, Dark Chapter, was nominated for an Edgar Award and translated into ten languages, followed by the critically acclaimed Complicit. A survivor and advocate against gendered violence, she holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and teaches creative writing and media studies.

Li's new novel is What We Left Unsaid.

At Lit Hub Li tagged "eight books (both fiction and non-fiction) that narrate this most American of stories from the perspective of people of color." One title on the list:

Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon

This is the book I always recommend when asked about US road trip narratives. A bestseller upon publication in 1982, this memoir chronicles Least Heat-Moon’s 13,000-mile road trip around the perimeter of America. He drove only on two-lane ‘blue highways,’ avoiding the large interstates and taking him through small towns and neglected corners of the country. The result offers both beautiful prose and an intimate glimpse of an America which may no longer exist. Least Heat-Moon is part-indigenous, and his sensitive awareness of race, class, and historical inequalities enriches his anthropological, but poetic style.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue