Three debuts, Danielle J. Jensen’s The Inadequate Heir (Del Rey), K.M. Moronova’s Once Upon a Demon’s Heart (Bloom), and Jaymin Eve’s Night Witch (Mira), each debuts on both the USA Today and Publishers Weekly lists.

Title	Debut / #wks on any list	NYT 07.12	LAT 07.05	USAT 06.28	PW 07.06	Amz (07.06)	UK: Amz UK (07.06)	Canada: Amz.ca (07.06)
Items on list -x- number of lists surveyed		10×3	10×2	150	15×3	100	100	100
Hardcovers
Aster, Starside	04.13.26 / 13	xxx..		x	15 -2			xxx..
Brown, Red Rising (Deluxe Slipcase Edition)	10.27.25 / 36	xxx..		64 -21	xxx..
Buehlman, Between Two Fires	03.16.26 / 12	xxx..			xxx..	xxx..		85 ++
Burke, Yesteryear	04.20.26 / 12	1 =	2 =	3 -1	1 =	3 =	5 -2	1 +4
Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping	06.10.24 / 85			xxx..	22 +1	xxx..	xxx..	93 +
Dinniman, A Parade of Horribles	04.27.26 / 11	12 -5	xxx..	128 +	8 =	70 +		xx
Dinniman, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario	01.12.26 / 26	7 -2	8 ++	27 -2		16 +19		10 +15
Dinniman, Dungeon Crawler Carl	05.26.25 / 47	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	19 +43		xx
Dinniman, The Butcher’s Masquerade	04.21.25 / 22	x		65 -21	xxx..	95 +
Dinniman, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook	02.02.26 / 22	8 +2		33 =		18 +33		12 +
Dinniman, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride	05.26.25 / 20	x		134 -74	xxx..	53 +40
Dinniman, The Gate of the Feral Gods	03.24.25 / 24	13 -2		54 -12	xxx..	33 +47		91 ++
Dinniman, This Inevitable Ruin	10.06.25 / 17	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	10 =	58 +40
Gillig, The Knight and the Moth	06.02.25 / 17	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..		82 ++
Haig, The Midnight Train	05.18.26 / 8	15 +	7 +	92 -38	16 -2	xxx..	92 -3	xxx..
Jensen, The Inadequate Heir	07.06.26 / 1			22 ++	20 ++
Moronova, Once Upon a Demon’s Heart	07.06.26 / 1			19 ++	13 ++
Parker, The Ballad of Falling Dragons	05.25.26 / 7	xxx		82 -32	12 =		xxx..	xxx
Pham, The Secret World of Briar Rose	06.15.26 / 4	6 =		xxx	xxx
Roberts, Powerless	11.20.23 / 100	xxx..		xxx..	9 =	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..
Spann, A Stage Set for Villains	02.16.26 / 13	10 -3			xxx..
Tingle, Camp Damascus	07.31.23 / 4			148 +	xxx..
Yarros, Fourth Wing	05.15.23 / 118	xxx..	xxx..	131 +	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..
Yarros, Onyx Storm	04.01.24 / 115	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	10 +1	xxx..
Yarros, Untitled Empyrean (Not Book Four)	04.20.26 / 10					88 -9	x	xxx..
Title	Debut / #wks on any list	NYT 07.12	LAT 07.05	USAT 06.28	PW 07.06	Amz (07.06)	UK: Amz UK (07.06)	Canada: Amz.ca (07.06)
Paperbacks [tpb=trade]
Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451	07.20.03 / 495		xxx..	x	xxx..	72 +	xxx..	xxx..
Brown, Red Rising [tpb]	05.02.16 / 36	xxx..	xx	xxx..		xxx..		40 +
Buehlman, Between Two Fires [tpb]	09.09.24 / 19			50 +7
Dinniman, Dungeon Crawler Carl [tpb]	01.12.26 / 26	3 +2	3 =	4 =	2 +1	31 -7		7 =
Dinniman, Dungeon Crawler Carl, Vol. 1 (Graphic Novel) [tpb]	06.01.26 / 6			35 +21	13 +2
Durst, The Faraway Inn [tpb]	04.13.26 / 12			xxx..	21 -4			xxx..
Eve, Night Witch [tpb]	07.06.26 / 1			24 ++	7 ++
Gillig, The Knight and the Moth [tpb]	06.01.26 / 6	xxx..	xxx..	110 -39	x		xxx..
Haig, The Midnight Library [tpb]	05.22.23 / 85	xxx..	xx	51 +	xxx..	96 -59	xxx..	x
Kraus, Angel Down [tpb]	05.18.26 / 8		7 -5	93 -30	xxx..	xxx..		xxx..
Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses [tpb]	05.16.16 / 273	xxx..	xxx..	58 +17	xxx..	xxx..	62 -29	x
Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses Paperback Box Set	06.19.23 / 148			xxx..		xxx..	xxx..	74 +22
Maas, A Court of Wings and Ruin [tpb]	05.14.18 / 193	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	72 -2	xxx..
Rowling, Harry Potter Box Set: The Complete Collection (UK) [tpb]	03.23.15 / 457						xxx..	67 -21
Weir, Project Hail Mary [tpb]	10.03.22 / 85	2 =	6 -2	6 -3	xxx	4 +5	19 +20	4 =
Yarros, Fourth Wing [tpb]	09.16.24 / 93	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	xxx..	13 =	xxx..
Yarros, Iron Flame [tpb]	06.02.25 / 54	xxx..		xxx..	xxx..		9 +5	xxx..
Title	Debut / #wks on any list	NYT 07.12	LAT 07.05	USAT 06.28	PW 07.06	Amz (07.06)	UK: Amz UK (07.06)	Canada: Amz.ca (07.06)
This cell color indicates rankings on children’s bestsellers lists		This cell color indicates rankings of books based on pre-publication sales				[Italics and brackets, and/or this cell color, indicate stale data — rankings from one or more weeks before — and do not contribute to the cumulative weeks on any list totals]

The table shows the current rank of each book and the change since last week, where:

= same as last week

+/- change since last week

+ back on list

++ new on list

x no longer on list (number of x’s: weeks off list)

All lists rank hardcovers and paperbacks separately, except for the USA Today list, which is a single list combining fiction and nonfiction in all formats. Dates shown are posted dates, except those in parentheses, which are dates compiled. New York Times posts its list one week in advance of print publication.

Note that some sources do not compile paperback bestsellers, and some exclude YA books (like the Harry Potter series) from their hardcover and paperback fiction lists.

The post Weekly Bestsellers, 6 July 2026 appeared first on Locus.

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Some countries built their identities on their land. Some countries built their identities on a shared ethnic heritage. America, however, began with an idea on a piece of paper. 

“America was an enlightenment experiment, and so that means we have to make our own identity,” said Mark Graybill, a professor of English at Widener University who specializes in American literature. To do so, we need books: novels that articulate what it’s like to live in this strange new land. 

Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard, wrote a definitive study on this problem called The Dream of the Great American Novel. Buell said that the calls to produce and recognize a national literature began in 1776, but they intensified throughout the 19th century. That was especially the case after the War of 1812, when America reaffirmed its independence from England. The widespread belief, said Buell, was that “now we are a mighty political entity, we should be a cultural force as well.” 

In 1868, the novelist John William DeForest coined the phrase “great American novel” in an essay that feared the genuine article had not yet been written. 

Over time, readers, critics, scholars, and the people who build school curricula have developed a loose consensus on some of the books that might aspire to the title — books that are certainly great, certainly interested in America, and certainly novels, but which may or may not be the great American novel. Buell has identified a collection of “recipes” that they all tend to follow. Among the key ingredients for one of the recipes, he said, are a “democratic collective that’s in distress in one way or another. A collectivity of people that are operating under great pressure, great anguish often. And in that collective crucible, you see national themes of one sort or another played out.” 

I talked to literary scholars and critics about five major contenders for the great American novel, all of which follow Buell’s recipe. I wanted to understand what it was about these books that spoke to so many people, who decided that they were so important, and what their vision of the United States is. 

Taken together, the national portrait these novels offer is darker than you might expect or than the people who helped canonize these books might have wanted. If they’re united on one thing, it’s the idea that America is not an innocent country. 

The Scarlet Letter (1850): An American origin story

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter has long been a mainstay on school syllabi and is a perennial pick for the great American novel. “It first became acclaimed, almost overnight, as the first serious topnotch piece of long fiction yet written by an American,” said Buell. 

The Scarlet Letter tells the tale of virtuous adulteress Hester Prynne, forced by her 17th-century Puritan neighbors to wear a red “A” forever to mark her for her crime, even as she insists on her own dignity and integrity. It is endlessly useful as a metaphor for talking about American tendencies toward mob-mindedness and our prudishness around sex, a censorious impulse that keeps recurring — and, on the other hand, for talking about Hester’s very American independence and self-determination. With its early colonial setting in the first days of Puritan Boston, it speaks to an America that had not yet become modern, and it functions as a kind of origin story. 

What the novel seems to insist upon most strongly, though, is the gloomy, dour Puritanism that began the American experiment. “The founders of a new colony,” Hawthorne wrote in the opening paragraphs, “whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” In The Scarlet Letter, that is the United States: a utopian idea, a prison, and a graveyard.

To say that The Scarlet Letter is the great American novel, then, is to fear that our Puritan roots are inescapable, that we can never transcend the tomb and the penitentiary — and to hope that we can still, like Hester Prynne, redeem ourselves from our sins.

Moby-Dick (1851): A democracy at sea 

Herman Melville was close friends with Hawthorne, whom he considered a mentor and to whom he dedicated his 1851 opus, Moby-Dick, the story of a sea captain obsessed with the titular white whale. Yet, Melville, unlike Hawthorne, was not revered in his own lifetime. 

Moby-Dick wouldn’t have its revival until the 1920s and ’30s, when critics at Columbia University took it up. “Melville emerges as this voice speaking to the middle of the 20th century like a prophet,” said Jennifer Greiman, a professor of English at Wake Forest University and editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. With its swirling, perplexing structure of digressions and asides — some chapters rendered as theatrical scripts and others as encyclopedia entries full of whale facts — Moby-Dick hadn’t made much sense as a 19th-century realistic novel. But it made a lot of sense to ambitious, boundary-pushing modernists. 

Greiman argued that Moby-Dick’s late adoption speaks to what is so American about it: the way it seems to have been written for a time that hasn’t yet arrived. “It’s that sense of it as a book that is speaking to something that’s going to come in the future,” Greiman said. 

Also distinctively American is Moby-Dick’s crew, made up of white and Black Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Indians, and Pacific Islanders. They make their collective fatal mistake early on in the novel, when Captain Ahab informs the men that he has no plans to fulfill the ship’s mission to harvest oil from whales. Instead, Ahab said, he wants to enact vengeance against Moby-Dick, the great white whale that took his leg — and the crew willingly signs on to his monomaniacal quest.

“It’s often read as a democratic tragedy,” said Greiman. “Because you have this multi-racial crew, and one of the first things they do together is hand over all of their power to Ahab and doom themselves.” 

In the crucible of Moby-Dick, we see the weakness of democracy under the sway of a charismatic despot. We see the enormous and chaotic forward-seeking ambition of America, and the possibility that it may yet find that its great experiment is impossible, and its quest will end in tragedy.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): Taking on America’s original sin

Like The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was an immediate hit. Twain was a literary celebrity, and his books were widely popular. But Huck Finn, the tale of troublemaking 13-year-old Huck rafting down the Mississippi with a runaway enslaved man named Jim, wasn’t considered especially important. “It’s not singled out until after his death,” said Matt Seybold, scholar in residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College.

It would be Ernest Hemingway who enshrined it in the canon, writing in 1935 that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” By the 1970s, said Seybold, it had become “probably the single most assigned work of literature in American classrooms.” 

Today, Huck Finn is assigned less often, especially at younger grade levels, Seybold said, in large part due to Twain’s frequent use of the n-word. Yet, it remains active and alive in the American imagination, enough so that Percival Everett won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for his 2024 novel James, which re-imagined Huck Finn from Jim’s point of view.

Huck’s relationship with Jim is, for most readers, the heart of the novel. Huck believes it to be his duty to return Jim to the elderly woman who enslaved him, but he also loves Jim and wants him to be free. In the novel’s most celebrated passage, Huck decides to go against what the world has taught him is right and help Jim escape, announcing boldly, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.” 

Seybold said this scene is frequently read as “America overcoming the sins of its inception;” Huck’s redemptive love for Jim is enough to help him transcend the hypocritical moralism of the slave-owning south where he grew up. But, Seybold notes, Huck Finn doesn’t end with that glorious moment. It goes on for another 50 pages and features a lengthy episode in which Huck toys with Jim’s freedom as though playing a game, while Jim is re-enslaved and dehumanized. 

Seybold agreed with Toni Morrison’s read of the ending as a metaphor for Reconstruction — the promise of freedom abruptly reduced and turned into something contingent. Twain, Seybold said, was radicalized by a Frederick Douglass speech in which Douglass describes sharecropping as being nearly as bad as slavery. 

In this context, Huck Finn is a bold statement on one of America’s great failures. “Twain takes us back into the cruelty, the absurdity of antebellum America,” said Seybold. “That’s also America, right?”

The Great Gatsby (1925): A bleak look at the American dream

Like Hawthorne and Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a literary celebrity. When he published Great Gatsby in 1925, it was a critical success, but its sales were modest. “I always tell my students, if you want to be a writer, just think about the fact that Fitzgerald’s last royalty check was for $13.13,” said Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, Georgetown professor of literary criticism, and author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.

It took steady campaigning from Fitzgerald’s friends and publisher for Gatsby to be remembered. It started to become an institution during World War II, when the US army shipped copies of the book out to soldiers for morale and, then, was further bolstered by its widespread adoption as a high school text. Now, generations of American school children have grown up reading about Jay Gatsby, the poor boy who became a millionaire by mysterious means, all to win the love of the untouchable Daisy Buchanan.

This was around the same time that academics stopped talking about the idea of the great American novel singular, but it remained an effective marketing tool for publishers and an aspiration for authors, said Buell. Gatsby benefitted greatly from that marketing tool, in large part thanks to its status as a book that took seriously America’s class divides. 

In The Dream of the Great American Novel, Buell writes that the idea of the American bootstrapper stretches back to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Gatsby makes that ideal sinister through Gatsby’s mysterious and ill-gotten gains and hollow as untouchable Daisy proves unable to live up to Gatsby’s image of her. Yet, Fitzgerald’s writing is at its most lyrical and lovely when he describes Gatsby’s longing. One of the indelible images of the novel is that of Gatsby standing alone at the end of his dock, stretching out his hands toward the green light of Daisy’s house. You know the things Gatsby is working for aren’t worth it, but Fitzgerald makes it beautiful to watch him try.

“It’s that idea of aspiration, of yearning, of trying even in the face of knowing that sometimes the game is rigged,” said Corrigan. “This is a novel that deeply questions the idea of an American meritocracy.” 

To say Gatsby is the great American novel is to say that America is a place of capitalist striving and that the dream of striving is beautiful. It’s also to posit that there is no clean way to make money, and whatever redemptive power you think you’ll claim at the end of your hard work will disappoint you.

Beloved (1987): The haunting of America

Starting in the 1960s, rebellions from within the academy started to break the canon apart. Feminist scholars were pushing for recognition of books by women; scholars of African-American culture were pushing for recognition of works by Black people. “That theory of a canonicity being bogus really gets rolled out in the 1980s,” said Buell.

Into this atmosphere came Toni Morrison, a Black woman who made it impossible to interpret her writing as an apologia for America. 

In Morrison’s books, it is clear that America has never overcome its sins. Never is that more the case than in her 1987 novel Beloved, about a formerly enslaved woman who is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed to save from slavery. 

Beloved was published to enormous acclaim, but it did not win that year’s National Book Award, despite being a finalist. The Black literary scene rallied around Morrison in response, with 48 critics, writers, and activists publishing an open letter in the New York Times in praise of Morrison’s accomplishment and registering their disappointment with the National Book Foundation. Later that year, Morrison would win the Pulitzer.

“For a lot of novels that become these cultural touchstones, there has to be a campaign behind them. There have to be people who are making cultural arguments for why it matters,” said Jeffrey Lawrence, an American literature scholar at Rutgers University. “And in Morrison’s case, this happened relatively quickly.” In 1993, five years after Beloved was published, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature. That, said Lawrence, is when Beloved “starts to be considered the classic work of the late 20th century.” 

In Beloved, Morrison was able to “unpack the difficulties of slavery…in so many different ways,” said Dana A. Williams, a professor of African American Literature at Howard University.  “It showed the history of the institution, yes, but it showed it from so many different perspectives.” Morrison depicted the way slavery left scars on both Sethe, her heroine; on Sethe’s entire family; and even on Sethe’s enslavers. Even the land seems haunted. There is not a part of America that isn’t damaged by the horrors of both slavery and by the effort to disavow, deny, and forget it ever happened.

“Ultimately, I think it also forced us to think very seriously about how we have articulated humanity in this country,” added Williams. “Like who’s alive, who’s dead.” Sethe is based on a real woman named Margaret Garner, whose case involved a debate over whether to charge her with murder or destruction of property for the killing of her baby. “It really did question: What is humanity and who has the right to it? Who has access to it?” said Williams. “Is it really an unalienable right?”

Part of Morrison’s project is to show that slavery has haunted America’s legacy from the beginning — that no matter what we say about ourselves, we are not an innocent country. In Beloved, that becomes painfully, inarguably clear. 

Closing the book

Let’s return to Buell’s idea that the great American novel is often about a democratic collective in peril. In the books we’ve talked about here, the threat is always a problem embedded in America’s national character: a mob-minded censoriousness; a weakness in the face of a charismatic leader; the sin, trauma, and whitewashing of slavery; the emptiness of capitalist striving. These are texts that tell us that America is a nation of ideas — beautiful ideas — and that it constantly struggles and fails to live up to those ideas. 

“The novel as a genre really exists to critique the society that it is writing about, in a way that allows us to ask questions and to answer questions that only fiction can allow us to do,” Williams said.

But what’s sort of lovely is that, as critical and merciless as they can be, and as imperfect as America still is, these books are still the ones we have enshrined and celebrated and cherished over the past 250 years. We teach them in schools and turn them into movies. We make sure that our people know about them, are warned at an early age that America’s innocence is a farce.

So, perhaps, the great American value that these novels enshrine is clear-eyed self-knowledge. Every country is prone to self-propagandizing and empty puffery, especially around an occasion like the 250th anniversary of one of its founding documents. But it’s comforting to know that the centuries-long American quest to define our national identity through texts has led to a canon of novels that tell us the ugly truth about who we are. 

Visit our bookshop.org page to purchase this week’s new books and support your local bookstore. And us!

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Beiko, S.M.: The Sleuth of Ferren City (ECW Press 978-1770416970, $17.95, 376pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/30/2026)

Young-adult fantasy novel, third in the Brindlewatch Quintet. Monstros have emerged in various places, looking for acceptance, but Camillite Sable is suspicious as she tries to find her missing friend.

 

Berman, Steve: Witchcraft in Your Lips (Lethe Press 978-1590215524, $20.00, 284pp, formats: paperback, 07/01/2026)

Anthology of six novellas (one reprint) about witches and queer love, ranging from bog spirits to Bloody Mary. Authors are Steve Berman, Mia Dalia, L.A. Fields, Joachim Heijndermans, Audrey R. Hollis, and Ivy L. James.

 

Bianco, Julia: Witch Season (St. Martin’s 978-1250384393, $30.00, 320pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Urban fantasy romance novel, first in the Broken Coven series. Katherine, enforcer for the LA Aestas coven, is forced to put up with Silas, the rich heir to the Noctis coven who tries to interfere with her methods.

 

Bourne, Brianna: Meet Me at Midnight (Penguin Random House/Delacorte 979-8217225552, $19.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

YA fantasy romance. Aria keeps meeting the same boy in her midnight dreams, meeting him in beautiful locations every midnight.

 

Broaddus, Maurice: A City Dreaming (Tor 978-1250265166, $32.99, 336pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 06/30/2026)

SF novel, third in the Astra Black trilogy. A new empire approaches the Muungano empire, a collection of city-states that spans the solar system.

 

Castle, Jayne: Enter the Nightmare (Penguin Random House/Berkley 979-8217187379, $30.00, 304pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Science fiction thriller, part of the Harmony series. After staying at the Hotel of Dreams, Alice’s life is falling apart again, with a dead body in the shower and a mysterious man rescuing her. Castle is a pen name for Jayne Ann Krentz, who also writes as Amanda Quick.

 

Codega, Linda H.: Pasha the Storm (Kensington/Erewhon 978-1645661825, $27.34, 560pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Fantasy novel. Exiled pirate queen Pasha is guarded hostage by nobleman Atle, but as the ambitions of Atle’s necromantic queen turn dangerous, Atle draws Pasha into his own treasonous plans.

 

Eudave, Cecilia & Myers, Robin: The Summer of the Serpent (Soho Press 978-1641295826, $27.00, 144pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Supernatural novel. In 1977 Guadalajara, children start seeing bizarre apparitions, while listless adults wander through the summer.

 

Hathaway, Amber: Hallowed Deadly Seeds (Deadly Seeds Press 978-1967381043, $16.99, 306pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/30/2026)

Horror novel, second in the Little White Flowers series. Alice Drayton and her brother get trapped in isolated Evanston, Maine, where the twisted religious community is determined to assimilate them.

 

Hofstatter, Eric: Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I’ll Hear You (Aqueduct Press N/A, $5.95, 109pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 07/01/2026)

Prose-poetry book with fantasy and horror elements. Part of the Conversation Pieces series.

 

Hur, Angela Mi Young: The Loom Tree (Kensington/Erewhon 978-1645660880, $27.48, 464pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Dark academia fantasy novel. Korean American teenager V crawls into a tree trunk whose powers unlock the diary of her mother, Sharon, who attended the terrifying magical boarding school Alvsdahl.

 

Hurwitz, Gregg: The Delivery (Amazon/Thomas & Mercer 978-1662539343, $19.99, 251pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 07/01/2026)

SF novella. Struggling parents Rebecca and Mark accept “Mr. Man,” an AI companion, into their home to help, but violent incidents start to plague the neighborhood.

 

James, V.V.: Redhaven (Orion UK/Gollancz 978-1399635547, £12.99, 384pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 07/02/2026)

Fantasy novel, part of the Sanctuary universe. Sarah and her daughter Harper flee a government crackdown targeting witches in America. Author also writes as Vic James.

 

Kim, Sophie: The Winged Game (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593983362, $32.99, 544pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Sports fantasy romance novel. Taissa, a former player of magical airborne sport Carriwitchet, is offered a chance to return to the game by Kion, the rival who destroyed her career. Simultaneous with the UK (Hodderscape) edition.

 

Laben, Carrie-Edmund: Smoke Season (Word Horde 978-1956252125, $22.99, 326pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/30/2026)

Cosmic horror novel. Searching for his estranged sister Helen, now a worshipped figure in a remote Montana commune, Justin ends up contending with a government agency set on wiping her out.

 

Mason, Ruthy: Death Do Us (Hachette/Union Square & Co. 978-1454965152, $18.99, 368pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Body horror novel. Young archaeologist Bea, feeling increasingly constrained by her imminent marriage, and notices her skin and hair falling off. A first novel.

 

McGuire, Seanan: Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions (Subterranean Press 978-1645243069, $95.00, 608pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 06/30/2026)

Collection of 33 stories featuring the superheroine, including 16 never-before-published. There is a signed limited edition of 1000.

 

Modesitt, L.E.: Last of the First (Tor 978-1250349057, $32.99, 448pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Fantasy novel, 26th in the Sage of Recluce series. Mirror Lancer Alyiakal is promoted to Subcommander, though high command on Cyador is full of treachery.

 

Newton, Ruth: The Carrier (Penguin Random House UK/Bantam UK 978-0857508126, £18.99, 448pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 07/02/2026)

SF thriller novel. People can avoid emotional pain by paying to give it to others — but those Carriers end up dead. A first novel.

 

Paxman, Emily: All We Have Left (Titan Books UK 978-1835417591, $18.99, 384pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Post-apocalyptic romance novel. Survivor Kayla brings her ailing sister to an exclusive community with a functioning hospital, where she’s courted by local politician Sid, whose marriage would help her chances of entry.

 

Rirdan, Daniel: The Woman Who Touched the Sun (Corino Press 979-8992609073, $13.99, 24pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, 06/30/2026)

SF novel. A woman from Nebraska with a samurai bloodline builds herself a spaceship in her barn, traveling to distant fiery reaches of space.

 

Shipton, Liz: Mother & Slaughter (Tyrannosaurus Yes 979-8295553233, $15.99, 380pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 07/01/2026)

Fantasy novel. In Draconia, where women must choose between being mothers and gladiators, star combatant Eleanor finds herself pregnant and takes a risky journey to find a witch outside the kingdom. Illustrated by Daniel Lorca.

 

Simmons, David: Fetty on the Switches (Clash Books 978-1968043117, $18.95, 198pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/30/2026)

Collection of 21 crime, horror, and love stories. In an alternate Baltimore where the dead rise, citizens struggle with phantasmagoric situations like biology-class vivisections and serial-killing monsters. A first collection.

 

Swift, Dana: When Dealing with Dragons (St. Martin’s/Wednesday Books 978-1250402431, $20.99, 339pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Young-adult romantic fantasy novel. Farren Walsh is determined to become a dragon veterinarian like her father, but her arrogant rival James Murphy interns at her family’s sanctuary.

 

Szal, Jeremy: Wolfskin (Orion UK/Gollancz 978-1473227521, $32.00, 672pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

SF novel, book 3 of The Common series. Vakov is a Reaper, an elite soldier injected with alien DNA that makes him stronger and faster — and has to fight a cult and the Shenoi, the genocidal race who gives him his powers.

 

Thorne, Rebecca: Moss’d in Space (Tor/Bramble 978-1250414144, $17.70, 368pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Cozy SF novel, first in the Moss’d in Space series. Torian buys an abandoned alien starship, and discovers that it houses an organic computer entity named Moss, abandoned inside by its former owner. Simultaneous with the Bramble UK edition.

 

Tremblay, Paul: Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep (HarperCollins/Morrow 978-0063398467, $30.00, 336pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Near-future SF horror novel. Gamer Julia gets a temp job “remote-controlling” a comatose man across the country for the company that owns the AI tech in his brain, and he starts to wake up.

 

Varga, Emily: The River She Became (St. Martin’s/Wednesday Books 978-1250878694, $22.00, 416pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

YA romantic fantasy novel. Scholar Yaseema archives fae relics by day, and tries to unlock their magic at night, and finds an ancient key to the fae realm where she can save her land.

 

Verne, Jules: From the Earth to the Moon: Annotated for Our Spacefaring Age (MIT Press 978-0-262553865, $30.00, 334pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/30/2026)

Reprint of the classic 1865 SF novel, with detailed annotations. Translated by William James Miller. With essays by Samit Basu, Jordan Bimm, Erika Nesvold, Adam Oyebanji, Malka Older, Adam Roberts, and Asif Siddiqi.

 

Walton, Jo: Everybody’s Perfect (Tor 978-1250314055, $29.99, 272pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/30/2026)

Fantasy novel. In a fantasy mirror city to Venice, laborer Tiry is one of many citizens who has a dream that his city Serenissima will have a doge and marry the sea.

 

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Barrow, Rebecca: Doe (Penguin Random House/Nancy Paulsen 979-8217006335, $20.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 06/23/2026)

Horror novel in verse. Being captain of the cheer team helps Maris forget about her absent father, and girlfriend that doesn’t love her. While sleepwalking, Maris meets an enormous decaying beast named Doe, who takes the form of a deer, but she doesn’t realize Doe is actually real.

 

Blackwell, Amelia: The Haunting of a Bronte (Macmillan UK 978-1035054145, $25.46, 424pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/25/2026)

Speculative novel. Georgiana uses her time travel device to visit her lover in 1995, but she ends up inside the Thorp Green Hall in the year 1845, where she meets Branwell and Anne Brontë. Georgiana must save the Brontë siblings from a killer.

 

Carey, M.R.: The Tinder Box (Orbit US 978-0316595490, $19.99, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/23/2026)

Dark fantasy novel. Former Solider Mag Tresti works for a widow, Jannae Mirchella, who’s a witch. One day, Mag Tresti discovers a tinderbox on the body of a demon that fell out of the sky, and this Tinderbox grants Mag any wish he desires. Simultaneous with the Orbit UK edition.

 

Dedroog, Lauren: A Dance of Serpents (Orion UK/Gollancz 978-1399616157, $18.99, 528pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/25/2026)

Fantasy novel. Diana is the princess of hell, but she won’t forget the way that the gods wronged her, her family, and her friends. Diana, along with her allies, search for justice, but the line between justice and revenge is unclear, and she has to keep herself from becoming the very thing she hates.

 

Doctorow, Cory: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before It’s Too Late (Macmillan/Farrar, Straus, Giroux/MCD 978-0374621568, $18.00, 240pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/23/2026)

Associational non-fiction about artificial intelligence. This book discusses why AI is valued at above $16 trillion dollars, a number so large that the only way for it to reach that value is by replacing huge amounts of the human workforce, despite it’s underwhelming performance.

 

Elison, Meg: Foundling Fathers (Tachyon Publications 978-1616964580, $16.95, 192pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/23/2026)

Satirical SF novella. A group of right wing billionaires doesn’t like how the country is being run so they clone the founding fathers, and raise them in secrecy, in order to bring back America’s “Former Glory.”

 

Evans, Malayna: The Isis of Egypt: Goddess of Thrones (The Quick Brown Fox/Alcove 979-8892424189, $29.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, 06/23/2026)

Historical fantasy novel of ancient Egypt. The goddess of thrones and magic, Isis, along with her husband, Osiris, are living a great life until the god of chaos comes in and traps Osiris in a box. Osiris does everything in her power to find him.

 

Everett, Sarah: The Romance Rewind (Penguin Random House/Putnam 979-8217002986, $12.99, 304pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/23/2026)

Young-adult fantasy time-loop romance novel. After Zadie’s breakup with Jason, she doesn’t know what to do, and is left wondering about the breakup. All of a sudden, she’s launched back to the day of their first date, and no one else remembers besides Jason’s cousin Marcus.

 

Haynes, Clarence A.: The Broken Hearts Agency (Grand Central/Legacy Lit 978-1538783603, $20.99, 398pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/23/2026)

Urban fantasy novel in the Our Mystical World series. Evelyn Kendricks just got dumped by her toxic boyfriend, all the while, she’s trying to cope with the ghosts that invaded the world.

 

Katouh, Zoulfa: The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue (Little, Brown 978-0316351942, $25.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/23/2026)

Young-adult fantasy/magical realism novel. Every woman in Jihad Dabbagh’s family receives a magical gift, and Jihad’s is a heightened sense for colors that changes based on her mood, so when her mother dies the world becomes permanently gray.

 

Kim, Suji: Under the Oak Tree, Volume 3 (Penguin Random House/Inklore 978-0593871256, $32.00, 528pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/23/2026)

Tie-in fantasy novel, third in the series based on the webnovel. Maxi fears that as she continues her studies of magic, her husband, Riftan Calypse, will discover that she’s not the proper noblewoman she claims to be.

 

Kiser, S.E.: Hunt the Ever Wild (Angry Robot UK 978-1836730071, $19.99, 336pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/23/2026)

Fantasy novel. The wizard Sy jumps at the chance to go on a hunt for a phoenix in Lichtenwald forest because the prize is enough for him to pay off the debt he owes to the king, but he needs help navigating the forest, so he teams up with Anya, a huntress, and claims that he’ll split the prize. A first novel.

 

Riesen, Lila: Rainsong (Penguin Random House/Knopf 978-0593810286, $19.99, 336pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/23/2026)

Horror novel. Zayn just moved to Mendocino, and the town seems to have a dark past; when she arrives there are missing posters of a girl everywhere, and off the coast is an island called Rainsong, which rumors say is haunted.

 

Tchaikovsky, Adrian: Green City Wars (Tor 978-1250290335, $28.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/23/2026)

SF noir novel. A raccoon private investigator named Skotch is willing to take whatever job you pay him for, as long as it isn’t too illegal. When he’s offered a job to search for a missing mouse that seems to have something everyone wants, he has trouble turning it down. Simultaneous with the Tor UK edition.

 

Tremblay, Rachel: Lavender Spike (ECW Press 978-1770418417, $19.95, 384pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/23/2026)

Dystopian SF novel. Izzy, the last working artist in the Old Holy Order, lives a live of poverty covertly selling her illegal paintings to the last followers of the Order, but a run-in with the government forces her to turn to rebels, and a new kind of art.

 

Voleur, Cat: Queer Tastes: Unconventional Representation in Horror Film (From Beyond 979-8-9925941-4-0, $15.99, 170pp, formats: paperback, 06/23/2026)

Associational non-fiction. This book takes a critical look at queer representation in horror films, and guides readers through 20 different horror films that span over 80 years of cinema. The author includes her personal experiences with the LGBTQ+ community as she takes you through these films.

 

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While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

The post New Book Releases: June 23, 2026 appeared first on Locus.

Visit our bookshop.org page to purchase this week’s new books and support your local bookstore. And us!

 

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Alexander, Jessica: Agnes, We’re Not Murderers! (Clash Books 978-1968043087, $22.87, 236pp, formats: paperback, 06/16/2026)

Gothic vampire horror novel. Agnes, and Mary, lesbian vixens from another world must survive despite Agnes wasting away. Their curse is spreading, and it seeks to purify the world. A first novel.

 

Berry, Jedediah: Kill All Wizards (Tordotcom 978-1250908056, $24.99, 144pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Fantasy novella, the first book in the Barbaric Ledgers series. A barbarian’s strength was exploited, and sword was stolen by a group of far away wizards. Now, he seeks revenge on every single one of them.

 

Curtis, Grace: Heaven’s Graveyard (Astra House/DAW 978-0756419844, $22.00, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Fantasy novel. Cod is an archaeologist determined to prove that her hero actually existed. When her former teacher tells her about an enchanted city found beneath the soil, Cod wonders if some things should be left untouched.

 

Eximeno, Santiago & Alonso, Alicia L.: Alicia Is in the Basement (Tenebrous Press 978-1959790631, $14.99, 114pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/16/2026)

Horror novella. Santi and Maria’s daughter disappears one day without a trace, tearing the whole family apart. Months later, Santi discovers a clue that reveals a new horror to the father.

 

Ghosh, Amitav: Ghost-Eye (Macmillan/Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0374298395, $29.00, 336pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Reincarnation fantasy. Varsha, a three year old, claims that she remembers another life, so her parents take her to a psychologist, and their understanding of the world is forever changed. 50 years later, activists begin a search for Varsha.

 

Hamilton, Peter F.: Exodus: The Helium Sea (Penguin Random House/Random House Worlds 978-0593357699, $32.00, 752pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Gaming tie-in novel, the second based on the new SF roleplaying game. The Crown Dominion is facing a crisis, as a group of exiles return for revenge. Finn, and his allies must team up to earn independence from the Crown Dominion. Simultaneous with the Tor UK edition.

 

Pennza, Amy: Dhampira (Ace 978-0593956045, $20.00, 496pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Fantasy vampire romance novel, the first in a trilogy. When Corinthe is discovered to be half-vampire, half-human, she is captured. She is sold to the vampire king’s knight, and is forced to become a pawn for the king’s court.

 

Stitch, Guillermo: The Coast of Everything (Sagging Meniscus Press 978-1963846386, $37.99, 760pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Genre-shifting novel of stories-within-stories mixing SF, mystery, noir, and fantasy. This novel has no ending, and many beginnings, and serves as a reminder to persist through everything.

 

Tavares, Nathan: The Disco at the End of the World (Titan Books UK 978-1835414194, $18.99, 400pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

SF romance novel. Mitch, and Gloria move to LA as the world’s ending, but when an old friend approaches them about a utopian society that can protect them, and their friends in the queer community, they decide to stand up for what’s right. A first novel.

 

Tchaikovsky, Adrian & Collins, Mike: The Final Architecture: Salvation’s Child (Cosmic Lighthouse N/A, $6.99, 110pp, formats: ebook, 05/26/2026)

Graphic novel, a prologue to Tchaikovsky’s series The Final Architecture. Aliens the size of planets, the Architects, have destroyed Earth. Marta does everything she can to protect her daughter Xavienne, but Xavi may know the secret to saving humanity.

 

James, Cassandra: Libertad (HarperCollins/Quill Tree 978-0063345669, $19.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Young-adult fantasy novel. Gasparilla and her crew hit the high seas again after a recent betrayal. The empire is closing in on this crew of pirates, so Ximena must do everything she can to protect those she cares about.

 

Lariviere, Sarah: Live From the Afterlife (Penguin Random House/Knopf 978-0593479995, $19.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Young-adult SF romance novel. Gigi’s ghost is forever in the consciousness of her old love, Axl Fischer. Axl leads a troupe that plans to use satire and art to defeat the police state that’s controlling America.

 

Cornell, Paul: The Lychford Collection Book 2 (Tordotcom 978-1250394026, $28.99, 352pp, formats: paperback, 06/16/2026)

Collection of the fourth through sixth fantasy novellas in the Lychford series. A group of witches is working to save Lychford, and the entire world from the supernatural forces that are gunning for its destruction.

 

Gammon, Jendia & Powell, Gareth L.: Of Dread, Decay, and Doom (Stars and Sabers 979-8990705579, $32.99, 362pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 06/16/2026)

Original horror anthology with 38 contributing authors including Eugen Bacon, Ai Jiang, and Eden Royce.

 

Linde, K.A.: The Raven at the Ash Door (Entangled/Red Tower 978-1682816714, $32.99, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Fantasy romance novel, third in the Oak & Holly Cycle series. Kierce McKenna’s magic is tied to a man she hates. Graves, the man she loves, will do everything he can to stop this, so he goes on a quest to find a missing stone that can lift any curse. Simultaneous with the Tor Bramble UK edition.

 

Carter, Aimée: Royal Vengeance (Penguin Random House/Delacorte 978-0593485972, $19.99, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Young-adult alternate-world mystery novel, third in the Royal Blood series. Evangeline Bright must kill the attempted assassin of the king of England in order to prove that she herself isn’t a traitor.

 

Gratton, Tessa: The Shape of Monsters (Orbit US 978-0316578813, $19.99, 560pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Queer fantasy novel, the second book in the Moon Heresies trilogy. Iriset freed the Moon-Eater God from prison, which landed her in a city full of monsters, where the only one she can trust is the emperor Lyric, who she’s betrayed before.

 

Tropea, Ashley: The Shrouded Queen (Simon & Schuster/Gallery 978-1668096215, $20.00, 448pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Romantic fantasy novel, the first in a series mixing elements of Ancient Egypt and Vikings. When Samira is captured by a shape-shifter, she needs to impersonate the princess, and go through trials meant to awaken divine powers.

 

Race, Holly: Six Savage Thrones (Orbit US 978-0316572897, $30.00, 400pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, 06/16/2026)

Fantasy novel, second in the Queens of Elben series. The kingdom of Elben is falling apart. All of the Queens must realize that they need to come together in order to cut ties with King Henry, as he’s using stranger and stranger magics. Simultaneous with the Orbit UK edition.

 

Poston, Ashley: The Someday Garden (Penguin Random House/Berkley Romance 978-0593952757, $20.00, 400pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Fantasy romance novel. Sophie is working a temp job fixing up the Lilymoore House. She discovers a door that’s never in the same place twice, that leads to a garden that highlights the instability of the future of Lilymoore.

 

Sanderson, Brandon & Orullian, Peter: Songs of the Dead (Simon & Schuster/Saga Press 978-1668068144, $30.00, 464pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Contemporary fantasy novel, first in the Strata Wars trilogy. Jack Solomon wakes up in a new reality after being killed, a reality where light and music are used to make magic, and where the history of London spreads beneath its surface.

 

Heard, Wendy: Such a Lucky Girl (Little, Brown/Ottaviano 978-0316610742, $25.99, 574pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Young-adult horror novel. Bella abandoned her best friend Kerry in order to pursue her dreams of becoming an influencer, and it worked. Kerry discovers a book on shadow work, and decides to get back at Bella.

 

DiLouie, Craig: The Summer Fun Massacre (Orbit US/Run For It 978-0316578240, $19.99, 304pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Slasher horror novel. Deputy Tom Bailey is always on edge this time of year when camp Summer Fun is wrapping up, because in the 80s there was a massacre that left a single survivor. Tom gets a call reporting screams coming from the camp once again.

 

Ruvane, Eileen M.: Tell Me My Future (Abrams/Amulet 978-1419785580, $19.99, 336pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Contemporary fantasy novel. Kess Turner is used to her mother making them move every few months, but their new home is very strange. Kess pretends to be a psychic in order to discover the truth, but she begins to actually have visions of the future. A first novel.

 

Tidhar, Lavie: The Three Coffin Problem (JAB Books 978-1625677983, $18.99, 290pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/16/2026)

Collection of nine humorous medieval dark fantasy mystery stories about Judge Dee. Judge Dee’s assistant, Johnathan, joins him on solving many mysteries, but he prefers to just lay around and eat cheese with bread.

 

Jenkinson, Becky: Wildflower (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 979-8217095216, $29.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/16/2026)

Cosy fantasy romance novel. Felicity, a magical florist, is cursed to always tell the truth, so she chooses her words extremely carefully in order to stay out of trouble, but one day she gets an anonymous message that puts her directly in harm’s way. A first novel. Simultaneous with the Zaffre UK edition.

 

Harrison, M. John: The End of Everything (Serpent’s Tail UK 978-1800812949, £16.99, 208pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/18/2026)

Satirical post-apocalyptic SF novel. Philip Tennet makes his living collecting artefacts that wash up on shore. The world has been changed after a crisis with unknown origins, and when Philip fishes up a creature that keeps changing, he must bring it inland before it destroys everything.

 

Billias, Stephen: The Zen Time Traveler: A Pilgrim’s Journey Through the Koans (Discovery Publisher 978-1788946896, $44.90, 257pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, 06/21/2026)

Fantasy time-travel novel. Stephen Maine uses poetry as a way to create a portal to thirteenth-century China, where myths he had heard his whole life are a reality, but when he forms a bond with a sword master, he becomes torn between his present day marriage, and his love affair of the past.

 

Scott, Megan: A Masterpiece in Blood (HarperCollins UK/Magpie 978-1335015266, $19.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/18/2026)

Young-adult fantasy novel, second in the Empyreal trilogy. Nicole is on the run from The Wake, and Kyan is supposed to be hunting her down, despite his feelings for her. They must go on a quest that takes them all over the world, but The Wake sees everything.

 

Kaster, Allan: The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 10 (AudioText/Infinivox N/A, $8.99, 443pp, formats: ebook, 06/19/2026)

Collection highlighting the best hard science-fiction stories published in 2025. Includes stories about the daughter daughter of a scientist launching a mission to Europa, astronauts caught in a galactic aurora storm, and borane life-forms discovering carbon life-forms.

 

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While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

The post New Book Releases: June 16, 2026 appeared first on Locus.

Visit our bookshop.org page to purchase this week’s new books and support your local bookstore. And us!

 

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Anderson, Taylor: Fleet of Ghosts (Ace 978-0593641606, $31.95, 464 pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 6/09/26)
Alternate history military SF novel, the first in the Destroyermen series. Courtney Bradford, along with other war veterans, sets out to explore a spot in the Pacific where ships keep going missing, and they find a fleet of strange lost ships.

 

Briar, Shiloh: Hopeless Necromantic (Orbit US 978-0316602105, $19.99, 368pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Fantasy romance novel. Helspira must escort Sikras as he attempts to prevent an undead army from entering the kingdom. Even Sikras doesn’t believe in himself, but as they grow closer they’re able to imagine a future where they succeed. A first novel. Simultaneous with the Orbit UK edition.

 

English, Shannon K.: Endless Blue Beneath (Orbit US 978-0316592574, $19.99, 464pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Fantasy novel, the first in the Daughters of Atlantea duology. On land, Eppie is nothing special, but underwater she is a powerful and ravenous mermaid. She quickly falls for another mermaid, Marie, and the two must survive the mermaid hunters.

 

Holmes, Jasmine: Our Sister’s Keeper (Bindery Books/Mareas 978-1967967100, $19.95, 336pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Historical horror novel. In 1927, the all-Black Free Town of East Cobb seems perfect, but the town houses nightmares that only women can see. Marah has the ability to remove traumatic memories from men, but a sudden death teaches her more about her power. A first novel.

 

Koenig, Kate: Her Sharp Embrace (St. Martin’s/Wednesday Books 978-1250321244, $21.00, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Young-adult fantasy novel. A group of outlaws called The Nightshades steal from the corrupt elite, and provide for the forgotten. Noa Toussiant left her wealthy life to join the nightshades, but her family puts all of The Nightshades in danger. A first novel.

 

Kritzer, Naomi: Obstetrix (Tordotcom 978-1250423375, $24.99, 208pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

SF novella. Doctor Liz is kidnapped by a fundamentalist cult because they’re desperate for an OB/GYN. Because she’s the only doctor there, she’s treated well, but she knows she needs to escape and free the girls trapped on the compound.

 

Leede, CJ: Headlights (Tor/Nightfire 978-1250857958, $27.99, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Horror novel. Daniel, an FBI agent about to quit, is called to Denver because innocent people are waking up wearing the skin of victims they’ve never met. Daniel is forced to confront his childhood in order to keep him and his family from being the next victims.

 

McGuire, Seanan: Inkpot Gods (Tor 978-1250339324, $29.99, 448pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Fantasy novel, fourth in the Alchemical Journeys series. Asphodel Baker created life in a way no one else had ever been able to, and she built the Impossible City on top of the ruins of Olympus. Her descendants are forced to confront the hellscape that she created.

 

Miller, Darcy: I Am Not a Vampire (Anymore) (Penguin Random House/Random House 978-0593903162, $19.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

YA fantasy romance novel. A girl hopes that she’ll get a chance at normal life after finally being turned human, but that changes when she’s forced to fight off her immortal ex-boyfriend, and raise a newborn vampire named Ezra.

 

Morín, Tomás Q.: Cat Love (Penguin Random House/Pantheon 978-0593702055, $24.00, 207pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Near-future SF novel. A cat is kidnapped and put on display in a Schrödinger’s box, so students can learn how to be better Emotional Support Humans. The cat finds out the truth of her kidnapping, and must find a way out of the box. A first novel.

 

Thompson, L.T.: Devils We Know (Bloomsbury USA 978-1547615230, $22.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

YA fantasy novel, sequel to Devils Like Us. A secret society wants to capture Death so that only the “unworthy” will face it. Cas, Remy, and Finn need to stop this because it will destroy the Mori, the only place where they can openly be themselves.

 

Unferth, Deb Olin: Earth 7 (Graywolf 978-1644453940, $27.00, 248pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

SF romance novel. Earth is reduced to rubble, but on a beach of artificial sand, two women meet. Some people are chasing eternal life through digital code, but others are creating a molecular collection in hopes that a future person can create a new earth.

 

Johnson, Jaleigh: The Reimagining of Thornwood House (Ace 979-8217188819, $30.00, 391pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Cozy fantasy novel. Evelyn Sharpe, a witch, moves to the sentient Thornwood House, but it’s not what she expected. Evie must form a bond with the house before being let in.

 

Slayton, David R.: The Silent Paths of Night (Blackstone Publishing 979-8228000780, $29.99, 338pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Fantasy novel, the second book in the Gods of Night and Day series. Raef hoped that the world would be okay once the moon goddess Phoebe returned, but Phoebe brought back a great evil with her.

 

Bennett, Ashley: Tentacles & Triathlons (Penguin Random House/Berkley Romance 978-0593956991, $18.99, 352pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Fantasy romance novel, the second in the Leviathan Fitness series. Reece Collins gets help from Cyrus, a kraken, in training for his triathlon. Feelings start to develop between the two, but will they be able to fall in love?

 

Saint, Jennifer: This Immortal Heart (Penguin Random House/Ballantine 979-8217092307, $30.00, 368pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Fantasy novel. Aphrodite hold ancient power, and has influence over every living thing. When her love affair with Ares lasts lifetimes. she must question her devotion to her divine purpose.

 

Eckert, Joseph: The Traveler (Tor 978-1250428554, $28.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

SF novel. Scott Treder jumps forward through time each day, with each jump getting larger and larger. His son, Lyle, is determined to figure out how to save him, so he begins to study quantum physics. A first novel.

 

Croucher, Lex: The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones (Orion UK/Gollancz 978-0063460218, $32.00, 464pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Young-adult dark fantasy novel. Briar Jones’ best friend, Seb, gets an acceptance letter to Briar’s dream school, the Temple School of Thaumaturgy, and Briar doesn’t. Seven years later, Briar discovers that Seb is no longer a sweet kid, and has instead become an arrogant villain.

 

Samotin, Laura R.: The Way It Haunted Him (Titan Books UK 978-1835412312, $18.99, 288pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Horror novel. Michael Stein blames himself for the death of his boyfriend, and chooses to continue his research of demons in honor of him. Michael becomes forced to confront the truth about his boyfriend’s death, while becoming obsessed with someone new. A first novel.

 

Seeley, Mollyhall: We Hexed the Moon (Simon & Schuster/Saga Press 978-1668099230, $17.99, 224pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Contemporary fantasy novel. Four newly graduated highschoolers are about to be separated from each other by their plans for the future, and instead of processing their emotions they perform a ritual to get rid of the moon, and to their surprise, it works. A first novel.

 

Kate, Lauren: White Lights (Grand Central 978-1538781326, $33.00, 416pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Dark academia fantasy novel, the first in a trilogy. Desdemona is recruited to the elite film school, Acheron, and she decides to finally pursue her lifelong dream of making movies, but the school isn’t as perfect as it seems.

 

Goodman, A.B.: House of Atreus: Agamemnon Rising (Planetary Books 979-8295701412, $19.99, 156pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 06/15/2026)

SF novel, the first in the House of Atreus duology. Set in a world where the Greek gods were actually artificial intelligence. Apollo, Artemis, and the oracles of Delphi are manipulating humanity, and Artemis forces king Agamemnon to kill his daughter.

 

Worthen, Johnny: Fresh Start (Flame Tree Press US 978-1787589636, $26.95, 336pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 06/09/2026)

SF novel. The empire sends the worst of the worst to the planet Fresh Start, where the most forgiving sentence is exile to five-generations. On this planet, Qays Mendoza searches for his old captain as the empire collapses, and Fresh Start is being abandoned. Simultaneous with the Flame Tree Press UK edition.

 

Schneider, Rachel: Light Wielder (St. Martin’s/Saturday Books 978-1250419101, $31.00, 448pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/09/2026)

Fantasy romance novel, second in the Fire & Metal series. Jovie started a war after sparing King Edmond’s life, per Acker’s request. Jovie wants to keep the Maile people protected from this conflict. Simultaneous with the Orion UK edition.

 

Simpson, W.A.: Steelbound (Flame Tree Press US 978-1787589827, $26.95, 288pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 06/09/2026)

Fantasy novel, fourth in the Riven Isles series. Ursa, and Lucea must work together to stop the rot. As they go on a journey through the Riven Isles, they discover secrets that could decide the fate of their world. Simultaneous with the Flame Tree Press UK edition.

 

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Today's links

• Naomi Kritzer's "Obstetrix": When forced birth cultists become forced obstetrics militants.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: DD-WRT; iTunes DRM is illegal; Fingertip magnet; Sony passwords v Gawker passwords; RIAA recants on 3 strikes; Parachute wedding dress; Roald Dahl (jerk); "Level Up"; The rent's too damned high; RIAA v "Search by artist"; "Robopocalypse"; You are not a wallet; The man who created the religious right; NY x voting; NY x antitrust; Media companies fund Heritage Minister's campaign; Richard Dreyfuss x iTunes EULA; 3-way street; RIAA lawyer becomes Solicitor General; Brock Allen's wrist-slap; Ad-tech interop; Apple's manorial security; Billionaires aren't taxed, "Rabbits."
• Upcoming appearances: Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Naomi Kritzer's "Obstetrix" (permalink)

Naomi Kritzer's Obstetrix is a new, tense thriller in the mode of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and Alderman's The Power; it's a beautifully turned, claustrophobic horror novel about an obstetrician who's been kidnapped by a Christian cult obsessed with fertility:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250423375/obstetrix/

Kritzer is a master of building scenarios that require her characters to express and resolve a wide variety of complex and contradictory emotions. Her breakout novel, Catfishing on CatNet is a charming and deceptively goofy story about an AI trained on the impeccable vibes in a really solid groupchat becoming sentient and demanding…cat pictures. This is the setup for a warm (but intense) novel of internet-mediated friendship and IRL mutual aid:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/19/naomi-kritzers-catfishing-on-the-catnet-an-ai-caper-about-the-true-nature-of-online-friendship/

Then there's her incredibly prescient 2015 story "So Much Cooking," about people in lockdown during a pandemic. For obvious reasons, it enjoyed an revival in 2020, with Kritzer penning an excellent essay reflecting on what it means to have thought through the implications of a disaster that is now upon us:

https://reactormag.com/didnt-i-write-this-story-already-when-your-fictional-pandemic-becomes-reality/

In 2023, Kritzer published one of the most memorable YA novels I've read, Liberty's Daughter, which is set on a libertarian seastead and told from the point of view of the daughter of the cult's founder:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

Liberty's Daughter is basically what you'd get if you rewrote a Heinlein YA novel from the perspective of one of the kids, who had to live with a Heinlein-type dad (Heinlein was childless and had some of the most batshit child-rearing ideas, which he managed to make sound bizarrely plausible). There's a lot of sf that is "in dialogue" with Heinlein (including some of mine), but no one nailed RAH like Kritzer.

Then there's Obstetrix; it's got one of those admirably propulsive setups. Doctor Elizabeth Gwynn is an obstetrician who performed an abortion to save her patient's life, only to be dragged into the culture wars by North Dakota's crusading attorney general, who charged her with felony murder and offered to let her plead out if she would admit that she was wrong to do it, as an example to other OBs who might be tempted. Now, Dr Liz lives in Minneapolis, where her savings are running out and no one wants to hire an obstetrician who's done time.

Then, Dr Liz gets a cold-call from a midwifing service that wants to hire her as an on-call doc. It's a weird offer from out of the blue, but Dr Liz can't afford to pass up a chance at steady work. She finds herself in a residence that the midwives work out of, and the nice woman there offers her a cup of tea. That's when the world fades to black, as the drugs in the tea take hold.

Liz sporadically regains consciousness in a van during a multi-day drive, and already she is thinking about her escape – even as she is becoming increasingly aware of how truly terrible her situation is. When she finally arrives at the cult's remote compound, frozen and isolated, she learns that she has been kidnapped because the fertility-obsessed cult needs an OB, especially since the daughter of the cult's founder, the "pastor," is carrying a high-risk pregnancy.

All that is in the first few pages, which leaves plenty of room for an expertly spun second act in which we get Kritzer's trademark interpersonal work, where carefully chosen and smartly wrought small details flesh out a picture of the complex dynamics of life inside a "high-demand" cult, from the way that members are manipulated into policing each other's compliance to the internal processes that keep members cowed even when they're unobserved by others. It's a brilliant work of sociological speculation and the engine that drives it is a series of maneuvers and gambits whereby Dr Liz hopes to make her way to safety.

I won't spoil the end, except to say that it is exciting, satisfying, and has a sweet denouement that does real justice to the whole book. All told, this is a read-in-one-sitting thriller that does as much to illuminate the workings and dynamics of patriarchy and religion as any gender studies class. It's peak Kritzer (so far), and that's saying something.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• The mayor of Shelbyville, Indiana, says only people who live in ‘shitty houses’ oppose data center https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/944984/shelbyville-indiana-mayor-shitty-houses-data-center

• Last Idea Factory https://starlogic.itch.io/last-idea-factory

• ‘Her silence was more powerful than words’: how I interviewed a Facebook whistleblower who wasn’t allowed to speak https://www.thenerve.news/p/carole-cadwalladr-sarah-wynn-williams-tim-wu-hay-festival-careless-people-gagging

• She won a religious exemption from using AI at work. The Pope's remarks could fuel similar appeals. https://www.businessinsider.com/worker-got-religious-exemption-using-ai-at-work-2026-6

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago HOWTO turn a $60 Linksys router into a $600 super-router https://web.archive.org/web/20060610003137/http://assets.lifehacker.com/software/router/hack-attack-turn-your-60-router-into-a-600-router-178132.php

#20yrsago Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: 1811 slang dictionary https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5402

#20yrsago Ex-RIAA head Hilary Rosen rethinks lawsuits and DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060609030533/https://www.p2pnet.net/story/8979

#20yrsago Norwegian ombudsman says Apple’s iTunes DRM is illegal https://web.archive.org/web/20060611194556/http://forbrukerportalen.no/Artikler/2006/1149587055.44

#20yrsago Implanting a magnet in your fingertip adds a sixth sense https://web.archive.org/web/20060613072724/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71087-0.html?tw=rss.index

#20yrsago Recording industry: Search-by-artist is “too interactive” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5055744.stm

#20yrsago US branch of “Pirate Party” launches https://web.archive.org/web/20060613041144/http://www.pirate-party.us/

#20yrsago Pranksters give fake McDonald’s anti-global-warming presentation https://web.archive.org/web/20060614011522/http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9621

#20yrsago Can. Heritage Minister’s election was funded by entertainment co’s https://web.archive.org/web/20060612224646/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1289/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#20yrsago High-def DRM licenses cost $15k https://web.archive.org/web/20060612202129/https://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32273

#15yrsago Richard Dreyfuss reads the iTunes EULA https://web.archive.org/web/20110611012317/http://www.cnet.com/8301-30976_1-20068778-10348864.html

#15yrsago Top universities a ‘breeding ground’ for Tories, warn Islamic groups https://newsthump.com/2011/06/07/top-universities-a-breeding-ground-for-tories-warn-islamic-groups/

#15yrsago 3-Way Street: visualization of the uneasy dance of pedestrians, bikes and cars at a busy intersection https://web.archive.org/web/20110610123449/http://blog.ronconcocacola.com/2011/06/02/nyc-goes-three-ways.aspx

#15yrsago Copyright extremist RIAA lawyer confirmed as America’s Solicitor General https://web.archive.org/web/20110610134934/http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/senate-confirms-verrilli/

#15yrsago Scot-free millionaire playboy’s lawyer was judge’s depute campaign treasurer https://web.archive.org/web/20110610123824/http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-06-06/news/fl-levin-sentence-mayocol-b060711-20110606_1_house-arrest-dui-manslaughter-case-kenneth-watkinson

#15yrsago Bubble-in forms betray individual, traceable “handwriting” https://web.archive.org/web/20110609164727/http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/wclarkso/new-research-result-bubble-forms-not-so-anonymous

#15yrsago Inbox Influence: plugin reveals corporate money behind the emails in your inbox https://web.archive.org/web/20110816105954/https://inbox.influenceexplorer.com/

#15yrsago Macedonia erupts after young man beaten to death by special police in public square https://web.archive.org/web/20110610132108/http://www.a1.com.mk/vesti/default.aspx?VestID=139049

#15yrsago Robopocalypse: rigorous, terrifying novel about a robotic campaign to exterminate humanity https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/07/robopocalypse-rigorous-terrifying-novel-about-a-robotic-campaign-to-exterminate-humanity/

#15yrsago Using clickfraud on Google ads to amass shares of Google https://gwei.org/index.php

#15yrsago Comparative analysis of leaked Sony and Gawker passwords https://www.troyhunt.com/brief-sony-password-analysis/

#15yrsago China’s Politburo warns Google not to be “political” https://web.archive.org/web/20110610165205/http://www.transparencyrevolution.com/2011/06/china-warns-google-not-to-be-evil/

#15yrsago Guerrilla camper re-opens shuttered Michigan public campsite https://web.archive.org/web/20110609184456/http://www.miningjournal.net/page/content.detail/id/563100/Campground-closed-in-2009-illegally-reopened.html?nav=5006

#15yrsago Record industry lobby says it no longer supports 3-strikes copyright termination laws https://torrentfreak.com/recording-industry-steps-back-from-piracy-disconnections-110606/

#15yrsago Death threats for Aussie climate scientists https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/06/australia-climate-scientists-death-threats

#15yrsago Wedding-dress made from life-saving parachute https://www.si.edu/collections/snapshot/parachute-wedding-dress

#15yrsago Level Up: Gene Yang’s comic about destiny, games, and filial piety https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/06/level-up-gene-yangs-comic-about-destiny-games-and-filial-piety/

#15yrago Roald Dahl: Jerk https://web.archive.org/web/20110602195454/http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/6/1/in-which-we-consider-the-macabre-unpleasantness-of-roald-dah.html

#15yrsago Rotting Gulliver’s Travels themepark in Japan https://web.archive.org/web/20110609235431/http://www.sleepycity.net/posts/40/Gullivers_Kingdom__Sea_of_Trees

#15yrsago Ticketed for being childless and eating doughnuts in a playground https://gothamist.com/food/two-women-ticketed-for-eating-doughnuts-in-a-brooklyn-playground

#15yrsago Internet Archive becomes archive of physical books, too https://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-the-new-physical-archive-of-the-internet-archive/

#10yrsago Swedish traditional costume made from Ikea bags https://ikeahackers.net/2016/06/swedish-folk-costume-5-ikea-bags.html

#10yrsago NSA dumps docs about its Snowden response, reveals that Snowden repeatedly raised alarms about spying https://web.archive.org/web/20160604213547/https://news.vice.com/article/edward-snowden-leaks-tried-to-tell-nsa-about-surveillance-concerns-exclusive

#10yrsago John Oliver buys and forgives $15M in medical debt, illustrates horrors of America’s debt-collectors https://web.archive.org/web/20160606234823/https://consumerist.com/2016/06/06/john-oliver-buys-15m-in-medical-debt-then-forgives-it/

#10yrsago David Byrne wants you to register to vote, and wants everyone else to, too https://web.archive.org/web/20160609060810/http://davidbyrne.com/were-better-than-this-vote

#10yrsago You are not a wallet: complaining considered helpful https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/07/its-your-duty-to-complain-thats-how-companies-improve

#10yrsago Web Sheriff’s legal scare strategy: throw everything at the wall, hope something sticks https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/07/web-sheriff-accuses-us-breaking-basically-every-possible-law-pointing-out-that-abusing-dmca-takedowns/

#10yrsago Lin-Manuel Miranda declares war on bots https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/opinion/stop-the-bots-from-killing-broadway.html

#10yrsago Uber loves competition, when it’s the one doing the competing https://www.boston.com/news/technology/2016/06/05/uber-app-urbanhail-startup-ride-prices/

#10yrsago MI5 warning: we’re gathering more than we can analyse, and will miss terrorist attacks https://theintercept.com/document/2016/06/07/preston-study/

#10yrsago Samantha Bee interviews Frank Schaeffer, who helped create the religious right https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhLY0JqXP-s

#10yrsago Why defense attorneys aren’t cheering Brock Allan Turner’s wrist-slap https://web.archive.org/web/20160611024154/http://mimesislaw.com/fault-lines/brock-turner-the-sort-of-defendant-who-is-spared-severe-impact/10288

#10yrsago Password hashing demystified https://www.wired.com/2016/06/hacker-lexicon-password-hashing/

#5yrsago Google and France agree on ad-tech interop https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#monkeys-paw

#5yrsago Billionaires don't pay tax https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#eat-the-rich

#5yrsago Apple's manorial security https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#manorialism

#5yrsago Rabbits: PK Dick meets Qanon https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#rabbits

#5yrsago Competition tames ISPs https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/07/fire-on-one-end-fool-on-the-other/#muni-fiber-now

#5yrsago New York to revolutionize voting https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/07/fire-on-one-end-fool-on-the-other/#sb309a

#5yrsago New York to revolutionize antitrust https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/07/fire-on-one-end-fool-on-the-other/#sb933

#5yrsago The Rent’s Too Damned High https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
  https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Enshittification of Life, the Universe, and Everything
  https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-enshittification-of-life-the

• Cory Doctorow's digital jail-break (DW In Focus)
  https://www.dw.com/en/cory-doctorows-digital-jail-break/audio-77414035

• Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It (Jim Rutt) (RIP)
  https://www.jimruttshow.com/cory-doctorow-3/

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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Albert, Melissa: The Children (HarperCollins 978-0063497856, $32.00, 416pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Fantasy/Horror novel. As an adult, Guinevere Sharpe lived off of the success of her mother who mysteriously died in a fire. When her estranged brother returns with an art piece titled “Mother,” Guinevere starts to piece together what really happened the night of the fire. A first novel.

 

Archer, Amy: Nemesis Mine (Harper Voyager US 978-0063459403, $19.99, 428pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Historical fantasy novel. Cyrus used to be the biggest villain in Agatha, but no one’s been paying attention to him recently. The hero of the land, Maximillian, creates a plan to start a fake rivalry with Cyrus, but it becomes harder to perform when they start to fall for each other. A first novel.

 

Arden, Katherine: The Unicorn Hunters (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593128282, $30.00, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Fantasy Novel. As Anne, the duchess of Brittany, is set to be married off to the king of France, she devises a plan to stop it. Anne plans a unicorn hunt in the forest of Brocéliande so that she can marry someone else and escape this arranged marriage. Simultaneous with the Penguin Random House UK edition.

 

Bandreddi, S.C.: The Game of Oaths (Candlewick Press 978-1536252637, $19.99, 432pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Young-adult dark fantasy novel. Falan Sunkara, a 17 year old trapeze artist, is seeking revenge after her sister died in the game of oaths, a game where 12 are selected to compete, but only one will survive. A first novel.

 

Cambias, James L.: The Ishtar Deception (Baen 978-1668073308, $18.00, 288pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/02/2026)

Science fiction novel, book four in the Billion Worlds series. In the far-future solar system, Sabbath and Daslakh of Deimos travel to the city of Ishtar on Venus to find out the truth about the death of an undercover agent.

 

Crocker, Ed: Moonfall (St. Martin’s 978-1250287755, $30.00, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 06/02/2026)

Fantasy novel, second in the Everlands trilogy. Sam has a plan to destroy the vampire city of First Light, but she’ll need the help of the city’s former ruler in order for it to succeed. The most dangerous sorcerer in history, Neuras Sinassion, is finally telling the truth about humanity.

 

DuQuette, Lon Milo & Bratkowsky, James M.: Young Aleister Crowley and the Magicians’ Revolt (Red Wheel/Weiser 978-1578639151, $16.95, 176pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/06/2026)

Fantasy novel. Aleister Crowley steps foot into Edwardian London where there’s a power struggle between magicians of the Golden Dawn, and the leaders of the Golden Dawn. The leaders’ power is fading, and Crowley finds himself in the middle of this war.

 

Gómez, Cynthia: Muñeca (Penguin Random House/Putnam 979-8217047581, $29.00, 171pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Gothic fantasy romance novel. Violeta, the heiress to Spanish colonial wealth is paralyzed, and Natalia Fuentes thinks dark magic caused it. Nati becomes Violeta’s caretaker in hopes of receiving a reward, but as feelings start to form between the two, Nati is forced to confront her past. A first novel.

 

Jane, Emily: Mr. Yay (Disney/Hyperion Avenue 978-1368116046, $18.99, 488pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Novel in Disney’s line of adult books. Mr. Yay (Who’s real name is Fatty Bratty), has a blossoming rap career, but his therapist, Miriam, has memories of a TV show named Mr. Yay, yet no one else does, and there’s no record of it on the internet. Miriam watches Mr. Yay continue to grow as her life starts to fall apart.

 

Kim, Isabel J.: Sublimation (Tor 978-1250376794, $28.99, 357pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Science Fiction novel. Immigration splits you into two copies of yourself, one stays in their original country, and one travels to their new country. Some stay in touch with each other, while others never speak to each other again. A first novel.

 

Lacrampe, J.P.: Valet (Simon & Schuster/Saga Press 978-1668216439, $28.00, 272pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Science fiction novel. Grayson panics as his sister plans to sell the family’s robotics company to a tech giant. Grayson, Cy (Grayson’s robot helper), and their dog, Sasha III, run away until they can figure out what to do. A first novel.

 

Leighton, Georgia: Maiden (Penguin Random House UK/Bantam UK 978-0857505934, £16.99, 432pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/04/2026)

Fantasy novel. Every year after the snow is melted, a young woman is selected to be sacrificed to the dragon. The three women in charge hold the power to stop the ritual, but doing so comes with a price.

 

Noni, Lynette: Shadow Reaper (Penguin Random House/Knopf 979-8217033454, $21.99, 496pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

YA fantasy romance novel. The streets of Aravell are swarmed with reapers, and they’re led by the Reaper Priest. When his most loyal follower is captured, he makes a deal with a person whose parents he murdered.

 

Pacton, Jamie: The Hyacinth Labyrinth (Peachtree Teen 978-1682638194, $19.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Young-adult fantasy romance novel. The fae Hyacinth, her friend Chloe, and a dragon travel through a labyrinth to find a library. Hyacinth and Chloe discover bandits, magical creatures, and their feelings for each other.

 

Pham, Cindy: The Secret World of Briar Rose (Penguin Random House/Kokila 979-8217113026, $21.99, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Fantasy romance novel. Corin finds her sister Elly after jumping into a portal that leads to Princess Amelia’s dreams. There they meet the dream version of Amelia, but suspect that she’s hiding some things that can’t be kept secret forever. A first novel.

 

Samorano, Désirée: Amarisa’s Cooking Pot (University of Nevada Press 978-1647792428, $26.95, 229pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 06/02/2026)

Collection of 21 stories. These stories draw on Mexican American culture, and possess a wide range of emotions that are all deeply human. It explores what it means to be alive in a world that’s so unpredictable.

 

Sim, Tara: The Dawn Throne (Orbit US 978-0316458962, $19.99, 448pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Fantasy novel, the third in the Dark Gods series. When the god of light, Phos, decides to attack the heirs for control of the cosmos, the heirs decide to bring the battle to Phos’s home realm. Simultaneous with the Hodder & Stoughton UK edition.

 

St. Jude, Jen: Where You’ll Find Us (Bloomsbury USA 978-1547611409, $20.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Young-adult fantasy novel. Calla’s parents disowned her because she was gay, but she’s trying to figure out if she’s even a girl. She finds a farmhouse that’s frozen in time, and houses queer teens from the past. Simultaneous with the Penguin Random House UK edition.

 

Tubb, Kristin O’Donnell: The Spiritualists (Simon & Schuster 978-1665985734, $19.99, 416pp, formats: ebook, 06/02/2026)

Young-adult fantasy novel. Stella, a psychic, gets an invitation to join a group of mystics, and in return they’ll get revenge on her sister’s killer. The only problem is, she’s the reason her sister is dead in the first place. A first novel.

 

Valldeperas, R.J.: Their Will Undone (HarperCollins/Quill Tree 978-0063388765, $19.99, 367pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Young-adult fantasy novel. Kasik must retrieve Nina and bring her to the emperor, however the path back brings them to dangerous places. Kasik questions her loyalty when desire starts to take over. A first novel.

 

Yang, Tessa: The Jellyfish Problem (Penguin Random House/Berkley 978-0593955826, $30.00, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Magical realism novel. Dr. Jo Ness gets a call from Nadia who tells her of a giant jellyfish terrorizing her island. Jo decides to fly over to the island where she meets Clementine, a jellyfish that changes everyone who sees it. A first novel.

 

Young-do, Lee: The Heart of the Nhaga (Harper Voyager US 978-0063349896, $32.00, 448pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 06/02/2026)

Fantasy novel, book one of the Bird That Drinks Tears series. The world is divided in two, the Tokebbi to the north, and the Nhaga to the south. No one has crossed the border in centuries, but that’s about to change.

 

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The post New Book Releases: June 2, 2026 appeared first on Locus.

The Locus Selected Books by Author list has been updated on our Forthcoming Books page, with information from the June 2026 issue covering upcoming titles from genre houses slated through December 2026. Find out about your favorite authors’ upcoming books!

For the complete list of books by publisher, subscribe to our print magazine or purchase the June issue in print or digital editions, available June 1, 2026.

The post Forthcoming Books Through December 2026 appeared first on Locus.

Today's links

• Molly Crabapple's 'Here Where We Live Is Our Country': An essential book for this moment and for the moments that led to it.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Home chemistry sets in danger; Every pirate wants to be an admiral; Painful computer workarounds; JPEG patent invalidated; UBS whistleblower v USA (x USA); David Foster Wallace x tennis; Who cares about "bandwidth hogs?"
• Upcoming appearances: London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Molly Crabapple's 'Here Where We Live Is Our Country' (permalink)

Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country is one of the most important, timely and salient works of history I've ever read. It's a history of the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist, internationalist organization that once dominated Jewish political identity:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646320/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-by-molly-crabapple/

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were hundreds of thousands of Bund members, both in the Pale of Settlement (the rural regions of the Russian empire that the Tsar confined most Jews to) and in diasporic centers like New York City. The Bund played an important role in the Russian Revolution and in the resistance to the rise of European fascism, and fought valiantly in the antifascist underground guerrilla bands in Nazi-occupied territories.

Despite this faded prominence, the Bund is all but unknown today. I was only vaguely aware of it, even though I attended seven years' worth of Yiddish classes at the Workmen's Circle, a Bund-originated socialist fraternal organization, and was bar-mitzvahed at a Workmen's Circle hall. It wasn't until I read about the Bund in Naomi Klein's essential 2023 book Doppelganger that I first caught a glimmer of its significance:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

The thesis of Doppelganger is that the world is full of "mirror world" pairs with opposite political valences. For example, the mirror world version of the health justice movement is MAHA. Both MAHA and health justice share many commonalities (such as a skepticism of Big Pharma and its captured regulators), but arrive at totally different conclusions. Health justice demands universal access to medical care, compulsory licenses and patent reform for life-saving medicines, and systemic interventions to address discrimination against gender minorities, women, and racialized people. MAHA starts from the same diagnosis, but arrives at a totally different prescription: "eating clean," buying unregulated supplements from grifters, rejecting vaccines, attributing chronic health problems to personal moral failings, along with a conspiratorial rejection of life-saving medication.

Mirror worlds are everywhere. One chapter of Klein's work deals with the "mirror worlds" of Jewish identity and what radical Jews once called "the Jewish question":

https://ernestmandel.org/english/works/Jewish-Question-Since-World-War-II

In the 19th century, antisemitism was often described as "the socialism of fools." In the real world, we observe the dominance of parasitic finance capital over productive labor and embark upon a great class struggle to seize the means of production. In the mirror world, antisemites observe this same fact, combine it with the fact that some of these bankers are Jewish, and embark on a genocidal program of antisemitic violence.

But antisemites weren't the only mirror-world pairing with a view on "the Jewish question." Early 20th century Jews also lived on either side of the political looking-glass. On one side, you had the Bundists, whose motto (and the title of Crabapple's book) was "Here, where we live, is our country." For Bundists, Jews belonged everywhere Jews were. As the Jewish socialist Meyer London wrote, "Thousands of Jewish boys and girls pray to God not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them free Egypt."

The Bund saw its struggle as just one aspect of the universal struggle for liberation. They understood that persecuted minorities everywhere labored under the double bind of racist and class oppression (and further, that women labored under gender oppression), but they also understood that these identity markers were tactical facts about how these workers should set about freeing themselves.

They didn't mistake identity for a strategic difference: the goal was always universal liberation, and the reason to consider identity-based oppression was to ensure that every comrade was brought along in the struggle. As Crabapple writes, the Bund more-or-less invented intersectional analysis, and they practiced it with an eye to all the struggles of the world. Bund newspapers (even those published by the Bund underground in the Warsaw Ghetto) closely tracked the struggles of Black workers in the Jim Crow south, just as the Black radical press of the day reported closely on antisemitic lynchings in Europe. The Bund underground even managed to send telegrams of support to Gandhi from Nazi-occupied Poland.

On the other side of the Jewish mirror was (of course) Zionism. Zionism and the Bund were founded in the same year, in response to the same events. The Bund was founded in secret by exiled radical Jews in Vilna whom the Tsar had banished for their resistance activities. Zionism was founded in Geneva by Theodor Herzl, who sheltered Jews who had fled Tsarist Russia to escape antisemitic violence.

Where the Bund called for universalism and solidarity with all workers to keep Jews safe in every place where Jews lived, Zionists dreamed of a Jewish homeland, a stronghold to which Jews could retreat from the world. Where the Bund fought antisemites who would banish or exterminate Jews, Zionist leaders were willing to align themselves with antisemites, finding common cause in the idea that European Jewry should abandon Europe in favor of Palestine.

Indeed, the Balfour Declaration – which established a plan for the UK handing over its occupied territories in Palestine to create a Jewish homeland – was fomented by vicious antisemites as part of a plan to ethnically cleanse the UK of all Jews:

https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232119

As Crabapple documents in detail, in the ensuing decades of struggle that followed, Zionist leaders repeatedly entered into alliances with antisemitic politicians, even those who presided over (and sometimes directed) campaigns of racist terror against Jews. Despite their mutual hatred, they shared a common goal: terrorizing Europe's Jews out of Europe and into Palestine.

Meanwhile, Bundists never wavered from their rejection of antisemites. In the Bundists' socialist, internationalist program, the pursuit of a Jewish homeland merely dangled the possibility of Jewish liberation – at the expense of Palestinians, and without having anything to offer to all the other oppressed peoples of the world.

While I discovered the Bund through reading Naomi Klein, many others learned about it from Crabapple's widely circulated 2018 New York Review of Books article, "My Great-Grandfather the Bundist":

https://archive.is/20260518010455/https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/10/06/my-great-grandfather-the-bundist/

Predictably, Crabapple's article provoked attacks from Zionists who told Crabapple they blamed the Bund for its own extermination. In their telling, the Bund's stubborn refusal to confront antisemitism as "history's oldest hatred" was a suicidal delusion that led their members into the Nazis' mass graves.

But for many Jews, Crabapple's article was a revelation about a different way to be Jewish, an identity that rejected the Apartheid state of Israel (South African Apartheid and the state of Israel share a birth year, and Apartheid South Africa and Israel carried on a robust program of mutual trade in arms and surveillance tools):

https://imeu.org/resources/key-issues/fact-sheet-an-overview-apartheid-south-africa-israel/275

This revelation only gained salience and prominence after October 7, 2023, when Israel responded to a massacre perpetrated by Hamas by embarking on a years-long program of genocide and extraterritorial aggression. Zionists have defended these crimes against humanity as inseparable from Jewish identity and the only plausible answer to "the Jewish question."

Israel's defenders insist that even naming the genocide in Palestine (let alone opposing it) is inherently antisemitic. Ironically, Israel's loudest cheerleaders are the millions of antisemitic evangelical Christian Zionists who vastly outnumber Jewish Zionists, who support Israel in hopes of bringing about a Biblical prophecy in which Christ returns and every Jew is cast down to Hell.

In the years since, Crabapple's work to revive the Bund has only gained adherents, especially among Jews who refuse to accept that their safety can only be secured through mass slaughter and imperial conquest. Crabapple's response to this burgeoning movement is this book, a massive, heroic, brilliant, and pitiless history of the Bund that proposes its own answer to "the Jewish question."

Beyond its political importance, Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a remarkable scholarly and artistic achievement. Crabapple taught herself to speak and read Yiddish so that she could consume primary sources, and she crisscrossed the globe to see and research the key sites of Jewish oppression and the Jewish liberation struggle.

It's a monumental book. Thanks to Crabapple's voluminous research, Here Where We Live delivers a blow-by-blow look at the Bund's rise and its triumphs, but even more importantly, the tactical disagreements, factional disputes, and personal animus that too often snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for these committed revolutionaries.

At times, Crabapple's tick-tock of these fights seems to embody the wry maxim: "Two Jews, three arguments." But the point of all this nuanced, textured detail isn't to rehash the tittle-tattle of the previous century, nor is it to show off Crabapple's prowess as a researcher. Rather, in rehearsing these fights, Crabapple shows how reasonable these disputes seemed at the time, and how terrible the consequences were for all concerned.

In this mode, Crabapple manages the admirable achievement of being both sympathetic and pitiless. Crabapple, after all, is a veteran political activist who has traveled extensively to active war-zones to document atrocities and offer mutual aid to those fighting for justice. She's endured every failure that radical politics can manifest, sat through every kind of bad meeting, and she recognizes in these disputes the same personalities and personal failings that have broken her heart a hundred times. She understands why these people are this way – but she can also see, with perfect hindsight, the ghastly horrors that followed, which swamp any matter of principle these people might have stood on.

There's plenty of this sympathetic pitilessness to go around, and it's not just the Bund or Jews who come in for it. Every factionalist blunder in pre-Revolutionary Russia, in the Soviet Union, in interwar Poland, and in occupied Poland comes in for examination – as do every imprisonment, maiming, rape and death that these blunders opened the door to. Crabapple's heroes are principled, but they are imperfect, and sometimes foolish, and sometimes self-deluding (for example, the Palestinian leader who insists that his rank-and-file fighters want to establish a multi-ethnic democracy, despite the undeniable presence in their number of people who want to banish all Jews from Palestine).

The twentieth century was a charnel house, and so the cost of these mistakes is high. Often, these mistakes lead to mass graves, with these mistake-makers tangled among the bodies. They never had the chance to learn from their mistakes. But, through Crabapple's work, we might.

It is in the postscript to this book that its true message lands. After 480 pages, we arrive at Crabapple's conclusion. In reflecting on these people, who died in their millions and whose memory was all but erased, she asks, "Did the Bund fail?"

Her answer is a resounding no. The Bund lost, but it did not fail. The Bund was failed, as were the Zionists, the Roma, European socialists, disabled and queer people – everyone the Nazis burned, gassed, or buried alive. These people cried out to the rest of the world – to America, to Canada, to the UK, to all the places that were not under Nazi occupation – and begged for help, for safe passage, for rescue.

The world slammed its doors. Even after they joined the war, they refused to admit Jews and other victims of Nazi genocide. They refused visas, closed borders, turned back boats of escapees, sometimes sending them back to occupied Europe to be slaughtered.

In his review in the New York Review of Books, historian Adam Hochschild writes:

Imagine that the United States had not passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which essentially slammed the door on almost all newcomers for more than forty years. Without it, Jewish immigration to the US would surely have soared during the 1920s and 1930s. Some 2.5 million Jews, most of them hoping for a better life than they had in tsarist Russia, had already come here between 1880 and 1924. Then, even in the decade before Hitler took power, Jews still had many reasons to leave Europe. Poland, whose Jewish population of 2.8 million was the continent’s largest, was a cauldron of antisemitism between the wars, with outbreaks of deadly violence, segregated seating and de facto quotas in many universities, and numerous other humiliations.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/a-dream-of-a-socialist-commonwealth-the-jewish-bund/

No one who's paid attention during this century's xenophobic policies and attacks on refugees can fail to see the parallels. And no one who's paid attention to the genocide in Gaza and the official response in the "free" world to Palestinian solidarity movements can fail to see those parallels, either.

For the Jews who are told – by Zionists, including the millions of American gentile Zionists who outnumber Jewish Zionists 30:1 – that all this is being done for us, that our continued existence requires it, Crabapple's history of the Bund shows us what's on the other side of the mirror. As NYT editor Max Strasser writes in his review of Here Where We Live:

[The Bund was] the kind of movement leftists today dream about — political party, social movement, mutual aid group — with tens of thousands of members. The Bund published newspapers and ran soup kitchens and summer camps; its athletes competed in a socialist version of the Olympics. Bund activists organized across Eastern Europe and beyond — they helped elect a congressman on the Lower East Side.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/books/review/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-molly-crabapple.html

The politics we dream of isn't a fantasy. It's the politics our grandparents lived – a politics that wasn't lost, but rather, erased. Erased by Nazis and Stalinists, who committed wholesale slaughter of Bundists. But that politics was also erased by Zionists, who swept through the Displaced Persons' camps of post-war Europe, imposing a draft on the Jews who'd been penned in those stinking camps by a world that refused to welcome Jews, even after the horrors of the death-camps were widely known. Zionists bullied and coerced these Jews – including Bundists who rejected their cause – to serve as foot-soldiers in the Israeli army, even beating elderly parents until their sons and daughters agreed to fight.

Bundists always rejected all forms of ethno-nationalism. As Jews, they had lived in the violence and oppression that always attended every ethno-nationalist program. They never imagined that Israel would escape this fate. As the Bundist leader Henryk Erlich wrote in 1933: "We are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful as the nationalisms of all the other nations."

Crabapple has done heroic and important work in excavating this history. She has vindicated the sacrifices made by the Bundist archivists who smuggled their papers out of Nazi occupation and gave their lives to ensure that some day their story could be told.

In so doing, she has also vindicated her own great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, a Bundist who fled the Pale of Settlement for New York City, whose art-practice traveled to Crabapple through her mother, who is also a painter. It wasn't just the art-practices that traveled – it was also the art, and it was one of Rothbort's paintings ("Itka, the Bundist," depicting a girl throwing a rock through a window) that set her on this journey.

This volume is also graced by Crabapple's own art, stark monochrome ink-washes in her characteristic style, which bring these long-dead people to vivid life. They're a reminder of the role that culture plays in every radical movement, of the ways that the Bund welcomed its members to live a radical life through sport and song and picnics, and not just meetings and street-demonstrations.

Even before this book, Crabapple had made a mark through her paintings and writings. But with Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Crabapple has given us a magnum opus, a book that might help us turn the tide of history.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• What Is a Dickover? https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

• Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI https://sites.google.com/view/elizaarchaeology/book

• Inside Graham Platner’s Plan To Wield Power https://www.levernews.com/graham-platners-power/

• mcmodernslopcore https://www.tumblr.com/mcmansionhell/817896092499869696/mcmodernslopcore

• Locus Award for Best Non-fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_Award_for_Best_Non-fiction

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sign a letter supporting the BBC’s online archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060704182401/http://www.freeculture.org.uk/letters/CreativeArchiveLetter

#20yrsago Home chemistry under assault https://web.archive.org/web/20060603021709/http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry_pr.html

#20yrsago Cliches to avoid when writing about women and video-games https://web.archive.org/web/20060704223941/http://www.richardcobbett.co.uk/codex/clicktoread/filingcabinet/writing_a_girls_in_games_article/

#20yrsago JPEG patent invalidated https://web.archive.org/web/20060613015757/http://www.pubpat.org/Chen672Rejected.htm

#20yrsago SF story about AI-human love https://www.salon.com/2006/05/30/perfect_man/

#15yrsago Sensation: Acerbic novel about pop culture and popular madness as functions of parasitic manipulation https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/30/sensation-acerbic-novel-about-pop-culture-and-popular-madness-as-functions-of-parasitic-manipulation/

#15yrsago Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral: why less copyright gets you more culture https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2011/may/30/internet-piracy-cory-doctorow

#15yrsago Social incentives vs economic incentives in crowdsourced work https://web.archive.org/web/20110602184500/https://blog.crowdflower.com/2011/05/designing-incentives-for-crowdsourcing-workers/

#15yrsago Painful workarounds from computer novices https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/hmlmd/what_is_the_most_painful_way_you_have_seen_your/

#10yrsago To imagine the ocean of the future: picture a writhing mass of unkillable tentacles, forever https://web.archive.org/web/20160530145354/https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/05/octopuses-may-indeed-be-your-new-overlords/

#10yrsago When Brad Birkenfeld blew the whistle on UBS, the US government paid him $104M and sent him to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20160602152611/http://fullmeasure.news/news/politics/the-whistleblower-05-23-2016

#10yrsago The last time there were this many unsold $100M+ homes on the market, the world economy imploded https://web.archive.org/web/20160529040314/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/business/a-worrisome-pileup-of-100-million-homes.html

#10yrsago David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis, finally collected between one set of covers https://www.csmonitor.com/Arts-Culture/Books/2016/0530/String-Theory-gathers-the-brainy-witty-tennis-writing-of-David-Foster-Wallace

#10yrsago United Arab Emirates hacked UK journalist https://citizenlab.ca/research/stealth-falcon/

#10yrsago Internet economics 101: “bandwidth hogs” considered harmless https://web.archive.org/web/20160530155601/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/should-broadband-data-hogs-pay-more-isp-economics-say-no/

#20yrsago JPEG patent invalidated https://web.archive.org/web/20060613015757/http://www.pubpat.org/Chen672Rejected.htm

#20yrsago SF story about AI-human love https://www.salon.com/2006/05/30/perfect_man/

#15yrsago Sensation: Acerbic novel about pop culture and popular madness as functions of parasitic manipulation https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/30/sensation-acerbic-novel-about-pop-culture-and-popular-madness-as-functions-of-parasitic-manipulation/

#10yrsago To imagine the ocean of the future: picture a writhing mass of unkillable tentacles, forever https://web.archive.org/web/20160530145354/https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/05/octopuses-may-indeed-be-your-new-overlords/

#10yrsago When Brad Birkenfeld blew the whistle on UBS, the US government paid him $104M and sent him to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20160602152611/http://fullmeasure.news/news/politics/the-whistleblower-05-23-2016

#10yrsago The last time there were this many unsold $100M+ homes on the market, the world economy imploded https://web.archive.org/web/20160529040314/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/business/a-worrisome-pileup-of-100-million-homes.html

#10yrsago David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis, finally collected between one set of covers https://www.csmonitor.com/Arts-Culture/Books/2016/0530/String-Theory-gathers-the-brainy-witty-tennis-writing-of-David-Foster-Wallace

#10yrsago United Arab Emirates hacked UK journalist https://citizenlab.ca/research/stealth-falcon/

#10yrsago Internet economics 101: “bandwidth hogs” considered harmless https://web.archive.org/web/20160530155601/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/should-broadband-data-hogs-pay-more-isp-economics-say-no/

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
  https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow

• LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
  https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant

• Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
  https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026

• Toronto: TBA, Jun 23

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Philadelphia: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with David Williams (Fitler Club/Philadelphia Citizen), Jun 25
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-book-event-tickets-1990110326559

• Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• On Enshittification – and what can be done about it (Re:publica)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhINQgPMVSI

• EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification

• The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
  https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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Banerjee, Anindita & Vint, Sherryl: Reactionary Worldbuilding (MIT Press 978-0262053679, $90.00, 434pp, formats: paperback, 5/26/2026)

Non-fiction collection with in-depth examination of the process of worldbuilding, and its connection to ideology. Includes apocalyptic reenactments, alternative histories, conspiracy theories, and more.

 

Frost, Jeaniene: A Curse of Beasts and Magic (Tor/Bramble 978-1250395993, $20.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Fantasy romance novel. Ever since Raine Stones family was killed, a beast that survives off of violence has lived inside of her. She stops the beasts energy until one night she uses it to save an elderly man, and finds a new realm of danger. Simultaneous with the Tor UK edition.

 

Haig, Matt: The Midnight Train (Penguin Random House/Viking 978-0593833377, $30.00, 304pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Time-travel fantasy novel. The Midnight Train can take you back to moments from the past. Wilbur wishes to use it to revisit his honeymoon with his ex-wife Maggie, but doing so is a big risk.

 

Hairston, Andrea: The Redemption Center Is Closed on Sundays (Tor 978-1250807311, $32.99, 416pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Science fiction novel. After the murder of a local celebrity, Oona the Saint Berdoodle teams up with a group of misfits to solve the case. Oona secretly knows who the killer is, but the killer knows she knows, and is trying to keep her silent forever.

 

Ishiguro, Naomi: The Rainshadow Orphans (Simon & Schuster/Saga Press 978-3751791564, $27.00, 641pp, formats: ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Fantasy novel, the first in a trilogy inspired by Japanese folklore. The Lucky Crows—a criminal organization—is terrorizing Rainshadow City. A family is seeking revenge against the Lucky Crows after the murder of their aunt. A first novel. Simultaneous with the Simon & Schuster UK edition.

 

Knútsdóttir, Hildur & Kowal, Mary Robinette: Dead Weight (Tor/Nightfire 978-1250329295, $24.96, 160pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Horror novella. Unnur befriends Ásta after finding her lost cat. They form a quick bond, but when things become violent, their friendship is truly put to the test. Translated from Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal.

 

Lourey, Jess: The Blackthorn Women (Amazon/Thomas & Mercer 978-1662535260, $16.99, 320pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Fantasy novel. With Katrine Blackthorn’s return to her family’s mansion in Faith Falls, Minnesota, all of her family’s fears start manifesting. Katrine needs to confront the dark secret of her family’s lineage if her family is to survive.

 

Lukens, F.T.: The Last Best Quest Ever (Simon & Schuster/McElderry 978-1665950978, $19.99, 320pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Young-adult humorous fantasy romance novel. Ellinore has one final quest to slay a mythical beast, but the problem is all of her quests were lies. On this quest she must decide whether she wants to continue the lie, or become someone new.

 

McBride, Hazel: A Queen Crowned in Flames (Penguin Random House/Delacorte 978-0593972977, $30.00, 480pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Fantasy romance novel, the second in a duology inspired by Celtic mythology. A queen named Aemyra Daercathian is fleeing. She must decide whether or not to make a great sacrifice in order to save her people.

 

Oh, Ellen: Jin Young, In Between (Penguin Random House/Crown 978-0593125984, $19.99, 272pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Young-adult fantasy romance novel about lovers in parallel worlds. Jin Young teleports to Mina’s world inside of a webcomic, but each time he does so, catastrophic weather nearly destroys his world.

 

Randall, Breanne: Curses, Keys, and Secret Societies (Penguin Random House/Dell 978-0593875025, $20.00, 384pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Fantasy novel, second in the Sisters of Light and Shadow series. Eléa Deniz returns home to discover the estate is now home to the Shadowcraft Academy. Eléa must find her power, and resist the prophecy involving her magic. Simultaneous with the Bloomsbury UK edition.

 

Roche, Máire: Bromantasy (Penguin Random House/Putnam 979-8217180707, $20.00, 352pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Humorous fantasy romance novel. Juniper O’Reilly and Mo Elmthorn set on a quest to slay a monster, only to discover the “monster” is a little girl. On the quest they may be forced to confront the truth of their “platonic” friendship. A first novel.

 

Tsamaase, Tlotlo: House of Margins (Kensington/Erewhon 978-1-64566-104-7, $28.00, 432pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Horror novel. Anaya, an up-and-coming African author disappears during a writing residency. Her sister Ranewa is determined to find out the truth on her disappearance, and realizes it’s more horrifying than she could have thought. A first novel.

 

Varghese, Anuja: A Kiss of Crimson Ash (Orbit US 978-0316591959, $19.99, 396pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Fantasy romance novel, the first in the Games of the Goddess trilogy. An ancient goddess teams up with a newly crowned queen, a heartsick prince, a common thief, and a courtesan with magic in her blood to stop the corrupt king of Nandapore. A first novel. Simultaneous with the Orbit UK edition.

 

Viel, Neena: I’ll Watch Your Baby (St. Martin’s Griffin 978-1250906342, $18.99, 336pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Supernatural horror/thriller novel. In 1994, Bless finally found the family she needed, but someone had unfinished business with her. She’s forced to face horrors from her past and her present, and there’s only one way out. A first novel. Simultaneous with the Titan Books UK edition.

 

Yeeun, Cho & Ryu, Sung: Teddy Bears Never Die (Orbit US/Run For It 978-0316601245, $19.99, 304pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Genre-bending novel with horror elements. Hwayoung, who lost her mother in a mass-poisoning attack, teams with Doha, whose mind is trapped in a teddy bear, to get revenge. Translated from Korean by Sung Ryu.

 

Kendall, Keala: That Which Feeds Us (Penguin Random House/Random House 979-8217117963, $20.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Young-adult Hawaiian Gothic horror/supernatural thriller novel involving the horrors of colonialism. Native Hawaiian teen Lehua goes to a luxury resort in search of her missing twin, and is haunted by dreams. A first novel.

 

Hudson, Lexy: Wonders Never Cease (Titan Books UK 978-1835416174, £10.99, 384pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Fantasy novel. Trix and Sander are ballerinas and their company’s star attraction. Trix falls for Sander, but finds herself questioning his past, and at the peak of their popularity, he goes missing. A first novel.

 

Lem, Darkly: Transmentation | Transgression (Blackstone Publishing 979-8228648807, $24.29, 452pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Science fiction multiverse novel, the second in the Formation Saga series. Malculm starts to question the motives of the society he works for. Prieme Dhalgram is doing whatever she can to expand Burel Hird’s territory across the multiverse.

 

Lemon, Sarah Nicole: A Dark and Wild Wood (Harper Voyager 978-0063441583, $32.00, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Fantasy novel. When Salomé’s sister disappears, she’s determined to find a way to save her. She travels into the wild black forest where she has an encounter with Lord Death, and he takes her in as his apprentice, but is it safe to trust Death? A first novel.

 

Palmer, Suzanne: Ode to the Half-Broken (Astra House/DAW 978-0756419585, $29.00, 442pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/26/2026)

Science fiction novel. Be—an old robot—has lived a life of isolation after the world almost ended three decades ago. Be is brought out of solitude by a cyborg dog, and they have to come to terms with who they’ve become.

 

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The post New Book Releases: May 26, 2026 appeared first on Locus.

Visit our bookshop.org page to purchase this week’s new books and support your local bookstore. And us!

---

Allen, Violet: Plastic, Prism, Void (LittlePuss Press 978-1964322025, $19.95, 336pp, formats: paperback, 05/19/2026)

Trans fantasy romance novel. Acrasia, a trans intergalactic moth goddess, has a love-hate relationship with a trans mech pilot from another universe, and is determiend to keep him in her dimension. A first novel.

 

Anonymous: A Breath of Time (Flame Tree Collections UK 978-1835627822, $30.00, 416pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 05/19/2026)

Fantasy romance anthology. Stories involve time-bending, time traveling, different timelines, and alternate history. Part of Flame Tree’s Romantic Fantasy series.

 

Barker, RJ: Mortedant’s Peril (Tor 978-1250398802, $28.99, 432pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Fantasy novel, first in the Trials of Irody Hasp series. Irody is a low-level Mortedant — a thankless job that involves reading the last thoughts of the dead — and has to clear his name when he’s implicated in his own apprentice’s murder. Simultaneous with the Macmillan/Tor UK edition.

 

Bruce, Camilla: The Temptation of Charlotte North (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593724972, $18.99, 448pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Gothic supernatural novel. Rebellious young woman Charlotte sees potential in a spirit on a remote island, but must overcome the wishes of a priest and schoolteacher to banish it.

 

Chefchaouni, Loretta: The Lustrous Dark (Peachtree Teen 978-1682638378, $19.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Dark fantasy novel. Midwife’s apprentice Shay discovers tries to save her long-lost mother, only to be abandoned in a deadly, ghoul-inhabited forest.

 

Coverly, S.D.: The Arcane Arts (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593974223, $29.00, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Dark academia romance novel. Ellsbeth is drawn to arcane Newlyn University, meets Professor Thaddeus Rawlins, and falls into a romance with him as he supervises her thesis in illegal mind-control magic. This is a pen name for Dan Frey & Dana Schwartz.

 

Fitzgerald, Patrick: Navigators You Can Trust (Podium Publishing 979-8347007738, $19.99, 420pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Fantasy adventure novel, first in the Navigators trilogy. The Navigational Brotherhood use their magical abilities as peacekeepers in the Perpetual War; fresh recruits get sent on a mission to retrieve a powerful talisman.

 

Isaacs, Robert: It’s Hard to Be an Animal (Grand Central 978-1538773284, $18.99, 288pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Magical realism/fantasy novel. On a blind date, Henry suddenly gains the ability to understand animals, and overhears three rats discussing a corpse in the New York subway, prompting him and his date to investigate.

 

King, Rachael: Song of the Saltings (Simon & Schuster/McElderry 978-1665984331, $19.99, 336pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 05/19/2026)

Young-adult folk horror novel. On Lotta’s island, a fearsome creature called the Glimm demands yearly sacrifices, but it rejected Lotta as a child. Now the sacrificial horses don’t seem to appease it, and a blight is harming the island.

 

Mare, Annie: A Star-Cursed Heart (Ace 978-0593817506, $18.99, 352pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Fantasy romance novel. In modern-day Salem, Lucy Prynne and Ashes Steadfast are descended from the town’s original families and made to fight each with conflicting curses, but the two women are also friends in love. Mare has co-authored mystery and romance novels with Ruthie Knox (some under the name Mae Marvel), along with new-adult romance as Robin York.

 

Moore, Alan: I Hear a New World (Bloomsbury UK/Archer 978-1-526643292, £20.00, 336pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/21/2026)

Fantasy novel, second in the Long London quintet. In 1958, Dennis Knuckleyard discovers that a key from the Great When that he gave away years ago has unleashed occult creatures on London.

 

Nayler, Ray: Palaces of the Crow (Macmillan/Farrar, Straus, Giroux/MCD 978-0374620752, $28.07, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Speculative novel. A group of four survives the German blitzkrieg in 1941; as they cross forested borderland, an intelligent flock of crows befriends by Neriya, a Jewish girl dreaming of becoming a biologist. Simultaneous with the Orion UK/Weidenfeld & Nicolson edition.

 

Raasch, Sara: The Fake Divination Offense (Tor/Bramble 978-1250428790, $19.99, 336pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Fantasy sports romance novel, second in the Magic and Romance duology. Rawball star half-giant Orok is forced into a PR relationship with fan-favorite cheerleader Alexo Warden.

 

Rex, T.K.: The Wildcraft Drones (Stelliform Press 978-1998466030, $15.99, 202pp, formats: paperback, 05/21/2026)

Collection of fourteen sci-fi tales. In the future, humans grapple with AI intelligence alongside climate crisis. Scientists make contact with a wild dolphin, and a drone is depressed after his human companion dies.

 

Rozakis, Caitlin: Startup Hell (Titan Books UK 978-1835415863, $19.99, 432pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Satirical fantasy novel. Morgan, junior salesperson at a tech startup, is sucked into the infernal plane. after she discovers her dead boss tried to trade his soul for profits.

 

Sawyer, Robert J.: The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine (Shadowpaw Press 978-1998273560, $16.99, 260pp, formats: paperback, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Science Fiction Novel. Ex-convict Roscoe Koudoulian re-uploads his consciousness into cyberspace, where he’s confronted with someone he left for dead centuries ago.

 

Smith, Ali: Glyph (Penguin Random House/Pantheon 978-0593701584, $28.00, 288pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Speculative literary novel, a companion to Gliff. Sisters Petra and Patch, now grown and estranged, reunite after Patch finds a phantom horse destroying her bedroom furniture. First US edition (Hamish Hamilton 1/26).

 

Summers, Georgia: Trollheim: Tale of Systir (Titan Books UK 978-1835416648, $28.99, 288pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 05/19/2026)

Fantasy novel. A Nordic girl, Sýstir, runs for her life when her mother is executed for witchcraft. She finds sanctuary among the mythical beings of Trollheim, but seeks to find out what happened to her missing sister Ada.

 

Tanzer, Molly: And Side By Side They Wander (Tordotcom 978-1250382054, $24.99, 112pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

SF novella. Fennel Tycho works with ragtag team to pull off an interstellar heist from an alien museum refusing to return humankind’s greatest art to Earth.

 

Villaire, Alyssa: The Neon Sky (Little, Brown 978-0316574983, $19.99, 400pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/19/2026)

Young-adult fantasy novel, sequel to The Glittering Edge. Penny and her witch boyfriend Alonso try to help their friend Corey undo the bloody magical bargain that made his family rich — but the cost of breaking it is taking a life.

 

Yeeun, Cho: Teddy Bears Never Die (Headline UK/Wildfire 978-1035431250, £14.99, 304pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/21/2026)

Genre-bending novel with horror elements. Hwayoung, who lost her mother in a mass-poisoning attack, teams with Doha, whose mind is trapped in a teddy bear, to get revenge. Translated from the Korean by Sung Ryu.

 

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While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

The post New Book Releases: May 19, 2026 appeared first on Locus.

Visit our bookshop.org page to purchase this week’s new books and support your local bookstore. And us!

---

 

Asher, Neal: Dark Agent (Pyr 978-1645060901, $28.95, 640pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/14/2026)

SF novel, second in the Time’s Shadow series set in the Polity Universe. Al Straeger has built a p-prador army from the Spatterjay virus, while Blite and Cormac are trapped in conflict on the world of Yossander’s Hold. Simultaneous with the Macmillan/Tor UK edition.

 

Binge, Nicholas: Abyss (Tor/Nightfire 978-1250373885, $24.99, 160pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Horror novella described as “Severance meets Lovecraft.” Joe joins the mysterious Ponos company as an administrative assistant, but gets more than he bargained for. Simultaneous with the Macmillan/Tor Nightfire UK edition.

 

Brennan, Sarah Rees: All Hail Chaos (Orbit US 978-0316568746, $19.99, 480pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Fantasy novel, the second in the Time of Iron series. Fantasy reader Rae, transported into her favorite book-realm, has played a villainess, and now faces undead armies, raiders, and an Emperor who wants her as his queen. Simultaneous with the Orbit UK edition.

 

Butcher, Jim: Out Law (Podium Publishing 979-8347030026, $16.99, 208pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/05/2026)

Fantasy novella in the Dresden Files set after Twelve Months. After the Battle of Chicago, Harry Dresden is pressured by John Marcone to help an underling, and deals with a demonic foe he himself may have created.

 

Dinniman, Matt: A Parade of Horribles (Ace 979-8217190065, $32.00, 704pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

SF LitRPG novel, eighth in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Carl and Princess Donut compete in races on the 10th Floor, while on the 11th floor, something called the “Parade of Horribles” is happening. Previously self-published, now with an exclusive bonus story, “Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret.”

 

Elrod, Thomas: The Franchise (Tor 978-1250406583, $28.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

SF novel with fantasy elements. The fantasy world of Malicarn is the setting of blockbuster movies — but it’s a “Truman Show”-esque environment where the people within believe their magical, dragon-filled lives are real.

 

Flett, Jane: Welcome to the Chaoskampf (Penguin Random House UK/Doubleday UK 978-1529955064, £18.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 05/14/2026)

Literary apocalypse novel. Marcy leaves her perfect life and takes up with a group of apocalypse-summoning filmmakers who think her old boxing scar is the mark of the Chosen One.

 

Francis, Dani: Broken Dove (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593875490, $32.99, 608pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Dystopian romance novel, second in the Silver Elite series. Exposed as a double agent within the Silver Elite, Wren aids in the allied Uprising, though she’s torn between her lover Cross and hotshot pilot Grayson. Simultaneous with the Penguin Random House UK/Del Rey UK edition.

 

Gailey, Sarah: Make Me Better (Tor 978-1250851758, $28.99, 432pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Wellness-gothic horror novel. Celia, seeking community, goes to the Salt Festival on a mysterious island, where the secluded community promises healing and transformation and the reef outside keeps growing.

 

Gammon, Jendia & Chiara, Ernie: Omniboz: Tales from the Land of Oz (Stars and Sabers 978-1967550098, $19.99, 152pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, 05/15/2026)

Anthology of short stories inspired by L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Authors include Adrian Tchaikovsky, Helen Gylnn Jones, J.R. Dawson, and more.

 

Glynn, John: The Lost Book of Lancelot (Grand Central 978-1538775233, $29.00, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Arthurian fantasy novel. Orphan Lancelot grows up in seclusion on the Isle of Women and in love with the handsome Galehaut; as he is drawn into Camelot politics, he finds himself in a battle between warring worlds.

 

Hoffman, Ada: Ignore All Previous Instructions (Tachyon Publications 978-1616964566, $18.95, 320pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Near-future SF novel. Working for the Callisto corporation, Kelli edits AI output into “appropriate” stories for TV; her rigid life is interrupted when ex Rowan seeks her help for his illegal gender-affirming surgery.

 

Leckie, Ann: Radiant Star (Orbit US 978-0316290357, $30.00, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

SF novel, a standalone set in the world of the Imperial Radch. The Radch, cracking down on the city Ooioiaa’s local rituals, permit only one more man to enter the Temporal Location of the Radiant Star and join its mummified bodies as a “living saint.” Simultaneous with the Orbit UK edition.

 

McIntyre, Vonda N.: The Curve of the World (Aqueduct Press 978-1619762800, $21.00, 408pp, formats: paperback, 05/15/2026)

Historical fantasy novel, published posthumously. In an ancient Minoan world, ambassador Iakinthu sails the world to return her son Rhenthizu to his home on the Pacific coast, a distant land no Minoans have ever reached.

 

Newman, Kim: Model Actress Whatever (Titan Books UK 978-1803366678, $19.99, 464pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Satirical horror novel. Soap-opera actress Chrissie discovers her character is about to be killed off, stops dieting, and discovers she has supernatural abilities, and has to rescue her aunt who’s a therapist for supervillains.

 

Noon, Jeff: Moon Over Brendle (Angry Robot UK 978-1836730309, $19.99, 256pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Fantasy novel with elements of memoir. In an alternate 1968 Lancashire, teenage Joe has the rare ability to see Greot, a swirling dust rainbow that settles on the dead, and becomes a successful SF novelist.

 

Ojeda, Mónica: Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun (Coffee House Press 978-1566897556, $20.00, 240pp, formats: paperback, 05/12/2026)

Near-future horror novel. Two best friends in Ecuador go to a hedonistic Solar Noise Festival: Noa embraces the narcotic haze and collective visions, but Nicole senses something sinister at play. Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker.

 

Parker, K.J.: Sister Svangerd and the Devil You Know (Orbit US 978-0316567008, $19.99, 336pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Fantasy novel, the second in the Loyal Opposition series. Brother Desiderius and Sister Svangerd take on a dangerous task from a high-up official. Parker is a pen name for Tom Holt. Simultaneous with the Orbit UK edition; ebook also available. Simultaneous with the Orbit UK edition.

 

Patel, Vaishnavi: We Dance Upon Demons (Simon & Schuster/Saga Press 978-1668068595, $28.00, 304pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Fantasy novel. Burned-out reproductive healthcare worker Nisha collapses at an Indian art exhibit after being beckoned by a statue, and wakes with strange powers.

 

Plett, Cale: The Saw Mouth (Penguin Random House/Delacorte 979-8217025701, $19.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Young-adult rural horror novel. Ten years after an apocolypse in which souls woke up inside machines and destroyed them, genderqueer teen Cedar finds themselves hunted by a rotting shadow in Sawblade Lake.

 

Roth, Veronica: Seek the Traitor’s Son (Tor 978-1250347909, $29.99, 432pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Fantasy romance novel, first in the Burning Empire series. Soldier Elegy defends her homeland from the Talusar, but a prophecy says she and Talusar general Rava will fall in love with the same man and only one will be victorious in the war. Simultaneous with the Macmillan/Tor UK edition.

 

Searcy, Holly: The Whisper Tree (Blackstone Publishing 979-8228465343, $29.99, 382pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Fantasy novel, second in the Amarra Chronicles. Elven druid Kiana joins an adventure party to track down royal artifacts, and must save the Whisper Tree from a corruption.

 

Smyth, Lauren: All That Glows (Enclave Escape 979-8886052619, $24.99, 336pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/12/2026)

Young-adult SF novel. Kyrie and her town in the Mojave Desert survived a plague-carrying rain ten years ago, but a masked man outside the town fence doesn’t seem to understand the world ended.

 

Turtledove, Harry: Lightning Runes (Arc Manor/Caezik SF & Fantasy 978-1647101770, $29.67, 304pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 05/11/2026)

Historical fantasy detective novel, second in the City of Shadows series (standalone). In 1940s Los Angeles, a missing musician and a trail of magic triggers an investigation into an ancient power threatening the city.

 

Vibbert, Marie: Multitude (Apex Book Company 978-1955765497, $18.95, 184pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 05/12/2026)

SF novel. Humanity — from a SETI researcher in Australia to a mathematician in Beirut — must contend with a hivemind collective of cephalopod aliens.

 

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The post New Book Releases: May 12, 2026 appeared first on Locus.

Today's links

• Lee Lai's "Cannon": A beautiful, subtle, long-lingering tale of duty, sex, and working for a shitty restaurant boss.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Ebay paying to run newspaper classifieds; Chuck Tingle v Sad Puppies; FBI v TOR; Daycare v Goldman Sachs; Scammers re-used covid nose-swabs; "The Adventures of Mary Darling."
• Upcoming appearances: Guelph, Barcelona, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Lee Lai's "Cannon" (permalink)

Lee Lai's Cannon is an extraordinary graphic novel that turns out a beautifully told, subtle and ambiguous tale about Lucy (Lucy -> "Loose" -> "Loose Cannon" -> "Cannon"), a queer Chinese-Canadian chef at a Montreal restaurant whose messy family, work, personal and sex life are all falling apart in ways that are powerfully engrossing:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/cannon/

This is the second outing from Lee Lai, whose debut, Stone Fruit, swept many of the field's awards and won major critical acclaim. When a debut comes out that strong, it's sometimes followed with the dread "second book syndrome" in which a creator who has poured everything they ever thought about putting in a book now has to write another book, from scratch. But Cannon avoids any hint of that second book malaise; rather, it is jammed with dense and densely connected ideas, character beats and graphic signifiers that are brilliant in so many ways:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/stone-fruit

Cannon is a thirtysomething chef in a Montreal restaurant run by Guy, an instantly recognizable hustler who praises Cannon for her culinary abilities and her pliability, talks over her, demands the impossible from her kitchen colleagues and periodically breaks out into soliloquies about his own martyrdom to the hardships of entrepreneurship.

Cannon cares for her grandfather, who has been abandoned by her mother, who has been traumatized by the abuse he meted out to her during her upbringing. Now in decline and unable to care for himself, Cannon's grandfather continues his abusive ways, scaring off all of his home help, which means Cannon must devote even more time to him (she can't bring herself to put him in a care facility that will inevitably be full of white people who don't speak Chinese).

These familial duties leave Cannon isolated, with only one important friendship: Trish, an up-and-coming novelist whom Cannon has known since their school days in Montreal's suburban Eastern Townships, where they were the only queer Chinese girls either of them knew. Trish owes her professional acclaim to her own neurotic social instincts, which she polishes on the page with the help of an old writing teacher who serves as her mentor. Trish may be Cannon's oldest and best friend, but she's not actually a very good friend, and now that they're both in their 30s, neither Cannon nor Trish is entirely sure where they'd make new friends.

This is where Cannon starts, as Cannon tries to resolve all these bad situations, each of which is only worsening. Trish disapproves of Cannon's sexual affair with the new front-of-house woman at the restaurant – even as Trish begins a friends-with-benefits arrangement with a guy from her fitness club who clearly wants more than the odd tumble. Guy the restaurateur positions Cannon as his hatchet-woman and confidante, driving conflict in the kitchen that she is meant to hold the bag for. Her grandfather enters a terminal decline, and still her mother won't answer her calls and texts about it. And then, Cannon discovers that Trish has violated her in a way that is intimate and appalling.

These may sound like the beats that you'd find in a melodramatic soap opera, but Cannon's affect is so stoic, and her interiority is so beautifully and inventively depicted – Lai deploying the unique strengths of the graphic novel form here with total virtuosity – that the vibe is more David Lynch than Dallas.

The result is something that's beautiful, sharp, critical and lingering. Long after I closed the cover, I found myself mulling over the delicate ways that Lai raised the contradictions, sorrows and beauty of queer love, racial identity, camaraderie, self-control, and self-indulgence. Lai's characters have no answers, only questions that can never be fully resolved. Instead, these questions are the defining puzzles, defeats and triumphs of their lives.

It's a magnificent, sensitive and innovative work of storytelling.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Here’s Every Single Death Linked to Immigration Enforcement Since Trump’s Raids Began in 2025 https://lataco.com/ice-death-tracker

• We only win when we’re singing https://www.absurdintelligence.com/we-only-win-when-were-singing/

• Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible https://nooneshappy.com/article/native-apps-should-be-avoided-whenever-possible/

• The Last Comic https://www.thelastcomic.com

• Heartland Institute Podcast Questions Whether All Americans ‘Should Have the Right to Vote’ https://www.desmog.com/2026/05/05/heartland-institute-limiting-voting-rights-lee-zeldin/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Ebay paying newspapers to run listings in the classifieds section https://web.archive.org/web/20010506063910/http://www.business2.com/news/2001/05/ebaypapers.htm

#20yrsago Airline spoons of the world photo-gallery https://www.flickr.com/photos/airlinespoons

#20yrsago Coach passengers arrested for moving to first class http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/4980364.stm

#15yrsago Hidden cognitive costs of doing stuff https://web.archive.org/web/20110507154653/https://us.lifehacker.com/5798202/the-cognitive-cost-of-doing-things

#15yrsago Syria’s man-in-the-middle attack on Facebook https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/syrian-man-middle-against-facebook

#10yrsago Weird erotica author who was dragged into Hugo Awards mess pulls off epic troll https://web.archive.org/web/20160506175535/http://www.dailydot.com/lol/chuck-tingle-trolling-hugo-zoe-quinn-genius/

#10yrsago FBI has been harassing a Tor developer since 2015, won’t tell her or her lawyer why https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/fbi-harassment.html

#10yrsago 2,000 US doctors endorse Sanders’ single-payer healthcare proposal https://web.archive.org/web/20160506095034/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/05/2000-doctors-say-bernie-sanders-has-the-right-approach-to-health-care/

#10yrsago Community college evicts daycare center to make room for Goldman Sachs https://www.golocalprov.com/news/daycare-center-being-moved-out-of-ccri-for-goldman-sachs

#10yrsago Data-driven look at America’s brutal, racist debt-collection machine https://www.propublica.org/article/so-sue-them-what-weve-learned-about-the-debt-collection-lawsuit-machine

#10yrsago Homeland Security wants to subpoena Techdirt over the identity of a hyperbolic commenter https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/06/homeland-security-wants-to-subpoena-us-over-clearly-hyperbolic-techdirt-comment/

#5yrsago NY AG attributes Net Neutrality fraud to telcos https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

#5yrsago Ed-tech apps spy on kids https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#i-spy

#5yrsago Scammers recycled covid nose-swabs https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#up-your-nose

#1yrago The Adventures of Mary Darling https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/06/nevereverland/#lesser-ormond-street

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Guelph: Musagetes Lecture, May 8
  https://riverrun.ca/whats-on/guelph-lecture-on-being-2026/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/

• Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe": How Disney killed the movies and took over the world.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Zappa v censorship; Chemistry set with no chemicals; Short cons; Mitsubishi's Dieselgate; "Bellwether."
• Upcoming appearances: Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe" (permalink)

Vicky Osterweil's The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World makes the kind of long, polemical, startling and illuminating argument that defines great cultural criticism; it's the sort of book that encapsulates the reasons I read criticism in the first place:

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2525-the-extended-universe

My first brush with this kind of criticism came more than two decades ago, when I read John Kessel's now-classic "Creating the Innocent Killer," a critique of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a book I had read and enjoyed enough to re-read several times:

https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating-the-innocent-killer

Kessel's argument is that Card used Ender's Game to smuggle in some very ugly ideas, wrapped in a story that was compelling, even exhilarating. In Ender's Game, we meet Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a small, physically weak boy possessed of a prodigious intellect and a great deal of sensitivity and empathy. Ender is tormented by an escalating series of aggressors, whom he retaliates against with overwhelming force, first to the point of lethality and then all the way to literal genocide. And here's where Card makes his move: Ender's sensitivity and empathy and intellect tell him that he must respond this way, because he can tell that his aggressors will not back off from their intention to harm him; and because Ender is so small and weak, he has to use whatever tactic his brilliant mind can devise, and if that tactic results in the death penalty for mere bullying, well, that's the bully's fault, not Ender's. Indeed, in dying at Ender's hands, these bullies re-victimize Ender, because Ender is a gentle, smart, wise, weak person, and these inescapable murders that he is goaded into committing are a stain on his soul that he can never wash away.

Before reading "Creating the Innocent Killer," I confess I didn't really understand what criticism was for. Like many people, I conflated "criticism" with "reviews," thinking of critical works as a species of inconveniently difficult-to-digest essays that might help me figure out which books to read and which movies to see.

Kessel's magnificent essay changed all that, and not in spite of the fact that Kessel had pointed out some very important problems with a book that I loved, but because of that fact. In helping me understand the ugliness hidden within something whose beauty and virtues I saw very clearly, Kessel taught me more about myself – about where my aesthetics and my values overlapped, and where they diverged. It was literally life-changing.

Like Kessel, Osterweil's 'Extended Universe' deals with media that I have a great deal of affection for – the products of the Walt Disney Company. Though I'm primarily interested in theme parks – I love a big, ambitious built environment of any description and Disney pursues these with a seriousness that few others can touch – the Disney films (and the films of the studios Disney purchased, like Marvel and Lucasfilm) are obviously intimately bound up in those theme park designs.

Osterweil has her own ambivalent affection for these movies. Like so many of us, she's been raised on them, and they've shaped how she sees the world and its stories. But – like me – Osterweil is deeply suspicious of capitalism, American imperialism, and the notion of "intellectual property," and she uses reviews of a dozen Disney films to make the case that Walt Disney and the studio he founded with his brother are standards-bearers for these odious forces, and not just in the overt ways that might immediately spring to mind, but also in subtle ways that can be teased out of a close reading of the films.

In so doing, Osterweil also makes a sharp and well-argued case that intellectual property, colonialism and racial oppression are all facets of the same drive, the drive of people who fancy themselves born to rule to dominate others, which requires that those others also be dehumanized and their work denigrated. When Walt Disney insisted that his be the only name associated with "his" movies, he was playing out the same logic that underpinned his virulent opposition to labor unions and his participation in American imperialism in Latin America.

As with Kessel, Osterweil's argument is full of surprises and illuminations that are especially vivid for those of us who have great affection for these works. As her chapter on Black Panther shows, this contradiction need not go unresolved. There is plenty of scope for fans to seize the reins of the narrative (and as her chapter on the reactionary backlash to the later Star Wars movies shows, it's not just the forces of progress and anti-racism who can pull off this move).

Like the very best criticism, Osterweil's book is more than a way to deepen your understanding of the material she dissects – it's a way to deepen your understanding of the world that produced it, and to deepen your understanding of yourself.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• BRIEF OF PENN & TELLER AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONER https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-6774/400679/20260312113948009_25-6774%20Penn%20and%20Teller%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf

• Zack Polanski calls for Trump to be 'kicked out' of his Scottish golf courses https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8954xe8yjpo

• Uncovering Global Telecom Exploitation by Covert Surveillance Actors https://citizenlab.ca/research/uncovering-global-telecom-exploitation-by-covert-surveillance-actors/

• What's Missing in the 'Agentic' Story https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/04/24/agents_as_collective_bargains

• Licensed to Loot https://static1.squarespace.com/static/65c9daef199ea70aa66592fe/t/69e7b2f2949631007bb3d969/1776792306864/Licenced+to+loot+AI+Data+Centre+Report.pdf

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Frank Zappa’s anti-censorship letter https://www.flickr.com/photos/mudshark/117551768/in/set-72057594090059726/

#15yrsago Chemistry kit with no chemicals https://web.archive.org/web/20110427212354/http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/chemistry-set-boasts-no-chemicals.html

#15yrsago Russian corruption: crooked officials steal multi-billion-dollar company, $230M tax refund, then murder campaigning lawyer https://web.archive.org/web/20110426045152/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/20/russia_s_crime_of_the_century?

#15yrsago Golden-age short-change cons https://web.archive.org/web/20110429014539/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2011/04/26/tricks-of-short-change-artists/

#10yrsago Campaigners search Londoners’ phones to help them understand the Snoopers Charter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szN7DlmMLYg

#10yrsago Mitsubishi’s dieselgate: cheating since 1991 https://web.archive.org/web/20160427145038/https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mitsubishi-cheated-fuel-economy-tests-since-1991/#ftag=CAD590a51e

#10yrsago Bellwether: Connie Willis’s classic, hilarious novel about the science of trendiness https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/26/bellwether-connie-williss-classic-hilarious-novel-about-the-science-of-trendiness/

#5yrsago The Big U https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/26/moolah-boolah/#poison-ivies

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyebuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance": A tour-de-force, a magnum opus, a work of utter brilliance.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Gloating about the dot-bomb; RIAA sues PC-less family; John Deere v infosec; Foxconn v Wisconsin; Copyfraud x torturers' reputations; "Careless People."
• Upcoming appearances: London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (permalink)

Ada Palmer may just be the most bewilderingly talented person I know: a genius sf writer, incredible librettist and singer, wildly innovative educator, and a leading historian of the Renaissance, and last year, she published her magnum opus, Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning book about so much more than history:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135916.html

All of my friends seem to be writing their magnum opuses these days! When (modern) historian Rick Perlstein and I did an event last year for my Enshittification tour, he told me he'd just finished his 1,000 page (ish? I may be misremembering slightly) history of the American conservative movement. And I recently had dinner with China Mieville, who told me he'd just turned in the manuscript for a novel he'd been trying to figure out how to write all his life.

I can't wait to read these books! And I couldn't wait to read Inventing the Renaissance, and I would have been much quicker off the mark but for the exigencies of book tours and books due and so on – but I've been reading it for the past two months or so, and I think I've pitched it about a hundred times to strangers and friends as I savored it, because it's just that good.

Inventing the Renaissance isn't a work of history, it's a work of "historiography" – the study of how histories get written and rewritten. Palmer's point here isn't to make us merely understand the Renaissance – she wants us to understand how the idea of a Renaissance, a rebirth out of a "dark age" into a "golden age" – has been used, abused, created and demolished, for centuries and centuries, including during the centuries when the Renaissance was actually underway.

Palmer teaches Renaissance history at the University of Chicago, where she is legendary for a unique annual pedagogical exercise in which she leads her students through a weeks-long live-action role-playing game that re-enacts the election of the Medicis' Pope. Every student is given a detailed biography of their character's position, goals, proclivities and history, and for weeks, the students scheme, ally, betray and assassinate each other. At the climax, the students take over the university's faux-Gothic cathedral, dressed in Renaissance drag (Palmer has a Google alert for theater companies that are selling off their costumes, and her tiny office at the university overflows with racks of cardinals' robes and other period garb), and they invest a Pope:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

This exercise is nothing short of genius, and the students who experience it often report that it is life-changing. That's because the final candidates are never quite the same, nor are the cardinals who cast votes for the winner. And yet, there are certain bedrocks that never shift, including the fact that Italy is always invaded by some of the factions involved in the election, though which cities burn also changes.

The point of this exercise is to expose the students to the power and limits of both "great historical forces" and the human agency that every one of us has within the envelope defined by those forces. Palmer wants her students to get a bone-deep understanding that while every moment has great forces bearing down on it, that the people of each moment have an enormous amount of leeway to channel the floodwaters that history will unleash. From the servant who bears a message from one great power to another, up to those great powers themselves, each person guides the course of history, even if they can't halt some of its outcomes.

Though Palmer unpacks this exercise and its meaning and results in the final part of her magnum opus, this message about forces and people is really the key to her historiography. She develops these themes in the most charming, accessible manner imaginable, weaving her own journey into history with her accounts of how different eras consciously created and deployed the idea of "the Renaissance" and how these ideas were bolstered, undermined, or ultimately demolished by new evidence. You could not ask for a better account of why there is not, and can never be, a single, canonical "history" of an era or a moment. There will always be multiple histories, overlapping each other, warring with one another, supplanting each other, or being revived as "lost" histories that reveal a truth that "they" have buried.

This is such an ambitious book, and the ambition pays off in so many ways. Take the book's structure: there's a long middle section in which Palmer describes how more than a dozen figures from the Renaissance experienced their era, with many overlapping events and timelines. Palmer's sensitive, beautifully researched and written accounts of the lives of these figures – highborn and lowly, sinister and virtuous – highlights the contradictions of this centuries-long "moment" we call "the Renaissance" and shows us how those contradictions can't ever be resolved, only acknowledged and understood.

This is Palmer the novelist, blending seamlessly with Palmer the historian. Palmer is a close literary – and personal – ally of the equally brilliant sf/fantasy writer Jo Walton, whose work has mined classical and Renaissance history to great effect since she and Palmer struck up their friendship. First, there were Walton's "Philosopher Kings" books, a three-book long thought experiment in which every person of every era who ever dreamed of living in Plato's Republic is brought through time and space to the doomed volcanic island that will someday give rise to the story of Atlantis, to try out Plato's ideal society for real:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/13/jo-waltons-the-just-city/

Then there was Lent, Walton's story of the fanatical reformer Savonarola, who is forced to re-live his life over and over, with breaks in hell where he is tormented by his failure:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190516170659/https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-jo-walton-lent-20190516-story.html

And this June, she'll bring out Everybody's Perfect, a novel that uses Palmer's trick of telling a story from many viewpoint characters, each of whom perceives the events so differently that their versions can't really be reconciled, except by understanding that there is no one history and there cannot be one history. There are only the histories, ever changing. The omnipotent third person narrator is a lie. I don't know if Palmer got this idea from Walton, or if Walton was inspired by Palmer, but it is a wonderful living example of how intellectual and creative movements (like those that are attributed to the Renaissance) feed one another.

One of Palmer's areas of specialty is free speech and censorship. Along with Adrian Johns, we co-taught a grad seminar called "Censorship, Information Control, and Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet" that connected Ada's work to the current battles over online speech:

https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/research/censorship-information-control-and-information-revolutions-from-printing-press-to-internet

Palmer wants us to understand that the majority of censorship is self-censorship – that the Inquisition could only intervene in a tiny minority of cases of prohibited thought and word, and they had to rely on key people – printers, for example – anticipating the Inquisitors' tastes and limiting their speech without an Inquisitorial edict (if this seems relevant to the Trump administration's "war on woke," then you're clearly paying attention):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

Those correspondences between the deep historical record and our current moment make Inventing the Renaissance extremely important and timely – a book hundreds of years in the making, and bang up to date.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Coyote vs. ACME | Official Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-43VeYGiPM

• From the Jew Bill to the Mamdani Act https://coreyrobin.com/2026/04/22/from-the-jew-bill-to-the-mamdani-act/

• This Alberta Startup Sells No-Tech Tractors for Half Price https://wheelfront.com/this-alberta-startup-sells-no-tech-tractors-for-half-price/

• Half of AI health answers are wrong even though they sound convincing https://theconversation.com/half-of-ai-health-answers-are-wrong-even-though-they-sound-convincing-new-study-280512

• Emails show Amazon colluding with other firms to raise prices, California authorities allege https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/20/amazon-sellers-price-raises-california

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Gloating NYT editorial about the dotcom crash https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/23/opinion/editorial-observer-after-the-fall-the-new-economy-goes-retro.html

#20yrsago RIAA sues family that doesn’t own a PC https://www.techshout.com/riaa-sues-local-family-without-computer-for-illegal-music-file-sharing/

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright troll loses domain https://web.archive.org/web/20110425035158/http://www.domainnamenews.com/legal-issues/righthavencom-invalid-whois/9232

#15yrsago Steampunk Venetian mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/160226.html

#5yrsago John Deere's dismal infosec https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

#5yrsago Foxconn's Wisconsin death-rattle https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#monorail

#5yrsago Laundering torturers' reputations with copyfraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

#1yrago Sarah Wynn-Williams's 'Careless People' https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyebuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton
  (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

• Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed": A rocket exploding in a human face, forever.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Is sugar poison? More watch-part motorcycles; "Something New"; "Seeds"; Bulldozer fight; Facebook tonsils; Against transparency.
• Upcoming appearances: San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed" (permalink)

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed seeks to describe the ideology that gave rise to Elon Musk, the social forces that gave rise to that ideology, and the terrible future that ideology seeks to bring about:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/muskism-quinn-slobodianben-tarnoff?variant=43838135402530

The book's starting point is that "Muskism" isn't merely the things Musk says, believes and does. It's the ideology that coalesces around him, from the people in his wake and the people he follows. Just as Henry Ford neither defined "Fordism" nor precisely practiced it, "Muskism" is centered on Elon Musk, but it's not Elon Musk's creation.

So what is Muskism? To answer this question, Slobodian and Tarnoff enumerate the factors and influences that produced Musk himself. There's apartheid, with its "rational" system of technocratic authoritarianism, which blended together a life of luxury and plenty (for white settlers), brutal surveillance and state violence (for the Black majority) and fascist control over speech (for everyone), combined with a meat-grinder draft that saw young men of Musk's age being called up to suppress liberation uprisings.

Peak apartheid coincided with peak personal computing, the moment where PCs (and then, modems) were getting cheaper and faster, propagating like mushrooms, offering a young Musk access to a broad world outside of the fascist bubble of South Africa, inspiring global ambitions in Musk.

Closer to home, there's Musk's family: his grandfather, a grandiose and vicious white supremacist who moved to South Africa from Canada because of his love for apartheid and racial hierarchy. There's Musk's father, a violent and abusive fool.

Muskism is also a new variant on techno-libertarianism. Traditional techno-libertarianism seeks to dismantle the state – or better yet, exit from the state, in the manner of an Ayn Rand hero. Techno-libertarianism is intimately bound up with settler colonialism, ever on the hunt for an "empty land" (terra nullius) that can be settled without committing the original sin of expropriation, the gravest offense in a religion organized around the total sanctity of private property:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

Muskism doesn't seek to exit the state, it seeks to colonize and control it. Long before DOGE, Musk was playing the organs of the state to his own tune, securing massive contracts and subsidies for his solar and rocketry businesses, relying on the massive, deep-pocketed government to keep his businesses afloat.

Obviously (DOGE!), Muskism also seeks to dismantle the state, but only the parts of it that can be transferred to Musk's own private hands. Muskism is about big government…for Musk, but not for you. It embodies that important conservative value summarized in Wilhoit's Law:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

This is Musk through and through – a man who demands the right to call innocent strangers "pedo guy" without legal consequence; and also wields the power of the state to shutter businesses that boycott his platform because of its shitty practices:

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/courtside/elon-musk-sues-advertisers-who-boycott-x-under-anti-trust-laws/

Musk grew up on science fiction novels and weaves stfnal tropes through his offerings (for example, calling his chatbot "Grok"). There's no shortage of reactionary politics in science fiction, but Musk doesn't confine his sf-inspired cosmology to reactionary literature. He's famously very fond of the Wachowskis' "Matrix" movies, and leans heavily into the metaphor of the Matrix in explaining his interest in wiring people directly into computers, in characterizing opposing political beliefs as "mind viruses," and in calling his political enemies "NPCs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

But Musk's relationship to this metaphor differs in a subtle and important way from the right's "Red Pill" rhetoric. Musk doesn't want to break out of the Matrix – he wants to control the Matrix. He wants to decide which opinions you're allowed to see and discuss (because "most people have weak firewalls for bad ideas"), he wants to beam ideas directly into your neural link, and he wants to abolish any form of workplace democracy, conquering the world with South African baasskap (boss-ism):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baasskap

Throughout this slim volume, Slobodian and Tarnoff tease these strains of thought out of Musk's deeds and utterances, and in the systems that he has built or colonized through acquisition. The authors are offering more than a psychoanalysis, though – they're surfacing the material basis for Muskism, the benefits it delivers to its adherents, and the victories it has racked up.

They reveal the method in Musk's chaotic and bullying management style, and recount the times Musk has successfully shattered sclerotic processes to make real breakthroughs, especially in aerospace. You'd be hard pressed to read these passages without feeling some grudging admiration.

Muskism gets stuff done…sometimes. At a cost. A high cost. Tarnoff and Slobodian count that cost, identify who pays it, and conjure up the world in which those costs continue to mount for all of us.

It's a chilling vision, a Torment Nexus dystopia run by someone who thinks cyberpunk was a suggestion, not a warning.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Move Slow and Upgrade https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/move-slow-and-upgrade/93EAB1B110C5AD50D2395B149DF98EC6

• Union Now Fund https://secure.actblue.com/donate/unionnow

• On Dangerous Rhetoric https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/monologue-on-dangerous-rhetoric

• What Did I Learn from Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler? https://theofficialacm.substack.com/p/what-did-i-learn-from-running-the

• Happy Tax Day, New York. We're taxing the rich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLKZnVB4F9k

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Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago US, EU want to delay copyright treaty to help blind people for 3-5 years https://web.archive.org/web/20110423170607/http://keionline.org/node/1114

#15yrsago Is sugar a poison? https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

#15yrsago More watch-part motorcycles https://ummaisoumenos.blogspot.com/2008/11/miniaturas-fantsticasbikesfeitas-de.html

#15yrsago Seeds: comic-book memoir of father’s cancer is moving, sweet https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/19/seeds-comic-book-memoir-of-fathers-cancer-is-moving-sweet/

#10yrsago Something New: frank, comedic, romantic memoir of a wedding in comic form https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/19/something-new-frank-comedic-romantic-memoir-of-a-wedding-in-comic-form/

#10yrsago Ben and Jerry arrested at Democracy Spring demonstration in DC https://web.archive.org/web/20160419173913/https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/co-founders-of-ben-and-jerrys-arrested-at-us-capitol/ar-BBrW5tb?li=BBnb7Kz

#10yrsago Competing construction companies stage a bulldozer fight in a busy street https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrtnIImGipg

#10yrsago Chicago Police Accountability Task Force Report: racism, corruption, and a “broken system” https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Final_Report_4_13_16-1.pdf

#5yrsago Facebook's tonsils https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/19/tonsilitis/#mod-traum

#1yrago Against transparency https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/19/gotcha/#known-to-the-state-of-california-to-cause-cancer

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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Bill Moran and Bob Loveless are the most influential knifemakers in the modern era. They were two key figures in the rise of custom knifemaking, which began in 1970 with the formation of the Knifemakers Guild. Both predated the Guild and had fully formed philosophies on knifemaking before its formation. There are an impressive number of dichotomies between Loveless and Moran. For two men who were influential in a similar time period for making the same product – knives – they had surprisingly different philosophies. Both men served as president of the Knifemakers Guild in the early years: Moran from 1972-1973, and Loveless from 1971-1972 and again from 1973-1974. B.R. Hughes wrote about the two knifemakers in 1986 [1]:

Future knife historians should be aware that Loveless and Moran had little in common. Loveless was an advocate of the stock removal method of making knives using stain-resistant steels, while Moran was a champion of the traditional forged blade. There were other, deeper differences. Loveless felt that quality should not be a condition of membership and that requirements should be as loose as possible to encourage new members. Moran was of the opinion that the Guild should have moderately strict guidelines and that members should be responsible to the Guild for unethical behavior… Be that as it may, the two, not friends by any means, ‘buried the hatchet,’ at least publicly, for the welfare of the Guild.

But looking at Moran and Loveless and how they viewed knifemaking is not only of historical interest. The arguments they were making decades ago are similar to those you can still find between some forging bladesmiths and stock removal knifemakers. And while they weren’t the only knifemakers making those arguments back then, they were two of the most influential voices. So it is valuable to examine the origins of these arguments to understand why some knifemakers still can’t agree.

Moran and Studying the Ancients

Moran was splitting time between a dairy farm and knifemaking from the 1940s. Moran found the book Bowie Knife, published by Raymond Thorp in 1948. Moran recalled [2]: “I must have read that book at least fifty times, and it certainly had a tremendous impact on me. It was during this same period that I began to attend gun shows in the Baltimore area. I was the only knifemaker who exhibited at these shows… People would stop at my table at a gun show back in the 50s and they would like my work, but when they discovered that I wanted $15 or so for a knife, they’d almost run away!” He sold the farm in 1960 and built a new shop, going full time as a knifemaker. Moran emphasized in his 1960 catalog how the study of ancient blades was key to his methods [2]:

I am the only maker of classical ancient blades… I do not make any wild claims that these knives can be used for cutting bolts or metal as a test of the knife’s quality. Moran Knives have long been acclaimed by many leading authorities as being the finest made today. They are probably the most expensive knives made because of the painstaking craftsmanship that goes into them. However, this results in a superior quality that one is unable to obtain in any other way. These knives will be collector items of future years… To my knowledge these knives are the only ones made today that are completely hand forged, hand tempered, and handmade in every respect… An immense amount of research and study of blades and forging techniques from ancient times until today has been required… The tempering process alone can only be learned by many years’ experience. This technique is the same as that used by the blade smiths of the seventeenth century. It was this tempering that enabled those blades to withstand such severe strain in combat.

Moran believed that ancient blades were better than modern knives, which is why he attempted to learn from them, as he said in his 1975 catalog [2]:

We must remember that the finest blades which have ever been made were developed at a time when one’s life depended on his blade. Anyone who does not believe this is true should make a study of ancient blades. It soon would be apparent to them that these were the finest ever made. I have tried to follow the methods and techniques used by the ancient smiths. These methods have worked out quite well for me. In all the years I have been making knives I have never had one returned with a broken blade.

Early Moran Knives. Weyer photo.

Moran Steel Choices

When it came to steel choices, Moran also believed that simpler was better, as he said in 1975 [2]:

Today, we hear a great deal about new and super steels. In over 30 years that I have been engaged in knife making, I have of course tried most all of the steels available in search of a superior steel. It is true that the corrosion resistant steels of today are far superior to the old stainless steels, but, what most people do not realize is that these steels were designed to hold their hardness at a high degree of heat. This of course, is unnecessary in a knife. Most of the high alloy steels have 12 to 18 percent chrome. This is a very definite drawback to good edge-holding qualities. It is true that this steel does have some advantages, such as being corrosion resistant, and this can be important to some people who do not have the time to wipe and oil their blade… Any steel manufacturer will tell you not to use the complex high alloy steels unless you need tools that allow you to cut under high heat, etc. For most tools and especially knife blades, one should stick to the high grade carbon steels. I myself, have found after 30 years of experimentation that the steel with the best all around qualities for a blade is in the straight carbon range. The high alloy steels have far more drawbacks than they have advantages.

Moran’s Differential Heat Treatments

Moran would heat treat his blades to have a hard edge but a “spring” tempered spine and soft tang. In 1960 he said [2] that this gave the blades “a combination of strength and edge holding quality that is unattainable from production made blades.” Again he made an appeal to ancient techniques [3]: “Of course this was a method used hundreds of years ago – especially in Europe – to make a better blade.”

Moran and Forging

Of course Bill Moran was famous for promoting forged blades. He believed that this was an important part of the ancient process, and claimed that it led to improved performance. In 1950 he said [2]: “The bar of steel is heated in a specially designed field stone forge … and forged by hand on the anvil. Every blade is heated and reheated, then forged dozens of times before the forging operation is finished. This hand forging greatly improves the quality of the blade.”

Moran believed that the performance improvement was due in part to the (now discredited) technique of “packing” as he said in 1975 [2]: “I use a technique known as hammer hardening or packing. This is an important step that unfortunately is understood by only a few smith’s. After the blade is forged almost to the finished shape, the blade is then hammered at a rather low heat with rapid, light blows. This causes the grain to be better aligned and the steel to be far more compact. This should only be attempted by a smith with a great deal of experience.” While “packing of molecules” is rarely claimed by bladesmiths anymore (iron atoms cannot be forced closer together), there are some that still perform cold or warm forging techniques for other purposes, so this could just be a case where Moran did not understand the metallurgy though there can be small benefits to the technique anyway.

Moran bowie. Weyer photo.

Moran and the Reintroduction of Pattern-Welded Damascus

Moran popularized pattern-welded Damascus in the early 1970s. This was due to his studies of ancient blades [4]: “Ever since I can remember, I, like all who love fine blades, have been fascinated with the beautiful Damascus blade. Many legends abound throughout history pertaining to the wonderful quality of these remarkable blades. After years of study and research, I felt I would like to try making them.” Moran would claim that Damascus blades had better properties [5]:

No one was more surprised than I, when I found this steel did have most unusual qualities. I found these blades could be left as-quenched and still have good flexibility, they also would hold a very good edge. Indeed I am now convinced that many of the old legends concerning these blades are true. These blades were far superior to any other blade because of the hundreds of alternating layers of iron and steel. The principle is the same as plywood or the laminated bow. I am now convinced that Damascus blades stopped being made so long ago for the same reason the wonderful composite bows of the Turks died out; that reason being they were so terribly difficult to make and after the fall of the Saracen empire, man went back to the self-bow which was made from a single piece of wood. The same being true for the Damascus blade; it was so much easier to make a blade from a single piece of steel.

Moran presented his first Damascus blades at the 1973 Knifemakers’ Guild Show in Kansas City. Knifemakers and collectors alike were very impressed. Butch Winter wrote [6]: “In those days the Guild Show crowds weren’t that big. There were a few people looking at Moran’s knives but they more or less were agog and didn’t understand what he’d done. The other makers were saying, ‘I wish I could do that,’ or ‘How’d he do that?'” Moran said that pattern-welded Damascus was key to bringing back forging and making his business sustainable [7]:

[T]he first year I showed my Damascus blades in Kansas City, I took in the most money I had ever made at any one show. For the first time, it occurred to me that it just might be possible to earn a decent living making knives. However, making Damascus cut my production by about two-thirds, and as I get older, it seems that I can’t make knives as quickly as I once did, and I was never a very fast bladesmith.”

Early 1970s Moran Damascus dagger. Weyer photo.

Loveless and Knife Design

Bob Loveless first attempted making knives after reading an article about Randall knives in 1953. He tried to buy one from Abercrombie & Fitch (then a sporting goods store) but the salesperson was rude and said it would be many months to be able to purchase one. Loveless made his own knife and returned to Abercrombie to show the rude sales clerk. He found instead that the clerk had been fired, but the floor manager was impressed with his knife and began ordering dozens of them.

Loveless is perhaps best known for his unique design sense. However, early on his knives looked a lot like Randall’s [8]:

[My first knives] looked a lot like knives that Bo Randall produced. The knives all had narrow tangs, single guards, leather washer handles with finger grooves and an aluminum pommel. Looking back, there is really no comparison between what we produce now and those early knives. They might have been good, solid edged tools, but they were lacking in aesthetics. Thankfully, over the years I’ve been able to break out of that early mold and create knives that not only are functional, but also look good.

Early Loveless knives. Weyer photos.

Loveless felt that first the knife must look good, and then when the customer picks it up it has to feel good [9]:

Eye appeal is the very first thing – it has a bearing on whether or not the knife will be accepted… If it is not appealing to the eye, then the prospect won‘t pick it up. If he doesn’t pick it up – you’re lost. But for the intelligent outdoorsman, you have got to get him to pick up the knife.

A knife must feel good in a man’s hand. Whether we realize it or not, our sense of touch is very critical to us. We get a lot of our input from our fingertips … it has to feel good … since we are directing our effort to the user’s hand primarily … it’s important to the knifemaker to understand the function of the hand… The knife designer, if he’s good, realizes that the human hand defines everything from the guard on back, in his work.

Loveless believed that having real experience was important to designing his knives [10]:

Unless you’ve had field experience, you can’t make hunting knives. I see knives with cutting edges that are too thick. With blades that are too long… With awkward and ill-shaped handles. Too many knife makers don’t understand their own hand. Their knives are not user friendly. You can’t teach a guy to make a good hunting knife if he’s never been in the woods, shot a deer, and been up to his elbows in deer guts. It’s like giving a typewriter to a man who is illiterate.

Loveless’s more developed style. Weyer photo.

Loveless and Steel

Loveless saw his process as iterating and improving to develop a knife that was better than any before it [10]:

Knife making can be thought of as an endless chase after perfection in design and execution – an ongoing pursuit of better steels and materials, and, of course, of working hard enough and being lucky enough to realize the measure of success that will give us a decent living. Some of us keep at it, often working long hours into the night after the demands of a regular day job. Sometimes, it becomes too much and we drop out. Yet it keeps calling us back – perhaps later when we can afford a better shop – to try again.

Loveless did not believe in forging of blades, and performed stock removal instead [8]:

I had no idea that flat stock in the steel of my choice (Jessop 139B) was available. When I ran out of steel, I contacted the manufacturer. The woman who answered the telephone suggested that I try their flat stock. I realized right then and there that I’d forged my last knife. Her suggestion was what you might call “a light bulb moment.” When that light came on in my head, I realized that there was no point in beating a piece of round steel stock flat, when you can buy it flat already. No matter what the forging community believes, you can’t improve a piece of steel by heating and beating on it.

While Moran used very simple steels, Loveless was looking for a modern alloy that would enhance performance. Loveless had started with a high nickel steel, Jessop 139B, relatively similar to 15N20 with 2.5% nickel. He liked the steel for its high toughness and found the nickel to improve the corrosion resistance. Next he tried the high silicon shock resisting steel S5 because it had a very high toughness rating according to the steel information he managed to find. The S5 made good knives with excellent toughness and good edge holding but he had issues with sudden fractures in the knives because of the fast brine quenching specified by the datasheet [11]:

S5 has almost 2% Si and 1% Mn, and when everything went just right, we got some very fine working knives out of it. Very high toughness of course, but also very good edge holding. But it was a Brine-quenching steel, and with S5 two problems were never licked: sudden, brittle fracture during testing, and rusting that seemed to pop out of the blade before my eyes. The brittle fracture just shouldn’t have happened, and two out of three times it didn’t. But the third time, I would put knife after knife in the vise for a simple bending test, and watch the damned things bust with very small bends. I hollered at metallurgists, kicked the dog, my kids wouldn’t bring me their report cards, my internist was pulling his hair, and my Old Lady was making me eat out in the shop.

Loveless even managed to request a “special modified melt of slightly different Silico-Manganese Shock steel” [11]. But he still had issues with the knives fracturing because of the severe brine quenching [6]:

I’d end up mumbling to myself, watching the moon go down and the sun come up trying to figure out what was going wrong. Never did, either. So I have a bad taste in my mouth over this kind of steel, which has been recognized for years as the best stuff to make chisels out of…the properties of the Shock steels intrigued me, and still do. But there was the rusting, and I got tired of having to hone my knife everytime I started out hunting, so I began wondering about things like that.

Loveless made a wish list of his ideal steel and eventually found it in 154CM stainless steel, as he wrote in his 1972 catalog:

So all during those years I was building in my mind a picture of what the perfect Loveless Knife steel would be, and what it would offer: working hardness exceeding Rc 62, working ductility and toughness at that hardness, and finally rust-resistance equal to the usual Knifemaker’s 440C, which I had tried but rejected due to poor edge-holding. During the summer of 1971, I learned of a steel made by a leading Tool Steel producer in the East (Crucible). They had developed it for service in the high-temperature regions of the fan-jet engines on the 747 aircraft, and it was alloyed to hold strength at 700 deg. F. My examination of the alloying, and a study of the heat-treating procedures suggested by the maker, led me to think it might be a candidate for fine hunting knives.

I ordered a quantity of 500-lbs, which was delivered in August. Test knives were made immediately, and placed in the hands of friends here in the West and in Canada, and I began hearing from these men, all critical knife users, within two weeks, with their comments. Previously knife buyers had to make a choice when they ordered a knife. The knifemakers, this one included, could offer edge-holding, or rust-resistance, but not both qualities, in the same knife. Typically, those of us who valued field performance preferred to make our knives from one of the better medium or high-carbon Tool Steels, in the judgment that edge-holding was the main reason for the existence of the benchmade knife. But two things were immediately apparent, in the letters commenting on the new knives. First, they did hold their edge, better than did my previous alloy. And second, they didn’t rust, in normal service, even if not cleaned up right away. We had to unlearn some things, and learn some new things, in the way of Shop practice, in making these new knives. But it was soon quite apparent that we had found a new kind of steel, and that this new steel was yielding the results I had been looking for. Knives made from Grade 154CM are indeed fine working knives… Exposure to blood acids in big game stains the blade slightly, if anything, but badly-pitted blades just don’t happen, and even the staining is rare. And the cutting edge holds up better than did the older Silico-Manganese Alloy knives. Blades are put in service at a working hardness of Rc 62-64, and are quite ductile and tough at that hardness… All Loveless Knives made since September of 1971 are of this fine new steel. We have almost 300 knives in the field now, and the results have exceeded my early hopes. The 154CM Alloy has brought new and better quality to Loveless Knives, and it’s the kind of steel I had hoped to find for years.

Weyer photo.

154CM and the Japanese version ATS-34 would become a standard for stock removal makers for decades (and is still used by companies like Emerson). Knifemakers also continue to use CPM-154 and RWL-34 (The RWL stands for Robert W. Loveless). Loveless enjoyed learning about steel and metallurgy. He wrote [11] that his copy of Tool Steels by Roberts, Hamaker, and Johnson was “well-thumbed and beloved.” Loveless wrote an article about metallurgy in 1975 which wasn’t too bad (according to this PhD metallurgist) [11]:

Eight thousand words or so ago, I set out to tell you something about steel, and knifemaking. Whether I succeeded or not is up to you, and how hard you want to work at knowing the world of fine knives. You won’t learn it all from an article, and may never learn it all in one lifetime for all I can see. But that’s what makes it interesting, even challenging, and yes … fun. There’s a little more to it than you thought there was. Right?

Loveless did not believe in “secret” heat treatments, in his article about heat treating he described his process and said sarcastically [11]: “[I]f you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind closed doors at the dark of the moon get ready!” He used modern heat treating methods rather than a forge or torch. He laid out his heat treatment steps for 154CM including a furnace, a cold treatment, and multiple tempers. He summarized the process afterward [11]: “If there’s any ‘secret’ to making knives like this, I’ve given it above, and I encourage you to try for the same results.”

Tradition vs Modernism Continues to This Day

Loveless and Moran seemed to disagree in almost every possible way. However, their fundamental philosophical differences seem to come down to tradition vs modernism. Moran found inspiration in ancient blades and thought that the secrets to superior blades was in the study of those blades. Loveless felt that through iterative design improvements and the use of new steels developed by modern science that superior performance could be obtained. Of course, this is somewhat simplistic. Moran developed new techniques and designs himself, and Loveless said that his tapered tangs could be found on blades from the 1800s.

Moran would take his love for the forged blade and found the American Bladesmith Society in 1976 along with Don Hastings, Bill Bagwell, and B.R. Hughes. This organization continues to this day and has continued to have a strong influence on those that forge blades. It remains relatively uncommon for bladesmiths to forge stainless and high alloy tool steels. While it is true that those steels are more difficult to forge, this is not the only reason why they remain uncommon. After all, it is also more difficult to use these steels with stock removal techniques but they are used much more frequently by those makers. The ABS founders did not believe that new steels were better, as Bill Bagwell said [12]:

Frequently, I note in some bit of literature that so-and-so is using a fantastic jet-age steel for his blades. Frankly, just because a given steel is great when used for the turbines of jet aircraft engines doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the ultimate cutlery steel. A blade that is forged, however, is made from steel that the smith has in effect manufactured expressly for a knife, and this makes possible the toughest, strongest, most effective cutting edge possible, but at the same time this blade will be relatively easy to sharpen once it gets dull.

The ABS bylaws specified (and continue to specify) that a JS or MS stamp cannot be used on a stainless blade, even if forged [13]. They justified this rule by claiming that stainless steels are inferior [13]:

[T]he Society discourages the continuous use of stainless steel for forging blades unless and until forged stainless steel blades have been proven, to the satisfaction of the Board, capable of being forged into quality blades that will consistently pass the standard ABS cutting and bending tests.

The ABS cutting and bending tests are much easier to pass with simple carbon steels since they require a differential heat treatment, which is difficult to perform with a stainless steel because of its high “hardenability” (air cooling leads to full hardness). It isn’t even possible to pass the Journeyman Smith cutting tests with a stainless steel, as the JS cutting test says that “Only forged blades of homogenous carbon steel are allowed.” I think that san-mai and other laminated type construction are ideal for the ABS bending tests, which would work very well with stainless steels. This would also demonstrate forging skill rather than only heat treating skill. The differential heat treatment can be performed with low alloy steels that have not been forged, so they are not an indicator of forged blade performance but only heat treatment. Stainless san-mai has become much more common over the past 10-15 years (though more commonly it is stainless “sides” with a carbon steel core).

The ABS board also claimed that stainless steels do not benefit from forging like carbon steels do. I have continued to hear this claim from many bladesmiths. B.R. Hughes wrote in 1977 [14]:

440C, D2, and 154CM are all … stain resistant steels, and all three will take and retain an edge for long periods of time even under heavy usage. It was not, incidentally, feasible to attempt to forge such sophisticated steels as those mentioned in the last two paragraphs, and the [common] view that many modern cutlers take of forging may in large measure be due to the fact that a few misguided souls even tried to forge 440C and even D2 by guess and by gosh, and the results were mostly awful.

Of course there have been a few brave bladesmiths who have used stainless steel despite the heavy social pressure of the ABS to avoid it, but they have remained a small number. For those who are brave, I have an article on how to effectively heat treat stainless steels that have been forged.

Nick Rossi knives in forged AEB-L

Another big difference between now and then is that the most common stock removal steels were 440C, D2, and 154CM, as Hughes mentioned. Those steels were very different than simple carbon steels. They have much higher carbide volume and thus higher wear resistance, but toughness is limited from those carbide structures. The chromium carbides were also relatively large which also limited toughness. So these steel choices led to very different properties, on the one end were low wear resistance simple steels with good toughness and ease in sharpening, used primarily by forging bladesmiths. On the other end were steels with high wear resistance and relatively low toughness (and some complained about sharpenability), used primarily by stock removal makers. Things have changed since then, such as the rise in popularity of AEB-L. Ironically, that steel dates back to the late 1960s, before the formation of the Knifemakers Guild, but did not become common in USA custom knives until the 2010s. AEB-L was designed for razors, and it has a much finer microstructure and much higher toughness than grades like 440C, D2, and 154CM. It has a much more similar performance profile to a low alloy steel favored by forging bladesmiths. And of course there are now a wide array of powder metallurgy high alloy and stainless steels available with a wide range of properties at different levels of wear resistance, toughness, and corrosion resistance.

I do think that claims from bladesmiths about the superiority of forged blades have slowed down. It was still relatively common in the 1990s and early 2000s but I don’t see it as much anymore. From my perspective the divide between forging bladesmiths and stock removal makers is smaller than ever. I do not see as much arguing about superiority as happened decades ago. It is most common for knifemakers to choose the method that is most appealing to them without making judgments about superiority (or inferiority) of the other method. So I think that improvement should be celebrated.

More History of Knives and Steel

Did you enjoy learning some history of knifemakers and the steels that they used? Then you will love my book The Story of Knife Steel. It is full of stories direct from the mouths of knifemakers, knife company owners, and metallurgists. Learn the development of steels, how they were introduced to knives, and the development of Damascus patterns and techniques. It is available in PDF, paperback, or hardcover. It is also available as a PDF bundle along with Knife Engineering 2nd edition.

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[1] Hughes, B.R. “The Knifemakers Guild: Beginnings.” Blade Magazine. August 1986.

[2] Hughes, B.R. and C. Houston Price. Master of the Forge, William F. Moran, Jr. and His Classic Blades. 1996.

[3] McEvoy, Harry K. “A living legend in modern cutlery William F. Moran, Jr.” Knife World. February 1979.

[4] Material handed out at the 1973 Knifemakers Guild Show written by Bill Moran.

[5] Moran Knives brochure 1973.

[6] Hughes, B.R. “Happy 25th, Damascus!” Blade Magazine. November 1998.

[7] Hughes, B.R. “William F. Moran Knifemaker Profile.” American Blade Magazine. April 1979.

[8] Hollis, Durwood. Knifemaking with Bob Loveless. 2010.

[9] Spangenberger, Phil. “R.W. Loveless: Leader in the Field.” Guns & Ammo Guidebook to Knives & Edged Weapons. 1974.

[10] Williams, Al and Jim Weyer. Living on the Edge: Logos of the Loveless Legend. 1992.

[11] Loveless, R.W. “Steel and Knives: A Bladesmith’s Bible.” Knife Digest. 1975.

[12] Hughes, B.R. “Interview: Bill Bagwell.” Knife World. February 1978.

[13] https://www.americanbladesmith.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ABS-ByLaws-2-7-2013-Signed.pdf

[14] Hughes, B.R. “Steel.” Knife World. December 1977.

The post Moran vs Loveless – Knife Steel Edition appeared first on Knife Steel Nerds.

Video

There is a video version of the following information:

What is Buderus?

Buderus is a steel mill in Germany. They have several of their own knife steel products, including Nitro-V, Nitro-B, and Nitro-X7. They have also produced a wide range of standard grades, including 1095, 80CrV2, 15N20, and W2.

Buderus was purchased by Bohler-Uddeholm in 2005, which was then purchased by voestalpine in 2007, meaning Buderus was then owned by voestalpine (voestalpine is not supposed to be capitalized) [1]. Buderus was sold by voestlpine at the end of 2024 [2], and that process was completed in February 2025 by Mutares SE &Co. [2]. The previous owner, voestalpine, stated that they were selling Buderus because they were “concentrating its product portfolio on the technologically demanding high performance materials segment, while simultaneously reducing its share of standardized tool steel and high-grade engineering steel production, the price of which is coming under increasing pressure due to greater competition from outside Europe” [3].

At the time of the sale, Buderus had 1,100 employees and units capable of making steel from beginning to end, including melting, casting, forging, hot rolling, and cold rolling [4]. Mutares is a soulless private equity company, so of course, they did not hold on to Buderus for long. They began the process of selling the hot rolling mill and heat treat facility to GMH Gruppe in August 2025 [5]. Mutares also sold the drop forging unit to a subsidiary of itself, FerrAl United Group (no, corporate business doesn’t make sense). Mutares said this would secure 670 jobs for Buderus, and GMH Gruppe said their two units would account for 300 of those 670 employees [6].

What happened to the other ~450 employees? Those were let go because the steelworks was shut down by Mutares [7], meaning no more melting and casting of steel for Buderus. Electric steelmaking was apparently difficult to make profitable in Germany due to high energy costs [8]. We were also told that the cold rolling mill would shut down. Cold rolling allows steel to be rolled down even thinner than a hot rolling mill, and also gives a better surface finish and tolerances.

GMH Gruppe is also a steel company, so they announced [6] that the acquisition of the Buderus hot mill “closes an existing production gap … expanding product range to dimensions of up to 300 mm square. This enables access to new markets – including those beyond the traditional passenger-car combustion-engine segment.” With the steelworks shut down Buderus can continue to make steel but they will be sourcing ingots from other facilities within GMH Gruppe – these include Georgsmarienhütte GmbH, Stahlwerk Bous, Schmiedewerke Gröditz, and Pleissner Guss [6].

Will Buderus Cease Production of Knife Steel?

I contacted Buderus and asked if they would continue to offer knife steel with these changes. Christian Simon, the head of sales responded, confirming that they would continue to source ingots from the sources within GHM Gruppe listed above, also mentioning Energietechnik Essen GmbH, the company that makes Cronidur 30 (sold as LC200N by Zapp). He then added information specifically about knife steels:

“Based on our billet and strip rolling mills, we can now offer you hot strip from Wetzlar in an even broader range of materials. You can, of course, continue to obtain our popular NITRO grades from us as hot strip. And whether ingot casting, continuous casting, or ESU grades – our modern electric arc furnaces are already producing Green Steel for a sustainable future.

For the time being, Buderus Edelstahl operates under the name GMH Precision Machining GmbH. We will soon provide further information about the new Buderus Edelstahl brand within the GMH Group.”

Sven Kunzer, Managing Director, added in a separate email:

“[N]ow the things are getting clearer. We are offering our knife grades like Nitro-V, Nitro-X7 and Nitro-B as hot rolled strip.”

In other words, no longer available as cold rolled strip, but hot rolled steel will be available. Buderus metallurgist Clemens Trinks sent me a document about their new production route which confirmed that they will be offering steel as thin as 2 mm (0.079″) which is likely thin enough for the majority of applications. Though Clemens also mentioned potential limits for width depending on the grade and that is likely even more so for the very thinnest sizes. The annealing available has also changed due the restructuring, and they have now moved to open air annealing box furnaces. To remove scale they are using shot blasting.

How Are People in the Knife Industry Responding?

There is confusion in the knife industry about what exactly is happening with Buderus. New Jersey Steel Baron has been selling Buderus steel to knifemakers for many years now. Their official communication [9] about Buderus said only that Buderus is permanently closing and says that these steels will not be returning. I believe that New Jersey Steel Baron did not know that Buderus is continuing and will continue to offer knife steel. Or perhaps they were ready to move on from Buderus. NJSB is correct that Buderus has been an important supplier of knife steel in recent years. Several difficult to obtain steels like W2 were regularly available in good sizes and prices due to Buderus. Other knife steel suppliers should pick up the slack from NJSB if they decide to no longer purchase these grades from Buderus.

There is also a recent Blade Magazine article [10] that interviewed a few people in the knife industry. They seem to all be under the impression that Buderus is closing for good. So we should get the word out that Buderus is still making knife steel.

Summary and Conclusions

There were some troubling reports about Buderus going away but those were premature. The recent statements I got from Buderus employees about continuing to produce knife steels in hot rolled strip are very positive. They should be able to continue making it through the new group’s steelworks to provide ingots and slabs for hot rolling. I don’t think it should be understated just how many different knife steel grades have been produced by Buderus in recent years, and hopefully for many years in the future.

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[1] https://www.voestalpine.com/specialtymetals/en/about-us/history/

[2] https://mutares.com/en/mutares-has-completed-the-acquisition-of-the-business-of-buderus-edelstahl-gmbh-from-the-voestalpine-ag/

[3] https://www.voestalpine.com/group/en/media/press-releases/2024-10-23-voestalpine-sells-buderus-edelstahl-to-mutares/

[4] https://www.buderus-steel.com/en/company/about-us/

[5] https://mutares.com/en/mutares-portfolio-company-buderus-edelstahl-has-signed-an-agreement-to-sell-two-business-units-to-gmh-gruppe/

[6] https://www.gmh-gruppe.de/en/news/acquisition-of-buderus-edelstahl-gmbh-business-units-legally-completed/

[7] https://www.marketscreener.com/news/buderus-edelstahl-to-be-broken-up-after-mutares-takeover-hundreds-of-jobs-affected-ce7c50dedd8af725

[8] https://www.ffh.de/nachrichten/hessen/mittelhessen/442556-buderus-edelstahl-in-wetzlar-das-wars.html

[9] https://newjerseysteelbaron.com/steel-signals-1-on-the-closures-of-crucible-and-buderus/

[10] https://blademag.com/knife-news/buderus-mill-closure-threatens-10xx-carbon-steel-supply-for-knifemakers

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