Object permanence: Hair-gel bombers v bras; Hair-gel bombers v chemistry; AOL digs for spammer's platinum; Stross on infosec in 2061; In-game Ponzi; Snowden on Shadow Brokers hack; Life v understanding advanced math; "Greatest of Marlys!"; Housing and precarity; LLMs as slot-machines for coders; Hypercard's backstory; Pirate Party; Fanbois' mental health v critics; Krugman calls for alien invasion; Trump x Serbian genocidaires; The last Sandman Slim; Muphry’s Law; NSA created the Shadow Brokers; DOJ kills private prisons; Walmart externalizes crime; "Sgt Augmento"; Zuckermuskian solipsism.
Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture' (permalink)
Nobody explains copyright like Jennifer Jenkins, the director of the Duke Center for the Public Domain, in which capacity she is responsible for the annual New Year's roundups of all the materials entering the public domain (a series that started in the decades during which the public domain was frozen by the Sonny Bono Copyright Act):
Jenkins has a gift for making one of the most complicated, worst understood, most consequential areas of law not only comprehensible, but also fascinating. Her late 2023 explanation of what "Mickey Mouse's copyright is expiring" actually meant was the single best explainer on the subject, in a crowded field:
Small wonder that she's the go-to copyright and trademark expert for so many media outlets. Perhaps you heard her Planet Money segments on which superheroes are in the public domain:
Jenkins' flair for legal communications carries over to her scholarly work, of course, which is why her Open Copyright Casebook is a standard text for American law schools:
Jenkins co-wrote the Casebook with her husband, the equally erudite and expert James Boyle. It's just one of their many fruitful collaborations; they are also the writing team behind THEFT! A History of Music, the greatest graphic novel ever created about the history of music, music law, music censorship, and the music industry:
Last year, Jenkins published Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, an Oxford University Press title that fuses her scholarly and popular work in a generalist textbook on the legal framework for music that will forever change how you think about music. Now, a second edition, with a lengthy section on new music litigation, AI copyright fights, and the issue of uncompensated labor is available as an open access download:
Music Copyright weaves together the economic, cultural, political and artistic history of music, pulling on historic threads ranging from antiquity to medieval Europe to the age of mechanical reproduction to describe changing views of musicians, their audiences, and religious and political leaders on what constituted music, who was allowed to make music, and what music was for. In so doing, she firmly establishes the extremely contingent nature of our present-day norms around music, showing that the "natural" present-day assumptions about who gets paid, who pays, and when payment (or permission) is required are anything but, and are always in flux.
For obvious reasons, much of Jenkins' text describes these changes in the context of the record, the radio, satellite transmission, P2P file-sharing, and digital sampling (along with a chapter on AI). These examples are liberally illustrated with links to musical excerpts that bring the subject to life (these are presented as hotlinks in the ebook; if you're reading the print edition, you can use the book's companion website:)
Interspersed with these histories and analysis are lengthy, extremely on-point excerpts from THEFT!, her graphic novel history of music. These enliven the text as much as the music samples, making this textbook as entertaining as it is informative.
Of especial interest – and importance – are the long sections on the courtroom battles of Ed Sheeran, Katy Perry, and Pharrell Williams over similar "grooves" and "vibes" to other songs, some of them well-known and some quite obscure:
These cases highlight the fundamental incoherence of music copyright, a system composed of improvised responses to new technologies, each layered atop the last in a messy pile that virtually no one understands.
Jenkins understands it, though. I've been reading, writing, and debating about this stuff since the late 1990s, and I learned something new on every page of this delightful book. This should be required reading for anyone who makes music, loves music, or cares about musicians and the arts more generally. It's a towering accomplishment and a brilliant read.
"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
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Friday's words: 564 (6039 total).
"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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Pompous scholars were a standard joke on the Italian stage through the 16th century. Arnoud Visser writes in The Public Domain Review that Francesco Belo, a playwright from Rome, published the first play to put one at the center. In El pedante, from the 1520s, the schoolmaster Prudenzio "talks in a mangled mix of Latin and vernacular." — Read the rest
Louis Pope Gratacap was the curator of mineralogy at the American Museum of Natural History from 1880 until his death in 1917. He usually read during his three-hour round trip to the museum from Staten Island. He also wrote novels, and one of them, The New Northland (1915), may be the earliest novel to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex. — Read the rest
SF novel. Azad is being hunted across the galaxies by the Vitruvian Authorities because he exposed the dark past of his world. Azad and his team need to team up with a space pirate to start a revolution.
Tie-in anthology of Critical Role, stories based on the livestreamed roleplaying game. Nine different tales of some of the most memorable characters, including: Essek Thelyss, Isharni, and Pumat Sol. Simultaneous with the Penguin Random House UK edition.
Ayinde, M.H.: A Dance of Burning Blades (Simon & Schuster/Saga Press 978-1668086858, $22.00, 688pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Epic fantasy novel, the second in the A Song of Legends Lost series. Tension is growing everywhere across the nine lands. The people hope to find out the secrets the king has been keeping from them.
Bennett, Robert Jackson: A Trade of Blood (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593723852, $32.00, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Fantasy mystery novel, third in the Shadow of the Leviathan series. Ana Dolabra must prove the innocence of the heir of one of the Empire’s most powerful families, and if she doesn’t, the Empire will fall apart. Simultaneous with the Hodder & Stoughton UK edition.
Kim, Bo-Young & Bowman, Sophie: A Plagued Sea (Tor/Nightfire 978-1250380753, $24.99, 102pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Horror novel. An earthquake on the coast of Haewon, a small seaside village, released a plague that turns its victims into fish monsters. Mu-young has been doing everything she can to survive here for the past three years.
Horror romance novel. After an accident that nearly cost his life, Jordan’s grip on reality seems to be slipping. After getting ghosted by a woman named Lilith, things start to get even weirder. Simultaneous with the Titan Books UK edition.
Supernatural romantic comedy novel, the second in the Supernatural Entanglements series. Gwen Wexloff can see the future, but not when it matters, until one day, she experiences a world-changing vision, and she needs to find help.
Doty, Max: The House that Eats the Dead (Macmillan/Tor Nightfire UK 979-8217092239, $20.00, 336pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/18/2026)
Horror novel. Claire discovers that her family’s new house eats anything that used to be alive. When she exploits this power, she forms a bond with the house, but its hunger starts to grow.
El-Arifi, Saara: Earthbound (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593723067, $29.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Fantasy novel. Alder returns to the cave he was born in to discover more about his past, and the truth has him shaken. In the fae court, Yeeran is trying to create a peace treaty with the elven army.
Goodman, A.B.: House of Atreus: Orestes’ Return (Planetary Books 979-8188214753, $19.99, 144pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, 07/20/2026)
SF novel, third in the House of Atreus series. Agamemnon’s exiled son, Orestes, has finally come of age, and must prove himself to Apollo, as he returns home to the kingdom.
Hanrahan, Gareth: The Dungeon Book (Orbit US 978-0316595421, $19.99, 352pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Fantasy novel. After Bait is captured by a dragon, and left for dead in a dungeon, she’s taken in by a family of goblins, and is given the chance to decide where she belongs. Simultaneous with the Orbit UK edition.
Young-adult fantasy romance novel. After seeing Zain kill a man, Roxana realizes that demons (and also angels) exist, but she can’t help her attraction towards him.
Johnston, E.K.: The Third Period Comeback (Penguin Random House/Dutton 979-8217110421, $17.99, 176pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Upper middle-grade “magic-tinged” novel. Hayley Rilko is cursed to ruin any hockey team she plays for, but it doesn’t go into effect until she’s no longer a kid, so she becomes determined to break the curse.
Kelly, James Patrick: The Book of Bots (Fairwood Press 978-1958880418, $19.99, 302pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 08/14/2026)
Collection of 12 stories about robots and AI that come in all different forms. Some are in the shape of a car, some are from the far future, and some only exist in cyberspace.
Critical non-fiction focusing on the films, looking at the world of Oz as a reflection of American society, exploring how beliefs about heroism, villainy, ethics, and truth change between the classic film and the recent Wicked films.
SF horror novel. A doorway to a parallel dimension malfunctions and causes infinite parallel Earth’s to collide with our’s. Abby Corman is the only one who knows how to stop this, but an alien hunter is determined to stop her.
Okungbowa, Suyi Davies: Season of the Serpent (Orbit US 978-0316428996, $19.99, 368pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Epic fantasy novel, the third book in the Nameless Republic trilogy. The Nameless Republic and Kangalaland are on the verge of war, and everyone must pick a side. Lilong lost her power, and is doing everything she can to get it back.
Contemporary fantasy novel. After the disappearance of Zahara’s sister, no one remembered she even existed in the first place, besides her. Four years later she finds evidence of her existence, and hires a private investigator to look into her past.
Ribay, Randy: Nest of Tongues (Penguin Random House/Random House 979-8217024346, $19.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Young-adult paranormal horror novel inspired by Filipino mythology. Lily and her brother Caleb are vampires, but choose to keep it a secret, until one day when a monster hunter kills another vampire.
Smith, Jasmine: Death Card (Penguin Random House/Putnam 978-0593858295, $13.99, 304pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Young-adult contemporary fantasy novel. Mikaela Broussard has a vision of a customer stabbing her in the heart. She decides to spend time with the customer, Joelle, in order to gather more information, but starts to find her irresistible. A first novel.
Spotts, Isabelle: Saint Delilah (Penguin Random House/Berkley 979-8217189816, $30.00, 311pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Horror novel. Delilah, a ghost, is trying to clear her unfinished business, and she needs to start with finding who her killer is, so she teams up with the owner of a strip club she used to dance at, and a stranger who can hear and touch her. A first novel.
Tchaikovsky, Adrian: Preaching to the Choir (Rebellion/Solaris UK 978-1837867301, $32.99, 176pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/13/2026)
SF novel, second in the Terrible Worlds: Transformations series. Ross asked Elena to come with her to a mysterious family gathering for moral support, despite the fact that spouses aren’t invited, and they uncover dark secrets.
Tooley, Adrienne: There Are Ghosts Here (Penguin Random House/Delacorte 979-8217027897, $19.99, 272pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Young-adult speculative horror novel. Willa Childs forgets the details of the accident that sent her to the Dorsey House, and the others stuck there, Caroline and Ivy, are intending to keep it from her.
Walter, Heather: The Witch Queen (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593598399, $30.00, 560pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Fantasy novel, second in the Crimson Crown duology. Queen Ayleth knows that having the kingdom under her rule isn’t perfect, and she’s consumed by fears that the witches will come to remove her, or that people will find out her secret. Simultaneous with the Penguin Random House UK edition.
Whitten, Hannah: Reliquary (Orbit US/Run For It 978-0316579537, $30.00, 320pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, 08/11/2026)
Horror novel. The estranged family of Claire’s late fiancé, Elias, reaches out after his death, and invites her to a three day stay at Harrow Point. While she’s there, she uncovers the reason behind her traumatic connection to the ocean.
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.
A French manuscript from about 1485 shows a woman spinning wool in her doorway while her child plays beside her. The doorway is the mouth of a giant snail shell. She lives there.
Robert Testard painted it for Charles d'Angoulême, a count in southwestern France, as one of 56 miniatures in Les secretz de l'histoire naturelle. — Read the rest
Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup delivers everything I want from a fantasy detective story. Wonderful characters, fantastic world-building, and a mystery worth solving.
Bennett tells the story from the point of view of Din Kol, an altered human whose misshapen talents left him useless to most regular sources of employment for altered humans in the Empire. — Read the rest
Doi Toshitsura was a feudal lord in Edo-period Japan who studied snow for about twenty years. His 1832 book of woodblock prints, Sekka Zusetsu, has eighty-six drawings of what he called "snow flowers" (sekka), plus a dozen more copied from a 1779 Dutch natural history book. — Read the rest
Luke Howard was an industrial chemist in London. He studied clouds as a hobby in the early 1800s. In his Essay on the Modification of Clouds, he gave the standard cloud formations the names we still use today. Cirrus is the Latin word for a wisp of hair, cumulus for "convex or conical heaps," stratus for a "horizontal sheet." — Read the rest
The writer’s political ideal—citizens appearing before one another as equals, engaging in dialogue and debate—had a counterpart in her spirited gatherings on the Upper West Side.
A draft rule reviewed by WIRED would prevent the census from counting undocumented immigrants. To protect against “distortions,” it would also bar questions about race and sexual orientation.
"From The 'London Times' in 1904" is an 1898 Mark Twain short story set six years in the future, and it describes something very close to the internet. It opens as a murder mystery. Clayton, a hot-tempered army officer, is accused of killing Szczepanik, the inventor of a machine called the telelectroscope. — Read the rest
It’s August in Brussels, which means it’s vacation time.
Whether you’re heading off to the beach or holding down the fort in town, this episode is brimming with book recommendations from our newsroom and from you, our listeners. Whatever your genre preference, from true crime thrillers to deep political dives, we’ve got your summer holiday covered.
But this installment is not just a book chat.
We’re also tackling the rise of populism and the crises facing liberal democracies around the world. That’s the topic of “Defeating Trumpism,” a new book by former Belgian Prime Minister and European Parliament Member Guy Verhofstadt. The book is a self-diagnosis from one of Europe’s most passionate centrists about the failures of his movement. And his prescription? A new political paradigm he calls “Citizenism.”
We’re on a break for two weeks, so expect us to pop back up on your feed with the daily Brussels Playbook Podcast on Aug. 24 and the Week Ender podcast on Aug. 28.
Questions? Comments? Get in touch! You can message us or send a voice message to our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.
If you were moving diamonds across the Deccan Plateau in the 1830s, there were rules about when to set out. Leave on a Tuesday or a Thursday, on the 5th, 13th, or 28th day of the lunar month. Eat coriander seeds before a Tuesday departure and jaggery before a Thursday one. — Read the rest
But if there’s one place where young American men are likely to congregate, regardless of race or political beliefs, it’s the world of video games. According to a 2017 Pew study, 72 percent of men under 30 say they play video games often or sometimes. The gaming world is a place they feel safe — which means it is full of untapped potential for building community, says video game expert George E. Osborn.
Osborn is the founder of Half-Space Consulting, which advises governments and NGOs on the social impact of video games. In his new book Power Play: Video Games, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence, Osborn shows that anti-democratic powers and violent actors have been exploiting the video games space for decades.
“Bannon’s intuitive understanding of the power of toxic gamer communities created the digital-activist base, the tactical playbook and the strategic approach necessary for ‘mainstreaming’ populist far-right ideas within the online media ecosystem,” Osborn writes in Power Play.
Yet Osborn also writes that there is a vast potential for good within gaming communities. He shows that gaming can help people understand pandemics and autocracies and climate change; that it can connect people to one another and make people less lonely.
I wanted to understand what those possibilities meant for the young men who are so invested in video games and are in so much trouble, so I called Osborn up to discuss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The public-private video game alliance that wasn’t
The US federal government has worked on pro-democracy campaigns with video game companies. In 2024, the State Department collaborated with The Global Game Jam, a nonprofit games development organization, on an initiative called Ctrl+Alt+Disinfo to create video games that would raise awareness of the global threat of disinformation.
The results, Osborn writes, featured “some fantastically inventive explorations of how disinformation works, including Medieval Courier (where a cunning messenger fox tweaks messages sent between two courts to sow mayhem), Polar (a game where you manipulate information by playing tarot cards with different propagandizing effects), and My Little Conspiracy (which puts you in the shoes of an early online moderator capable of guiding the conversation online).”
The next year, President Donald Trump began his second term, and Elon Musk’s DOGE began aggressively cutting budgets across the government. Educational video games didn’t make the cut, and the State Department clawed back the money it had already granted the project.
You write in the book that there’s always been a wide audience for video games across demographics. But when people talk about gaming’s traditional audience, they’re mostly talking about young men. How does that happen?
In the 1980s and the 1990s, video games were not sold on the basis of who wants to play. They were sold on the basis of who buys technology. There were two primary audiences: families with kids, and young men buying tech.
Then a couple of things all happen at the same time: The introduction of the smartphone in about 2007; the emergence of digital storefronts like Steam and The App Store; the financial crash. Video games companies start to think, “We have done very well in a small number of markets. What happens if we start reaching a wider base?”
The number of people around the world playing video games goes from hundreds of millions to about the 3.6 billion that we see today. When you look at the gender split of players, roughly speaking, the gender split in the US is now nearly 50/50, and the average age of a player is much closer to late 30s, early 40s. It creates this space where that traditional audience of younger men start to feel left behind, like the industry is moving away from them.
What’s really interesting, when you look at this in the context of the research that I’ve done, is that it creates a grievance culture amongst some of those younger men. That ultimately opens up the opportunity for someone to begin taking advantage of it.
In the book, you talk about how there are a few different things that make gamers an attractive group for political actors to try to target. One of them was this idea that gamers are highly likely to act on their beliefs. What does that mean in this context?
The nature of play — I think it was actually the writer Naomi Alderman who talked about this — is that it encourages agency. If you compare it to other creative mediums, even the most linear of video games, a player [moves] through it in their own way. They don’t have exactly the same experience as everybody else.
It encourages people to really believe in themselves as participants in the medium. They are not solely consumers of the culture, and therefore they feel that they have a greater say over what happens.
Then it [also] creates a strong community tie between the people who are involved in play. The sheer breadth of choices available to you brings the community together to talk about how to play, and ultimately the way it makes them feel. [That’s] part of the reason why these information spaces are so powerful.
Along those lines, you document Steve Bannon getting interested in Gamergate and leveraging that phenomenon to help create the alt-right of the 2010s. A lot of the political groups you discuss who try to intervene with gamers use top-down propaganda, but it seems like Bannon’s really interested in them as a specific community, right? He’s not making didactic games about why they should support Trump. He’s talking about how they’re heroes fighting for ethics in gaming journalism. What’s the effect of that choice?
It creates a sense of power within those communities they may not have otherwise felt. If you compare it to the last US election, Kamala Harris’s campaign created an officially branded Fortnite experience. It promised players a chance to engage with the campaign’s key pillars. Which is exactly the kind of top-down, non-inclusive communication where you are going into someone else’s arena and putting something in there that would never emerge from that space organically.
Obviously the message doesn’t work. It ends up reeking of elitism.
I think what Bannon realized is this group had its own things that it felt were important. Particularly within Gamergate — I think that they were talking about things that were toxic, lies, untrue. But it coalesced to create an identity around that group. Bannon realized that ultimately, if you promoted it upwards, then they would feel part of this wider community.
A lot of the most visible political activity associated with gamers in the US has been pretty dark and even quite violent. I’m thinking of not just Gamergate, but the Charlottesville riots and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Is it possible to harness the energy of this community toward more constructive ends?
I just came back from Games for Change in New York. It’s a big festival in the US every year. There’s satellite events around the world. It looks at the way that these dynamics can be used for various social goods, provided that you are actually leaning into them.
The UN’s Playing for the Planet Alliance reached hundreds of millions of people by asking game makers to create content on their behalf [about climate change]. It wasn’t a case of saying, “We need you to create games that do this specific thing.” It was much more, “Here is a theme. Create something that works for your community.”
When more elite institutions chose to engage with games communities on their terms, they tended to achieve much bigger reach, at a much lower cost, and with much more positive outcomes than any of the hostile uses that I talk about in the book. And frankly, because these communities have often felt pushed to the side, they also feel particularly validated when someone comes into their space and says, “Actually, we do recognize your power. We would love to work with you to make the most of it.”
How do you know that the effects are so much bigger than something like Gamergate? Are there numbers you can cite?
You’re talking about this potentially massive effect, but thus far it’s tended to be sporadic. When you compare it with a lot of the examples that I look at in the book, especially Saudi Arabia’s attempt to use video games within its soft power strategy, there’s clearly much more strategic thinking [from the Saudis] about the way to influence these communities.
That’s one of the missing pieces of the puzzle in a lot of democracies. We have the ingredients for this to work really effectively, but at the moment it feels like we’ve not got anyone cooking.
I came away from this book with this sense that for a lot of young men, video game communities are a precious space where they feel seen in a way that they don’t in a lot of the rest of society right now. What makes this world so special to these men?
Video games have always been social. With young men in particular, because the medium has been so closely attuned to them, [many of them] are going to find their groups and communities within these worlds.
This is me speaking more from British experience, of thinking what it’s like to be a man growing up in the UK. We’ve seen significant cutbacks in local investment into things like community groups, clubs, youth spaces. Online communities and online game communities have helped replace a lot of things taken out of civil society.
You write about campaigning to combat the loneliness epidemic in the UK through gaming outreach. How did that initiative come together?
I was contacted by the government around April 2020, during the pandemic. I was working at the time as the head of campaigns and communications at Ukie, the video games trade association.
Quite early into my job, I realized all of the different games companies that formed Ukie had very different cultures. You couldn’t tell them what to do, because frankly, it wouldn’t work.
So I went in and said, “Okay, we’ve got an ask. We want you to encourage your communities to find one hour to sit down in their favorite online game with a friend, family member, or co-worker, and ask them how they’re doing.”
Different companies took part in the campaign. But they went out to their communities with different messages. Some of them were going out with streams from their community managers. Some of them were just replicating the messaging that we had. Some of them were doing more dedicated messages to players via games.
It’s not particularly scientific, so take it with a pinch of salt. But afterwards, the polling firm Ipsos MORI found that across Europe, players in the UK were roughly 10 percentage points more likely to say that video games made them feel less lonely than other parts of the continent.
Looking back on that, I can see that a lot of the ideas I’ve had, about how games can be an information ecosystem and about how you effectively communicate to it, can be found in that campaign.
It’s about decentralizing the message. It’s allowing people to take it and run with it. That’s when it becomes really effective.
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Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Afifi, Nadia: A Fugitive’s History of the Known Universe (Flame Tree Press UK 978-1787589483, $26.95, 288pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, 08/11/2026)
Anonymous: Critical Role: The Mighty Nein: Stories Untold (Penguin Random House/Random House Worlds 979-8217298488, $30.00, 320pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Ayinde, M.H.: A Dance of Burning Blades (Simon & Schuster/Saga Press 978-1668086858, $22.00, 688pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Bennett, Robert Jackson: A Trade of Blood (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593723852, $32.00, 400pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Kim, Bo-Young & Bowman, Sophie: A Plagued Sea (Tor/Nightfire 978-1250380753, $24.99, 102pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Chapman, Clay McLeod: Devil Inside (Harlequin/Mira 978-0778306214, $18.99, 384pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Dade, Olivia: World’s Okayest Oracle (Reluctantly) Seeks Demon (Penguin Random House/Berkley Romance 978-0593818220, $20.00, 458pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Doty, Max: The House that Eats the Dead (Macmillan/Tor Nightfire UK 979-8217092239, $20.00, 336pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/18/2026)
El-Arifi, Saara: Earthbound (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593723067, $29.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Goodman, A.B.: House of Atreus: Orestes’ Return (Planetary Books 979-8188214753, $19.99, 144pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, 07/20/2026)
Hanrahan, Gareth: The Dungeon Book (Orbit US 978-0316595421, $19.99, 352pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Jafari, Sara: Heavensent & Hellbent (Penguin Random House/Delacorte 979-8217028634, $20.99, 416pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Johnston, E.K.: The Third Period Comeback (Penguin Random House/Dutton 979-8217110421, $17.99, 176pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Kelly, James Patrick: The Book of Bots (Fairwood Press 978-1958880418, $19.99, 302pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 08/14/2026)
Keslowitz, Steven: Traveling the Yellow Brick Road: What We Learn from The Wizard of Oz and Wicked (McFarland 978-1476699646, $39.95, 236pp, formats: paperback, ebook, 08/13/2026)
Maberry, Jonathan: Bewilderness (WordFire Press 978-1680577969, $23.99, 514pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, 08/11/2026)
Okungbowa, Suyi Davies: Season of the Serpent (Orbit US 978-0316428996, $19.99, 368pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Penelope, Leslye: The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass (Orbit US/Redhook 978-0316594691, $19.99, 496pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Ribay, Randy: Nest of Tongues (Penguin Random House/Random House 979-8217024346, $19.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Smith, Jasmine: Death Card (Penguin Random House/Putnam 978-0593858295, $13.99, 304pp, formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Spotts, Isabelle: Saint Delilah (Penguin Random House/Berkley 979-8217189816, $30.00, 311pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Tchaikovsky, Adrian: Preaching to the Choir (Rebellion/Solaris UK 978-1837867301, $32.99, 176pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/13/2026)
Tooley, Adrienne: There Are Ghosts Here (Penguin Random House/Delacorte 979-8217027897, $19.99, 272pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Walter, Heather: The Witch Queen (Penguin Random House/Del Rey 978-0593598399, $30.00, 560pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audiobook, 08/11/2026)
Whitten, Hannah: Reliquary (Orbit US/Run For It 978-0316579537, $30.00, 320pp, formats: hardcover, paperback, ebook, 08/11/2026)Wired
