Books

Books

Every season, the Next Big Idea Club editorial team reviews dozens of upcoming books to curate a selection of the most exciting, must-read nonfiction titles. We start with a broad pool of nominees from which we identify a small handful of finalists and, ultimately, an official season selection. Today, it's our pleasure to share our list of five finalists for Season 29! Without further ado, the new books we're most excited about right now are . . .

San Francisco Poet Laureate emerita invites writers featured in Women in a Golden State to present at SFPL's Monthly poetry reading. was San Francisco's seventh Poet Laureate. Her poetry draws on her multiethnic background which includes Polish and Cherokee heritage, and her experiences as a lifelong resident of San Francisco. Her most recent book of poetry, Pick a Garnet to Sleep In, was published in 2024, and her book of essays, Noodle, Rant, Tangent, was published in 2022.

Natural History Museum Los Angeles County: New: "Unearthed - Raw Beauty," an exhibit of mineral specimens displayed in their natural and uncut form, through April 18, 2027 ( https://nhm.org/unearthed-rare-mineral-exhibition). Ongoing exhibit: "Fierce! The Story of Cats," is an international traveling exhibit, from the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in France, runs through Feb. 18 (this exhibit requires an add-on ticket price to the museum's general admission; nhm.org/cats). Hours: 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Sunday (but closed on the first Tuesday of the month and some holidays).

Hey Demigods and Campers! Show your fandom for the Percy Jackson Universe proudly with our collection of essential apparel and more, like Camp Half-Bloodt-shirts, comfy hoodies, and must-have books. And for a limited time only, fans can get a 15% discount using the code "ABCNEWS15". So whether you're gearing up for your next quest or just want to share your Riordanverse pride, we've got you covered.

"The object of the Museum is to acquire power," announces a crusty old archaeologist in Penelope Fitzgerald's 1977 satire, The Golden Child. It isn't a goal he respects. He wants the museum where he's settled into semiretirement to genuinely devote itself to educating its visitors. Instead, he correctly charges, its curators act like a pack of Gollums, hoarding "the art and treasures of the earth" for their own self-aggrandizement and pleasure.

When I came across the idea for this novel a few years ago, I knew it was bigger in scope than anything I'd done before and I accepted that the research alone would be more demanding than anything I'd tackled in the past. When I finally sat down to write Adam and Eve I also realised, by the end of the first draft, that this was going to be my final novel,

"We started by asking everyone to collect images regularly. Just spontaneous snapshots as we went. Of everything. Sketches, screens, notes, half thoughts, moments in motion. Over time it became this huge grab bag of elements," Simon says.

The internet, since its very inception, has been a conduit for pleasure, sex and sexuality. From early erotic ASCII art and hook-up sites, to the proliferation of porn sites in the 1980s and 90s, despite attempts to curtail it, shadowban it and commercialise it from the top down, sex remains an underlying force in our online world, fuelling intimate moments of screentime and alternative forms of income generation.

Fresh off the success of her Oakland-set debut novel, Shut Up, This is Serious, Bay Area author Carolina Ixta returns with a sophomore offering inspired in part by the inequities she saw in the region. For Ixta - a public education advocate and alumna of the Oakland Unified School District who now teaches fourth and fifth grade in San Leandro - fiction writing is a megaphone for social consciousness. Writing for a young adult audience, in particular, allows her to entertain young readers and teach them about their own realities.

"It works for me best to draw analog, edit digitally and add text or colour my drawings in a second step. But for this I already need to know the text elements, so it usually takes me really long to figure out the different elements before I can really start working and puzzle everything together," says Leo. "Most often I work with already existing stories (not strictly texts) and love to do lots of research and deep dives to find links and parallels in other stories. It's important to add historical context and give the stories more dimension."

Because, let's face it, creative work does require some form of faith. It is a tumultuous thing to launch an idea into a vast nothingness and hope that it makes a light bright enough to be found by others. Luckily, these luminaries were my light, and I hope they may become yours as well, and - more so - that these snippets lead you to more of their work.

In this book, you will learn how to use artificial intelligence to create mini-games. You will attempt to recreate the look and feel of various classic video games. The intention is not to violate copyright or anything of the sort, but instead to learn the limitations and the power of AI. Instead, you will simply be learning about whether or not you can use AI to help you know how to create video games.

For the 10 th year in a row, my New Year's resolution is to read more books. Ideally, as I tend to tell myself during these protean early weeks of January, 2026 will be remembered for languorous evenings on the couch, tearing through the inventory of novels that crowd the modest capacity of my living-room shelves, perhaps with a tumbler of scotch resting on a coaster.

It may seem like they've been around forever, but the crossword as we know it is barely a century old. They started in the New York World in 1913, where it was originally called a "word-cross." Going on to obsess writers like T.S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov, who reportedly wrote the first Russian-language puzzle as a teenager, the crossword settled into a kind of urbane normalcy over the course of the 20th century, a feature of newspapers and cheap jumbo packs.

"Through playing her, I was able to get the courage to make the changes that I wanted to make in my life, to really go after the version of my life that I felt like I was meant to live. And when the show came out, I became acutely aware of women all over the world that were feeling very similarly,"

I know you probably have a bunch of unread books at home that you already own - maybe entire bookcases full of them - but what fun is that!? Our Scary Mommy team of voracious readers have done all of the research for you and compiled a list of the very best and most exciting new releases coming our way in 2026.

Many editors languish in the margins of history, their contributions largely invisible despite how much they shape whom and how we read. But in recent years, amid a wave of books unearthing overlooked figures, biographers have turned their sights to pioneering book and magazine editors-including Malcolm Cowley of Viking, Judith Jones of Knopf, Bennett Cerf of Random House, and Katharine S. White of The New Yorker -anointing them as the unsung architects of the American literary canon.

In her debut work of fiction, Half His Age, McCurdy continues to shake open a Pandora's box, shedding light on blurred parent-child boundaries and loss of identity due to over-enmeshment, with solid one-liners that feel straight out of a sitcom writers' room. Lead character Waldo is a high school senior whose life doesn't seem to be her own. She play-acts through sexual encounters and disassociates at the school disco (I stand off to the side watching, enveloped by a blanket of catatonia).

Human development is a lifelong, cumulative process. Midlife, however, is largely overlooked and misunderstood. When exactly is midlife? The general consensus is that midlife encompasses the years between 40 and 60, give or take. In a 2015 poll, people expressed the belief that midlife begins at age 44 and ends at age 59, however the roles and life circumstances that surround middle adulthood are perhaps more defining of this era than a specific age.

One of the best cyberpunk manga of all time is on sale for an incredible price at Amazon. Battle Angel Alita's Deluxe Edition Series Box Set collects the complete original run in premium hardcover format. The Deluxe Edition Series Box Set is on sale for $100 off, dropping the price from $180 all the way down to $80. This is the best deal ever for the six-volume, 2,392-page collection, and this says a lot considering it was published in December 2018 by Kodansha Comics.

Book Gossip, a newsletter about what the literati are really thinking, is entering a new chapter. I'm Jasmine Vojdani, a senior newsletter editor at New York, where I also cover books and culture. I first moved to the city to start a degree in creative writing, choosing the M.F.A. and NYC (and, naturally, debt) - and I have lots of thoughts about that.