In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted.

John of John is a singular novel about duty and patience and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that shows Douglas Stuart working at an even higher level of artistic creation.

Available from Penguin Random House

Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His New York Times-bestselling debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was the winner of two British Book Awards, including Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, Kirkus Prize, as well as several other literary awards. Stuart’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker and Literary Hub.

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For the last decade, as she’s spent countless hours in doctor’s waiting rooms searching for diagnoses, treatments, and relief, being the owner and operator of Lena Dunham’s body has felt, as she puts it, “like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight.” It’s not easy dragging a wrecked car anywhere, much less to the Met Gala while sewn into a gold lamé corset. Or to the set of the hit show that you—as a twenty-five-year-old—are writing, directing, producing, and starring in. Or to a Vogue cover shoot, the Golden Globes, or your publicist’s office to discuss the latest internet disaster. But Dunham does it, even if it means interminable hospital stays, vomiting in the bathroom when she’s meant to be meeting Oprah, or terrifying those closest to her because she can no longer tell the difference between fighting to do what she loves and being a servant to her own ambition.

As Dunham takes us through her journey, tracking her rise to fame from selling the pilot of Girls to the present. Told in three acts, it becomes clear that the spotlight casts long shadows, distorting the relationships she once held dear and isolating everyone in its glare. And when an endless supply of drugs can’t protect you from pain, and begins to control your every move, being famous doesn’t stand a chance against the darker corners of the human experience.

In Famesick, Dunham asks herself what the cost of fulfilling her dreams has really been, and whether it was worth it. What she finds is deeper than physical relief, and more lasting.

Available from Penguin Random House

Lena Dunham is the creator of the critically acclaimed HBO series Girls, for which she also serves as executive producer, writer, and director. She has been nominated for eight Emmy awards and has won two Golden Globes, including Best Actress, for her work on Girls. She was the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America award for directorial achievement in comedy. Dunham has also written and directed two feature-length films (including Tiny Furniture in 2010) and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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Few musical artists have had the lasting impact and relevance of Talking Heads, with well-known tracks such as, “Psycho Killer” “Take Me to the River” and “Road to Nowhere.” One of the foundational bands of New York’s downtown 1970s music scene, the band has endured as a musical and cultural force for decades. Their unique brand of transcendent, experimental rock remains a lingering influence on popular music—despite their having disbanded over thirty years ago.

Gould offers an authoritative, deeply researched account of a band whose sound, fame, and legacy forever connected rock music to the cultural avant-garde. From their art school origins to the enigmatic charisma of David Byrne and the internal tensions that ultimately broke them apart, Gould tells the story of a group that emerged when rock music was still young and went on to redefine the prevailing expectations of how a band could sound, look, and act. At a time when guitar solos, lead-singer swagger, and sweaty stadium tours reigned supreme, Talking Heads were precocious, awkward, quirky, and utterly distinctive when they first appeared on the ragged stages of the East Village. Yet they would soon mature into one of the most accomplished and uncompromising recording and performing acts of their era.

More than just a biography of a band, Gould masterfully captures the singular time and place that incubated and nurtured this original music: downtown New York in the 1970s, that much romanticized, little understood milieu where art, music, and commerce collided in the urban dystopia of Lower Manhattan. What emerges is an expansive portrait of a unique cultural moment and an iconoclastic band that shifted the paradigm of popular music by burning down the house of mainstream rock.

Available from Harper Collins

Jonathan Gould is a writer and a former professional musician. Born and raised in New York City, he began playing drums in high school and became serious about it while attending Cornell University, which led him to move to Boston in 1975 to study with the eminent jazz drummer Alan Dawson. He went on to spend many years working in bands and recording studios in Boston, Woodstock, and New York City before turning his full attention to writing about music in the early 1990s under the mentorship of the retired New Yorker editor William Shawn. In addition to his playing and writing about music, Jonathan also raised a family, served in local politics, and took an active role in the life of the upstate New York community where he lived for twenty-five years. He currently divides his time between Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Livingston, NY. He is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, he is the author of Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America and Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life.

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• Exclusive interviews with The Clash—Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Topper Headon—plus managers, road crew, producers, and other insiders.
• A vivid, behind the scenes chronicle of the band’s meteoric rise.
• The cultural and political forces that shaped The Clash and defined their uncompromising vision.
• Fresh insights and newly added material from surviving members of the band and other major figures close to them, appearing for the first time in this new edition.

Packed with the energy of punk’s golden age, Passion Is a Fashion takes you inside the real story of The Clash, capturing not only their brilliance but also the chaos and heartbreak that forged their enduring legend. This is the indispensable Clash book, now more essential than ever.

Available from Aurum/Quatro Publishing

Pat Gilbert is a former editor of MOJO, the best-selling and internationally acclaimed music magazine. He has also contributed to Q magazine, the Guardian, The Times, and the Sunday Times, and produced radio programs for the BBC. He has written two books for Aurum: the definitive biography of the Clash, Passion is a Fashion—hailed by Uncut magazine as “a great book”—and Shut It! The Inside Story of The Sweeney.

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From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped music’s sound, style, and spirit. In Mighty Real, veteran journalist Barry Walters chronicles its LGBTQ history from the Velvet Underground to the 21st century’s dawn as he honours the artists who redefined gender, defied tradition, and dared to challenge sexual norms with the help of a record business that wasn’t as straight as commonly believed.

Drawing on his decades as a New York- and San Francisco-based music critic, Walters examines how LGBTQ musicians, music industry executives, and fans reshaped the mainstream. He connects the dots between David Bowie’s dazzling reinventions, Grace Jones’s androgynous glamor, Prince’s boundary-shattering sexuality, and the radical candor of the Indigo Girls to prove they’re all doing the same thing: fighting oppression.

With exuberance, insight, and encyclopedic knowledge, Walters brings to life the songs and society that filled dancefloors, bedrooms, and streets as he uncovers yesteryear’s coded LGBTQ messages that paved the way for today’s unabashedly queer hits. Mighty Real is a masterful love letter to the music that liberated generations, and it’s written in a page-turning, personal way that blurs distinctions between chronicle and memoir. This is the rare and revolutionary music history told to help you laugh, cry, and then rally against lingering inequality.

Available from Penguin Random House

Barry Walters has spent 40 years documenting the intersection of mainstream and LGBTQ culture. He began his career at The Village Voice — where he came out publicly in a 1986 Pet Shop Boys review — before becoming a fixture at Spin and Rolling Stone. In 1992, Walters’ work at the San Francisco Examiner made him the first critic to receive an award from The National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. Throughout the Nineties, he was The Advocate’s music columnist before a decade’s worth of writing at Out. Along the way, he’s regularly appeared in Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Pitchfork, and other media mainstays. Love Me Like You Should: The Brave and Bold Sylvester, a 2020 mini-documentary he wrote and co-produced for Amazon Music, won a Clio Award.

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In 1975 a young queer singer from Cleveland meets Nan Goldin and joins her in New York’s bombed-out downtown, where something unprecedented is brewing. At Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, in derelict lofts and underground clubs, a generation of visionary women artists is rewriting the rules of creativity, sexuality, and power.

Adele Bertei didn’t just witness the No Wave explosion—she ignited it. As acetone organist for the Contortions and Brian Eno’s assistant, she was at the epicenter when punk collided with post-punk, when Lydia Lunch screamed her first songs, when Kathy Acker was penning her transgressive novels, when Kathryn Bigelow was making her first films.

No New York reveals the untold story of the boundary-pushing women who made No Wave possible: Nan Goldin capturing flash-lit portraits of gender fluidity, Barbara Kruger deconstructing media, Kiki Smith exploring the body’s mysteries, Lizzie Borden challenging cinema itself. While mainstream culture wallowed in sexism and homophobia, these artists created something fluid, fierce, and transgressive.

Raw and gripping, No New York takes readers deep into the artistic and sexual experimentation of an era when everyone read Jean Genet, quoted Antonin Artaud, and believed true expression mattered more than money or fame.

Includes 55 rarely seen images of iconic musicians and artists that capture the look and feel of the era. Images are from Bertei’s personal collection as well as well-known artists and photographers like Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, Vivienne Dick, Michael Granros, Marcia Resnick, and Julia Gorton.

Available from Penguin Random House

Adele Bertei is an author, director, performer, and musician, and resides in Los Angeles, CA. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, daughter of an Italian immigrant and a ballroom dance instructor. Her career in music began as singer/guitarist in a rock band called Peter and the Wolves, performing at longshoremen and biker bars in Cleveland. The premature death of bandmate Peter Laughner of Pere Ubu resulted in Bertei’s move to New York in 1977, where she quickly became a pivotal figure in a counter-cultural movement of art, film, music, and literature. She was an original member of the Contortions, produced by Brian Eno on the seminal No New York record.

As author, her first book Peter and the Wolves is a short memoir of her rock and roll education via legendary Cleveland musician Peter Laughner, released by Smog Veil Records in November, 2020. Titles include Why Labelle Matters published by the University of Texas Press in March, 2021. Twist: Tales of a Queer Girlhood published by ZE Books in 2023, and Universal Mother (Sinéad O’Connor) released by Bloomsbury in 2025. No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene was released by Faber & Faber in March 2026 in the UK, and by Beacon Press in the USA.

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Trying on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh’s hip-replacement surgery, he both succeeds and fails. He covers ground with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tire. A ambivalent Duolingo bot becomes his unlikely confidante as he attempts to describe his family in a foreign language. Ever adding to his list of “Countries I Have Been To,” he rides a horse named Tequila in Guatemala, buys a bespoke priest’s cassock in Vatican City, and goes on safari in Kenya without taking a single photo.

Time takes its toll: scrolling through his address book, he counts those he couldn’t bear to outlive, and realizes how many are already gone. He is bitten by a dog and insulted by a wee train passenger. A woman on the street late at night either sexually harasses him or doesn’t. It’s easy to agree with the lady waving a sign that reads, “Enough Is Enough.” And yet, life holds much to delight in: the massive testicles of a ram, a trip abroad with his sisters, a really excellent reptile video, a pair of well-made cotton underpants.

Throughout these essays—at once acerbic and tender, playful and profound—Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity our fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit.

Available from Hachette Book Group

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In “The Journey to Galway,” a mother who has learned of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in WWII, travels to Galway to inform his wife and their three now fatherless children. “Sleep,” originally published in The New Yorker, explores the rift between two lovers as one of them cannot reckon with his grief and fear after the death of his brother. Death, again, is a central character in the title story, “The News from Dublin,” as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin to try to save his younger brother who is dying of tuberculosis. Maurice must petition the health minister for access to a new experimental drug, and this is the only hope.

Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles of mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight. Tóibín is a master of short fiction as well as the novel, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale.

Available from Penguin Random House

Colm Tóibín is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning author. His novels include The Master, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Le prix du meilleur livre étranger, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; and Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award. His works also include The Empty Family, The Testament of Mary, and Nora Webster. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

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When Lieutenant Lauren Kelly is exiled to the Homicide Cold Case Unit at the DA’s office, she knows her superiors are sticking her there as punishment until she can quietly retire. That way, no one can claim they discriminated against the only trans detective in Donn County.

Even though Lauren has enough on her plate already—a teenage daughter struggling with Lauren’s transition, an ex-wife Lauren hasn’t gotten over, and a former detective father with Alzheimer’s—she starts looking into the murder of Sherry Darling, a trans sex worker and Lauren’s former high school classmate. As Lauren looks deeper into Sherry’s case, she finds evidence of a cover-up with far-reaching implications that may or may not be tied to the reason her mother left.

In a genre where queer perspectives are few and far between, Gigl’s procedurals are as refreshing as they are propulsive. All We Hide poses searing questions about identity and justice with one hand, and takes your breath away with the other, making this an exciting new project from a celebrated author in queer crime fiction.

Available from Soho Press

Robyn Gigl is the author of the critically acclaimed Erin McCabe Legal Thrillers, which include: Survivor’s Guilt, named one of the 100 Best Mystery/Thriller Books of All Time by TIME magazine and winner of the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing; By Way of Sorrow, a CrimeReads Best Novel of the Year; Remain Silent, a Joseph Hansen Award nominee; and Nothing but the Truth, selected as one of the best crime novels of 2024 by The New York Times. Robyn practices law by day and writes novels at night. Fortunately, she has a very boring social life.

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Alternately melancholic and hilarious, this book chronicles Pyle’s bonkers experiences while attending hair school, his evolving relationship with his mother, how the Ramones affected his young teen brain, a life-changing car accident, and other situations from a creative life lived fully, providing oodles of salacious dish. You’ll discover how a punk rock pen pal led to a career in showbiz and how to put out the same record over and over again.

Photography, performing and writing music in bands, recording and producing numerous other artists, writing about music, and scoring for film and TV are all part of Pyle’s distinct observer’s eye — one that sees all creative media as aspects of the same stream.

Available from ECW Press

Don Pyle is a Toronto artist, working primarily in music, sound, photography and writing. The band Long Branch, in which he has played with Sally Lee, Lisa Myers, and Laura Pitkanen since 2014, released their second album, Arc of the Sun, in July 2025. He has released numerous records with other bands he has been a part of, including Phono-Comb, Greek Buck, Black Heel Marks, The Filthy Gaze of Europe, Fifth Column, King Cobb Steelie, and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. His early photographs of the beginning of punk in Toronto, starting at age 14 in 1976, were the foundation of his first photography exhibition, Trouble In The Camera Club, at The Beaver in Toronto in 2008. He’s written about music for Eye, Now and Exclaim! magazine, and was the sex advice columnist for a local paper for a year. He recently signed with ECW Press for the publication of his third book, Rough Description

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