As we come to a close on this year, we’re excited to share a preview of some of our forthcoming 2026 books. Save 50% on all pre-orders using code 6HLW25 during our Holiday Sale.

Bummerland by Randolph Lewis

In Bummerland (Bison Books, March) Randolph Lewis scours the soul of the country during the first Trump administration and pandemic era with a sharp eye and keen wit, looking for glimmers of democratic hope and redemption in America.

“Keenly observed, deeply felt, and beautifully written, Randolph Lewis’s Bummerland is the funniest, saddest, and wisest book you’ll read this year. You won’t find a better guide to the tragic America wrought by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”—Ari Kelman, author of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek, winner of the Bancroft Prize in History

“This acid-tongued, profoundly sad and hilarious, tragic-gonzo adventure trip through a seductively deranged country feels out the grim landscape of the great American derailing of the 2020s. It invents, with a growing number of other shining books, a passionate pragmatic genre to approach a soft revolution devoted to well-being, creativity, equity, sustainability, and solidarity.”—Kathleen Stewart, author of A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America

And You Will Call It Fate by Timothy J. Hillegonds

In And You Will Call It Fate (Nebraska, March), Timothy J. Hillegonds explores an eight-year relationship with Sean Dempsey, a charismatic yet volatile former NFL player turned entrepreneur who profoundly reshaped the trajectory of Hillegonds’s life. Set against the backdrop of Chicago’s financial district, the memoir follows Hillegonds—a high school dropout, struggling addict, and estranged father—as he unexpectedly enters the high-stakes world of finance under Dempsey’s intense mentorship.

“Haunting, disturbing, and uplifting, And You Will Call It Fate tells the complex tale of a friendship that saved the author from addiction—a friendship as exhilarating and ensnaring as a line of cocaine, full of false promises and flashes of rapture and insight. The character of Sean Dempsey is Hillegonds’s Gatsby—enigmatic, lavish in lifestyle, and dangerous to be around. But, like the author of this brave and beautiful book, you’ll be glad you came into his orbit.”—Miles Harvey, author of The Island of Lost Maps and The King of Confidence

“Timothy J. Hillegonds has crafted a courageous and unflinching exploration of masculinity, rage, addiction, and redemption. At its core—and perhaps even to the author’s own surprise—it’s a moving testament to our capacity for transformation and the unstoppable momentum of personal evolution once the will is awakened.”—Katherine Rowland, author of The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution

Slow Guillotine by Teo Rivera-Dundas

Slow Guillotine (Nebraska, March) follows three broke weirdos whose collective desire to make and think about art is constantly interrupted by their art-industry-adjacent minimum-wage jobs. Throughout the novel, the three friends’ day jobs in a failing independent bookstore, a sterile gallery in downtown Manhattan, and miscellaneous living rooms across the Long Island birthday-party-clown circuit interweave with their attempts to come to terms with their precarity, gender-dysphoric embodiment, and the floating dream of collective liberation.

“Slow Guillotine’s subversive, heat-seeking pulse is defiantly pro-ennui, embracing projectile vomit and the thing we want most besides love, that is—language at the very edge, and the shedding of our perpetually too-snug skins.”—Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals: Stories

“Teo Rivera-Dundas makes the banal shine brilliantly—because when you’re young and in New York, geared with friendship, queerness, and art, even the most mundane trivialities can turn into bold misadventures. Slow Guillotine is a tender, slithering threat: hope hovering, ready to strike.”—Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary

Marzia by Marzia Babakarkhail and Pamela Say

From her childhood in Puli Khumri, Afghanistan, to her courageous advocacy on the global stage today, Judge Marzia Babakarkhail weaves together deeply personal stories that resonate with international audiences. Marzia (Potomac Books, March) takes readers on a heart-pounding journey through the stark realities of life under Taliban rule following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021—navigating checkpoints, relying on secret networks, and making high-stakes decisions in moments where every second mattered. 

“Marzia is more than a story of survival. It is a story of a woman whose bravery, kindness, and unshakable belief in justice changed countless lives.”—Deeyah Kahn, Emmy and Peabody Award–winning documentary filmmaker

“This compelling story sheds light on Marzia Babakarkhail’s fight for justice, her enduring connection to her roots, and her remarkable ability to turn adversity into triumph. A tale of grit and perseverance, her life is a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit. A thoroughly gripping read!”—Nerissa Roberts, head of faculty for English for Speakers of Other Languages at Oldham College

All that Refuses to Die by Michael Imossan

All that Refuses to Die (Nebraska, March) is a poetry collection that interrogates the present conditions of Africans through a historical lens. Michael Imossan moves into historical spaces such as museums and sites of enslavement, touching artifacts that hold meaning, and asking, Where was Africa? Where is Africa now? And what has changed? 

“Michael Imossan is a capacious poet. He shows us how a heart can take in an entire continent and spread it as love to the world. His collective heart is perhaps the most interior heart and most true.”—Fady Joudah, author of The Earth in the Attic and Tethered to Stars

“What is impressing me about Michael Imossan’s work is the manner in which he is negotiating multiple ‘influences’ and compulsions as a poet, for these manifest themselves in his lyricism and his engagement with a personal narrative of self and self-identity as well as his own wrestling with the influence of tradition. It is telling that were we to list the personages that appear in his epigraphs and, to some extent, in his allusions, we will understand Imossan to be fully ensconced in contemporary world literature. And yet we will also see the extent to which he has become immersed in the varied milieu of contemporary African poetry.”—Kwame Dawes, from the foreword

The Heart Folds Early by Jill Christman

Courageous, clear-eyed, tender, and unexpectedly funny, Jill Christman’s The Heart Folds Early (Nebraska, March) folds the mournful recklessness of the young widow she was against the backdrop of her later marriage and new motherhood, including the choice to end a half-term pregnancy when a routine ultrasound reveals her baby has only half a heart.

“At once fierce and exquisitely tender, The Heart Folds Early is a breathtaking journey into the mind of a mother grappling with an impossible choice. Jill Christman has written a profoundly generous book, offering her story with open palms and, in doing so, affirming the right of every woman to be the authority on her own body and life.”—Nicole Graev Lipson, author of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters

“This book is a continuous wonder, a compulsively readable story told with keen wisdom and nerves of steel about the fierce desire to grow and birth babies from a full life of one’s own. Christman plows right through the pastel curtain around labor and delivery, revealing exactly why the mother and creator of life must wield the power to control this dangerous, bloody, and powerful act and to choose a future for herself and her children.”—Sonya Huber, author of Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto

Life Beyond Fear by Natalie Oceanheart

In Life Beyond Fear (Potomac Books, March), Natalie Oceanheart chronicles her family’s survival of the dangerous turbulence between Russia and Ukraine, from early signs of unrest in 2014 to their life-altering immigration to the United States after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Natalie Oceanheart’s unsparing account of war is told with both a psychologist’s eye for human observation and a woman’s heartache at being in the center of an impossible situation. This memoir of surviving the war in Ukraine and becoming a refugee serves as a crucial reminder of both our humanity and inhumanity.”—Katya Cengel, author of From Chernobyl with Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union

“For all who have endured war, displacement, and loss, or carry that legacy within their families, may we find in Natalie Oceanheart’s Life Beyond Fear a reminder of our shared hope for one humanity and lasting peace.”—Joanie Holzer Schirm, author of My Dear Boy: A World War II Story of Escape, Exile, and Revelation

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For the full list of books that will be published throughout the Spring/Summer 2026 season, check out our catalog.