A list of interesting sounding books — fiction and non-fiction, older and not yet published — that I haven’t read yet but have caught my eye somewhere (as at August 2026):

• Crossing the Wine-dark Sea, by Emily Wilson

• The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud, by Cecilia Rikap

• Unsayable, by Michael Cunningham

• Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather

• Music Against the Night, by Yiyun Li

• Fancy Work: Unpicking Past Lives, by Alice Hattrick

• We Are Not Machines, by Sarah O’Connor

• When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy, by Beronda Montgomery

• Life of M, by Rachel Cusk

• The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity, by Andrea Wulf

• How to be less useful: The Joy of Inefficiency, by Priyanka Mattoo

• All We Say, by Ben Rhodes

• Opening Night, by Sara Baume

• Backtalker, by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

• Anni Albers: A Life, by Nicholas Fox Weber

• Writing(s), by Claire-Louise Bennett , Marguerite Duras, Dorothy Spencer

• Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI, by Carissa Veliz

• Books - A Manifesto: Or, How to Build a Library, by Ian Patterson

• Vocal Break, by Lauren Elkin

• William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love, by Philip Hoare

• Lives of the Saints, by Nancy Lemann, introduction by Geoff Dyer

• How to Talk to AI (and how not to), by Jamie Bartlett

• Ambivalence, by Brian Dillon

• The Hour of the Wolf, by Fatima Bhutto

• Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain, by Zakia Sewell

• The Last Kings of Hollywood, by Paul Fischer

• Table 4 at The River Cafe, by Ruthie Rogers

• Friction: A Biography, by Jennifer R. Vail

• The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI:How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late, by Cory Doctorow

• The Beginning Comes After the End, by Rebecca Solnit

• The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict, by Priya Parker

• The Revolution Will Be Internalised: On the unlikely politics of inner prepping, by Anouchka Grose

• Foreign Return: On Art and Inhabitation, by Neha Kale

• Aug 9 - fog, by Kathryn Scanlan

• Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City, by Anand Giridharadas

• Autobiography of Cotton, by Cristina Rivera Garza; translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

• The Floating World, by Ben Eastham

• In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner, by Akshi Singh

• Good People, by Patmeena Sabit

• Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, by The Friends of Attention

• This is Where the Serpent Lives, by Daniyal Mueenuddin

• Over The Water: Essays on Islands, by various contributors

• Bookish, by Radhika Jones

• Range, by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight

• Contrapposto, by Dave Eggers

• Ghost Stories: A Memoir, by Siri Hustvedt

• Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, by Thomas Dekeyser

• Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen, by Kate Evans

• Marble in Metamorphosis, by Rachel Cusk & Chris Kontos

• The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations and Robots, by Lisa Siraganian

• Algorithmic Capital: Resistance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Jonathan Durand Folco and Jonathan Martineau

• Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution, by Anand Gopal

• No Is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining, by Sara Ahmed

• Don't Forget We're Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion, by Lamorna Ash

• Name Recognition, by Min Jin Lee

• American Hagwon, by Min Jin Lee

• Who Owns Beauty?, by Bénédicte Savoy, translated by Andrew Brown

• Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power and the Will to Live, by Amber Husain

• Last Week in End Times Cinema, by A.S. Hamrah

• Last Night in Brooklyn, by Xochitl Gonzalez

• The Complex, by Karan Mahajan

• The Last of Earth, by Deepa Anappara

• A Tender Age, by Chang-rae Lee

• Repetition, by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

• To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, by Harriet Armstrong

• Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant

• Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement, by Leonard Koren

• My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction, by Deborah Levy

• Painting Writing Texting, by Chantal Joffe & Olivia Laing

• How to Weather Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change, by Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton

• Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, by W. David Marx

• Flower, by Ed Atkins

• The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, by Ian Bogost

• We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope, edited by Malka Older, Annalee Newitz and Karen Lord

• The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism, by Robert Dorschel

• Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free, by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

• What Is Mine, by José Henrique Bortoluci, Translated by Rahul Bery

• Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet, by O Tochi Onyebuchi

• Sick of It: The Global Fight for Women's Health, by Sophie Harman

• Pretentiousness: Why it Matters, by Dan Fox

• Squeeze Me: Lemon Recipes & Art, by Ruthie Rogers and Ed Ruscha

• The Exhibition of Persephone Q, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

• Love Divine, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

• The Catastrophe Hour: selected Essays, by Meghan Daum

• Land, by Maggie O’Farrell

• Minister without Portfolio: Memoir of a Reluctant Exile, by Hooman Majd

• Earlier, by Sasha Frere-Jones

• What the Deep Water Knows, by Miranda Cowley Heller

• Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, by Nadia Asparouhova

• What Is Free Speech?, by Fara Dabhoiwala

• The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, Edited by So Mayer and Sarah Shin 

• Death of an Ordinary Man, by Sarah Perry

• The Last Human Job: the work of connecting in a disconnected world, by Allison Pugh

• The People’s Project, curated by Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith

• Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939, by Janet Flanner

• Information Age, by Cora Lewis

• I Want To Burn This Place Down, by Maris Kreizman

• Cyberfeminism Index, by Mindy Seu

• The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty 

• The Other Island, by Carina del Valle Schorske

• Shopkeeping: stories, advice and observations, by Peter Miller 

• Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life, by Sofia Samatar

• Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority, by Anne Anlin Cheng 

• Acts of Resistance: the power of art to create a better world, by Amber Massie-Blomfield 

• The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, by Sarah Schulman 

• The Wilderness, by Aysegul Savas

• Three Lives A Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, by Tove Ditlevesen

• Vilhelm's Room, by Tove Ditlevesen

• Searches: selfhood in the digital age, by Vauhini Vara 

• The Work We Need, by Hilary Cottam 

• The Age of Choice, by Sophia Rosenfeld 

• The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd

• Mood Machine: the rise of Spotify and the costs of the perfect playlist, by Liz Pelly

• Alterations, by Cory Winrock (Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books)

• Immemorial, by Lauren Markham (Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books)

• Lecture, by Mary Cappello (Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books)

• Together, by Ece Temelkuran

• Liquid Reflections, by Liliane Lijn

• Notes from an island, by Tove Jansson

• Nova Scotia House, by Charlie Porter