Most Anticipated!!!

& being "heroes"

I did not expect my forthcoming novel, The Come Apart, to be on Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated of 2026 list. I swear to you I didn’t. It never crossed my mind. I was in no way anticipating “Most Anticipated” treatment.

(NOT)

But when the list of 314 (!) books came out last week, I eventually scanned the piece to confirm my (lack of) expectations and, duly confirmed, was surprised to feel a little…mopey. Just a little. Like muted grey, not gut-punch charcoal. This emotional response intrigued me, actually: how I could feel let down about something I’d had not one hopeful thought about?

The next question was: What could this moment teach me, how might it offer preparation for other potentially deflating moments sure to come? It’s interesting how little we talk about the difficult emotions around publishing. On social media, especially, we focus on celebrating wins, both our own and others. Perhaps rightly so. It’s good practice, and at its best, an act of bolstering literary community. But maybe we should be more willing to talk frankly about the negative emotions that swirl around the writing life—thirst, envy, shame, doubt, cynicism. Not to accentuate them, but to acknowledge, supportively, how normal and common they are, and what we can do with them.

(Do they cover this in MFA programs now? They definitely did not when I was in grad school a thousand years ago, and it took me a long time to work through grappling with the lows that, let’s be honest, outweigh the highs. Maybe there’s a seminar for this now. A practicum. An in-house cohort therapist.)

While I was pondering my little book’s unanticipated status, its invisibility among the ranks of the elite tastemakers 😱, I scrolled past some more news about the literary culture of our times. In short, another report about the Death of Reading. Apparently, based on a recent survey, 40 percent of Americans read zero books in 2025.

Given this context, how self-pitying could I possibly be about TCA not being on a list of 314 (!) new books to hit shelves in the coming year? I mean, I guess one could feel even more hopeless about the state of literary life. But for some reason, the cognitive dissonance between Nobody Reads Anymore and 314 anticipated books and that ain’t even nearly all of ‘em, folks! gave me a rush of desperate solidarity, the satisfaction of circling wagons with my kind. Or, another metaphor: I was standing on the head of a pin, shoulder to shoulder with anyone else who happened to like reading books. It was regrettable, sure, to be exiled in Pinheadville, but it was a community nevertheless. We might be but an itty-bitty sliver of the masses, and yet there are enough of us to support, somehow, at least according to some calculus I cannot understand, the creation of a list of 314 books entering the marketplace, in bold defiance of whatever else was going on Out There. Couldn’t I feel good about this?

A few days later I had coffee with a friend who reminded me of what I already knew about the real purpose of these lists, the numbers of which are abundant, nearly as abundant as the books that make the lists combined with the books that don’t! My friend decried the uncoolness of the very listmaking apparatus. It’s a very obvious marketing tool and not much more than that (Tell me: Have you ever actually sought out a book because you read about it on one of these lists?! If you have, I genuinely want to know). The media outlets’ lists are social-share generators, designed to create metrics that support a numbers-story needed in order for the outlet to stay afloat. This is a cynical take, yes, but there’s a lot of truth to it. In not being on the list, I was not being covertly requested to perform unpaid marketing labor, so I guess that’s something to be happy about. More time to read and write, then? Off into the woods I can go.

I told my friend about another thing that’d happened right around the Lit Hub Most Anticipated Moment. A magazine had arrived by mail, its cover story another Most Anticipated roundup. The Come Apart didn’t appear on that list either; again, no surprises there, but I mentioned this at dinner to my husband and daughter, largely because the magazine happened to be lying nearby on the dining table, where our mail goes to die. “You know, lists, whatever,” I said, sharing a dismissive look with Todd.

It was my daughter’s response that threw me. A “most anticipated books” list? Cool! She found it remarkable, heart-lifting even, that such a list even existed. Imagine! People out there caring about books! In times like these!

Touché, my darling teenager. Always there to help me see a little differently.

Which is to say, we can react to the rankings, the marketing apparatus, whatever. And/or we can also be glad there are still new books to read all the time, and some of them won’t even be banned (!), and we might be so lucky as to find solace and escape and a wealth of wisdom in their pages while very real worries are howling, quite ferociously, at our doors.

Anyway, there you have it, it’s all rather embarrassing (the writing life is nothing if not embarrassing; enter ye and prepare to blush), and now in an attempt to escape/redeem myself I will go back to the Lit Hub list and quickly pick out five books, just five, that I’ve not heard of before and can now look forward to anticipate reading eventually, if not this year. (I’m so slow.)

Here they are: Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin, Cleaner by Jess Shannon, Will This Make You Happy: Stories & Recipes from a Year of Baking, by Tanya Bush, and The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary by Terry Tempest Williams.

In closing, a few high fives. If you, too, have a book coming out in 2026 and are not on any lists, high five, buddy. If you have a book coming out and are on a list, high five, buddy. If you are writing a book and trying not to think about future lists at all, high five, buddy. To Elizabeth Alexander at the Mellon Foundation, who dreamed up a big project that might make the world a better place to be a writer and reader, high five, queen. To the hardworking culture workers at the publishing houses and the media outlets making and covering books: high five, buddies. And if The Come Apart ends up on a list, you bet I’ll do my unpaid marketing task, then send hearty high fives to anyone who would put it on a list. And heartiest high fives to the buddies who have pre-ordered it, who exist, who are dear to me, such dear buddies! And if you’re like, who cares about literary lists, we have an authoritarian nightmare to wake up from and deal with, and innocent people are being gunned down and disappeared, and my heart is near-to-bursting every hour of these horrifying days, you’re not wrong—and here’s a big virtual hug. And a song for the week:

I listened to “Heroes” no less than a dozen times today. I’ve had it on repeat for nearly two weeks, ever since it was used in the final moments of the Stranger Things finale, which we watched at the turn of the new year. Let me suggest that you listen to this song very closely, and let it help your heart to burst wide open—because hearts burst and heal, burst and heal, that’s what they do.

I was four years old when David Bowie released “Heroes,” so I’ve been hearing this song pretty much my entire life on the radio. But I never really experienced it—absorbed it—until the past two weeks. “Heroes” has a consistent beat, its dynamics are actually kind of un-dynamic; it chugs along, and that synth line (or is it a guitar?) snakes along throughout, adding to the droney effect, and in the first three minutes of the song Bowie sounds so reasonable, so measured, like he’s just sipping tea while suggesting, just spitballing, say, we could be heroes, just for one day. Just an idea amongst pleasantries. Maybe you catch a whiff of passion, barely retrained beneath this mild entreaty…AND THEN: Notice how, when the song gets to about 3:20, Bowie’s vocals transform. The mannered pose drops. He’s done being mild. It’s time to let loose. He becomes desperate, shouty, strangled, crying out in exultation/exhortation that we COULD BE HEROES, FOR EVER AND EVER. The tambourine kicks in, shimmering behind Bowie’s vocal fever pitch, and the utter desperation just grows and grows, rising as the song chugs along, and tell me, these days, how can you not be crying by the end? I have cried to “Heroes” this morning and I will probably cry to it again, and I hope you, too, will let it help burst your heart right open.

Thank you, Stranger Things, for bringing me back to Bowie, for sending me deep down a Bowie trail the past couple weeks, just when I needed it. I was startled, a few days ago, to find that the late artist’s birthday (Jan. 8) and his death (Jan. 10) fell right in the midst of this trip I’ve been on. Olivia Lang had this to say:

@olivialanguage

Olivia Laing on Instagram: "10 years, still loved, still missed…

And a couple more songs for the week, yes?

Most Anticipated? How about Most Improved.

Couple of high schoolers in Nashville with charisma to burn and a penchant for GBV-style lo-fi melodies. Keep an eye on em.

Finally, I got this old Feist song in my head recently, and I’ve been revisiting The Reminder. If, like me, you haven’t listened in a while, or you’re new to Feist, this album is stellar, poetic, dynamic—an early aughts classic for sure.

Feel it all, indeed.

a few Halloweens ago

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