After seven years of releasing lengthy seasonal recommendations list, I sort of let the ball drop in 2026 and realized way too late that I hadn’t put out a list of Spring 2026 recommended titles. So, I decided to just wait till all the Fall 2026 catalogs were out and put out a full annual list of recommendations, and to simplify things a bit more.
This list is a much more streamlined and focuses on my major research interests: science fiction, fantasy, and horror studies; literary studies (esp. sociology of literature); media and cultural studies; and postwar American studies.
All past and future recommendation lists can be found here.
RECOMMENDATIONS!
Asbury, Family Game Night: Board Games from the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties (Kentucky)
Bering-Porter, Undead Labor: Capitalism’s Zombie Worker (Minnesota)
Boucher, Totally Radical: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Environmental Justice (Mississippi)
Bracken, Believable Impossibilities: Race, Testimony, and the Horror Film (Chicago)
Brouillette, Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era (Duke)
Cardon, A Planet in Hospice: Environmental Justice in Existential Ecofiction (Ohio State)
carrington, Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination (Fordham)
Cordasco, Speculative Fiction in Translation from Around the World (Wales)
Cressler, et al., Body and Blood: Catholic Horror in America (NYU)
Davis-McElligatt, Black Aliens: Kinship in the Cosmic Diaspora (Ohio State)
DeJong and Lajeunesse, Their System, Our Game: Homebrew and the Worlds of Pathfinder (Michigan)
Diffrient, Seeing Is Hearing Is Believing: Sensory Horror and Assistive Technologies (Wayne State)
Dixon, Reading Relations: How Authors Enter Our Lives (Iowa)
Dosser, Nostalgic Futures: The Reactionary Fantasies of Speculative Fiction Fandoms (Rutgers)
Du, Ghost Animation: How Manying Rebuilt Empire in Postwar East Asia (California)
Egan, Toxic Fear: Pollution Anxieties in the American 1980s (Georgia)
Giannini, Breaking into Song: Television Musicals from Glee to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Bloomsbury)
Gillard, Psycho Century: Robert Bloch, American Horror Master (Mississippi)
González, Galactic Herencia: Latinos in the Star Wars Universe (Arizona)
Gray and Gershon, eds., Reading Media: How to Do Textual Analysis (NYU)
Grossman, Standardization (Standardisation): A Literary History (Chicago)
Gutjahr, Faith in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life (Princeton)
Gwenffrewi, J.K. Rowling and the Anti-Trans Panic (Ohio State)
Han, Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism (Columbia)
Hick, The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value (Bloomsbury)
Hind, Speculative Flesh: Ecologies Flesh, Indistinction, and Speculative Fiction (Wales)
Johnson, Mexico in Space: From la Raza Cósmica to the Space Race (Arizona)
Jones, For the Dead Remember The Life of M. R. James (Oxford)
Kearney, Designing the Teenage Girl: The Debut of a Popular Character (Texas)
Kies, Conservatively Queer TV: Masculinities in the Reagan Era (Syracuse)
Lavender, Race, Law, and Speculative Fiction: Future Pasts (Penn Press)
Mann, Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction (Duke)
McGrath, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton)
Mingazova, Narrative Slowness as Effect: Attention, Affect, Boredom (Nebraska)
Murray, Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT)
Osborn, Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture (Chicago)
Packer and Stoneman, Cypher Culture: Conspiracy, Fandom, and the Messages That Were Not There (LSU)
Perry, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook (Johns Hopkins)
Petrick, The Tablet Computer: The Idea of a Machine (Johns Hopkins)
Sallis, Ever New Earths: Columns from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Iowa)
Schatz, Power Surge: Conglomerate Hollywood and the Studio System’s Last Hurrah (California)
Singer, Strange Hybrids: Science Fiction, Literary Fiction, and the Contemporary Novel (Virginia)
Smith, Bridge to an Unseen Shore: New Age Music as Visionary Art (California)
Smith, et al., Occulture: The New Face of American Spirituality (Oxford)
Sohn, Asian Ameritopias: Asian American Speculative Fictions (Temple)
Stanfill, Professor Superstar: Fandom and Anti-Fandom of Academia (Michigan)
Stein, Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s (Chicago)
Streeby, Science Fiction Ecologies: Worldmaking with Butler, Le Guin, and Merril (NYU)
Telotte, Before Trek: Building American Science Fiction Television (Texas)
Thompson, On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s (Minnesota)
Trammell, How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play (Duke)
Trauvitch, Fi-Sci: Avatars of Science in Fiction (Ohio State)
Tuleja, Skirmishes with Patriotism: Looking for America in the Long Shadow of Vietnam (Kentucky)
- Note: Tuleja wrote Land of Precious Snow (1977), which I wrote about last year, and I interviewed him to learn more about that book and his incredible career. This is his pseudo-memoir of that period.
Vena, No More Chainsaws: Feminist Criticism and the New Wave of Women’s Horror Cinema (Rutgers)
Waddington, The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games (McGill-Queen’s)
Wills, Doom Town, USA: The Nevada Test Site as Ground Zero of 1950s American Culture (Kansas)
Worthen, Paper Screens: The Internet in Contemporary Fiction (LSU)
Zipes, Once upon a Time There Was Truth; Or, Why We Need Fairy Tales (Yale)
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