Your Fall Guide to Fall Guides

This week we wanted to take some time to celebrate our literary peers. We’ve been so wrapped up making exciting plans for Scratch, that keeping up with the books dropping this fall season has largely fallen by the wayside. It’s no small secret that this is also a time for being inundated with lists. For books, tech deals, new movies and restaurants, gift ideas — you name it.

A well-curated list is an act of care, and below are some of the best ones we’ve come across, covering a vast sea of topics and genres, small and university press publishers, works in translation, and overlooked gems. We know publicists and marketing departments are stretched thin for the volume of work they’re expected to promote, and we know online editorial budgets are as tight as they’ve been in years. If you’re looking for a book or two to read off the beaten path, we suspect you’ll find it somewhere in the links below. 

And remember, our Scratch Reader Mailbag is open to all. Send us your questions about writing, journalism, publishing, and so forth, and we’ll answer them as best we can. Just click here, scroll down to "Mailbag," and follow the instructions listed.

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Places Journal: “Bookshelf: Fall 2026”

For those new to Places, I’d describe it as a long-running website about how we engage with our environments, both natural and built, and the resulting consequences — both ecological and societal. On any given day, I’m bound to find journalism about landscapes, urbanism, climate, race and geography, architecture, and whatever else involves a person thinking critically about spaces.  

Among the books on this list I’m most eager to check out are Insurgent Play: Social Worlds of Urban Disruption, which Places describes as using the author’s “background as a skateboarder and a sociologist to blend together theories of play, informal urbanism, urban design, and the everyday,” and Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide by Eyal Weizman, which… let me just quote the review:

How do atrocities materialize in space? What is disclosed when we understand architecture not as a collection of buildings but as a practice that constructs and destroys, organizes movement, distributes vulnerability, and shapes the conditions in which life can take place? These questions animate Eyal Weizman’s investigation of how the Israeli state and military inflict violence on the Palestinian people and the landscape of Palestine, through soil, subsoil, buildings, infrastructure, bodies, and atmospheres; how they annihilate the means of survival, then erase the evidence.

— Rahawa

LitHub: “Now and Then, Mothers and Daughters, Sonnets and Sequences: Seven Poetry Books to Read This Month”

I love prose but it feels like there are times when the poetry get lost in the shuffle, and this season felt like one of those moments. I recently stumbled upon this fantastic list of poets engaging with history and memory in some way, and I ordered every book on the list. I'm fascinated by how poets use space — they don't have the opportunity to overexplain. Good poetry relies on an economy of language, where every single word has to do some work. I study groups of poems (like a crown of sonnets) to better understand transitions. I also find it a great deal of fun to unpack the metaphorical impact of a line and/or image. More well-curated lists highlighting poetry books, please!

— Latria

Words Without Borders: “The Watchlist: September 2026”

Vol 1. Brooklyn’s Tobias Carroll is a long-time pal and a stupendously voracious reader (I have no idea how he reads so much) whose judgement I whole-heartedly trust. Translated works rarely get the love they deserve — or, for that matter, the compensation — but here Carroll selects six books for your consideration, all priced at $20 or under. Honestly, I’d read anything he suggested, but the speculative fiction novel Bonobo by You-jeong Jeong, translated by An Seon Jae, and Berta García Faet poetry collection A Little Pretty Personality, translated by Kelsi Vanada, are my picks from this bunch. 

— Rahawa

Hyperallergic: “12 Must-Read Books on Textiles and Fiber Art”

Hyperallergic is one of the places I regularly read for arts journalism and cultural criticism. As the daughter of a seamstress I've thought about textiles since I could crawl, and as I've gotten older my appreciation of handmade, one-of-a-kind things has grown. Y'all know from this piece on my desire to be an arts critic and this piece on my attempt at taking an ekphrastic poetry class that I'm something of an art fiend, so it feels like this list was made with me in mind. If you love books like The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St. Clair, there are a couple of new books on this list that you will want to add to your TBR pile. 

I didn’t get to see Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textile, curated by Rapheal Begay (Diné) and Dr. Hadley Jensen, when it was an exhibition, but at least now I can buy this book on Indigenous land-based relational practices and textile weaving.

— Latria

Drafting the Past: “12 New Books We Want to Read This October”

On the more academic side of things, the history podcast Drafting the Past recently expanded its website to include book reviews. The above list is a feast of deeply researched titles that, from the outside at least, look largely accessible to readers from non-academic backgrounds too.

Those interested in the circulatory system of capitalism and looking to splurge a little should check out Miriam Posner’s Seeing Like a Supply Chain: The Hidden Life of Logistics (Yale University Press, if you’re reading this, please send me a copy). The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West by Kevin Waite seems fascinating as well, and is described by Drafting the Past as “The first book-length biography of a Black woman who was forced by her enslaver to walk to California and labor there for five years before suing for her emancipation in 1856.” Me being me, I’m adding it to my cart immediately.

— Rahawa

Orion Magazine: “Books that Whet Our Appetites"

Orion Magazine is my go-to for literary writing about the environment, deep ecological thought, and ideas tethered to the human experience. This particular list features books that examine our philosophies on food and culture. Some of the books, like Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses, which was originally published back in 1991, are older and well on their way to being classics, but there are new releases too, filled with evocative, sensory-rich writing meant to further our understanding of the human experience.

— Latria

Electric Literature: “15 Small Press Titles You Should Be Reading This Fall”

Long live the small press! Where would we be without them? I’ve seen enough online chatter about Hub City Press’s Daytona Teddy Riggs to have my interest piqued. Same goes for Yñiga from Coffee House Press. What can I say? I’m from Miami, and good, lyrical diasporic writing will get me every time. In fact, more than a few books on this list fall under that category, so take a look.

— Rahawa

Garden & Gun: “Fall Is for Southern Readers: Our Favorite Books This Autumn”

Disclosure: I'm one of the 20 or so writers/literature lovers that Garden & Gun reaches out to every season when they put together this massive list of fall books. I love seeing what my contemporaries are into, given that we're an eclectic group with diverse tastes. The list often highlights beautifully rendered, regional small press offerings that frequently get overlooked. Anthologies like New Stories from the South 2026 (featuring work from folks like Silas House, Ron Rash, and friend-of-Scratch Deesha Philyaw) sometimes get slept on. 

Unexpected addition to my kitchen: Good Spirits: The Joy of Cocktails and the Stories Behind Them by Tiffanie Barriere, who is a delight.

Also, paging resident Floridian Rahawa Haile — there's a book called Gator!: The Making of America’s Iconic Reptile, from First Encounters to Florida Man, by Mark V. Barrow Jr. on this list!

— Latria

Post-Credits Scene From the Garden

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