news

this is where i am privileged to list all the book-related things that have happened since we last spoke, which i will do quickly and without making it weird. my new book came out; it became a NYT, Sunday Times, USA Today, and Washington post bestseller; NPR, Elle, Amazon, and Library Journal listed it as one of the best books of the year; i signed so many books my knuckles swelled up like little oak burls; an incredible artist animated a scene that went mildly viral on instagram; i talked so much i lost my voice; a few days ago i was recognized in a bookstore! by a stranger!¹

all of this lends weight to my theory that i am actually still twelve years old. in 7th or 8th grade i was named Most Likely to Become a Famous Author (a category i suspect my language arts teacher of making up just to be nice to me), and spent the next month hallucinating about exactly these sorts of unlikely things.

i also just finished up the edits for a short story collection, out fall 2026 from tor! there will be four (4) new stories, and a bunch of older ones.

some day maybe i'll have something smart or at least funny to say about how it feels to revisit almost a decade of my own work—like meeting ten different mildly humiliating versions of yourself in the mirror—but not yet. for now i'll just say: if you've ever loved something enough to make art about it, the love is still there, waiting for you. what a privilege to get to pick it up and hold it for a little while.

the annual(ish) alix e. harrow gift guide

most of you—being organized, responsible, upright members of society who do not find themselves saying, on december the twenty-third, "oh my god, did we forget the great uncles?"—have already finished your holiday shopping by now. i am therefore forced to admit that this isn't really a gift guide.² it's just an excuse to flip back through my reading journal and talk about the books i loved this year. it's an indulgence! a treat! a written record of joy, which—in this fucking year, in this fucking country—feels strangely urgent to me. i want to send it in an email to all my friends. i want to shake it in the face of my elected officials: we lived, assholes! and we read some really good books.

the raven scholar by antonia hodgson

a brilliantly constructed palace-intrigue-type murder mystery, set in a fully fantasy world full of gods & magic. every piece of it—the dialogue, the pacing, the relationships, the reveals—is achieved with such effortless craft that it made me a little distraught. perfect for:

• whichever of your friends hosted the GOT watch parties back in the day

• your grandma who only reads mysteries. this is your chance to lure her over to secondary world fantasy!

• basically everybody?? my husband liked it, my brother liked it, my mom liked it. a four quadrant hit

the bewitching by silvia moreno-garcia

a really well-drawn multi-generational haunting that i mostly did not read at night because i am a coward. it's so hard to flip between three different timelines and make them all click along correctly but moreno-garcia has written like twelve novels. there is no trick she cannot pull off. get it for:

• the person in your peer group who arranged the nosferatu movie date

• your too-online buddy who hates dark academia; this one is actually dark, i promise

• any graduate student

the isle in the silver sea by tasha suri

a clever and ardent romance about a lady knight and her lover stuck in a repeating narrative that serves the interests of an evil queen (if i had a nickel, etc). buy it for:

• your crush! if they like it, great! if they don't, great! i've saved you some time

• your co-worker who is skeptical of romantasy as a genre

• anybody who liked the knight and the moth (another favorite!!) or the everlasting

the river has roots by amal el-mohtar

another effortless and sharply lovely fairy tale from the queen of lovely fairy tales. there's a tactile beauty to everything el-mohtar writes, a joy in the words themselves, that i simply adore. buy it for:

• your sister. trust me.

• english lit majors, but specifically if they fuck with 18th and 19th century folkloric traditions

• also music majors. trust me.

the incandescent by emily tesh

there are by now enough Magic School fantasy books to have produced their own sub-genre of books that have beef with Magic School fantasy books. this is the best of these, i think—a magic school from the perspective of a tired and competent teacher trying desperately to keep these idiot children alive.

• your teacher friends, obviously

• anyone who has had to get a tattoo about a different magic school covered up

• your mom, probably

amplitudes: stories of queer and trans futurity ed. by lee mandelo

one of the consequences of re-reading my own short fiction is remembering how much i like short fiction. thematic anthologies are difficult, tonally, but mandelo has managed to curate a collection of bleak, joyful, irreverent, incisive, endurant queer fiction.

• everybody who attends your friendsgiving, probably

• the relative that makes everybody go to art museums on vacation and actually reads the plaques

• any person in your life who has expressed a certain grim exhaustion with "cozy" queer fiction

i, medusa by ayana gray

look: there are a lot of mythic retellings in the wake of madeline miller. (this is fine, to be clear—we must all of us resist that high school-ish urge to assume that a thing is automatically bad just because everyone is doing it). but few are as smart and heartfelt as i, medusa. ideal for:

• the member of your family who had the longest and most intense greek myths phase

• the man in your life who is apparently always thinking about the roman empire? i don't actually know any of these but i'm fascinated by the internet's insistence that they exist

• circe girlies

ladies in hating by alexandra vasti

i didn't keep up much with new romance releases this year, having discovered and read almost everything judith ivory and joanna bourne ever wrote (god bless them both!). but i really like alex vasti, and this was a very sweet historical about two gothic novelists trapped in a haunted? house together. altogether pleasing. get it for:

• anyone you are trying to lure into historical romances. it's a great gateway drug!

• your pastel friend who has a shocking fondness for halloween

• your buddy who is really goin through it and needs something deeply earnest

fate's bane by c.l. clark

i've liked pretty much everything CL Clark has written—she pays such attention to bodies and to power, and the way love negotiates with both—but this is my new favorite. it's a lilting, tragic folk ballad about the love story caught between two warring clans, miraculously novella-length. get it for:

• nicola griffith fans. which should be, by my calculations, everyone

• your teenage niece who is really into arcane

• the friend you are trying to lure away from the sanderson industrial complex. books can be short! and epic!

girl dinner by olivie blake

sharp, slick, and bleak as hell, this is olivie blake in her dark satire era. this is a series of biting jokes in a bloody trench coat. but—like all actually good satire—it’s built on a foundation of genuine anger. and what is anger, but love treated badly? buy it for:

• the adjunct in your life

• the student in your life

• the kind of woman who has stepped up to the poison chalice of hyper-femme perfection—and then stepped away, shuddering

a wizard of earthsea: the graphic novel illustrated by fred fordham

i'm snobbish about graphic novel adaptations, despite having no qualifications or artistic standing. this is one of the most important books in my life (nbd), and fred fordham's lonesome, lovely watercolors are exactly correct. 

• literally anyone. your neighbor. your friend's preteen. your dad.

• but maybe specifically your children. that’s who i got it for.

i just thought of about ten more books i want to talk about, and twenty more i haven’t gotten to read yet, which is a helpful reminder that lists are by their very nature finite, subjective, imperfect, and incomplete. it takes a certain amount of arrogance even to write one! but my love has always been the kind that has an ego.

anyway. thank you all for surviving this year with me. thank you for indulging my ego. thank you for emailing me about all the good books i missed this year :)