Publishers Weekly chooses best books of 2026

Book News and Events
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Publishers Weekly

is a trade magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Here are the ten books they have pointed out on their best of the year list. So here’s what some industry insiders are talking about:

The AGI Chronicles; The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Intelligence—Kevin Roose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men—Jon Ronson (Riverhead)

Cool Machine—Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

The Danger to Be Sane: Creativity and the Eccentric Mind—Rosa Montero, trans. from the Spanish by Lindsey Ford (Europa)

The Disappearers—Marlon James (Riverhead)

The Palm House—Gwendoline Riley (New York Review Books)

Public Access Afterworld—Jane Schoenbrun (Hogarth)

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State—Jill Lepore (Liveright)

This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark—Craig Fehrman (Avid Reader)

Transcription—Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

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I think The Vast Enterprise is going to be my next audio book. This one keeps popping up on multiple lists. That’s a sign I try to take notice of. Plus the author will be at the Texas Book festival.

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Thanks, @Anne_Glasgow! I was just about to enter those, and I’m delighted you beat me to it! It seemed like it was going to be a lot of work, so I appreciate you taking care of that.

I haven’t read any of these, unfortunately. Public Access Afterworld made it to my shortlist after reading an excerpt for it. It’ll be reviewed on BookBrowse next week. There are a couple of others I’m interested in, but who knows whey they’ll rise to the top of the TBR stack.

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I read Transcription. The Palm House and the beginning of Cool Machine. None of them resonated with me and the only other I’m interested in is The Disappearers as we’ve discussed before. That along with The Vast Enterprise will give me almost half their list.