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Compulsive Reader News
http://www.compulsivereader.com
Volume 29, Issue 7, 2 July 2026

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IN THIS ISSUE

New Reviews at Compulsive Reader
Literary News
Competition News
Sponsored By
Coming soon

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Hello readers. Here is the latest batch of reviews and interviews:

A review of Rite of Spring by Kris Kneen

Kris Kneen new book, Rite of Spring, is delightful, strange and bizarrely sexy. The title hints at awakening and that is one of the key themes in this book, which teases and tricks the reader with its silky narration, fast plot, and the beautiful conjunction of suspense and rich inner dialogue. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/07/01/a-review-of-rite-of-spring-by-kris-kneen/

A review of What Mennonite Girls Are Good For by Jennifer Sears

It’s a high-stakes adventure, with planes, guns, pervs, and the gyrations of a goddess in disguise. At the end of the day, it’s a short story collection about religious syncretization, told with a voice of winsome aloofness that makes funnier-than-hell into its own corner plot in heaven. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/29/a-review-of-what-mennonite-girls-are-good-for-by-jennifer-sears/

An Interview with David Zindell

I learn that Zindell, now 73, plans to keep writing, keep creating in his Neverness universe. On a bright May morning in Denver, we talk about writing, old friends from the Northern Colorado Writer’s group, Nietzsche, AI, grandpas, and philosophy. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/28/an-interview-with-david-zindell/

A review of Hybrid Heaven by Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss

Hybrid Heaven is more polyhybrid than hybrid. Like much of Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss’ work, it moves across disciplines, cultures, identities, genres, and styles to create poetry that is distinctive and striking. The poems engages with memoir, African mythology, music, migration, colonisation, and perhaps above all, the role that language has to play, both in creating and unmaking the cultural constructs that frame our lives. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/27/a-review-of-hybrid-heaven-by-andrew-geoffrey-kwabena-moss/

A review of Extinction Song by John James

There is a particular kind of helplessness that arrives with parenthood: the moment you hold something new and fragile and realize, with full clarity, what kind of world you have brought it into. John James knows this feeling well, and in Extinction Song, his Snowbound Chapbook Prize-winning collection from Tupelo Press, he does not pretend to have survived it with any wisdom intact. This is not a book about what to do. It is a book about what it feels like to watch, and to love anyway, and to keep watching. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/26/a-review-of-extinction-song-by-john-james/

A Review of Patricia Carragon’s Stranger on the Shore

The grittiness of New York City, with its painful solitude but also its joyful exuberance, rules this collection. From a shabby walkup in Harlem to a swinging nightclub in Greenwich Village, for cab drivers, musicians and for all of us, jazz rules over this domain, and it thrives in Carragon’s poetry. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/25/a-review-of-patricia-carragons-stranger-on-the-shore/

A review of Gopal Lahiri Selected Poems selected by Sanjeev Sethi

This carefully curated selection reveals Gopal Lahiri as a poet of remarkable range—equally attentive to ecological precarity, linguistic fragility, philosophical inquiry, social consciousness, and the intimate afterlives of memory. Moving seamlessly across expansive meditations and compressed lyrical forms like haiku, Lahiri crafts a poetic universe where language becomes both witness and wound, archive and awakening. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/24/a-review-of-gopal-lahiri-selected-poems-selected-by-sanjeev-sethi/

A review of Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

If memoir is your ticket. If you’re a sucker for a life story that only uses the crayon colours it loves best. If you wonder what kind of woman reared the author of The God of Small Things (1997 Booker winner) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017 longlist), there’s an autobiography on the shelves, calling your name. It’s time to run, not walk, to the library or bookstore and snag your copy. Tell your partner and kids you’re going offline for the next three hundred pages. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/18/a-review-of-mother-mary-comes-to-me-by-arundhati-roy/

A review of Fragments of an America Volume II by Chris McNally

One can immediately tell through the vulnerabilities captured in the collection that McNally is a heart-on-the-sleeve type poet. With this second volume, he chronicles the life of the worker across a landscape of American politics that lays bare personal grief alongside a public manifesto. He laments the fractured reality of the present day with deep moral seriousness. While the politics are pointed, they never come across as partisan screed. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/17/a-review-of-fragments-of-an-america-volume-ii-by-chris-mcnally/

A review of Sacred Remnants by Charles Freyberg

Sacred Remnants explores aspects of Freyberg’s past and the links between colonisation and gentrification and the ways in which history and culture can be fractured by the impulse to sanitise, exploit and commercialise. The book is divided into three parts. The first, Mavericks and Divas, focuses heavily on the colourful characters of Kings Cross who impacted directly on Freyberg, like burlesque and strip tease performer and painter Elizabeth Burton, a frequent subject of Freyberg’s work. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/16/a-review-of-sacred-remnants-by-charles-freyberg/

A review of Why Do I Feel This Way by Laura Mayer

Mayer, an occupational therapist, healer, and writer based in Arizona, New York and Florence, Italy, practices healing based on personal experience. In her book she lauds the relevance of epigenetics, a relatively new approach to gene expression emphasizing the hitherto under-appreciated role of historical and behavioral components of pain, illness and suffering. Components which she and other authors increasingly demonstrate as vitally relevant to the diagnosis and management of disease. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/15/a-review-of-why-do-i-feel-this-way-by-laura-mayer/

A review of Skylighting by Charles Hansmann

Skylighting is written in close first person with a deeply speculative, experiential tone. Impulsively I ask, why do we write, and read, novels like this? Maybe we are trying to get at something fundamental, visceral. Something communal yet impossible to share. The universal experience of loss accompanied by a grasping, an inability to psychologically adjust to an overwhelming absence Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/14/a-review-of-skylighting-by-charles-hansmann/

A review of Gardening on Mars by Jane Frank

The title, Gardening on Mars, intrigues. Will it involve intergalactic insights? A theme of cultivating plants in our challenging soils? Motifs of extraterrestrial landscapes? Not quite, as Jane Frank’s third poetry collection does take us travelling but with a substantial focus on the interconnected environments of our inner and outer worlds. It is Earth that is walked and returned to us via Frank’s rare choice of images sequenced with unexpected details. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/12/a-review-of-gardening-on-mars-by-jane-frank/

A review of The Shipikisha Club by Mubanga Kalimamukwento

The alternating chapters of the first part that focus on Ntashé as she attends her mother’s trial highlight the tensions between mother and daughter, as she witnesses the way her mother is changed “from the person she knew to the monster gaining color as the trial proceeds.” Though well aware of her father’s violence and drunkenness, Ntashé seems more inclined to sympathize with him than with her mother, whom she sees as a sort of bully. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/11/a-review-of-the-shipikisha-club-by-mubanga-kalimamukwento/

A review of Keeping Room by Ann E. Wallace

Ann E. Wallace’s third book of poetry, Keeping Room, examines what it means to live with illness and beauty. And neither has strict borders in Wallace’s beautiful and haunting poems. The illnesses she addresses are not only her own, or her loved ones, but the sickness and depravity of the world we find ourselves in now. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/10/a-review-of-keeping-room-by-ann-e-wallace/

A review of Now-Then: New and Selected Poems by Mike Ladd

Now-Then shows just how much Ladd has done and the ways in which the work has transformed and progressed over the years. His older work still feels fresh and it’s a pleasure to be able to read generous selections of multiple books in one place. His newer work is rich with a maturity that allows for the lightest touch and the deepest thought. Whether in the Bolivian Mountains, Java, driving along the Huon Highway or in an Adelaide suburb, Now-Then is full of consistently transcendent and powerful work. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/08/a-review-of-now-then-new-and-selected-poems-by-mike-ladd/

Dream Life of Niki de Saint-Phalle

Charlotte LeBon was brilliant casting: she looks a lot like the real Niki. (Except she is too expensively coiffed in almost every shot, even in the throes of agony.) Another problem is the camera’s almost deliberate avoidance of Niki’s actual sculptures and paintings: what was all the fuss about, anyway? Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/07/dream-life-of-niki-de-saint-phalle/

A review of becalming by Aga Maksimowska

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a third-culture kid gets into a Master of Fine Arts’ program in Canada, produces a novel, then wonders if living in Poland might be preferable — this book ticks your boxes. The titillation is Canadian-tame, the plot aims for literary high, and there’s ice hockey culture thrown in for good measure. Millennial meets morality, with motherhood poking in to give a bit of advice. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/04/a-review-of-becalming-by-aga-maksimowska/

A review of Man Ray: When Objects Dream by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson

When Objects Dream, the catalog raisonée, the book, is a work of art in itself. It will turn your coffee table into a living museum. The reproductions are stark, practically bleeding; the organization of the book, skirting Ray’s ever-wavering lines between genre and chronology, is every bit as delicious and sumptuous — practically on a par with — a visit to the exhibit itself. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/03/a-review-of-man-ray-when-objects-dream-by-stephanie-dalessandro-and-stephen-c-pinson/

A review of Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Tender is the Flesh shows the horrific effects of apathy. Bazterrica spares no detail. There is no breathing room, no one to hold your hand as you read the atrocities depicted in this novel. Though incredibly graphic and disturbing, Tender is the Flesh is one of the best novels I’ve read and has left a permanent impression in my mind. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/01/a-review-of-the-coast-of-everything-by-guillermo-stitch/

A review of The Coast of Everything by Guillermo Stitch

From the get-go, Guillermo Stitch’s new novel The Coast of Everything hurls salvos of delicious sentences, voice, and prescient irony that hit the reader broadsides and leave them gasping for crawl space but wanting more. These days, reading – let alone writing – a 747-page novel is a highly transgressive, seditious, treasonous act. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/06/01/a-review-of-the-coast-of-everything-by-guillermo-stitch/

All of the reviews and interviews listed above are available at The Compulsive Reader on the front page. Older reviews and interviews are kept indefinitely in our extensive categorised archives (currently at 3,765) which can be browsed or searched from the front page of the site.

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LITERARY NEWS

In the news this month, winners have been announced for the James Tait Black Awards, sponsored by the University of Edinburgh and the longest-running book prizes in the UK. In fiction, the winner is On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis, translated by Katharine Halls (Peirene Press). The biography winner is The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut (Knopf). Each winner receives £10,000.

The Crime Writers Association has unveiled shortlists for the 2026 Dagger Awards, which honor the best books in the crime writing genre. The winners will be named during the awards ceremony at the CWA gala dinner on July 2 in London. The CWA awards thirteen Daggers in total. Nine of these are for books and short stories and are judged independently by industry professionals. Check out the complete CWA Dagger shortlisted titles here: https://thecwa.co.uk/awards-and-competitions/the-daggers/

Julia Elliott won the $US150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which aims to celebrate and amplify exceptional writing by women and non-binary authors working in the U.S. and Canada, for her short story collection, Hellions (Tin House). The four finalists each receive $US12,500. In addition to the cash prize, the winner receives a five-night stay at Fogo Island Inn, while the four finalists and the winner are invited to participate in a group retreat residency in the Leighton Artist Studios, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade (Scribner) has won the 2026 Plutarch Award, sponsored by Biographers International Organization and the only international literary award for biography judged exclusively by biographers. Wade receives a $US3,000 honorarium.

The Writers’ Trust of Canada announced that Renato Gandia for his poetry collection Psalmody for the Estranged, Graham Slaughter for his creative nonfiction The Perfect Home For Your Child, and Julia Cottrelle for her short fiction The Old Turtle Climb are the winners of this year’s RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, which was established in memory of poet and short story writer Bronwen Wallace and “has a proven track record of helping talented developing authors secure their first book deal.” Each winning author receives C$10,000.

Diana McCaulay won the £10,000 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, which recognises a distinguished work of fiction, nonfiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place, for her novel A House for Miss Pauline, published in the U.S. by Algonquin.

Kevin Young won the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize, which is designed to “encourage and celebrate excellence in poetry,” for Night Watch (Knopf). The prize is for first edition books of poetry written in, or translated into, English and submitted from anywhere in the world. Each of the other finalists receives C$10,000.

Konstantin Richter has won the 2026 German Non-Fiction Prize for Dreihundert Männer. Aufstieg und Fall der Deutschland AG (Three Hundred Men: The Rise and Fall of Germany Inc.). Richter receives €25,000. The prize is awarded by the Börsenverein’s Foundation for Book Culture and the Promotion of Reading, the Deutsche Bank Foundation, the City of Hamburg, and the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Winners of 2026 Nebula Awards, sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, were named at the 61st annual Nebula Awards Ceremony in Chicago, Ill. This year’s categories include the first Nebulas for Best Poem and Best Comic. In future years, the comic award will be called Best Comics Writing. The Nebula winners were: Novel: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga). Novella: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom). Novelette: “Uncertain Sons” by Thomas Ha (Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, Undertow). Poem: “The World to Come” by Jennifer Hudak (Strange Horizons, 22/12/25). For the full list visit: https://nebulas.sfwa.org/news/

The shortlist has been released for the £5,000 (about $6,685) Klaus Flugge Prize, which recognises “the most promising and exciting newcomer to children’s picture book illustration.” The winner will be named September 9. This year’s shortlisted illustrators are: Becky Colvin for The Great Green Island, Laila Ekboir for We Are Like Birds, Thekla Priebst for The Voyage that Changed the World, Justin Worsley for Henry the Artistic Dog, Forest Xiao for Seven Babies, Circle Yuen for Our Dance.

The £30,000 Women’s Prize for Fiction was won by Virginia Evans for The Correspondent (Crown). The £30,000 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction was awarded to Lyse Doucet for The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan. More information on the prize and the judges reports can be found here:

https://womensprize.com/

Alice Jolly has won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for her novel The Matchbox Girl, which tells the story of Adelheid Brunner, a patient of Dr Hans Asperger in the now-infamous Vienna Children’s Hospital during the 1930s, while the city is under Nazi occupation. Alice received her prize from Walter Scott’s great-great-great-great grandson,

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has chosen Elizabeth McCracken as the winner of the 2026 PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, which recognises writers who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form. McCracken will be honoured at the annual PEN/Malamud Award Ceremony, held in partnership with American University, on October 4.

Winners of the 2026 Australian Book of the Year Awards, voted on by Australian booksellers and sponsored by the Australian Booksellers Association, are: ABA BookData Adult Fiction Award: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, ABA BookData Adult Non-Fiction Award: Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent, and ABA Kids’ Reading Guide Children’s Award: Here Come the Cousins by Maggie Hutchings and Sarah Zweck.

The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands by Amir Tibon (Little, Brown) has won the $US100,000 2026 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, which is awarded “to an emerging author writing in or translated into English” in association with the National Library of Israel.

Waterstones has revealed its 2026 Debut Fiction Prize shortlist, which is voted for by the company’s booksellers. The winner will be named on July 16. This year’s shortlisted titles are: Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, Honey in the Wound by Jiyoung Han
Under Water by Tara Menon, May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry, A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia, and The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski.

A shortlist has been released for this year’s Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award, which “celebrates excellence, originality, and the very best in crime fiction by U.K. and Irish authors.” The prize is run by Harrogate International Festivals and sponsored by T&R Theakston. The winner will be revealed July 23, on opening night of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, and receives £3,000 and a hand-engraved oak beer cask provided by T&R Theakston. This year’s shortlisted titles are: The Midnight King by Tariq Ashkanani, The Death of Us by Abigail Dean, Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney, The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths, Clown Town by Mick Herron, and Quantum of Menace by Vaseem Khan.

Six writers are in the running for $A60,000 Miles Franklin award. These include Little World by Josephine Rowe (Black Inc), My Heart At Evening by Konrad Muller (Evercreech Editions), Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah (UPQ), You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson (Affirm Press), Fierceland by Omar Musa (Penguin Random House Australia) and First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn (UQP). Each shortlisted author receives $5,000 from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Last year’s winner was Siang Lu for Ghost Cities. The Miles Franklin literary award will be announced on 5 August.

Sisters in Crime Australia has released a longlist in four categories for the 2026 Davitt Awards, recognising the best crime and mystery books by Australian women. The shortlist will be unveiled in July and winners named in August/September. Judging continues for the Davitt Awards’ shortlist which will be announced in July, with winners announced in August/September. Check out the complete longlist here: https://sistersincrime.org.au/davitt-awards-2026/

Essayist, cultural critic, and poet Hanif Abdurraqib has won the C$75,000 Weston International Award, honouring “career achievement of an international author whose body of nonfiction work, written in English or widely available in translation, has advanced our understanding of the world.” The prize is sponsored by the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation and administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

The 2026 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade is being awarded to French-British lawyer and author Philippe Sands. He will receive the award on October 11 during the Frankfurt Book Fair. Sands has received many awards for his books, including the Baillie Gifford Prize (2016), the Wingate Literary Prize (2017), the British Book Award (2017), the Prix Montaigne (2018), the Austrian Booksellers’ Honorary Award for Tolerance in Thought and Action (2023), and the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize (2025).

Winners have been chosen for the 2026 Orwell Prizes in nonfiction and fiction, honouring books that meet George Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into an art.” The Orwell Prize for Political Writing went to Escape from Kabul: The Afghan Women Judges Who Fled the Taliban and Those They Left Behind by Karen Bartlett (New Press). The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction went to Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Details of all the prizes and winners can be found here: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/news-events/news-events/news/orwell-prize-winners-announced-at-ceremony-at-university-college-london/

Finally, the shortlist has been chosen for the $US25,000 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, given to the author of a book that “reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work,” and sponsored by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation. The winner will be announced on October 21, Le Guin’s birthday. The shortlist is: Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House Press), Sunward by William Alexander (Saga Press), Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell (Neon Hemlock), Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (Algonquin), The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tor Books), Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Tor Books), Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta (DAW Books), One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp), and Slow Gods by Claire North (Orbit).

Have a great month.

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COMPETITION NEWS

Congratulations to Carole Nott who won a copy of The Millionare Mop by Nats Cleaning.

Our new giveaway is for a copy of The Girl on the Beach by Carol Snow. To win, send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line “Girl on the Beach” and your postal address in the body of the mail.

Good luck!

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SPONSORED BY

Receive recognition for your book!

Big Book Award accepts books from all authors and publishers from anywhere in 100 categories, recognizing excellent books.

Final deadline is August 15th,

https://www.nycbigbookaward.com

, winners announced every fall.

Independent Press Award excludes the Big 5 and deadlines December 15th,

https://independentpressaward.com

Simon & Schuster’s Former Publisher, Hollywood Executive, Famous Actress & Screenplay writer and lots of publishing experts you can meet with at BookCAMP,

https://www.ipabookcamp.com

For more information, contact Ted Olczak, Ted@GabbyBookAwards.com or (718) 938-4590.

Get recognized and get your winning title published in Printed Word Reviews magazine,

https://www.printedwordreviews.com/

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COMING SOON

We will shortly be featuring reviews of IRØNCLAD by Marc Vincenz, Splashed Things by Blake Chapman, If It’s True by April Krassner, I Can Tell You the Version That Will Make You Take My Side by J Brooke and lots more reviews and interviews.

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Drop by Compulsive Reader talks (see the widget on right-hand side of the site) to listen to our latest episode which features Andrew Geoffrey Kwabena Moss reading from and talking about his new book Hybrid Heaven & other(ed) poems or visit

to listen on Spotify or search for Compulsive Reader Talks on your favourite podcast platform.

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(c) 2026 Magdalena Ball. Please feel free to forward and share this newsletter in its entirety.

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