New Releases - June 2026 edition

Check out these highly anticipated new releases featuring fiction and nonfiction titles. Click on the title to request a copy or get your name on the waitlist. Don’t forget to watch for more featured releases next month!

FICTION

Contrapposto by Dave Eggers
Drawing is a refuge from household chaos and violence for young, talented Cricket; it also brings him under the spell of golden-eyed Olympia. When she commandeers him for their first audacious collaboration in their small Indiana town, she initiates a lifelong entanglement that, for Cricket, will bring agony and ecstasy. A year older, she is brash, cultured, and ambitious; Cricket is quiet, watchful, and devoted to pursuing art's essence. While in high school, he rides the train to Chicago to take life drawing classes. At the state university, flummoxed by the focus on conceptual art, he finds a renegade mentor at the "Prairie Atelier." Olympia becomes an astute, gutsy, and pragmatic curator and impresario; Cricket remains gloriously independent, humble, and offhandedly intrepid. Their sporadic reunions propel them across America and around the world, with every tumultuous encounter testing Cricket's love for Olympia and his conviction that what matters about art are the "hours of creation," the "rapture." As entwined opposites, Cricket and Olympia form a contrapposto, an expressive pose in which the human body twists in two different directions. Drawings by Eggers (The Every, 2021), who was a painting major in college, and others punctuate his surpassingly beautiful and enthralling prose as he ingeniously meshes the arresting and affecting drama of Cricket and Olympia with an insightful, caustically funny, at times tragic, and truly profound inquiry into the making and meaning of art... Eggers' many awards include the Newbery Medal for The Eyes and the Impossible (2024), which subtly alludes to his passion for visual art, gloriously brought to fruition here. Copyright 2026 Booklist. 

Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim 
DEBUT When a person emigrates in this novel's world, a separation happens: one instance of them travels on to their new home, and one stays behind. From there, the two instances can decide whether to remain connected, either staying in sync in order to eventually reintegrate or becoming estranged. Soyoung Rose Kang is faced with this decision. At age 10, "Rose" and one instance of her mother left for the U.S., while "Soyoung" and the other instance of her mother stayed in Korea. When their grandfather's death brings Rose to Seoul years later, she meets her Korean instance for the first time. Soyoung hopes that she and Rose will reintegrate--whether Rose wants to or not. Along with their also-instanced childhood friend Yujin/YJ, Rose and Soyoung explore whether they are two halves of a whole, or just two halves. The novel's second-person perspectives, complex science, and slower starting pace help readers to navigate a layered narrative and exciting plot. VERDICT Kim offers a unique sci-fi take on diaspora and identity. Hand to fans of Kazuo Ishiguro and China Miéville.--Kristi Chadwick. Copyright 2026 Library Journal. 

The Jellyfish Problem by Tessa Yang
Marine biologist Jo Ness grieves the loss of her best friend and colleague Aldo, who was working with her on a jellyfish guide. She receives a call from Nadia, an old friend she hasn't seen in years, pleading for her help with a massive jellyfish that is terrorizing a Maine island community. Nadia is nowhere to be found when Jo arrives in Shattering Point, and the locals there each have a different take on the sea monster, which they have named Clementine. With a varied cast of characters, the novel captivates from start to finish and provides a sense of solace as the events unfold. The finale is perfection, sure to leave readers feeling satiated and impassioned, with sticking power that lasts long after the book's close. VERDICT Perfect for fans of Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures or Emily Habeck's Shark Heart who are looking for the same immersiveness, heartbreak, and comfort those novels evoked.--Juliana Newsom.  Copyright 2026 Library Journal.

NONFICTION

1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World by Liaquat Ahamed
Pulitzer-winning economist Ahamed (Lords of Finance) offers an eye-opening investigation of the "first truly significant global financial crisis." In 1873, the Vienna Stock Exchange, inflated by a speculative real estate bubble, collapsed, affecting "people from every stratum of society." Soon a "preeminent American investment bank... shuttered its doors," inspiring runs on banks and further panic-selling. The period of global economic malaise that followed was the first to be referred to as the "Great Depression," and Ahamed notes that "it is remarkable" how it seems to have set the mold for future crashes. Moreover, while the 1873 crash is "now largely forgotten," its reverberations, he argues, were immense. The crisis led to "a giant redistribution of wealth" from "debtors to creditors," as "bankers and financiers" profited "inordinately." This provoked a general mood of "populist ire." Around the world, "politics took a darker turn." In the U.S., the Grant administration's ineffectual response played a role in "prematurely ending Reconstruction." In Europe, "novice investors who had lost their savings" sought scapegoats, and "increasingly directed their anger against Jews." Meanwhile, government debt defaults in the Middle East caused turmoil. Throughout, Ahamed returns to the Rothschilds, owners of "the largest... private European bank," using their central placement in the events that unfolded as "a natural connective thread." Granular and deeply researched, it's an essential new perspective on the link between capitalism's boom and bust cycles and the emergence of reactionary political movements. Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly 

The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building by Brian Jay Jones
A history of an iconic American building. Biographer Jones (Jim Henson, 2013, and George Lucas, 2016) writes that the building got its name when Thomas Jefferson crossed out the words “Congress House” on Pierre L’Enfant’s map of the projected federal district and wrote in “Capitol.” The building itself—“a project that came with a pedigree like perhaps no other in American history”—began to rise on September 18, 1793, when George Washington laid the cornerstone in a Masonic ceremony. It did not rise quickly; the original estimate for its completion was far too optimistic, both in time and cost. When Congress finally moved into its new quarters in November 1800, only the north wing was complete. The House of Representatives met, for the time being, in a space meant for the Library of Congress. The District of Columbia itself had fewer than 400 houses; many members of Congress shared beds in boarding houses. Work on the Capitol was ongoing, with much squabbling between legislators, the projects’ architects, and their nominal superiors—Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War in the 1850s, oversaw many important improvements. Air quality in the legislative chambers was a constant issue until air conditioning arrived in the 1920s. And the majestic dome, which caught Washington’s eye in one of the first designs submitted, underwent several changes before it reached the proportions we now know. The narrative takes further power from the many incidents that took place in and around the Capitol, including its burning by the British in 1814, an attempted assassination of Andrew Jackson, its use to house Civil War soldiers, and, of course, the mob attack of January 6, 2021. “As both the symbol and the epicenter of the American experiment,” Jones concludes, “the Capitol houses not just the government but the American psyche.” A fascinating look at the center of American government and the colorful characters who built and have occupied it. Copyright 2026 Kirkus 

Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen by Charles O’Malley 
Step aside, m'lords. Think of Shakespeare, and you think of Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Juliet, or Cleopatra. But the single figure who appears in more plays than any other is Margaret of Anjou, queen to King Henry VI and one of the most complex of late-medieval English women. So say O'Malley, a writer and dramaturg, and Stern, a scholar and critic, in their enlightening book. Shakespeare wrote four plays in which Margaret appears--among his earliest forays into historical drama. She is the first of his great female characters, a woman torn between duty and desire. While the historical Margaret lived for little more than 50 years (1430-1482), the dramatic character takes on an immortality no less compelling than Lady Macbeth or Hamlet's mother. "She commands armies, acts as regent without her husband's explicit permission, seeks revenge, strikes a rival, stabs a foe, and revels in the murders of the children of her enemies," the authors write. She raised questions about gender and power not only for her own historical century but for Shakespeare's as well. In the 1590s, to have a Queen Elizabeth was to have a woman in a man's role. Elizabeth herself announced that she had "the stomach of a king." So, too, Margaret would reach out from the stage to limn herself a "tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide." She became a focal point for understanding how Elizabethan theater could interrogate the nature of female rule; how crafting a woman's part (that would have been played by a boy, given the times) shaped the young playwright's sense of domestic drama; and how, throughout the history of Shakespearean performance, actresses tested their own mettle on the mantle of this ferocious queen. An insightful study of Shakespeare's first great female character. Copyright 2026 Kirkus