Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks
Benjamin Hale
Harper, $30, 2026
In Cave Mountain, Benjamin Hale, writer in residence at Bard College, begins with a child’s disappearance in the Arkansas wilderness and follows the story somewhere stranger. What reads at first like a survival narrative—six-year-old Haley Zega lost and found after three days in the Ozarks—expands into a layered investigation of place, memory, and belief. Hale connects the episode to an earlier, unsettling crime tied to a fringe religious sect, revealing eerie overlaps in geography and psychology. Part true crime, part philosophical inquiry, Cave Mountain probes how people interpret the inexplicable—and how some mysteries resist resolution.
Composing Olana: A Journey on Foot Through Frederic Church’s Greatest Work of Art
Annik Lafarge
Fordham University Press, $24.95, 2026
As 2026 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hudson River School master Frederic Edwin Church, a wave of new books is reexamining the artist and his most ambitious creation: Olana. In Composing Olana, writer Annik LaFarge approaches Church’s hilltop estate not just as a historic site but as a work of art in its own right. Following the winding carriage roads Church designed across the 250-acre landscape, LaFarge traces how geology, ecology, and global influences shaped the views he carefully orchestrated over the Hudson Valley. The result is part walking guide, part cultural history—an invitation to experience Olana the way Church intended.
The Fountain
Casey Scieszka
Harper, $28.99, 2026
Catskills readers may already know Casey Scieszka as the co-owner and head innkeeper of the Spruceton Inn in West Kill, the beloved “bed and bar” tucked deep in the mountains. Now she adds novelist to her resume. Scieszka’s debut, The Fountain, begins with a woman returning to her Catskills hometown after nearly two centuries away. Vera Van Valkenburgh, forever 26 and mysteriously immortal, is searching for the source of her condition—and a way to end it. As tech money descends on the mountains and old family secrets resurface, Scieszka spins a wry, speculative tale about time, identity, and what it means to live a meaningful life.
Tom Paine’s War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time
Jack Kelly
St. Martin’s Press, $31, 2026
Hudson Valley historian Jack Kelly—author of numerous popular histories including Band of Giants and God Save Benedict Arnold—returns with a vivid account of the American Revolution through the life and words of Thomas Paine. Tom Paine’s War focuses on the tumultuous year of 1776, when Paine’s incendiary pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis helped stiffen the resolve of a struggling patriot cause. Blending biography with battlefield narrative, Kelly shows how Paine wielded both pen and musket in the fight for independence, reminding readers how the right words, at the right moment, can help shape the course of history.
The Big Breeze
Steven Fechter
Encyclopocalypse Publications, $18.99, 2026
Set in a small upstate New York town, Steven Fechter’s The Big Breeze follows Joseph “Breeze” Bye, a former Major League pitching phenom whose career ended abruptly after a mysterious hit-and-run left him paralyzed. Now a reclusive painter of baseball legends, Breeze lives with memories of the game he once dominated—until a dying man calls to confess the truth behind the accident that changed everything. As the past resurfaces, Fechter blends sports lore, art-world ambition, and noir-tinged intrigue into a character-driven novel about talent, pride, revenge, and the strange afterlife of athletic greatness.
Circling Planes
Mike Jurkovic
Bushwhack Books, $15, 2026
Ulster County Poet Laureate Mike Jurkovic’s latest collection, Circling Planes, gathers poems that channel the restless energy of American culture—music, memory, politics, and the strange poetry of everyday life. Jurkovic, a longtime fixture of the Hudson Valley literary scene and president of the Calling All Poets reading series, writes with a voice shaped as much by jazz improvisation as by the Beats and singer-songwriters. The poems move between the intimate and the cosmic, riffing on politics, humor, and the electricity of lived experience. The result is a collection that reads like a late-night jam session: searching, sharp-edged, and deeply rooted in the rhythms of contemporary life.
Vanity
J. R. Solonche
Main Street Rag Press, $17, 2026
Former Orange County Poet Laureate J. R. Solonche—author of more than 40 poetry collections—returns with Vanity, a book that finds wonder in the smallest facts and fleeting images. Drawing on everything from ancient artifacts to the quiet persistence of crocuses in spring, Solonche crafts poems that balance wry humor with philosophical reflection. His work moves with a light touch, attentive to the absurdities and mysteries of everyday life while remaining grounded in careful observation. The poems meditate on human limitation, perception, and the strange clarity of dreams, revealing a voice that can be playful, probing, and gently profound all at once.
