This month’s bookshelf includes novels by Susan L. Katz and Maureen Brady, Kingston poet Eric Amling’s Wet Manual, a tour of vanished underground music venues, and Andrew Noone’s account of two people who challenged slavery in Massachusetts courts.
Pole Dancers at the Red Barn
Susan L. Katz
She Writes Press, 2026, $18.99
At a converted barn outside Easton, Pennsylvania, five pole dancers have created a refuge where bodies, identities, and hard-won truths can take center stage. Rhinebeck author Susan L. Katz’s debut novel-in-stories pairs the performers and club owner with the mothers who shaped them, tracing how domestic violence, addiction, shame, religion, and rigid expectations travel across generations. Spanning the 1940s through the 1980s, Pole Dancers at the Red Barn follows its characters as they turn inherited wounds into self-expression and shared belonging. Katz treats the club as both workplace and sanctuary—a charged setting for examining sexuality, family, resilience, and chosen community.
Tessa’s Landing
Maureen Brady
Rootstock Publishing, 2026, $19.99
In 1846, famine has hollowed out life on Ireland’s Achill Island when 16-year-old Tessa O’Melia’s imprisoned father leaves her family facing starvation. Though determined never to leave home, Tessa is sent aboard a fever-ridden “coffin ship” bound for America and an arranged marriage. The crossing proves perilous; arriving in New York, she discovers her intended husband nowhere in sight. Tessa’s Landing, by Woodstock novelist Maureen Brady, follows its heroine through the squalor of Five Points as she builds a life through marriage, motherhood, friendship, and ingenuity. Rooted in detail, the novel portrays immigration as an ordeal of separation, survival, and self-determination.
Where the Wild Gigs Were: Volume 2
Tim Hinely and Eric Eggleson, editors
HoZac Books, 2026, $27.99
Chronogram contributors Peter Aaron and Dan Epstein have chapters in this second tour of America’s vanished underground music venues. Tim Hinely and Eric Eggleson gather recollections of rooms including Boston’s Rat, LA’s Madame Wong’s, and Syracuse’s Jabberwocky—places where a city’s music scene could gather, make noise, and acquire its own mythology. Original newspaper ads, obscure flyers, and vintage photographs fill out the 241-page paperback. The appeal goes beyond nostalgia for clubs you may have loved or never entered: These writers remember the people and nights that made the rooms matter, and preserve stories that disappeared with the venues.
Wet Manual
Eric Amling
Blush, 2026, $18
Kingston resident Eric Amling’s second book of poetry moves between bad jokes, bodily dread, ecological unease, and sudden tenderness. A therapist at a parking meter, deli wieners turning through the night, a motorcycle gang on McEntee Street: Ordinary sights become stranger the longer Amling looks at them. His lines can swerve from slapstick to grief within a breath, and their crowded images reward reading aloud. In one “Wet Manual” poem, he walks into a liquor store he has misread as “Wind and Spirits.” That slip catches the collection’s ethos: language plays tricks on the speaker, then shows him something he needed to see.
Tomorrow’s Dawn
Andrew Noone
TidePool Press, 2026, $32
Claverack resident Andrew Noone traces two freedom suits that helped bring slavery to an end in Massachusetts. Elizabeth Freeman, known as Mumbet, was born in Claverack and enslaved in Sheffield; Quock Walker lived in central Massachusetts. In the early 1780s, each challenged an enslaver through the courts, forcing judges to confront the gulf between revolutionary promises of liberty and the lives of people still held in bondage. Noone follows their separate histories and the legal arguments that connected their victories. Tomorrow’s Dawn also restores a Hudson Valley beginning to Freeman’s story, too often told as though it started in the Berkshires.
