Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future
Jonathan Van Meter
Viking, 2026, $31.51
Kim Kardashian’s greatest talent may be making everyone argue about whether she has one. Woodstock-based journalist Jonathan Van Meter takes that argument seriously in this intimate, unabashedly sympathetic biography, tracing her ascent through family history, Los Angeles privilege, reality television, and an instinct for monetizing attention. Years of access yield revealing domestic scenes and a portrait of ambition shaped by the O. J. Simpson trial, early marriage, and relentless scrutiny. Van Meter’s enthusiasm sometimes inflates his claims for Kardashian’s cultural importance, but his lively reporting makes dismissal harder. Come for the celebrity anthropology; stay for the machinery behind modern fame.
Rose Knox: How One Woman Mixed Kitchen and Boardroom to Remold an American Business
Rachel Greenfield
Cornell University Press, 2026, $27.95
Gelatin makes an unlikely vehicle for a history of women’s power, but Rachel Greenfield finds a formidable driver in Rose Knox. Taking over her husband’s Johnstown company after his death in 1908, Knox built a national brand while presenting herself as a practical housewife. This richly researched biography unpacks that calculated persona alongside progressive workplace policies, marketing innovations, and decidedly conservative ideas about women’s roles. Greenfield, a Pine Plains resident, resists sanding away the contradictions of a businesswoman who championed women’s abilities while opposing suffrage. Period recipes punctuate the narrative, edible artifacts of an era when domestic expertise could become a passport to authority.
Naked Out Loud
Machan Taylor
New Haven Publishing, 2025, $28.99
A voice powerful enough to fill stadiums can still struggle to speak for itself. In this candid memoir, Kerhonkson-based singer Machan Taylor traces that tension from a childhood uprooted from Japan to tours with Pink Floyd, Pat Benatar, and Sting. Backstage glamour shares space with racism, damaging relationships, and the exhausting business of keeping insecurity out of the spotlight. Taylor’s conversational prose sometimes leans heavily on spiritual maxims, but her frank accounts of musical camaraderie and professional humiliation give the book its bite. Psychedelic therapy supplies a frame for an absorbing story of learning to hear herself beyond the thunderous applause.
The Buddy Snatchers
Devin James Leonard
Crystal Lake Publishing, 2026, $16.99
A high school reunion is alarming enough without parasites commandeering your classmates. Hudson’s Devin James Leonard gives that familiar social nightmare a squirming upgrade in this profane, gleefully gross horror novel set in an Adirondack logging town. His narrator, Cal McCarthy, is a hard-drinking screw-up whose blackouts and head injury complicate the already difficult task of recognizing who remains human. Leonard gets comic mileage from Cal’s verbal sparring, while the invasion turns old friendships into tests of trust. The banter occasionally threatens to swamp the suspense, but the combination of bodily violation, small-town claustrophobia, and spectacularly bad decisions keeps things entertaining.
Once Around the Sun: Seasonal Rituals, Food, and Stories from a House Upstate
Lisa Przystup
The Monacelli Press, 2026, $44.56
The Catskills lifestyle book gets a welcome infusion of personality in Lisa Przystup’s seasonal scrapbook of life at her Delhi farmhouse. Photographs by Kate Foster and John Hesselbarth accompany reflections on flowers, food, weather, and the rituals that make a year feel inhabited. Tomato sandwiches, foxgloves, and winter light receive the attention usually reserved for grand occasions; contributors including Alison Roman and Rachael Petach expand the conversation around the table. The lush presentation invites coveting, but Przystup’s playful, observant prose keeps the enterprise grounded in experience. Beneath the beautiful surfaces runs an awareness that loving the seasons means accepting loss.
This article appears in November 2026.
