The Hudson Valley has long attracted writers, but this season’s crop of new books suggests the region is becoming something more than a scenic backdrop—it’s a literary ecosystem. From memoir and civic reflection to queer romance, cultural criticism, and stories that rethink love, identity, and belonging, these six forthcoming books are rooted in the concerns of the moment while carrying unmistakably local connections. Consider it a midsummer reading list assembled right here at home.
Waiting for Dawn: Living with Uncertainty
Marisa Renee Lee
Legacy Lit, $28, 2026
In her new book, Waiting for Dawn, Marisa Renee Lee turns her attention from grief itself to the strange emotional terrain of uncertainty. Best known for her bestselling 2022 book Grief Is Love, Lee writes here about chronic illness, long Covid, fertility struggles, caregiving, and the destabilizing experience of living without clear answers. Drawing from personal experience as well as research into stress, healing, and resilience, she argues against the tyranny of forced positivity, offering instead a framework rooted in self-compassion and endurance. The result is part memoir, part practical guide for surviving life’s murkier stretches. Lee, who previously served in the Obama White House, lives in Poughkeepsie with her family.
The Art of Becoming a Citizen
Gail Godwin
Bloomsbury Publishing, $25.99, 2026
Few American novelists have spent as much time examining the moral and emotional contradictions of modern life as Woodstock resident Gail Godwin. Across a literary career spanning more than five decades—including National Book Award finalists like A Mother and Two Daughters and The Finishing School—Godwin has explored questions of identity, responsibility, intimacy, and belief with uncommon psychological precision. In The Art of Becoming a Citizen, she brings that same sensibility to civic life, reflecting on democracy not as abstraction but as a daily practice shaped by empathy, attention, and ethical responsibility. Blending memoir, cultural criticism, and philosophical inquiry, the book asks how Americans might recover a sense of shared public purpose in an increasingly fractured age.
Down to Earth: An 831 Stories Romance
Julia Turshen
831 Stories, $14.99, 2026
Julia Turshen made her name writing cookbooks that treat cooking less as performance than as daily sustenance—practical, generous, and rooted in community. With Down to Earth, the Hudson Valley-based author takes an unexpected turn into fiction, penning a queer romance set in the fictional Upstate town of Sungold. The novel follows Paige, newly arrived from Brooklyn with her young son, and Frankie, a lifelong local and vegetable farmer who’s carefully ordered life begins to shift. As attraction builds between them, Turshen explores themes familiar from her food writing: care, nourishment, chosen family, and the uneasy process of starting over. Turshen lives Ulster County with her spouse, Grace Bonney.
My Heart & I Agree
Lucy Sante
Verse Chorus Press, $21.95, 2026
Few writers have mapped the psychic geography of New York’s margins as sharply as Lucy Sante, whose essays and criticism have long moved between urban history, photography, music, and cultural detritus. My Heart & I Agree gathers new and previously published pieces into something resembling an intellectual mixtape: memoir fragments alongside meditations on film, memory, art, and the strange sediment of American life. There are riffs on obscure cultural artifacts, sharply observed autobiographical moments, and the signature Sante voice—restless, erudite, funny, and alert to beauty in overlooked places. Following her acclaimed memoir I Heard Her Call My Name, the collection feels both retrospective and newly unguarded. Sante lives in Kingston.
Loving Arrangements: Stories About Modern Living and Loving
Edited by Nan Bauer-Maglin and Daniel E. Hood
Rutgers University Press, $26.95, 2026
Marriage used to come with a script: meet, marry, move in together, stay monogamous, repeat until death. Loving Arrangements: Stories About Modern Living and Loving asks what happens when people stop following it. Edited by Kingston resident Nan Bauer-Maglin and Daniel E. Hood, this essay collection gathers writers exploring polyamory, living-apart-together relationships, queer family structures, platonic partnerships, open marriages, and other reimagined forms of intimacy. The tone ranges from funny to searching to deeply vulnerable, but the larger throughline is clear: contemporary relationships are being rewritten in real time. Rather than prescribing a new model, the book captures people improvising their way through love, commitment, freedom, and companionship.
Heavy Cream
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
Simon & Schuster, $28, 2026
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s fiction occupies that unstable territory between satire and ache, where adolescence becomes both absurd and existentially high-stakes. Her debut novel, Alice Sadie Celine, established the Andes-based writer as a sharp chronicler of female identity formation, and Heavy Cream deepens that project. The novel follows 16-year-old Gerry after her mother disappears, leaving her to cycle through the homes—and competing ideologies—of three women who each embody a different vision of adulthood, class, ambition, and femininity. Moving between Connecticut affluence, Manhattan privilege, and artistic aspiration, Gerry tries on identities the way other teenagers try on outfits. Funny, psychologically astute, and emotionally searching, Heavy Cream doubles as both coming-of-age story and social comedy.
This article appears in June 2026.
