New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention. There's something about the idea of coming home and reawakening dormant familial trauma that just makes for great horror stories, and Sacrificial Animals is no exception. In the novel, brothers Nick and Joshua Morrow return to their family's farm in Nebraska after many years estranged from their abusive father, reopening old wounds and allowing supernatural forces to take root. Sacrificial Animals bounces between "Then" and "Now" perspectives, painting a picture of the boys' childhoods under the violent and racist man, and the gravity of returning once they learn he is dying. The slow burn horror story weaves in Chinese mythology, using flowery language and a Cormac McCarthy-like lack of quotation marks (and McCarthy-like brutality) to really give it a folkloric feel.

Something strange is happening in science fiction. Such are the flora and fauna of what's now being called, rather neatly, the New Weird, the genre's version of the grotesque--though it's only "new" in the sense that it's finally rupturing, like miraculous sidewalk weeds, up through the literary cracks. That's thanks, in very large part, to a very small book called Annihilation. When it came out in 2014, the first in a three-part series, many people professed to love it. Perhaps a few of them genuinely did.

During a book tour stop in Portland, Oregon earlier this year, author Jeff VanderMeer (Borne, the Southern Reach Trilogy) met up with two speculative-fiction contemporaries: Omar El Akkad and Lidia Yuknavitch. Like VanderMeer, both had recently published dystopian-ish novels set against a backdrop of climate change. El Akkad's American War chronicles a fossil-fuel civil war in the U.S.; in Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan, a new Joan of Arc for a global-warming era battles fascist forces. Given the obvious real-world resonances of the three books (the admittedly more fantastical Borne tackles out-of-control capitalism via a futuristic desert city terrorized by a giant flying psychotic bear), VanderMeer organized a three-way conversation to examine what he calls their "parallel evolution"--as well as dicuss how to take on a troubling present reality in an meaningful and productive way. They feel like boundaries that mean less and less, attempts at containment or to say "this couldn't possibly happen to anyone reading this now."

This weekend marks the unofficial beginning of summer. That means the time has come for taking hikes, playing frisbee, and spending long hours in a pool near you. But for a certain class of folks--the species known as "bookworm"--summer is the ideal time to practice their page-turning. But with so many new tomes hitting shelves, it's hard to know where to start. Below are some of our favorite books of 2017.