Latine Heritage Month may be coming to an end, but reading Latine titles is a year-round activity for us! With so many titles out this month, there’s something for all readers, check out our list of most anticipated book releases to help pick your next read.
How to Look Away: On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear by Daniel Peña | NONFICTION
In How to Look Away, Daniel Peña explores how fringe elements of his Texas childhood—AM radio, conspiracy theories, Post-Cold War paranoia—came to dominate the American political discourse and contributed to our extreme tolerance of human rights abuses against migrants from Latin America and elsewhere. He asks: What compels us to look away from these abuses? And how do we wake ourselves into action?
These evocative essays braid journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, roaming from the vestigial Comanche War battlefields of his native Austin, to the black markets of Mexico City, to the home of a cartel hitman’s family doomed to live in the unglamorous aftermath of his crimes. Writing from both Mexico and the United States, Daniel Peña reflects on two childhood fears: demons and the death penalty. Or the answer to the question, “Do you ever really belong to yourself?” A question that serves as the looking glass through which Peña meditates on American citizenship and the kinds of people we are willing to disappear in the name of the American project.
How to Look Away conjures disquiet and longing beside clarity and hope as it offers a haunting account of the strange bond between two nations, this American moment, and the land upon which our bodies stand.
The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest by Alejandra Kamiya | Translated by Daniel Hahn | FICTION
In 12 stories of exquisite compression and perfectly-formed images, Japanese-Argentine writer Alejandra Kamiya conjures absences, shadows, and all that must remain unsaid.
As dawn breaks, a woman goes to the market in search of ingredients to make a perfect breakfast for her husband and son, while a subtle note of disquiet grows louder. A Japanese prisoner of war resolutely obeys a command as precise as it is inexplicable: he must dig a pit in a precise location until he receives another command, which never seems to arrive. 2 girls discover themselves through electrically charged games, which they will recall in letters for the rest of their lives.
In prose that is at once serene and shot through with disquiet and mourning, Kamiya creates a fictional world with its own rhythm, where preice, minimal phrasing reveals vast emotional landscapes. Enigmatic yet sharply clear, The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest is a book of quietly shattering epiphanies from a unique voice in international fiction.
Hear the Dead by Ann Dávila Cardinal | FICTION
One woman. A string of unsolved murders. Only she can hear the victims.
For more than forty years, Elena Altieri has been hiding from the tragedies of her New York City punk rock youth. Tragedies that left her best friend, Sin, dead, and other women in their orbit missing. Now, the past is catching up with her in more ways than one. Not only is she hearing strange noises under the hum of her tinnitus, but the photographs she took of a recently deceased musician are going viral, thrusting her back into a world she hoped would remain locked away forever.
When Elena begins to hear the screams of a woman ringing in her ears, she becomes convinced that she's somehow hearing Sin's murder. Desperate for answers, she has no choice but to revisit her past, and what she'll uncover will not only force her to reckon with her own fractured memories, but might prove that Sin, and other innocent women from their youth, were the victims of an unspeakable crime that only she can solve.
Old punks never die, and Elena's going to prove that.
Chloe Vega and the Missing Unseen by Leslie Adame | MIDDLE GRADE
After saving her parents from the clutches of an evil sorcerer, Chloe Vega just wants a normal year at her magical academy. But when you wield legendary new powers, danger is never far behind.
Her enemies will stop at nothing to use her to reveal the Agents of Magic to the rest of the world. And with their secret society on the brink of discovery, the agency begins to question whether Chloe is their best weapon—or their greatest risk.
When Chloe’s powers spiral out of control, the cost isn’t just their chance at victory, it’s the people she loves. Can she master her powers in time or will she lose everything?
Nixta Taqueria Presents: From Tacos to Tahdig by Sara Mardanbigi and Edgar Rico with JJ Goode | NONFICTION
Sara Mardanbigi and Edgar Rico are proud hyphenated Americans: Iranian and Mexican, respectively. It's their superpower and what they've built their award-winning restaurant Nixta Taqueria on. Pulling from their rich culinary heritages, they've done what first-genners do best—created delightful twists on Mexican, Iranian, and American classics. In Nixta Taqueria Presents: From Tacos to Tahdig, they sling tacos and tostadas, alongside platters of golden, fluffy rice; rich stewed meats; and so, so, so many herbs.
Sara Mardanbigi and Edgar Rico are proud hyphenated Americans: Iranian and Mexican, respectively. It's their superpower and what they've built their award-winning restaurant Nixta Taqueria on. Pulling from their rich culinary heritages, they've done what first-genners do best—created delightful twists on Mexican, Iranian, and American classics. In Nixta Taqueria Presents: From Tacos to Tahdig, they sling tacos and tostadas, alongside platters of golden, fluffy rice; rich stewed meats; and so, so, so many herbs.
With over 100 recipes and stunning photography, Nixta Taqueria Presents: From Tacos to Tahdig is a celebration of where Edgar and Sara have come from and where they are now. Come along for the ride!
The Havana Syndrome: Secret Weapons, a Government Cover-Up, and the Greatest Spy Mystery of Our Time by Michael Rey & Oriana Zill de Granados | NONFICTION
For nearly a decade, U.S. diplomats, spies, and soldiers around the world have reported sudden, devastating neurological injuries — symptoms eerily consistent with exposure to a directed energy weapon. Victims were told their illnesses were “psychosomatic.” Government agencies dismissed the evidence. And the CIA insisted no adversary was behind it. As the cases grew, from Havana to Hanoi, the media dubbed the phenomenon “the Havana Syndrome.”
In this groundbreaking exposé, 60 Minutes producers Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados reveal the hidden history of the so-called Havana Syndrome: from early attacks in Cuba and China, to the spread across global hotspots from Tbilisi to Vienna, to the mounting evidence implicating an elite Russian “kill” unit. Drawing on more than nine years of reporting, including secret medical records, whistleblower testimony, and intelligence reports, they expose not only the technology behind the attacks but the U.S. government’s effort to downplay and deny them.
Combining the pace of a thriller and the authority of rigorous investigative journalism, this book brings readers inside the lives of officers like “Adam” and “Poly,” whose careers and health were destroyed by the attacks, and Lt. Col. Greg Edgreen, the Pentagon investigator who risked everything to demand accountability. The Havana Syndrome is both a geopolitical saga with chilling consequences for national security and a deeply human story of betrayal and resilience.
You Are What You See: How My Favorite Shows Became My Worst Influences by Doménica Feraud | NONFICTION
From the sleek hallways of Constance Billard to the rainy corridors of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Doménica Feraud — like so many of us — was raised by TV. It was her greatest comfort, her most passionate obsession, her favorite form of therapy. Her childhood friends were cloaked in laugh tracks, her mentors monologued under stage lights, and her ideas of love, sex, power, beauty, and self-worth were shaped frame by frame.
But what if the stories that comforted women also misled us into becoming shells of who we were meant to be?
In You Are What You See, Feraud peels back the shiny veneer of pop culture to uncover the deeper truths encoded in our most beloved media. With fierce intellect and unflinching vulnerability, she revisits the onscreen moments that taught her how to exist as a woman, how to eat, how to please, and how to love — for better or for worse. From the subtext of sitcom banter to the seductive manipulation of office romance, she reveals the quiet violence of cultural messaging and the radical possibility of unlearning it.
A bold blend of cultural criticism, personal narrative, and feminist inquiry, this essay collection invites readers to reclaim their gaze and rewrite the stories they've been told about who they are. For every feminist who ever crushed on a problematic character, every person shaped by reruns, and every pop-culture devotee ready to challenge the status quo, You Are What You See is a mirror, a reckoning, and a call to demand more from the media that shapes our world.
False Face by Josh Galarza | YOUNG ADULT
Rusty is positive Todd with two D's is a figment of his troubled mind. That’s the only explanation for why he breaks into musical numbers and lurks in the school bleachers to stare unabashedly at Burt, the cutest guy in school. But when Todd's antics go a little too far, Rusty quickly finds himself in a dangerous situation. Little does Rusty know, the boy he's head over heels for just might be the one to save his life.
By day, Burt Espinoza is the only out kid in school who’s ever maintained his social status. But by night, he is a real hero: a secret agent rescuing vulnerable queer kids in danger. His handlers (also his adoptive moms) are concerned he’s pushing himself too hard to be the man he thinks he needs to be. Now Burt has to prove that he's ready for his biggest mission yet: saving the only boy he's ever hurt.
Raw, surreal, and timely, this novel is perfect for fans of Rex Ogle and Randy Ribay.
The End of the Vodka by Oscar De Muriel | FICTION
In 1938, showgirl-turned-socialite Dorothy Hale falls from a Manhattan skyscraper. Her friend Clare Boothe Luce – writer, diplomat and rising political figure – commissions Frida Kahlo to paint a memorial portrait.
Months later, reporting from Europe, Clare encounters the Duchess of Windsor in Paris and begins to question what really happened that night. In New York, Frida, estranged from Diego Rivera, wrestles with betrayal, ambition and the demands of her art. As she works on the painting that will become one of her most unsettling, she edges closer to the truth.
At the heart of this novel lies a real-life mystery: was Dorothy Hale’s death an act of despair, or something far more dangerous, entangled with the power struggles shaping the modern world?
A Shadow of Jaguars by D C Frost | FICTION
In Mexico City for a family funeral, Detective DJ Arias encounters a group of Robin Hood-style thieves who call themselves the Jaguars. Their activities reach across the border into Los Angeles with a Hollywood murder that entangles LA's elite and the nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners who serve them, and threatens DJ's own loved ones.
A sequel to the mystery A Punishing Breed, A Shadow of Jaguars finds DJ and partner Bobby Talbot struggling to untangle a murder where Hollywood, wealthy powerbrokers, and an immigrant population struggle to coexist and survive. Throughout it all, his faithful dog Evidence is by his side.
Desert Flowers by Jairo Buitrago | Illustrated byManuel Monroy | Translated by Elisa Amado | CHILDREN’S
Against the backdrop of the vast desert, two little girls are celebrating their grandmother's birthday in her house, with a little table, hats and lemonade. But nobody else has shown up.
"I have a very big friend who lives all alone," explains their grandmother, and so, the three of them set out searching for the friend. Quickly, they find themselves alone, surrounded by the beautiful blooming desert. In the quiet moments, the girls begin to wonder: perhaps there is no greater gift than the time they spend together.
