Dispatch No. 4 · September 2026

Dispatched 31 August 2026  ·  47 new releases for September

September has sent the genre back to school. Forty-seven releases, five of them set in or around a term, and a dozen horror titles stocking the shelf early for October. Freya Marske's Bodies of Magic arrives on the 15th, pitched as A Deadly Education in a hospital: an academy of healer-mages where the final exam is sat in randomly assigned groups that pass or fail together. Hannah Kaner's A Snake Among Swans lands on the 8th, warring kingdoms and a forest that speaks in the voices of the dead. The same day brings Jordan Tannahill's The Living Realm, in which an aging British expat in Berlin starts seeing the lovers he lost to AIDS thirty years ago; Richard Armitage narrates the audiobook, and readers have not stopped saying so. Term starts on the first.

A thing I have promised before and should probably explain again: I am building a searchable database of queer speculative fiction. The code is nearly done. The part where someone reads reviews of several thousand books and records what the representation actually is has further to go, and that someone is me. Most of the effort has gone into the queer nuance other book services don't bother with, and I've written about it over at Marginalia. One question before I decide when to release it: how many years' worth of books does it need to hold before it's worth your time?