Playboy’s storied literary history is so cemented it’s a punchline: I read it for the articles. The roster of Playboy bylines could revive code blue-level literacy rates: James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gabriel García Márquez, Kurt Vonnegut, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, and David Foster Wallace, to name a few. Literature has always been sexy—and can especially be a salve to the utter sexlessness of our current era. So it’s only fitting that Playboy should beckon, endorse, and crown the next wave of authors. This crop of 2026 books will immerse you in everything from ‘90s lesbian DJ love triangles to the neuroses of the straight male mind to the history of subversion and desire. Ahead, 15 Playboy-approved books.
1. LOST LAMBS by Madeline Cash – FSG, January 13
The buzzy debut from the Forever Magazine founder is a clever portrait of the modern American family overflowing with charm, wit, and style. Sure, the Flynns’ are going through it: imploding open marriages, a teenage daughter dating a guy named “War Crimes Wes”—but the big heart of this book is as spirited, and tender as, well, a little lost lamb. I could live in Cash’s mind, but I’ll settle for a few days in her smart new novel.
2. DON’T STEP INTO MY OFFICE by David Fishkind – Arcade Publishing, January 13
Turning 26 is hard enough—especially without witnessing a murder on the shores of the Hamptons. This black comedy thriller follows a failed writer 10 years after the incident, who finds himself back at the beach for his father-in-law’s birthday, where he’s surrounded by ultra-wealthy WASPs who, though politely tolerate him, aren’t quite as harmless as they seem. This astute debut is a propulsive story about complicity, what we remember, and what we try to forget.
3. POOR by Caleb Femi – MCD, January 27
When Caleb Femi’s debut poetry collection was first released in the U.K. in 2020, it became an overnight sensation. Chronicling his upbringing in South London housing projects, this searing work combines photography and poetry to outline the struggles, sagas, and joys of a Black boyhood.
4. SECOND SKIN: INSIDE THE WORLDS OF FETISH, KINK, AND DEVIANT DESIRE by Anastasiia Fedorova – Catapult, Feb. 3
Queer archive curator Anastasiia Federova probes ideas about kink in this expansive, deeply-researched book, which is based on the assumption that we are all fetishists in some way, whether it be for designer bags or pristine sneakers. Through nuanced reportage and memoir, she explores the history and future of subversion and desire.
5. MURDER BIMBO by Rebecca Novack – Avid Reader Press, February 10
Catherine Lacey calls Rebecca Novack’s scintillating debut “Gone Girl for the Luigi Mangione era.” Need we say more? The novel follows a sex worker tapped by government operatives to assassinate a politician. There’s just one problem: After she does the deed, she realizes they picked her because she’s disposable—and she’s the only one who can save her life.
6. LEAN CAT, SAVAGE CAT by Lauren Joseph – Catapult, February 17
Celery sours and flings with rockstars—this novel is chock full of good old-fashioned glamor, seduction, and style. London bohemian dropout Charli doesn’t have much direction but does have an abandoned research project about Romy Haag—the transsexual disco singer and longtime David Bowie lover. This knowledge proves useful when she meets a musician—and the two enter a self-destructive, deliriously sexy mission of turning him into a star.
7. SUPERSTARS by Ann Scott, translated by Jonathan Woollen – Astra, April 7
Originally published in 2000, this French cult classic novel chronicles Paris’ queer rave scene in the ‘90s. Think: lesbian DJ love triangles, anticonformists, grainy MTV, and designer drugs. The long-awaited English translation of this pop novel is sure to be spotted on the L train this spring.
8. TRANSCRIPTION, by Ben Lerner – FSG, April 7
Ben Lerner is your favorite writer’s favorite writer, and the de facto expert on neurotic straight men. In his latest novel, a narrator conducts what is to be the final published interview with his 90-year-old mentor—only he drops his phone down a hotel sink. Unable to confess the mishap, the interview moves forward, and what unfolds is a prismatic dreamlike conversation about fathers, sons, and male friendship.
9. AMERICAN SPIRITS by Anna Dorn – Simon & Schuster, April 14
Quick-witted and queer, Anna Dorn’s novels are keenly tuned to the dial of the moment, operating on a freak-quency that captures the absurdity of being alive right now. (Especially in Los Angeles.) The Lana Del Rey obsessee’s latest novel is a shimmering pop star sendup, following 38-year-old star Blue Velour’s psychosexual affair with her producer and the vapid ambition of her fangirl assistant. When the pandemic shuts down Blue Velour’s tour, all three hole up in a cabin in the Redwoods and chaos ensues.
10. KILL DICK by Luke Goebel – Red Hen Press, April 14
Caustic, combative and tender, Kill Dick is the kind of book that makes you want to write. The literary thriller follows a 19-year-old NYU dropout loaded up with pills and a Brentwood mansion. But when a string of murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, her life begins to unravel as the headlines get too close to home. Luke Goebel has woven an insane portrait of Los Angeles in the vein of Bret Easton Ellis and Joan Didion. It’s a car chase of a novel, where you never want to look away.
11. FAT SWIM by Emma Copley Eisenberg – Hogarth, April 28
This corporeal collection of linked short stories about queerness and existing in a fat body is spiky, acerbic, and utterly addictive. It’s a book as provocative as it is lush, traversing everything from toxic beauty startups to viral sex tapes.
12. BINARY STAR by Sarah Gerard – Two Dollar Radio, May 5
The rerelease of this 2015 breakout debut follows a young woman dealing with anorexia and her alcoholic boyfriend on a road trip in an odyssey of codependence. Grim and wise, it’s an all-too relevant reissue for the GLP-1 era, featuring a new introduction by Catherine Lacey.
13. TIME ALSO WILL MAKE IT INTERESTING by Red Jordan Arobateau – Night Boat, June 9
Night Boat is publishing the selected journals of the trans, mixed-race artist and dyke erotica writer Red Jordan Arobateau, an iconoclast of the 90s, chock full of barbed and brilliant prose spanning his life from 1950s-60s gay bars of Chicago and New York to his transition in 1990s San Francisco.
14. LOVERS XXX by Allie Rowbottom – Soho Press, June
Following Aesthetica, the revelatory novel about a former influencer undergoing an experimental procedure to undo years of plastic surgery, Allie Rowbottom is trading Botox for big hair. LOVERS XXX is a glamorous, sun-drenched Los Angeles epic set in the early ‘80s, during the so-called Golden Age of pornography, and ends thirty years later. Raw and moving, it explores the intimate and complex friendship between two adult film starlets as they navigate sex, drugs, and life on the neon-lit margins.
15. FIGHTS! By Scott McClanahan – Rose Books, Summer (Cover not yet released)
In his first novel since 2017’s acclaimed The Sarah Book—lines of which run through my head so often they’re familiar to me as my own heartbeat—McLanahan traces the two loves of his life across the mountains of West Virginia and New York City: his wife Julia Escoria and the deceased Tyrant Books publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano.
This is sure to be less of a fight, and more of a K.O.