Clockwise from top left: map of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (ursulakleguin.com), portrait of Peter Straub (Reg Innell / Toronto Star), historical image of a Spanish bullfight (public domain), James Thurber sketch on New Yorker letterhead (bidsquare.com), painting of Susan Sontag (Juan Bastos / Wikimedia Commons), and portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Charles Osgood, 1841 (public domain)

Our country’s literature has never been one-size-fits-all, and Library of America’s upcoming roster of releases explores great writing at every magnitude, from an epic fantasy saga to a compendium of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it micro-fiction. Whether these works can be read in a single sitting or serve as an excuse to return to the same faraway world night after night, each testifies to the unstoppable power of books to enchant, entertain, and illuminate. This season a modern horror maven joins the LOA series with three psychological thrillers, one of the great American novels gets the full-dress LOA annotated treatment, and dog lovers who caught wind of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats rejoice: a reissue of a beloved canine collection is about to be unleashed.

Browse the list below for information about contents and publication dates, and click here for a full description of each new release.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA SERIES

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Complete Earthsea, Volume One
A Wizard of Earthsea | The Tombs of Atuan | The Farthest Shore | Stories
Brian Attebery, editor
Library of America #400 / ISBN 978-1-59853-850-2
September 2026

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Complete Earthsea Volume Two
Tehanu | Tales from Earthsea | The Other Wind | Stories
Brian Attebery, editor
Library of America #401 / ISBN 978-1-59853-851-9
September 2026

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Complete Earthsea (two-volume boxed set)
ISBN 978-1-59853-852-6
September 2026

Peter Straub: Three Novels of the 1970s
Julia| If You Could See Me Now | Ghost Story
Emma Straub, editor
Library of America #402 / ISBN 978-1-59853-854-0
October 2025

Susan Sontag: The Collected Essays (two-volume boxed set)
Essays of the 1960s & 70s | Later Essays
David Rieff, editor
Library of America volumes #246 and #292 / ISBN 978-1-59853-859-5
October 2026

SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS

American Flash Fiction: An Anthology
David L. Ulin, editor
ISBN 978-1-59853-853-3
September 2026

Ernest Hemingway: The Annotated Sun Also Rises | 100th Anniversary Deluxe Edition
Robert W. Trogdon, editor | Introduction by Adam Gopnik
ISBN 978-1-59853-855-7
October 2026

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Parables, Fantasies, Fragments
Edited and with an introduction by Robert S. Levine
ISBN 978-1-59853-860-1
October 2026

Thurber’s Dogs
James Thurber
ISBN 978-1-59853-856-4
October 2026

Map of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (ursulakleguin.com)

Set in a far-flung archipelago populated by dragons and powered by magic, Ursula K. Le Guin’s beloved Earthsea saga offered a variation on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and anticipated the wizard school adventures of a certain lightning bolt–scarred protagonist. But these entrancing and transportive books—written across two distinct phases of Le Guin’s career—are far stranger, deeper, and philosophically compelling than the fantasies to which they’re often compared. In A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), a young man called both Sparrowhawk and Ged learns to wield the magic within him. In The Tombs of Atuan (1971), Le Guin’s focus shifts to a young woman whose true name was taken from her when she became priestess of the Nameless Ones. In The Farthest Shore (1972), Ged embarks on a long journey with the teenaged Prince Arren to find out why magic seems to be draining out of Earthsea. Le Guin returned to Earthsea eighteen years later with Tehanu (1990), in which Ged returns to the isle of Gont without his magic. Tales from Earthsea (2001) explores the beginnings of the school for wizards. And in The Other Wind (2001), a village sorcerer dreams every night that the stone wall that divides Earthsea from the dry land of death is crumbling.

The volumes contain more than a dozen additional pieces, including “A Description of Earthsea,” four stories not included in Tales from Earthsea, and Le Guin’s essays about the series. With jackets and a boxed set case featuring the work of artist and printmaker Olivia Lomenech Gill, this definitive two-volume edition presents Le Guin’s most popular fictional world in a timeless collection that includes the author’s previously unseen hand-drawn maps.

A horror visionary enters the LOA series with three terrifying novels of earthly transgression and otherworldly retribution. The work of Peter Straub, Michael Chabon writes, “restored the literature of horror and the uncanny to its rightful place at the heart of the American canon.” To celebrate that achievement, this volume gathers the books that launched Straub’s career: Julia (1975), about an American heiress haunted by the specter of her lost child; If You Could See Me Now (1977), a fusion of social and supernatural horror centered on two cousins experiencing a phantasmagoric reunion; and the best-selling Ghost Story (1979), a masterwork of intricate narrative construction and an unsettling exploration of our deepest fears. For only the fourth time in our history, the LOA volume is edited by the author’s child, in this case the acclaimed writer (and Brooklyn-based bookseller) Emma Straub.

Another family pairing joins the Fall 2026 lineup with a two-volume boxed set of Susan Sontag’s Collected Essays, edited by her son David Rieff. This handsome reissue assembles Sontag’s nine complete nonfiction collections, plus six uncollected essays, and includes the landmark works Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and Regarding the Pain of Others.

Brief is beautiful, and bountiful, in American Flash Fiction, Library of America’s newest special anthology, which showcases the diversity and visionary range of this miniature and mesmerizing form with deep roots in our nation’s literary history. A melting pot of genre and style, these one hundred pieces by one hundred writers span nearly two centuries, traversing vast imaginative territories often in the space of just one or two pages. Placing famous voices like Mark Twain and John Steinbeck alongside Harlem Renaissance icons Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, hard-boiled maven Dashiell Hammett beside speculative fiction trailblazer Sofia Samatar and peerless experimentalist Donald Barthelme, the collection—introduced by acclaimed writer and critic David L. Ulin—proves this burgeoning category is no flash in the pan. Rather, the short-short stands as a vital and capacious strand in American writing, encompassing satire, surrealism, humor, horror, prose poetry, metafiction, and more.

An apocryphal account in which Ernest Hemingway once bet a group of fellow writers $10 that he could compose a complete tale in only six words is sometimes cited as the origin of flash fiction. That boast, like many things Hemingway, appears to be exaggerated; the story, reproduced below, is likely far older:

For sale:
Baby shoes. Never worn.

But what cannot be disputed is the power and influence of The Sun Also Rises, the novel that established Hemingway as the preeminent voice of the Lost Generation. Set in 1920s Paris and Spain, this timeless work receives the full annotated treatment in a deluxe anniversary edition featuring LOA’s authoritative text, running commentary from leading Hemingway scholar Robert W. Trogdon, and an introduction by New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik. More than one hundred illustrations and ample marginal notes bring to life as never before the headlong vivacity of Parisian nightlife, the manic energy of the running of the bulls, and the rich color of the Spanish countryside. (This deluxe edition follows 2025’s The Annotated Great Gatsby.)

Indeed, the true basis of micro-fiction may lie with another upcoming special publication. After Nathaniel Hawthorne graduated from college, in 1825, he returned home to Massachusetts and over the next twenty years plied his craft in a second-story bedroom study, keeping a series of notebooks that served as sources for his later work. Sprinkled throughout are short parables, fantasies, and fragments that read, in many cases, like teasers for some larger opus to come, but which are in fact gem-like works that Hawthorne revised and refashioned until perfected. For example:

A family, consisting of a father, mother, and two children, are out on a walk, and sitting together in a wood. The little girl rambles away into the wood—they call for her—within a brief time, she comes back. At first, they notice no difference in her; but by degrees, they begin to see something odd—they notice it more and more, till, in the course of years, they almost suspect that it was not their own child, but a strange child, who came back.

Now for the first time these short, intriguing pieces appear together in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Parables, Fantasies, Fragments, edited by eminent Hawthorne scholar Robert Levine. Previously known only to a small cadre of scholars, these gnomic transmissions reveal a hidden dimension of one of America’s greatest writers.

In response to last year’s blockbuster Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats, we heard but one complaint from readers: what about the dogs? Now mankind’s other best friend gets its LOA due with a deluxe hardcover reissue of Thurber’s Dogs, the classic collection of New Yorker fixture James Thurber’s best writings and drawings about the unpredictable, often inexplicable relationships between dogs and their humans. Canine wiles brought out the best in the often misanthropic Thurber, as seen in “The Dog That Bit People,” a hilarious portrait of Muggs, an antisocial Airedale; “In Defense of Dogs,” an account of a Scotch terrier that scandalized the author by having an unexpected fifth puppy during a walk on Fifth Avenue; and “Memorial,” a gently touching tribute to a dying poodle. “Only a few books have stayed with me through all the moves and upheavals of adult life,” the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley has written, “but Thurber’s Dogs is one of them, and it will stay with me to the end.”