You've got a little more than seven weeks left before the end of 2018. You've probably also got a pile of books you bought this year that you still haven't finished. Normally we'd tell you to buckle down—but not right now. Right now, you're surrounded by new releases that demand your attention, whatever your preferred flavor. Hardboiled sci-fi? Yup. Behind-the-scenes history of one of the internet's favorite destinations? That too. Dread-inducing horror comics? Dark, lyrical genre short stories? Literary nonfiction? A look back at the political power of women's outrage? Yes, yes, yes, [checks notes] and yes. All told, we pulled together our nine favorite WIRED reads of the moment; the faster you get through these, the sooner you can get back to working on that pile.
Richard K. Morgan, Thin Air
Regardless of your thoughts on this year's Netflix adaptation, Morgan's 2002 novel Altered Carbon still looms as a taut, fraught noir sci-fi standout. Now, after a detour into fantasy, the author has returned to the hardboiled corners of the genre. The Mars of Thin Air has little in common with Bezos-Musk visions of human exploration, or even Kim Stanley Robinson's eco-concern; it's a planet of greed and graft, from the triads of the Gash to the entropy of the Uplands. Embroiled in that maelstrom is Hakan Veil, a born-and-bred mercenary who awakens from his hibernation to find himself in more than one set of crosshairs. The only solution? Paint the planet even redder. Morgan has always had a pretty pen, and here its grudging lyricism transforms something that might in lesser hands be a rote, if well-plotted, alpha-male fantasia. [Amazon] —Peter Rubin
Kenji Miyazawa, Once and Forever
Japanese poet Miyazawa was a master folklorist revered for the compassion and sheer awe of his prose. In Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa, translator John Bester guides us through Miyazawa’s short fiction—his were otherworlds, replete with talking foxes and jealous earthgods where snow resembles “a shining white halo” and the sun burns bright like “a red-and-gold speckled wild pear.” Formalists like to categorize Miyazawa’s work as fairy tales—there’s a sense of childlike whimsy alive in most accounts—but that configuration is largely incomplete: his stories soar, burn, mutate. They are slyly, luminously transcendent, small forces of nature that stamp the mind. Enter “The Restaurant of Many Orders.” Sit with “The Bears of Nametoko.” Wander about “The Spider, The Slug, and The Raccoon.” You won’t soon forget his name. [Amazon] —Jason Parham
Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, We Are the Nerds
You know Reddit for its tangle of internet communities, as divisive as they are diverse. You probably don’t know the whole cast of characters who made Reddit what it is today. Lagorio-Chafkin’s 500-page history of the company—its unexpected popularity, its limit-pushing communities, its turbulent years cycling through ill-fitting CEOs—functions almost as a history of free speech on the internet. The book doesn’t gloss over the unsavory bits (neo-Nazis, child porn, The Fappening), nor does it glamorize co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, both barely of legal drinking age when they found themselves running one of the internet’s most popular websites. But Lagorio-Chafkin still manages to find delight in Reddit’s past, and optimism for its future. And we could all use a dose of optimism. [Amazon] —Arielle Pardes
N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'Til Black Future Month?
I know they're supposed to be, like, the most perfect form of storytelling or whatever, but short stories have never jazzed my juice. They're dinky. You have to constantly reset your brain. They love an Ambiguous Ending. But I made an exception for N. K. Jemisin, one of my favorite authors. (It didn't hurt that one of the stories was first published in WIRED.) And it's sensational. Bursts of luscious, sensuous fantasy. I shiver, full-body, at the end of each one. Plus, there's a kind of magic to the ordering, the stories—22 courses—adding notes and flavors and dashes and complexities. One story's literally devoted to fantasy cooking (the unforgettable phrase "fortune in fungi" appears). Jemisin's always had a talent for rich description, but here, it's divinely concentrated. Fine, short stories can be perfect after all. [Amazon] —Jason Kehe
Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino, Gideon Falls, Vol. 1: The Black Barn
One of 2018's best new comics is also one of the creepiest titles of the last few years—and its first six issues are finally available in the trade paperback, the perfect way to read the form. (Sorry, tablets. Sorry, monthly issues. But you know I'm right.) In the city, a trash-collecting paranoiac is haunted by lifelong dreams; in the country, a new-in-town priest stumbles into an ever-widening nightmare. The connection between them only starts to come into focus over the collection, but Jeff Lemire's writing is as human and imaginative as ever, and artist Andrea Sorrentino gives tremulous, disorienting shape to a delicious nightmare. [Amazon] —P.R.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black
From the opening rattle of this blade-sharp debut collection, terror lurks on the page. Stylistically fearless, the 12 stories are elegantly and darkly imagined: they’ve got gristle and just the right amount of gore. The inaugural portrait, the surreal “The Finkelstein 5,” is classic Americana with a twist: a white man named George Wilson Dunn (an ominous portmanteau of George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson, and Michael Dunn, the killers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Jordan Davis, respectively) unjustly murders five black kids, and rebellion erupts. In this community, black residents are able to adjust their blackness—in one case, “to a still very serious 7.6”—though such abilities ultimately prove fruitless, because the America of Adjei-Brenyah’s telling does not reward the powerless. Other stories wiggle and squirm with brilliance, and just as beautifully tremble with panic and bouts of wit. Friday Black is not just a bold debut; it may very well be the year’s most visceral work. [Amazon] —J.P.
Susan Orlean, The Library Book
The New Yorker legend's latest finds its fuel in the largest library fire in U.S. history: the Los Angeles Central Library, where a 1987 conflagration consumed $14 million worth of books. The Library Book is both a Hollywood true-crime investigation and a vivid history of a city through the prism of its libraries, but its observations on the role of books in communities feels urgent and contemporary. In an early chapter, Orlean describes the volunteers who “formed a human chain” to pass the salvaged books “through the smoky building and out the door”, who “created for that short time a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other.” With elegant prose and thorough research, she raises larger questions not only about the importance of books, but how democracies depend on the accessibility of information—and, by extension, the public spaces that house those vital resources. [Amazon] —Pia Ceres
Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger
In the two years since Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to become the 45th President of the United States, women have been angry. They’re holding marches, speaking out, and running for office in droves. But, as Rebecca Traister points out in her latest book, women have always been angry, and that fury has fueled everything from the suffragette movement to Black Lives Matter to #MeToo. Rather than putting together yet another think-piece on Women in a Post-Trump World, Traister—as she did with her previous book All the Single Ladies—digs deep, tracing the ways culture has attempted to silence half its population by calling them hysterical or simply unworthy of opinions and viewpoints. It’s a rare thing to have a book that is insightful, funny, and also a true lesson in histories so often kept hidden. Want some talking points for this year’s Thanksgiving dinner? Start here. [Amazon] —Angela Watercutter
Karina Longworth, Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood
Anyone who's listened to her acclaimed Hollywood-history podcast You Must Remember This knows Longworth has a knack for threading astute cultural histories with tastefully juicy personal narratives. And in Hughes–the wealthy, needy, often childlike cinephile and philanderer–she's found an ace subject with which to view the film industry's 20th-century ascent. Recounted with deep-dive research and vivid writing, Seduction tracks the famed tycoon's showbiz career from the vantage point of the many women he pursued (and often discarded) along the way, with appearances by everyone from Jean Harlow to Katherine Hepburn, and cameos from supporting players who've been lost to time. It’s not so much a revisionist history of Hollywood as it as a reminder of just how powerful the movies used to be–and how that power could be seized and abused, with after-shocks that are still being felt nearly a century later. [Amazon] —Brian Raftery