LSA Fall Reading List: Slightly Spooky Edition

The leaves are falling, the air is cooling, and it’s time to get cozy with a book that is a little scary, wonderfully strange—or perhaps just a bit moody. This fall’s reading list is full of frighteningly good books of poetry and prose by LSA alumni.

• A Splintering (Dzanc, 2026), a second novel from Helen Zell Writers’ Program (HZWP) alum Dur e Aziz Amna (M.F.A. ’21) portrays a woman undone by her own ambition, while haunted by a violent brother and a past that she can’t escape. Originally published in 2025 in the UK by Duckworth, the book is also the winner of a 2026 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and a BBC Book Club pick.

• HZWP alum Sarah Anderson (M.F.A. ’24) takes readers on an ill-fated journey with her debut novel, Fallow (FSG, 2026), in which we follow protagonist Natalie from a blood bank where she is selling plasma for cash, to a job as a surrogate mother for a mysterious corporation where she must give birth seven times over 10 years, to an even more sinister social experiment. The book is described by the publisher as an “alarmingly real vision of a woman balancing on the knife-edge of capitalism.” (Yikes.) 

• Chris Crowder (A.B. ’18, M.F.A. ’21), a lecturer in LSA’s Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts, has published his debut collection of poetry, The Kin of Nakedness (Four Way Books, 2026), described by the publisher as displaying a “signature gift for distilling the bizarre beauty of this existential maelstrom … though our nakedness terrifies us, the mortification of the flesh is its capacity to feel every excruciating and ecstatic thing.” 

• National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship recipient and HZWP alum Brian Gyamfi (M.F.A. ’23) has received high praise for his debut poetry collection, What God in the Kingdom of Bastards (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025). The publisher describes the collection as “an exploration of grief, memory, Blackness, and the haunting legacy of familial trauma by way of colonialism, told through the lens of two brothers … Their relationship anchors the collection, weaving themes of love, loss, and the arduous reconciliation between the living and the dead.” 

• If the trailer for the new Nathan Fielder documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is the kind of thing that creeps you out, Sucker (Anchor, 2023) by Daniel Hornsby (M.F.A. ’14) might also have you trembling with fear. While the novel tells a different story than Fielder’s film does, Hornsby’s sinister satire of greed, Silicon Valley, and medical horror is sure to make your blood run cold. “This skewering of Silicon Valley startup culture is … complete with fangs,” says Kirkus Reviews.

•  Kendra Langford Shaw (M.F.A. ’12) has published her first novel, The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos (Pantheon, 2026), and it has been described as literary and speculative, fantastic and historical. Peter Ho Davies, the Charles Baxter Collegiate Professor and director of HZWP, calls the book “by turns playful and poignant, about the lives and objects we bequeath to the future. Shaw’s brilliant debut imagines an Arctic as fantastical as anything in the Florida of Karen Russell’s Swamplandia.”

• Mercy (HarperCollins, 2025), a novel by Patricia Ward (M.F.A. 1995), sits firmly in the horror genre. The publisher describes the young adult thriller as “perfect for fans of Sawkill Girls, Bone Gap, and Dark and Shallow Lies,” and says “this suspenseful contemporary mystery delves into a small town’s supernatural, multigenerational curse—and the girl determined to break it.” (Frightening.) 

Illustration by Becky Sehenuk Waite