The Antidote. Best seller Karen Russell’s long-awaited second novel, The Antidote, is a speculative American epic set in Depression-era Nebraska after two major weather catastrophes. To survive the ecological wreckage, a group of enchanted locals—led by a witch known as “the Antidote,” whose body is a depository for the memories the settlers wish to forget—work to come up with a plan for moving forward. Read more.

Primordial. Through intense and vivid imagery, Mai Der Vang asks what we owe to the world, to each other, and to the living, breathing beings that inhabit the earth with us: “For a human/ to call out to a creature, part of/ the human must be creature, too.” Read more.

The Dream Hotel. In Laila Lalami’s mind-bending novel, data sourced from people’s dreams can be used against them—and the authorities have reason to believe that Sara is going to commit a crime against her husband. So they send her to a “retention center” where she must prove her innocence, and an unsettling narrative unfolds as Sara struggles to return home. Read more.

Careless People. For six years, Sarah Wynn-Williams advised Facebook’s top brass, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and erstwhile COO Sheryl Sandberg, about how the company should deal with international governments, only to, as her bombshell book alleges: watch them cozy up to authoritarian regimes, casually mislead the public, and fire her shortly after she accused her boss of sexual harassment. Read more.

Scorched Earth. In lyrics of grief, Black joy, and vulnerability, Tiana Clark’s poetry collection, a finalist for a National Book Award, reminds us that poetry is a means for survival. Scorched Earth takes readers on a nonlinear journey as Clark reaches toward a future that’s different from the one she initially imagined for herself, but beautiful nonetheless. Read more.

Gemini. Twenty years after co-writing Apollo 13, TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger returns to the subject of space to tell the unbelievable story of Project Gemini. This heart-pounding account of the most crucial moment in the space race will deepen your appreciation for just how giant a leap the moon landing was for mankind. Read more.

The Seduction. There are no heroes in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel of cold-blooded decadence. This six-episode drama not only makes the novel’s key villain its protagonist, but also supplies backstory that recasts her as less a monster than a wounded woman fighting for the same freedom men enjoy. Read more.

The Beast in Me. Claire Danes’ latest antihero, Aggie Wiggs, is a Pulitzer-winning journalist at the center of this Netflix cat-and-mouse thriller—and Danes’ best role since Homeland. The ideally cast, impeccably paced, diabolically addictive 8-episode murder mystery that she anchors is one of the year’s most suspenseful rides. Read more.

Surviving Mormonism With Heather Gay. The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Heather Gay’s shrewdly timed three-part documentary series is not a direct attack on tradwife influencers. What Gay objects to is the way their fluffy content serves as propaganda for a church whose hierarchy, according to Gay, has many dark secrets to conceal. Read more.

John M. Chu has a vision for America. The director speaks with TIME about making Wicked: For Good, conspiring with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, and Trump’s war on DEI. Read more.

On its surface, Come See Me in the Good Light is a film about death. But it’s really a film about the vibrant beauty of life. For spoken word poet Andrea Gibson and their partner, poet Megan Falley, turning their story into a documentary provided the opportunity to remind them of what’s most important: one another. Read more.