Books Your September 2026 Reads Stories You May Like Powered by Sound, Researchers Help Protect Animals Worldwide From Food Network to TikTok, Hotelie Is a Gen-Z Culinary Star Test Your Knowledge of Big Red Presidential Trivia This month’s featured titles include a comedian’s essays, animal verses for kids, and a memoir by a New York Times obituarist For more titles by Big Red authors, peruse our previous round-ups. Have you published a book you'd like to submit? Scroll down for details! And did you know that Cornell has an online book club? Check it out! I’m a Lot Alison Leiby ’06 “In this hilarious and unforgettable collection of essays, TV writer and comedian Alison Leiby delivers a laugh-out-loud treatise on what it truly means to embrace every part of yourself,” says Harper’s Bazaar. “Whether she’s reflecting on the back-surgery complications that nearly left her dead at 19 years old or the peculiarities of being an only child, Leiby paints a candid, kaleidoscopic portrait of herself as a woman who refuses to conform to any one label.” Comprising 14 personal essays, Leiby’s book is subtitled Surviving Myself and All the People I’ve Been. In it, the humorist who has been dubbed a “Jewish Millennial David Sedaris” contemplates serious topics like coping with chronic pain and opting for an abortion—along with much more lighthearted ones such as being a cat mom and obsessing over the “Real Housewives” shows. “For creative and ambitious women, Alison Leiby’s lifelong Diet Coke-fueled struggle to separate her work from her worth will be illuminating,” says Booklist, “while also emphasizing how ridiculous it is that such a battle exists.” A Guide to Mao’s China Gavin Healy ’96 A former Asian studies major in Arts & Sciences, Healy is a lecturer in the history department at Columbia, where he earned his doctorate. His nonfiction work, published by Cornell University Press, is an academic book accessible to educated lay readers. Subtitled Showing the Nation to Foreign Guests, it explores China’s state tourism bureaucracy during the era of Mao Zedong (1949–76). “The People’s Republic crafted its national narrative through tightly managed tours,” says the publisher, “and foreign visitors were led through model communes and factories by officials, guides, and service workers still negotiating what tourism meant within a socialist state.” Healy’s research draws on government archives, firsthand reports from tourists, ephemera, and more, as it examines how tourism staff helped shape how foreigners (including those from other socialist countries) viewed the Chinese system. “Socialist China has often been depicted—both in accounts for a general readership and in specialized scholarship—as isolated behind a ‘bamboo curtain’ that was lifted only after the death of Mao and the introduction of Deng Xiaoping’s policies of ‘reform and opening,’” Healy writes. “Yet, what many of these accounts have in common is that they take ‘the world’ as synonymous with the capitalist West.” Nature’s Remarkable Partners Leslie Bulion ’79 Aimed at readers aged eight to 12, this illustrated book of verse and prose celebrates cooperative relationships between disparate types of animals around the globe. They include that of the ocean sunfish and the Laysan albatross: the fish offers a food source for the bird, which cleans harmful parasites off its body. Another spread spotlights the alligator’s mutuality with long-legged wading birds like storks and egrets: “Gator, dear, / when I nest near / your jaws and sharped-tooth sneer / opossums and racoons steer clear, / while my growing chicks and I need not fear.” An Arts & Sciences alum, Bulion also holds graduate degrees in oceanography and social work. She has previously penned numerous children’s books melding science and poetry including Galápagos: Islands of Change; Hey There, Stink Bug!; and Spi-ku: A Clutter of Short Verse on Eight Legs. “The animal interplay is fascinating, couched in imaginatively crafted, often slyly funny verse,” Kirkus says of her latest, calling the volume “clever, visually appealing, and thought-provoking.” Stories You May Like Powered by Sound, Researchers Help Protect Animals Worldwide From Food Network to TikTok, Hotelie Is a Gen-Z Culinary Star Are They Dead Yet? Sam Roberts ’68 Roberts is a veteran journalist who has spent decades at the New York Times—most recently on its obituaries desk, where he has covered upwards of 1,600 notable deaths. His nonfiction book is a memoir of his beat, exploring (in the words of the subtitle) the “art of the obit.” Booklist calls it “lively, entertaining, deeply perceptive, and occasionally very funny” and “one of those books that gives us a new appreciation and greater understanding of something we thought we already knew”; Kirkus lauds it as a “brisk, witty look at writing about the dead.” Published by Bloomsbury, the volume not only takes readers behind the scenes of how the nation’s “paper of record” decides whom to cover out of the roughly 150,000 humans who pass away on an average day, but parses some of the obits bearing Roberts’s byline and traces the history of the obituary as a journalistic form. “Even when the reporting leans impersonal and crafting the prose is solitary and fleeting, obituary writing is a collaborative process,” Roberts observes. “You really can’t write an obituary without its costing someone else their life. The obit, online especially, becomes a memorial that is universal, accessible, and eternal.” The Revolutionary Life and Marriage of Lucy Knox Donna Tesiero ’76 Tesiero’s latest biography of a historic woman in early America focuses on Lucy Flucker Knox, who defied her wealthy royalist family and married a bookseller loyal to the Colonies; he’d go on to become a Revolutionary War hero, a close confidant of George Washington, and the new nation’s first Secretary of War. “Lucy Knox’s insistence on ‘equal command’ in her marriage to Henry Knox made stronger a relationship that weathered danger, tragedy, loss of physical beauty, and political and financial distress,” Tesiero writes in the intro. “In the crucible of war and the birth of a nation, Lucy Knox would be a harbinger of women to come.” A former government major in Arts & Sciences, Tesiero also holds a JD and two master’s degrees. Her previous historical works include Six Nations Diplomat: Molly Brant and the American Revolution and A Revolutionary Woman: Elizabeth Freeman and the Abolition of Slavery in the North. Skirmishes with Patriotism Tad Tuleja, MA ’68 “Sixty years ago, as a young man in a nation at war, I faced a choice,” the graduate literature alum writes. “I could participate in a conflict I believed to be unjust, or I could deny the federal government the use of my services and try to escape its net. In this predicament I was not alone.” Tuleja’s memoir chronicles not only his personal experiences, but the wider phenomenon of draft-age men during the Vietnam War era who avoided enlistment in various ways and for different reasons—a population of millions that he calls a forgotten majority. “Tracing his own journey from a flag-waving Boy Scout to a disillusioned humanist wrestling with the consequences of saying ‘no’ to military service, he explores the complex pressures of family, expectations about masculine duty, and the fevered nationalism that continues to grip the United States today,” states the publisher, University of Kentucky Press. “This is not a tale of heroism or protest but a candid reckoning with moral ambiguity and the cost of a life-altering decision.” Tuleja’s many previous publications include fiction, ghostwritten memoirs, nonfiction, and academic writing. To submit your book for consideration, email cornellians@cornell.edu. Please note that to be included, books must be recently published by a conventional publisher—not self published, pay-to-publish, publish on demand, partner-published, or similar—and be of interest to a general audience. Books not featured will be forwarded to Class Notes. Published September 14, 2026 Leave a Comment Cancel replyOnce your comment is approved, your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment * Name * Class Year Email * Save my name, email, and class year in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ Other stories You may like Chime In What Building a Dragon Taught Me About Collaboration Campus & Beyond Lacrosse Wins the NCAA Title—and Big Red Fans Rejoice Chime In We Create Rich Characters, While Defying Publishing Norms