Why release a film guide now? There are loads of genre websites dedicated to exposing a new “lost” masterpiece. There are so many entities jockeying to define a canon. And lists. So many lists. Many of these lists are designed specifically to evoke clicking, and as more streaming services search for new content, more obscure movies now get their poster-sized screen icon for your perusal. Still, many are still passed over by viewers. Some of the mystery and fun of searching for “cult” or “lost” movies dissipates as websites throw everything at the wall at once to see what sticks. But one thing the Internet can’t control is the compulsion of being as film buff. Billups Allen is a film critic and pop culture enthusiast who enjoys writing about films languishing outside the arena of cult status and/or movies derailed from the curve of the academic canon.

For readers of The Cloisters and Counterfeit, Natalie Lemle’s debut novel offers an insider’s view into the world of stolen artifacts and the hidden networks that link museums to organized crime, when a woman is forced to remember the summer she spent on an archaeological dig in Italy, as everyone she knew then may now be in danger. Successful trusts and estates attorney Lena Connolly is asked by a colleague to assist on a case: the Italian government claims an artifact was looted and sold to a museum illegally and is seeking repatriation. The object in question is a cup made of dichroic glass, which would have been rare even in Ancient Rome, let alone thousands of years later. Lena has done everything she can to put the study abroad summer she spent on an archaeological dig in the Italian Alps behind her. Her dreams of being an archaeologist shattered when her mentor Cyrille disappeared and her enigmatic boyfriend Giamma went dark, but with this new case, the past comes roaring back. Told in alternating timelines, Artifacts follows young Lena as she falls in love with both archaeology and Giamma on the streets of Torino while her adult self pieces together what truly happened on the dig, now a fully restored Roman villa with World Heritage status. The dichroic cup, Lena discovers, may have been taken from the very site she helped unearth. Powerful and exuberant, Natalie Lemle’s Artifacts brings readers behind the museum glass and asks questions about cultural heritage and the historical preservation of our shared sense of humanity.

For fans of Dolly Alderton and HBO’s Hacks, a whip-smart, laugh-out-loud funny debut novel about faking it (and “making it”) as a writer in Hollywood. TV writer Caroline Neumann is thirty-four and mired in professional envy and self-hatred. Even Harry, her usually supportive therapist husband, thinks it’s time for her to press pause on her career ambitions and focus on getting pregnant, despite Caroline’s serious ambivalence about having children. When Caroline accidentally stumbles on Harry’s patient session notes and offhandedly mentions what she finds in a meeting with a producer, the momentum of Hollywood takes over. Before she knows it—and unbeknownst to Harry—Caroline finds herself pitching a TV show about the deepest, darkest secrets of her husband’s favorite patient, a woman known to Caroline only as the Teacher. Amid the indignities of the Hollywood development process, Caroline must balance her burning desire for professional validation against her own morality and the health of her marriage. And when Caroline forms a real-life relationship with Teacher herself, the lines between art and life begin to blur further, shaking up Caroline’s understanding of what it means to be the “likeable female protagonist” of her own life.

This unusual fictional memoir - in good part autobiographical - narrates without self-pity and often with humor the adventures of a penniless British writer among the down-and-outs of two great cities. The Parisian episode is fascinating for its expose of the kitchens of posh French restaurants, where the narrator works at the bottom of the culinary echelon as dishwasher, or plongeur. In London, while waiting for a job, he experiences the world of tramps, street people, and free lodging houses. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and of society.

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

For every lover of food culture, this scrupulously researched and accessible cookbook presents one-of-a-kind dinner parties inspired by seminal moments in culinary history. In ten chapters—each an important moment in food history, from Ancient Rome to Al-Andalus in Spain, from the Ethiopian Empire to nineteenth-century New York City—the authors pair menus with immersive retellings of historic culinary breakthroughs, and present the ingredients and modern techniques adapted for today’s kitchens to allow cooks of all abilities to entertain with dishes that were created and enjoyed hundreds of years ago but remain relevant to today’s food tastes and values. Readers learn to orchestrate feasts from Apicus , blend spices from the Silk Road, feature indigenous ingredients of the Americas, revisit the “classics” from the Court of the Sun King, and savor the complex delicacies from the birth of the American restaurant scene. The home cook can prepare an entire seven-course Tudor feast, for example, or pick and choose dishes from around the world throughout time. Rich illustrations, hand-drawn maps, and contemporary photography create an immersive experience, while Harris’s foreword puts these historic foodways and their legacies into contemporary context.

"Can the absence of words tell a story? Like a pattern in lace, the holes as important as the threads?" A search. A puzzle. Sixty protagonists―all of whom are dead. Told entirely through obituaries and ricocheting through time, Remember You Will Die is an innovative, genre-bending epic about the messy tapestry of human history and the threads that connect us, told through the eyes of Peregrine, an AI mother grappling with the unexpected death of her human daughter, Poppy. And from the newspaper clippings of individual lives emerges something else unexpected: generations entwined through blood and art and the consequences of their actions, betrayals and redemptions that traverse our dying world and beyond. Spanning continents, centuries, planets, and genres, and centering a diverse mix of human experiences, Remember You Will Die is a provocative exploration of who we are and what we could be.

Grady Hendrix takes on the haunted house in a thrilling new novel that explores the way your past—and your family—can haunt you like nothing else. When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world. Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success. Unfortunately, she’ll need his help to get the house ready for sale because it’ll take more than some new paint on the walls and clearing out a lifetime of memories to get this place on the market. But some houses don’t want to be sold, and their home has other plans for both of them…

One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace, and desire. A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown. The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey. The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him. The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears. S., conceived by filmmaker J. J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst, is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don’t understand, and it is also Abrams and Dorst’s love letter to the written word.