The Nebula and Bram Stoker Award Winners Have Been Announced

As for the winners, one of my favorite books from last year—Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter—won the Nebula Award for Novel. For the Award for Novella, I’m not surprised to see Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots as the winner. I haven’t read it, but I read This Is How You Lose the Time War, which I loved. It even had a viral moment on Twitter. Good times.

Your Favorite Author’s Favorite Beach Read

Well, technically, not just authors are included in Cultured Mag‘s round-up of the best books to read at the beach this summer. Among the authors who are included, though, are Chang-rae Lee (who recommends Sky Daddy by Kate Folk), Ryan O’Connell (who recommends The Works of Guillaume Dustan), Rachel Reid (who recommends Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian), and others. Some of the other recommended books are The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Luster by Raven Leilani, On Censorship by Ai Weiwei, and more. On the one hand, I appreciate the varied genres and release dates (one of the books was published as far back as 1954), but the diversity throughout the whole list really leaves me wanting.

The 2025 Bram Stoker Award Winners

You read that year right. As with the aforementioned Nebula Awards, we are still awarding 2025 books, but hey! Better later in the next year than never—plus, I love being reminded of some great horror as a somewhat recent horror-reading convert. And, wouldn’t you know it, the book that won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel is The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. You can read my thoughts on it in our Best Books of 2025 list. Other winners include Ryan Coogler for Sinners (it won Superior Achievement in a Screenplay), Becky Siegel Spratford for Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Fiction (it won Superior Achievement in Long Non-Fiction), Mike Mignola for Bowling With Corpses and Other Tales from Lands Unknown (it won Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel), and more. Side note, but I also included The Buffalo Hunter Hunter in a list of books to read if you loved the movie Sinners. Just throwing that out there…

3 Caribbean Romances to Start the Celebration

The Caribbean is vast, and according to this excellent list by Jessica Pryde, the Caribbean is the perfect setting for romances set in the early 20th century, based around baked goods, and that have sapphic vampires (!). Celebrate Caribbean Heritage this month with these banging (fanging?) romances.