It’s a new year and with it comes new books from Syracuse University Press. This month, the press launches their Spring 2026 catalog of books. Explore all of this season’s titles in our catalog or take a look at a selection of some of the spring’s upcoming books below.
Wisdom of the Marsh takes an in-depth look at the Montezuma Wetlands Complex through the overlapping lens of environmental and social justice. Exploring the history of the land and its relationship with the people who inhabited it, writer Clare Howard and photographer David Zalaznik present a complete portrait of the marsh’s exploitation and restoration, providing a hopeful perspective through which to view our future.
In the lyrical memoir Black Heel Strings, Robin Michel Caudell meditates on memory and identity as she traces her childhood in a Black family navigating poverty and racism on the Delmarva Peninsula. Many know Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman’s exodus stories out of bondage in rural Maryland, but what about the people who stayed? It is from this place and history that Caudell’s story begins. Growing up in the segregated 1960s, Caudell is the living legacy of the ones who did not run away and of the Free People of Color/Christianized Indians who partnered with their enslaved brethren in a precarious dance of love in Chesapeake Country.
In the fictional Adirondack towns of Silver Lake and Lost River, a colorful cast of residents coexist, sometimes unharmoniously, with seasonal visitors, travelers, and vacationers. Their stories are told in The Loon Counters, which sees the residents and visitors of the community encounter Olympic torchbearers, a mysteriously unseen-but-often-heard violinist, pushy hikers, brooding art museum security guards. The characters recur across stories, seasons, and locations, finely illustrating the subtle shifts in the life of a rural, isolated Adirondack enclave.
In The Raven of Ruwi and Other Stories from Oman, Omani author Hamoud Saud invites readers into the soul of Muscat, the capital city of Oman, a country famed for its long coastline, rugged mountains, and stark desert landscapes. This geography provides the backdrop for stories that reveal both the beauty and hardship of a country and people on the margins. Saud’s Muscat is not a postcard-perfect city but a living, breathing place of cement forests, forgotten roundabouts, and ravens perched on bank flagpoles. In “The Raven of Ruwi,” a narrator wanders the city’s commercial district where Indian music drifts from balconies and the streets are filled with weary bank workers. In “The Sad Donkey of Muscat,” a blind man recounts the city’s history as told to him by a donkey. And in “Post Office of the Dead,” a forgotten postmaster receives letters from Dostoevsky and Kafka, triggering a surreal unraveling of time and identity.