Your literary guide to the 2026 Oscar nominations

by Thomas Pynchon

🎧 Audiobook

🏆 13 nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor, 2 Best Supporting Actors, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director

Take a Pynchon classic, move it from the 1980s to the 2020s, add a prestigious director, some rising stars, and a few established ones, and you have the leader of the book-to-movie pack in nominations.

Vineland County is a haven for sixties counterculture warriors, including Zoyd Weeler, whose life is uprooted when he discovers that his former nemesis, Federal agent Brock Vond, has come to town. Voyd disappears underground, but not before he sends his daughter on a mission of her own, which will unearth secrets of her own secret past. This book has all of the elements of a political thriller, family drama, soap operas, and so much more.

by Mary Shelley

🎧 Audiobook

🏆 9 nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Adapted Screenplay

Is there really anything more that can be said about Mary Shelley’s book—considered to be the first science-fiction novel—that hasn’t already been said (especially by someone who neglected to read it in high-school English...)? While it seems like there wouldn’t be much, we keep returning to this story again and again, reveling in the gothic novel’s appeal both on the page and screen. The story of Victor Frankenstein’s hubris and the humanity of his Creature is one that we seem destined to see again and again, with no end in sight to how it fascinates and horrifies us.

Guillermo del Toro’s faithful adaptation is bound to make even the most severe critic of movie adaptations tune in, so be sure to check out the book to make sure for yourself!

by Maggie O'Farrell

🎧 Audiobook

🏆 8 nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Costume Design

When the book, Hamnet, came out in 2020, it was a huge sensation. It shined a light on the little-known history of one of the most famous people ever, about whom little is known, William Shakespeare and the death of his son. This novel imagines Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway, the birth of their children, and the loss of his child, and how that influenced his writing of what’s probably his most famous tragedy, Hamlet. The writing is beautiful and the story is wrenching, while also affirming all the ways one can grieve and feel in the light of such great and personal loss.

The movie is getting tons of buzz, and, despite not getting the Best Actor nomination everyone thought it would, still has many people thinking that a gold statue is in it’s future soon.  

by Denis Johnson

🎧 Audiobook

🏆 4 nominations including Best Picture, Best Original Song, Best Cinematography, and Best Adapted Screenplay

Sometimes the shortest books can pack the biggest impact. In this novella, Denis Johnson sets out to do just that, with his story of the American West on the cusp of great change, told through the eyes of one man struggling with all the change around him. Railroad worker Robert Grainer’s job is to build the thing that will shake up his entire existence, the railroad connecting all of America together. With great loss behind him, he moves forward, trying to find his place in this new world.

The Oscars love a western, and this one is unlike many that we’ve seen of late, so there’s a chance that we may see a win or two (or four!) tumbling down the tracks.

by Liz Gotauco

🎧 Audiobook

🏆 1 nomination for Best Makeup & Hairstyling

As an out and proud Disney adult, I love the HEAs and sweet stories that they have turned all fairy tales into over the past century. However, they’ve really blunted the wild, sometimes horrific and scary and violent tales that many of our beloved fairy tales started as when they were first written down.

The Ugly Stepsister is a body horror masterpiece, which really does vibe with the traditional story (hold on to your toes!), and for those who want a fun deep-dive into what these stories really were at the outset, be sure to check out Gotauco’s wonderful, gross, funny, informative nonfiction book. Your fairy godmother will thank you!

by Lizzie Johnson

🎧 Audiobook

🏆 1 nomination for Best Visual Effects

There is little as primary and terrifying as fire. It consumes everything in its path without thought or feeling, and anyone or anything in its way better move or be made ash. Anyone who has been through a devastating fire knows how life altering it is, and that’s what Johnson set out to show in her book, Paradise, including the story of a school bus full of children trying to find their escape as the flames bare down on them.

The movie focuses specifically on the story of that bus and its occupants, but if you want to dig deeper into the town of Paradise before, during, and after the fire, which was the deadliest in America’s history, this nonfiction book will open your eyes.

by Andrea Gibson

🏆 1 nomination for Best Documentary Feature Film

To finish us off, this documentary about a poet dying of cancer and her partner, also a poet, forced to watch her wife die, is somehow both sad and uplifting at the same time. Andrea Gibson knows that she’s dying when she lets a documentary crew into her home and her marriage, where we, the viewers, are witness to private moments of grief, joy, humor, and all that makes up life, even at the end.

While Gibson is known mostly for being a spoken-word poet, she has many published collections to chose from, including this award-winning collection. It explores many different avenues of the human experience with brutal honesty, including her cancer diagnosis, which is the focus on the documentary. Watch and read with tissues.