4 Best Substacks to Read in 2026

Table of Contents

• Four Substack Writers You Should Be Reading This Summer
• Why Did I Recommend These Four? Here’s My Criteria…
• 1. Panache Press by Kate Naglieri
• 2. Sailingwriter by Christine Kling
• 3. Read Against the Patriarchy by Caitlin Weaver
• 4. DEVOUR by Odette Williams
• Read Next
• FAQ — Best Substacks to Read in 2026

Four Substack Writers You Should Be Reading This Summer

Print magazines used to run long-form essays about cities you’d never been to but suddenly needed to visit. Real reporting. Specific shops. Quotes from actual people who had been there (not just googled it). Then they stopped doing it, and the inbox got listicles.

The good news: a handful of Substack writers are bringing real writing back, across travel, food, books, and life lived in unique ways (on a sailboat is my dream). These four are doing the work the algorithm refuses to do — the best newsletters for women writers, readers, and anyone hunting for summer reading newsletters that actually deliver. They’re the ones I suggest you subscribe to to kickoff your summer because they will genuinely make it better!

Why Did I Recommend These Four? Here’s My Criteria…

Substack is full now. There are more newsletters than anyone has the time to read. The ones worth a permanent slot in your inbox — the Substacks worth subscribing to long-term — are the ones that add something to your week the algorithm can’t give you. As a thriller author whose Substack recommendations get asked for constantly, these are the four that pass my test. Here’s how:

1. Would you tell a friend about it at brunch?

The through-line all four share is that they’re built on a real person’s actual lived experience. Each one is a specific human’s specific perspective on a subject she knows cold. A vintage kimono in a Nakano basement. The light on the water in Baja at six p.m. A Sicilian nibble platter for Memorial Day weekend. A feminist breakdown of why Jane Eyre is the original anti-tradwife (never thought of this, but as the writer of a trad wife thriller, she’s right!). They have an interesting take that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

2. Does it pull you out of your own lane?

2026 is a hot mess and escapism is how I get through the day. The secret to being a writer worth reading is having a life worth writing about (and writing every day). The same thing is true if you just want to enjoy your life — you need to find inspiration outside of work. New places. New flavors. People doing interesting things you’ve never heard of. These four constantly bring me surprising new things and I find myself genuinely BETTER because of them. They widen my week in real, tangible ways. They will do the same for yours.

3. Does it have a real opinion?

Caitlin will tell you a book didn’t work. Kate will tell you the bidet at Haneda is so good it makes American bathrooms feel medieval (and she’s right! After I got home from Japan I bought bidets for all my toilets — they sell them at Costco, I’m not even joking). Christine will tell you the actual weather the day she got stuck off Saturna Island. Odette will tell you a Sunday roast doesn’t need to take five hours and then prove it to you with a recipe you can run on a Tuesday. Real opinions. Real expertise. Four writers who picked a lane and went deep:

1. Panache Press by Kate Naglieri

panachepress.substack.com — Fashion, art, and travel writing from an arts-and-culture writer with an explorer’s heart.

Panache Press is the rare Substack that covers fashion, art, culture, AND travel without diluting any of them. Kate Naglieri is a former journalist who reports things out — long-form essays on the power of color or the history of Pendleton blankets, interviews with vintage-shop owners and poets and Bay-area stylists, opinion pieces that take a stance, and a recurring travel column called “Just the Ticket” that takes you city by city, with the specific shop, the specific restaurant, the specific shrine. Tokyo. Hakone. Kyoto. Puglia. The North Fork of Long Island. Glen Arbor, Michigan. The kind of long-form magazine writing print publications stopped paying for, brought back one weekly-ish post at a time.

I’ve written a travel memoir myself (Where to Nest), so I read travel writing the way other writers read travel writing — looking for the details that actually transport you. Kate’s recent “Just the Ticket: Tokyo, Japan” is a great example. My boyfriend and I have been going to Japan every year for about three years now (favorable exchange rate, we LOVE it), and Kate captured the things I’d never been able to put into words. The bidet hello at Haneda. The way konbini culture turned 7-Eleven into a destination — she had upwards of twenty of those egg salad sandwiches, which are amazing and the reason 7-Eleven brought them to the U.S. although the ones here don’t taste as good. The vintage kimono shopkeeper at Miyoshima who hand-picked every single piece of a full furisode set and told Kate to “practice, practice, practice” tying it. The 100,000 trees donated from across Japan to grow the forest around Meiji Jingu Shrine in the middle of Tokyo. Those aren’t generic facts. Those are the details that come from actually paying attention while you’re there, and the way she writes them makes me want to book another flight. Subscribe to Panache Press if you keep a running list of places you need to see.

2. Sailingwriter by Christine Kling

sailingwriter.com — A nautical mystery novelist writing dispatches from the actual sea.

Christine Kling is the author of the Seychelle nautical mystery series, and the kicker is she ALSO literally lives the life she writes about. She and her husband sail their boat around the world year-round. Her Substack is what happens when a novelist with that much craft writes about the actual logistics of her actual life — whales and weather and which Mediterranean port made them dump their plumbing and where she’s anchored this week. Recent dispatches span Baja, Kalymnos in Greece, the Canary Islands, Saturna Island in British Columbia, and a wonderful piece on the Michelin Guide. Every post is somewhere she’s actually been with a boat under her, and the writing has the same quiet authority as a thriller from a writer who knows her setting cold.

I wrote a detective who lives on a sailboat — Violet Crisp in The Storm Reaper — so I have spent A LOT of time researching what life on a boat actually looks like day to day. I also have my own week-on-a-boat story in my memoir Where to Nest — a charity yacht trip from Greece to Montenegro that went absolutely sideways (water rationed, three days trapped at sea, the toilet pump-valve incident I will not get into here). Christine is who I send people to when they want the honest version. Her recent “Curiouser and Curiouser in Baja” post — whales, wanderlust, the slow rhythm of nomadic life — is the dispatch I’d hand any reader who has ever romanticized running away to sea. She doesn’t romanticize it. She writes the weather AND the wonder and I absolutely love every one of her posts. They make me miss being on the water. Subscribe to Sailingwriter if you want travel writing from somebody who actually lives the lifestyle she covers.

3. Read Against the Patriarchy by Caitlin Weaver

caitlinweaver.substack.com — Feminist book criticism with the tagline “Fighting the patriarchy one heroine at a time.”

I write feminist thrillers, so my whole job is paying attention to how women get written and how women get treated, and Caitlin’s Substack is one of the places I go to think about both. Read Against the Patriarchy is the smartest feminist book Substack out there right now. Caitlin Weaver is herself a novelist, which means her book criticism reads like it’s written by someone who actually understands the craft, not a content writer chasing engagement. Her premise: “Come for the books, stay for the feminism.” She does themed reading lists, cultural criticism that’s actually critical (she’ll tell you why a book didn’t work), gendered analysis of who gets to write what, and essays on motherhood, imposter syndrome, and the genuine difference between buying books and reading them. The patriarchy joke is the hook. The writing is sharper than the hook.

Her recent “Beach Reads, But Feminist: The Best Summer Books About Women’s Lives” is exactly the kind of summer reading list I want — a curated stack of books about women’s lives, with the kind of analysis that makes you text her back. I think about Gillian Flynn’s Cool Girl monologue from Gone Girl more than is probably healthy (my post about it went viral) — Amy explaining that the Cool Girl is a male fantasy who eats pizza, watches sports, and never makes him feel guilty about anything. Flynn wrote that in 2012, and according to a 2024 King’s College London study, more than half of Gen Z men now think feminism has gone too far (here’s my take on it). The Cool Girl pressure didn’t go away after #metoo. It mutated. Gen Z is under MORE pick-me pressure than millennials were, and #metoo didn’t really fix much unfortunately. That’s the cultural reading I want from a book newsletter, and that’s what Caitlin delivers. Subscribe to Read Against the Patriarchy if you want book recommendations from Substack writers who have actual opinions.

4. DEVOUR by Odette Williams

odette.substack.com — Recipes, cocktails, and Sunday-night hosting from an Australian-American food writer who treats her readers like grown-ups.

Odette Williams is the author of the cookbook Simple Pasta, and DEVOUR is her ongoing food Substack — recipes, cocktails, home-and-hosting, seasonal eating, and the occasional style post that ties the table together. The architecture is the thing that makes it stand out from every other food newsletter: DEVOUR is organized into actual navigable categories (Recipes, Cocktails, Style, Home & Hosting, Guest Host, Instagram, Archive) so you can find what you want to cook tonight without scrolling through her last six months of writing. As someone who LIVES in my inbox, I have feelings about Substacks that bury their best posts. Odette doesn’t.

What I actually want from a food Substack: a recipe I’ll cook on a Tuesday night, not a 12-step stunt-food project from an influencer plate. Odette’s recent “Linguine With Shredded Arugula, Lemon, Chile, Garlic and Parmesan” is exactly that — a quick pasta straight from her favorite restaurant in Sydney, the kind of weeknight dinner you can actually pull off after a long day. She tells you what to do, why the technique matters, and what the meal is supposed to feel like when it lands on the table. Real meals you’d serve people you actually love. Home and food are how we have built community for centuries, and I think Odette is doing genuinely important work — giving people the tools to put a real meal on a real table and gather their actual humans around it. Subscribe to DEVOUR if you want weeknight cooking that respects your time.

Read Next

If you’re stocking summer reads alongside your Substack subscriptions, my full crime thriller The Storm Reaper is your next pick. It’s a Fire Island whodunit about Violet Crisp — a patrol officer who’s spent ten years trying to prove a serial killer has been using hurricanes to disguise murders. Set inside a barrier-island community where everyone knows everyone, and the storm is both weather and weapon. Slow-burn psychological suspense, dark humor, real American folklore. Read the first two chapters free below.

FAQ — Best Substacks to Read in 2026

What Are the Best Substacks to Read in 2026?

The four best Substacks worth subscribing to right now, each in a different lane: Panache Press by Kate Naglieri (fashion, art, and travel), Sailingwriter by Christine Kling (nautical-life dispatches), Read Against the Patriarchy by Caitlin Weaver (feminist book criticism), and DEVOUR by Odette Williams (recipes and hosting). Each one is written by a woman at the top of her craft.

What’s the Best Substack for Fashion, Art, and Culture Writing?

Panache Press by Kate Naglieri. She’s a former journalist writing in the long-form magazine tradition — essays on the history of objects (Pendleton blankets, oyster plates, trompe-l’œil), interviews with artists and designers, and a recurring travel column called “Just the Ticket.” If you miss the kind of style-and-culture coverage print magazines used to publish, Panache is what you’re missing.

What’s the Best Substack About Life on a Sailboat?

Sailingwriter by Christine Kling. Christine is a nautical mystery novelist who sails with her husband full-time, year-round. Her Substack is the real-time travel-meets-nautical-life dispatch — Baja, Kalymnos, the Canary Islands, Saturna Island — written with novelist-level craft and zero romanticizing. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s actually like to live on a boat, this is the source.

What’s the Best Feminist Book Substack?

Read Against the Patriarchy by Caitlin Weaver. She’s a novelist writing book criticism that takes gender seriously — themed reading lists, cultural essays, and analysis of who gets to write what. Her “Jane Eyre Was the Original Anti-Trad Wife” piece is the kind of reframe you don’t get anywhere else. The patriarchy joke is the hook. The writing is sharper than the hook.

What’s the Best Substack for Recipes and Home Cooking?

DEVOUR by Odette Williams. Odette is the author of the cookbook Simple Pasta and one of the few food Substacks architected like an actual cookbook, with navigable categories so you can find the recipe you remember three weeks later. She writes recipes you’ll cook on a Tuesday, cocktails to bring to a party, and Sunday roasts that don’t take five hours.

Is The Storm Reaper out yet?

The Storm Reaper, the first novel in the Violet Crisp series, launches June 1, 2026. It’s a Fire Island crime thriller about a patrol officer trying to prove a serial killer has been using hurricanes to disguise murders for a decade. You can read the first few chapters free — about a 20-minute read.