18 new books to reinvigorate your summer reading.
Hope you all had a lovely long weekend! More importantly: hope you’re all excited for the new books coming out today!
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Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori, Life Ceremony
(Grove Press)
“[A] series of funhouse mirrors, each story in the collection pushing readers to reconsider what is true, distorting the image so completely as to open the viewer to new and unexpected perspectives.”
–Shelf Awareness
Meng Jin, Self-Portrait with Ghost
(Mariner)
“Jin’s stories are at once pungent and claustrophobic yet rife with clear-eyed observations about humanity’s flaws and failings, our insatiable need, our capacity to inflict pain and bestow joy upon others.”
–The San Francisco Chronicle
Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez
(Tin House)
“What makes the stories that compose Night of the Living Rez truly stand apart from many comparative drug narratives is that they are stories about people who will do anything to help one another, about relationships of mutual survival.”
–Adroit Journal
Bruce Holsinger, The Displacements
(Riverhead)
“This bleak but resilient view of a harsh future surely entertains, and it also hearkens to hope.”
–Booklist
Bolu Babalola, Honey and Spice
(William Morrow)
“Kiki is the epitome of cool; her dialogue oozes with confidence, and her biting wit rolls off her tongue with ease—leaving readers wishing they could play her clever disses on repeat like their favorite song.”
–Kirkus
Concita de Gregorio, tr. Clarissa Botsford, The Missing Word
(Europa)
“A quietly devastating but somehow hopeful tale.”
–Kirkus
Katherine J. Chen, Joan: A Novel of Joan of Arc
(Random House)
“Making her real requires imagination and empathy, and Chen brings both to the task of putting solid flesh on the charred bones of a legendary figure.”
–Kirkus
Hermann Berger, tr. Adrian Nathan West, Brenner
(Archipelago)
“Taken in total, and thanks to West’s lucid translation along with a series of evocative photos, the chronicle offers a cogent view of a rambling man desperate to shape his life into meaning.”
–Publishers Weekly
Ron Shelton, The Church of Baseball
(Knopf)
“It’s a remarkable account of how the Hollywood sausage is made, but it’s also a touching account of the author’s relationship with baseball.”
–Sports Illustrated
Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality
(Verso)
“Even the most anti-Marxian among us, [will] find ourselves compelled, if not to accept the book’s intricate hypotheses, at least to accord them an ungrudged admiration for the brilliance of their formulation and the serene and quietly convinced tone in which they are advanced.”
–The New York Review of Books
Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith, Wash Day Diaries
(Chronicle)
“With spare dialogue and lush renditions of self-care rituals, Rowser and Smith paint a loving and intimate portrait of city life for a group of young Black women.”
–Publishers Weekly
Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
(Knopf)
“[S]he’s written a novel that draws any curious reader into the pioneering days of a vast entertainment industry too often scorned by bookworms.”
–The Washington Post
Anuradha Roy, The Earthspinner
(Harpervia)
“Roy delivers profound insights on the power of art…the hideous nature of religious intolerance, and perhaps most sadly, the consequences of pursuing a dream. This is Roy’s best to date.”
–Publishers Weekly
Isabel Kaplan, NSFW
(Henry Holt)
“As a Hollywood coming-of-age story, this does the job.”
–Publishers Weekly
Olivia Wenzel, tr. Priscilla Layne, 1,000 Coils of Fear
(Catapult)
“Wenzel’s unique literary voice carries the reader through meditations on origins, grief, racial identity, love, and belonging.”
–Booklist
Margarita Montimore, Acts of Violet
(Flatiron)
“This spellbinding effort delivers its fair share of magic.”
–Publishers Weekly
Reece Jones, Nobody Is Protected
(Counterpoint)
“This well-researched account is disturbing in its demonstration of the unwitting complicity between the American justice system and an organization born of racist violence.”
–Kirkus
James Reginato, Growing Up Getty
(Gallery)
“Though the litany of facts—marriages, births, deaths, mergers—tends to dampen the narrative at times, Reginato’s storytelling is at its most engaging in its cinematic depictions of the family in their element … The result offers the approximate pleasure of thumbing through a century of society pages.”
–Publishers Weekly
