21 new books coming out this week; or, 21 reasons to visit your local indie.
What time is it?! If you’re a young millennial, you might’ve sung “Summertime! Anticipation!” out loud, and now the songs from High School Musical will be stuck in your head for the rest of the day, and I’m sorry. If you’re a book lover and avid reader of this site, though, you know that it’s New Books Tuesday, aka the time you should be running over to your local indie to get these new titles. (Anticipation!)
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Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties
(Ecco)
“It feels transgressive that Afterparties is so funny, so irreverent, concerning the previous generation’s tragedy.”
–The New Yorker
Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun
(Hogarth)
“The brushstrokes of plot that kick off Something New Under the Sun suggest the makings of a mildly satirical novel starring yet another neurotic upper-middle-class family. But that’s just misdirection, and Kleeman excels at it.”
–The Los Angeles Times
Stephen King, Billy Summers
(Scribner)
“The ever prolific King moves from his trademark horror into the realm of the hard-boiled noir thriller … Murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining. Another worthy page-turner from a protean master.”
–Kirkus
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Savage Tongues
(Mariner)
“Van der Vliet Oloomi’s strategy is to forgo plot—and most of the other conventions of fiction—in favor of a book-length monologue. Arezu considers not only her own past, but, more generally, racism, colonialism…among other things.”
–Kirkus
Ash Davidson, Damnation Spring
(Scribner)
“There is so much that is right and particular about this novel. Rarely will a reader have such a tactile experience of life in a forest logging community as one receives here.”
–BookPage
Dolly Alderton, Ghosts
(Knopf)
“An astonishingly assured debut… Deftly observed and deeply funny, Ghosts considers where we find, and how we hold onto love with what might well be described as haunting precision.”
–Vogue
Mona Awad, All’s Well
(Simon & Schuster)
“Awad is particularly deft in describing the hellish nature of pain and the ways those living with chronic pain are often misled, dismissed, or derided.”
–Kirkus
Anna Qu, Made In China
(Catapult)
“Poignant … Vividly narrated and psychologically perceptive, Qu’s story uses family trauma to find perspective on immigration and perhaps even America itself.”
–Booklist
Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Songs for the Flames
(Riverhead)
“Like Bolaño, [Vasquez] is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure.”
–TIME
Rebecca Donner, All Frequent Troubles of Our Days
(Little, Brown)
“A superb, sure-footed work of historical detection conceived with a powerful intelligence.”
–The Times (UK)
Phillip Lopate, The Contemporary American Essay
(Anchor)
“There’s something for everyone in this sumptuous collection.”
–Kirkus
Joyce Carol Oates, Breathe
(Ecco)
“Fecund with fear and anguish, and driven by raw, breathless narration, this hallucinatory tale will not disappoint. Oates is on a roll.”
–Publishers Weekly
David Hoon Kim, Paris is a Party, Paris is a Ghost
(FSG)
“Those willing to immerse themselves in its mysterious and forlorn landscapes will be amply rewarded by this startlingly original debut.”
–Financial Times
James Tate Hill, Blind Man’s Bluff
(W. W. Norton)
“This moving account doesn’t disappoint.”
–Publishers Weekly
James Rebanks, Pastoral Song
(Custom House)
“This is a wonderful book. James Rebanks writes with his heart and his heart is in the right place. We should listen to him.”
–The Telegraph (UK)
Chandler Baker, The Husbands
(Flatiron)
“The Husbands also gestures at the workplace but turns the bulk of its attention to the inadequacies of the nuclear family, where women are expected not only to have it all, but to do it all, too. The book reads like a direct descendant of Ira Levin’s 1972 feminist classic, The Stepford Wives.”
–The New York Times Book Review
Bethan Roberts, My Policeman
(Penguin Books)
“Her novel is a humane and evocative portrait of a time when lives were destroyed by intolerance.”
–The Guardian
Megan Abbott, The Turnout
(G. P. Putnam’s Sons)
“The Turnout is the kind of gripping, unnerving page turner we have come to expect from an author who does noir better than almost anyone.”
–BookPage
Julie Kavanagh, The Irish Assassins
(Atlantic Monthly)
“The writing is clear and yet warm, leaving the reader in no doubt as to how much personalities, foibles and mere coincidence affect law, politics and history … This is one of the best researched and most enjoyable historical reads I have come across in quite some time.”
–The Irish Independent (IRE)
Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell
(Graywolf)
“Evocative and polyphonic, surprising but never artificially shocking, Akbar’s poems flit from the divine to the corporeal in the same breath.”
–Publishers Weekly
ed. Halimah Marcus, Horse Girls
(Harper Perennial)
“The essays are tender, critical, and deeply personal, and the universal themes of growth and belonging come through consistently but, refreshingly, never feel repetitive.”
–Publishers Weekly
