Ann Beattie! Mysterious Korean SF! Colin Channer! 26 books out in paperback this July.
July is here! And, as ever, that means (amongst other things) that there are heaps of new books to look forward to. Today, we’re focusing on books newly being released in paperback this month. And there are many, many to be excited about, especially if you missed any of them the first time around. Below, I’ve selected twenty-six to consider, including novels, story collections, essays, memoirs, critiques, and poetry collections.
You’ll find many an exciting book, including the enigmatic author Djuna’s Counterweight; a new collection from veteran story writer, Ann Beattie; poetry from the Jamaican writer Colin Channer; powerful and personal reflections on artists, including Winslow Homer and a number of painters from the Netherlands; and many, many other books from acclaimed writers, including John Milas, Ruth Madievsky, Andrew Lipstein, Rachel Louise Snyder, Hila Blum, and more.
Read deeply this July, Dear Readers. After all, you’ve got many a marvelous thing to choose from. It’ll be worth it.
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John Milas, The Militia House
(Holt)
“This is a beautiful horror story told masterfully and elegantly. It is a brilliant, different kind of war novel, one that reveals the insidious ways the violences of war can tear people apart from the inside out.”
–Roxane Gay
Andrew Lipstein, The Vegan
(Picador)
“Andrew Lipstein follow[s] up his first novel, Last Resort, about the publishing world, with The Vegan, which explores more universal themes….You root for its thinky, troubled hero, even while you enjoy watching him sweat….Not since Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals has a Brooklyn writer made so plain a case for greater sensitivity to the natural world. And The Vegan, a pig in a blanket of irony, subversion and humor, is much easier to swallow.”
–The New York Times
Djuna, Counterweight
(Vintage)
“Read[s] like classic dystopian fiction….The first novel to be translated to English from South Korean author Djuna (whose identity remains a mystery), this quick-moving puzzle of an SF story is intriguing and fascinating as it imagines a future where humanity is intertwined with AI.”
–Library Journal
Rachel Louise Snyder, Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir
(Bloomsbury)
“In No Visible Bruises, Snyder probed the pathology and sociology of intimate partner violence….Women We Buried, Women We Burned, an engrossing memoir of her own troubled, motherless early life, helps explain both her attraction to that dark subject and her appreciation of its complexity. [Snyder’s] difficult past, with all its emotional complexities, becomes an asset. It renders her unafraid to explore the grittier aspects of human nature…moving.”
–The Boston Globe
John McPhee, Tabula Rasa: Volume 1
(Picador)
“McPhee is uncommonly perceptive about his own orientations and process….Tabula Rasa both demystifies what it means to write about the world and deepens one’s pleasure as to the many mysteries inherent to writing.”
–Chicago Tribune
Jenn Shapland, Thin Skin: Essays
(Knopf)
“It is rarely a compliment to be called ‘thin-skinned, ‘ but essayist Jenn Shapland wears it like a badge of honor…[She] was diagnosed with extreme dermatologic sensitivity—and writes of her sensitivities across five sweeping essays…Thin Skin could have been Shapland’s argument for why we should protect our sensitive epidermises from the harshness of the world. Instead, she encourages us to break down our emotional, mental, and physical barriers and really explore what life’s got to offer, even if it may hurt a little.”
–Time
Colin Channer, Console: Poems
(FSG)
“Channer (Providential) blends haunting lyricism, photography, and Jamaican patois into a potent combination that captures the geography of memory from the Caribbean to Senegal to New England….Sensory details startle with their physicality and immediacy….These intricate poems render the depths of memory in refreshingly original language.”
–Publishers Weekly
Tomás Q. Morín, Machete: Poems
(Knopf)
“[Morín’s] writing cuts to the core with electrifying force….A promising and powerful new voice in American poetry, the Texas native arrives with a revealing anthology about suffering, self-identity and the trivial occasions that tie one’s existence together.”
–The Free Lance-Star
Hila Blum, How to Love Your Daughter (trans. Daniella Zamir)
(Riverhead)
“This mesmerizing, quietly harrowing novel begins with a mother’s complete estrangement from her adult daughter and works backward to reveal the ways that maternal love can strangle when it was only trying to cradle, can recklessly misdirect when it wanted to protect. Excellent and unforgettable.”
–Ann Packer
Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral and Other Stories
(Vintage)
“A consummate storyteller, equally at home writing novels and short stories, Tessa Hadley possesses a brilliance that is hard to overstate. It’s a pleasure to welcome After the Funeral…which is exactly as one hoped it would be: impeccably literary, emotionally satisfying, yet unexpectedly unsettling….Harkening to a range of contemporaries (Henry James, Muriel Spark, and Elizabeth Bowen as well as Zadie Smith and Alice Munro), Hadley always delivers fiction that cuts to the quick.”
–Boston Globe
Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy
(Catapult)
“Madievsky’s debut has everything I want from a novel: a toxic sister relationship, countless nights at a trashy LA nightclub called Salvation, and a dreamy sapphic romance….This novel is hypnotic; I inhaled it.”
–Nylon
Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
(Back Bay Books)
“[S]tellar reporting, artful storytelling….In his skillful hands, the climbing temperature is revealed as an invisible, planetary animator that is already pushing landscapes, bodies, and social systems to their limits—and, unless we change course, it will take humanity to an oven-like climate that will feel more like a war than a home. This searing plea for a better, fairer and cooler future should be read by anyone with skin in the game—which is every single one of us.”
–Naomi Klein
Donovan X. Ramsey, When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era
(Random House)
“A compassionate and urgent story that centers the victims of this superdrug, When Crack Was King is an illuminating look at the devastating, racialized impacts of the U.S. criminal justice system—and a warning for us to do better as more drug epidemics rear their ugly heads.”
–Time
Jacqueline Rose, The Plague: Living Death in Our Times
(Picador)
“Rose’s sophisticated analysis brings an idiosyncratic perspective to the Covid era. It’s a profound take on creating a more just world in the wake of the pandemic.”
–Publishers Weekly
Ann Beattie, Onlookers: Stories
(Scribner)
“Her best in more than two decades… Beattie is a dry yet earthy writer, in touch with moods and manners, with an eye for passing comedy…she takes notes on her species, as if she were a naturalist observing robins. She pries at the mystery of life.”
–The New York Times
Jamel Brinkley, Witness: Stories
(Picador)
“Brinkley tackles several themes in the book, including community, responsibility and grief, and he does so beautifully, with assured prose and artful dialogue that rings true, sometimes painfully so. This is a brilliant collection that offers hope, but not at the expense of realism.”
–NPR
Hannah Michell, Excavations
(Random House)
“Excavations is not only set in Seoul, but imbued with the city’s history and spirit….Though at its center Excavations is a mystery novel, it weaves together large-scale allegories of capitalism and economic ambition with the smaller-scale drama of a single family in crisis, embedding layers of meaning into a page-turner.”
–KQED
Laura Cumming, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
(Scribner)
“If you haven’t yet read Thunderclap by Laura Cumming—a brilliant exploration of Carl Fabritius, Vermeer and survival and loss—rush out and buy it. By far the best book on art of the Netherlands that I’ve read.”
–Edmund de Waal
William R. Cross, Winslow Homer: American Passage
(Picador)
“[William] Cross reveals how Homer’s radiant and dramatic paintings are also shaped by profound questions about humankind’s place in the glory of nature….With plentiful color reproductions, Cross’s meticulous, vivid, and revelatory biography transforms our appreciation for this quietly steadfast and subtly trailblazing artist.”
–Booklist
Mariana Alessandri, Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods
(Princeton University Press)
“A compelling, philosophically sound case for finding ‘dignity’ and strength in the discomforting emotions that are a natural part of the human condition….Through insightful observations of temperaments at the dark end of the emotional spectrum, Night Vision reminds readers that our humanity is only truly visible in the dark and that the darkness is where we emotionally grow.”
–Shelf Awareness
Jamila Ahmed, Every Rising Sun
(Holt)
“Jamila Ahmed’s Every Rising Sun is a beautifully imagined and fiercely feminist retelling of a cherished classic—and an audacious new invention all her own. You won’t want to miss Ahmed’s gorgeous writing, this rich and vibrant world, and of course, Shaherazade, a timeless heroine who speaks with an urgency it’s impossible to deny. I turned the last page, grateful to be reminded of how during humanity’s darkest nights, stories are what keep us alive.”
–V. V. Ganeshananthan
Elizabeth L. Silver, The Majority
(Penguin)
“Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s] legend lives on, most recently in Elizabeth Silver’s new novel The Majority. Its RBG-esque protagnist, Sylvia Olin Bernstein, eighty-three, considers her life as she looks back to her decades on the highest court…stealthily devastating…[an] important novel.”
–The Los Angeles Times
Anita Gail Jones, The Peach Seed
(Holt)
“The sweeping story of a Black family in the South focuses on resilience and love…Jones is always insightful about family dynamics. And it’s a pleasure to see older people as main characters in a novel, depicted fully and without condescension. Engaging characters keep a complex multigenerational plot moving to embody decades of Black history.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: An Indigenous Memoir of Family Myth and Identity
(Norton)
“In this powerful debut, Leah Myers reveals with unvarnished honesty something that so often remains unspoken: what it feels like to teeter on the edge of identity, to face down the specter of erasure and a dwindling sense of self. By reconstructing family history and myth, she uncovers old foundations and builds a new home atop them, throwing its doors open, miraculously, to all of us.”
–Francisco Cantú
Ron Rash, The Caretaker
(Vintage)
“Master storyteller Rash (In the Valley, 2020) returns with a tale of friendship, love, and betrayal set in his beloved Appalachia…In lyrical, understated prose, Rash explores themes of devotion, deception, and family ties in this unforgettable story that will appeal to fans of Alice Munro and William Kent Krueger.”
–Booklist
Ali Bryan, The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships
(Holt)
“Ali Bryan is a comedic genius—the kind of writer who makes you laugh until your guts hurt, and then turns around and sucker punches you with a truth so powerful it breaks your heart. The Crow Valley Karaoke Championships is a wise, hilarious, big-hearted novel that made me want to move to Crow Valley, practice up on my singing, and hang out with this motley crew of characters in all their quirky, messy, charming, relatable glory.”
–Amy Jones
