Danez Smith! Audre Lorde! Kwame Dawes! 27 new books out today.
It’s another Tuesday in August, and I come bearing tidings of new things to come. Below, you’ll find no less than twenty-seven now books to consider in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, with a remarkable range of material. There’s new poetry from Danez Smith, Kwame Dawes, and Kenzie Allen; a new, formally inventive (and thus an homage) biography of Audre Lorde; an offering of macabre musings from Spencer Henry and Madison Reyes, the creators of the Obitchuary podcast; a novel following the life of Black aviatrix Bessie Coleman; highly anticipated fiction from Gina María Balibrera, Gayl Jones, Priscilla Morris, Zoe Whittall, and many others; and more.
Summer is nearing its (official) end, but with good places to be and great things to read while at them, the summer can last a bit longer. Read on, and let those to-be-read piles gloriously grow.
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Gina María Balibrera, The Volcano Daughters
(Pantheon)
“The Volcano Daughters is a work of fierce ambition and blazing emotion…a journey that spans continents and generations….Her invocation of the voices of a group of women whose lives were distorted and cut short by El Salvador’s violent dictator El Gran Pendejo left me breathless—and is one of the most powerful stories of motherhood, sisterhood, and survival I’ve ever read. A colossal achievement.”
–Julie Buntin
Priscilla Morris, Black Butterflies
(Knopf)
“A powerful, gripping portrayal from within the siege of Sarajevo….In Black Butterflies, Priscilla Morris uses beautiful, tightly-calibrated prose and deep empathy to portray the disbelief, reckoning, resilience, and will to keep living of the besieged inhabitants of Sarajevo and the novel’s fierce, unforgettable protagonist, the painter Zora, who survives with art in the midst of unexpected love and unfathomable loss.”
–Aube Rey Lescure
Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky
(Knopf)
“Elif Shafak approaches the world with grace, lyricism, and courage. Confronting societies riven by conflicts over gender, religion, sexuality, nationalism, memory, ideology, and more, Shafak wields the novel’s artistic power to cut through complacency and orthodoxy with ruthlessness and beauty. Her words and works—compelling and provocative—leave us in a space of light, a clearing from where we can see this world anew.”
–Viet Thanh Nguyen
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
(FSG)
“An award-winning poet, writer, feminist and activist in her own right, Gumbs is among the first researchers to delve into Lorde’s manuscript archives. The resulting book highlights the late author’s commitment to interrogating what it means to survive on this planet—and how Lorde’s radical understanding of ecology can guide us today.”
–NPR
Daniel Saldaña París, Planes Flying Over a Monster: Essays (trans. Christina MacSweeney, Philip K. Zimmerman)
(Catapult)
“Daniel Saldaña París writes about cities as labyrinths, with each new path twisting through memory and failure and searching and invention, leading readers to corridors where the intimate and the cosmic intersect. Planes Flying Over a Monster is a tremendous work of art.”
–Laura van den Berg
Rosie Schaap, The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country
(Mariner Books)
“Sharp as a pencil, witty as a friend, and wounding as a lover, Rosie Schaap’s The Slow Road North is a mature and searching exploration of what it means to leave, lose, love, arrive, and heal. It’s also a necessary contribution to the stack of books that render Northern Ireland, site of so much suffering and resistance, with intimacy and nuance.”
–Emma Copley Eisenberg
Danez Smith, Bluff
(Graywolf)
“Smith’s searing fourth collection (after Homie) offers a powerful self-indictment of art and the artist in an age of social and political collapse.”
–Publishers Weekly
Kwame Dawes, Sturge Town: Poems
(Norton)
“Like one of his heroes, Bob Marley, Dawes changes not just the way readers look at the world but the lens through which they see reality. His is a transcendent vision, filled with tenderness, curiosity, and compassion for what has been and what might be.”
–Library Journal
Kenzie Allen, Cloud Missives
(Tin House)
“This incredible debut announces Kenzie Allen as an important voice in Native literature. Through impeccable craft, she explores themes of health and healing, Indigenous genealogy and identity, kinship and love. These poems are a ‘song against the song of our demise.’ May their missives travel far and wide; may their words bloom like sweetgrass.”
–Craig Santos Perez
Alejandro Puyana, Freedom Is a Feast
(Little Brown)
“‘Born storyteller’ gets thrown around too easily, but how else would we believe that this is a debut? Freedom Is a Feast is fearlessly ambitious, dizzyingly complex, gorgeously written, and chock full of magic, sin, loss, and enduring love. A novel like this comes with fantastic precedent—García Márquez, Allende—but seems to have arrived fully formed, all by its dazzling self.”
–Marlon James
Gayl Jones, The Unicorn Woman
(Beacon Press)
“A surprising, welcome gift from one of America’s finest and least predictable writers. This chronicle of a Black GI’s return to the American South after World War II provides Jones with the occasion to kick back and gently unravel the story of Buddy Ray Guy, an erstwhile Army cook and tractor repairman….a warm, savory evocation of the elegiac, the fantastic, and the historic. Even when she dials down the intensity, Jones is capable of quiet astonishment.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Carole Hopson, A Pair of Wings
(Holt)
“Bessie Coleman was a pioneering aviatrix who, in the early part of the twentieth century, was forced to travel to France to learn to fly, as no one in the U.S. would give a Black woman lessons. Her thrilling true story makes for an exciting, inspiring work of fiction in Hopson’s hands. This may be the author’s first novel, but as a professional pilot herself, she takes the tale and soars with it.”
–Leigh Haber
Spencer Henry, Madison Reyes, The Big Hot Book of Death
(Plume Books)
“Henry and Reyes, who share outlandish real-life death notices on their Obitchuary podcast, serve up macabre trivia in this entertaining mélange….this will appeal to readers with a dark sense of humor.”
–Publishers Weekly
Moon Unit Zappa, Earth to Moon: A Memoir
(Dey Street Books)
“Upon reading Earth to Moon, one might wonder how a child left to parent herself to such a degree could grow into such a self-actualized adult. Every family is locked into its own form of dysfunction—but Earth to Moon is written with so much authenticity that you cannot help but feel connected.”
–Rosanna Arquette
Frank Andre Guridy, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play
(Basic Books)
“When is a stadium not just a stadium? How about when it is a staging ground for protest? Or a site to drum up support for war? Or a publicly funded cudgel of gentrification? In Guridy’s new book, he unmasks the power of the stadium and how it is interwoven into our lives whether we are sports fans or not. His concrete and steel protagonist comes to life in ways both exhilarating and terrifying…a masterwork of history, journalism, and cultural analysis.”
–David Zirin
Bridget Collins, The Silence Factory
(William Morrow)
“I loved Bridget Collins’ last two novels so much I was almost nervous to read this one in case it didn’t live up to my feverish expectations. I was wrong: in The Silence Factory she has created another world that exists on the edge of time and magic. Epic in scope and rich at sentence level, this is storytelling at its most immersive.”
–Erin Kelly
Zoe Whittall, Wild Failure: Stories
(Random House)
“How do I describe this short story collection that distracted me from my cooking and almost caused me to burn my dinner? It’s like Zoe Whittall cut these slice-of-life stories with a serrated knife whose blade is sharp enough that we see an expert storyteller in her element and dull enough that the wounds of her characters hurt so good.”
–Catherine Hernandez
Simon Mawer, Tightrope
(Other Press)
“The characters in Simon Mawer’s latest spy thriller, Tightrope, set in the gray, exhausted, murky days of post-World War II England, spend a lot of time in tense encounters that pivot on the issue of who knows what, and who’s telling the truth about it…[Mawer] brings a fine sense of story, an intriguing plot and a lovely way with a sentence….Tightrope is full of satisfying twists, and we can’t help cheering for its tough, resourceful heroine.”
–The New York Times
Kapka Kassabova, Anima: A Wild Pastoral
(Graywolf)
“A fascinating account of pastoralism in the Balkans. In her fourth book set in a region unknown to many readers, Kassabova examines the threats facing one of the few remaining nomadic peoples in modernity: the Karakachans, ‘Greek speakers of mysterious origin’ whose homeland is ‘impossible to know’….At its heart, this is an emotional story about the bonds between humans, animals, and the land. A lush ode.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Ken Liu, Laozi, Laozi’s Dao de Jing: A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time (trans. Ken Liu)
(Scribner)
“This beautifully designed new edition serves as both an accessible new translation of an ancient Chinese classic and a fascinating account of renowned novelist Ken Liu’s transformative experience while wrestling with the classic text. Throughout this translation, Liu takes us through his own struggles to capture the meaning in Laozi’s text in a series of thoughtful and provocative interstitial entries.”
–Patrick Hester
Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough
(FSG)
“A profound portrait of this storied place….Vivid profiles of historical figures….The culmination of many years of passionate inquiry, Frazier’s deep history—grandly detailed, vibrant, and caring—does right by the resilient, ever-morphing Bronx.”
–Booklist
Harriet Constable, The Instrumentalist
(Simon & Schuster)
“A fascinating story of music, ambition, and womanhood in eighteenth-century Venice….In The Instrumentalist, the Venetian Republic is a character in its own right, amid the glory and decadence of its final century.”
–Charmaine Wilkerson
Nnedi Okorafor, She Who Knows
(Daw Books)
“Readers of Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2010) will be familiar with Najeeba, who becomes the powerful mother of the titular protagonist, Onyesonwu. But this prequel begins when she’s just an impulsive girl and she feels called to accompany her father and brothers on their annual journey on the salt road—a trip customarily unavailable to girls….This is the first in a trilogy of novellas….While this book may be short, its impact is anything but small.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Kailee Pedersen, Sacrificial Animals
(St. Martin’s Press)
“The mythic Chinese figure of the nine-tailed fox spirit goes Midwestern Gothic in Pedersen’s unsettling debut. Literary horror that isn’t afraid to show its teeth. Pedersen is sure to win fans.”
–Publishers Weekly
Jane Campbell, Interpretations of Love
(Grove Press)
“Each character slowly comes to feel the force of loss, the way the past ‘tends to leak into the present all the time, ‘ and the deep mystery of love and connection. Campbell probes these complicated ideas in clear, shimmering prose, turning the characters’ engagement with their psyches into something quite intoxicating . . . A heady and heart-filled debut.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Jodi Picoult, By Any Other Means
(Ballantine Books)
“Perennial bestseller Picoult…takes on another hot-button topic sure to ignite controversy and conversation: the question of Shakespearean authorship….[A] timely and affecting tale….Picoult’s many, many fans will pounce on her latest incisive, pot-stirring tale, while the Shakespearean theme will attract even more readers.”
–Booklist
Shelly Jay Shore, Rules for Ghosting
(Random House)
“Rules for Ghosting has everything: a family funeral home and a main character who can see ghosts, an adorable pit bull named Sappho, a mother coming out at seder dinner, a trans love story, a fiery climax that brings everything to a head, humor, heart, and so much more. It’s about finding your place in the world, in your family, in partnership and, finally, within yourself. It was a joy to read, and I can’t wait to see what’s next from Shelly Jay Shore.”
–Celia Laskey
