Jamaica Kincaid! Eimear McBride! 19 books out in paperback this August.

August, amazingly, approaches, the final month in a summer that has at once felt slow and like it has slipped by with the curious swiftness of a half-remembered dream. Still, the summer is not over, and August is a perfect month to do all the things for the season that you haven’t yet had the time to—and catching up on that ever-more-towering TBR pile, or doing the all-important work of adding even more glorious to-be-reads to it, is a fine thing to do indeed.

To that august August end, I’ve selected nineteen great new books to check out this August, each in an exciting new paperback reprint edition. You’ll find much-praised and buzzed-about novels from Jason Mott, Eimear McBride, Addie E. Citchens, Jessica Francis Kane, and many others; expansive fiction in translation; a compilation of Jamaica Kincaid’s lifetime work that shows her remarkable range; Margaret Grace Myers’ defining history of America’s fraught attempts to teach sex ed against the backdrop of a country’s complicated self-identity; poems by Steven Duong that chronicle ruptures and aftermaths; and much, much more.

While I try to always balance the genres represented in these lists, you’ll see that fiction is particularly heavily represented in what’s being released this August, but I hope you’ll find wonder, joy, contemplation, and calls to action in all of the books below. Stay safe, as always, and let those TBR piles continue to grow!

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Jason Mott, People Like Us
(Dutton)

“Mott follows up his 2021 National Book Award–winning novel Hell of a Book with a surreal and intimate story about two Black writers contending with loss, longing, and gun violence.”
–The Millions

Samanta Schwebelin, Good and Evil and Other Stories
(Vintage)

“Beautifully translated by Megan McDowell, in prose that shimmers with a sort of menacing lyricism, the stories of Good and Evil are powerfully evocative and unsettling. They seem to hover, indeed like fever dreams, between the reassuring familiarities of domestic life and the stark, unpredictable, visionary flights of the unconscious.”
–Joyce Carol Oates

Addie E. Citchens, Dominion
(Picador)

“A stellar Southern drama of secrets and sin….This Faulknerian, God-troubled novel is an earthly scorcher.”
–Publishers Weekly

Jamaica Kincaid, Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974 –
(Picador)

“Putting Myself Together captures [Kincaid’s] questing sensibility through a half-century’s worth of personal essays and cultural criticism that provide a model of sumptuous slow thinking.”
–The New York Times

Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life
(Beacon Press)

“Griest’s rigorous and fascinating research both proves and enacts her book’s thesis: a life devoted to art is not only possible but a ringing answer to the powers that attempt to thwart such lives and work. A deep, moving, radical book that I want to press into the hands of every young artist.”
–Melissa Febos

LaShawn Harris, Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs and the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City
(Beacon Press)

“[An] immersive account….With a kaleidoscopic view of the shooting’s aftermath that draws on interviews, court proceedings, and national and international reactions, Harris paints the killing as a major turning point in American political consciousness, when Black activists and the public began to question police treatment of the disabled and mentally ill. The result is an elegantly written and riveting view of a pivotal but little-remembered political sea change.”
–Publishers Weekly

Steven Duong, At the End of the World There Is a Pond: Poems
(Norton)

“At the End of the World There Is a Pond is a momentous debut….These poems delight, surprise, and dive deeply into tricky relational waters, keeping us attuned to a sparkling aliveness even as we chart the true darkness of despair….Winsome, finely wrought, funny, and profound, At the End of the World There Is a Pond is terrific company for the tumult of all times.”
–Gabrielle Bates

Jessica Francis Kane, Fonseca
(Penguin Books)

“Jessica Francis Kane has done something marvelous—bringing us Penelope Fitzgerald as a character in a novel she meant to write but never wrote—and maybe never could write, for how it was about herself in some extraordinary straits. Hauntingly witty, funny, pitch-perfect, Penelope Fitzgerald comes alive again in Fonseca. I was riveted, start to finish.”
–Alexander Chee

Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face
(Faber & Faber)

“McBride shares a common lineage with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett–not only as Irish writers but also as unrepentant experimenters with no respect for the sanctity of traditional syntax. In her hands, language is not a tidy vessel for information so much as it is a malleable substance.”
–NPR

Xenobe Purvis, The Hounding
(Holt)

“The Hounding is a lush and atmospheric warning of the dangers of individuality for girls indifferent to the gaze of others. Every word in this spare, sharp novel cuts and implicates the small-minded townsfolk who chase rumors like wild dogs chase prey. A virtuosic debut from a brilliantly keen mind and eye. Certainly, Xenobe Purvis shares a bloodline with Shirley Jackson.”
–Diane Cook

Margaret Grace Myers, The Fight for Sex Ed: The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine
(Beacon Press)

“Margaret Myers uses careful research and crystal-clear prose to trace the endless loop of politics and denial that sex education in the United States has been stuck in for generations.”
–Chelsea Conaboy

Paul Andrew Hutton, The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West
(Dutton)

“When Hamlet speaks of ‘the undiscovere’d country,’ he ponders what lies beyond death. For those enterprising would-be conquerors of North America, however, death was not in contemplation…The Undiscovered Country offers an intimate look at those westering generations…From the perpetual frontiersmen Daniel Boone and David Crockett, to inevitable adversaries Red Eagle, Mangas Coloradas, and Sitting Bull, and on to the last of their ‘Wild West’ ilk, Kit Carson and ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, Hutton tells a powerful story, rich with texture, and solidly founded in the sources. Eschewing triumphalism and guilt alike, his narrative recovers…what it was like for both American frontiersmen and Native Americans to experience the settlement of a continent.”
–William C. Davis

Jon Lee, To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban
(Penguin Books)

“More than any American journalist of the war in Afghanistan, Jon Lee Anderson knew where to find the story: in the lives of Afghans navigating between an American occupier and a repressive Taliban. With his characteristic courage, curiosity, humanity, and unflinching eye for official hypocrisy and the revealing detail, Anderson paints a riveting picture of what went wrong over the two decades after 9/11. To Lose a War is an epochal and essential record of what happened in Afghanistan, a timeless warning about imperial overreach, and a poignant tribute to the resilience of Afghans who lived through it all.”
–Ben Rhodes

Kim de l’Horizon, Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues (Trans. Jamie Lee Searle)
(Picador)

“Kim de l’Horizon has managed that rare thing: an honest love letter. At once kaleidoscopic and urgent, Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues is an exquisite inquiry into what it means to be an individual in a body, a family, a society, with all the attendant misery, humor, joy and enduring mystery.”
–Krystelle Bamford

Melissa Pace, The Once and Future Me
(Holt)

“Virginia, 1954: A woman identified as Dorothy Frasier awakens on a bus en route to a psychiatric hospital. But does she belong there?…there are the flashes of ‘memory’ that seem to jerk her back to the future: 2035, to be exact….A cinematic ride….One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets The Hunger Games—and what an offspring!”
–Kirkus Reviews

Emily Hunt Kivel, Dwelling
(Picador)

“Kivel debuts with a rollicking and resonant modern fairy tale of real estate and its discontents…as [she] brings her weird and wonderful cast of characters to vibrant life, she never drops the incisive real-world commentary on the housing crisis and rising inequality. The result is a sui generis delight.”
–Publishers Weekly

Paraic O’Donnell, The Naming of the Birds
(Tin House)

“This Victorian mystery novel is Dickens meets Sherlock Holmes meets La Femme Nikita, and it wears its genre conventions proudly.”
–NPR

Eli Zuzovsky, Mazeltov
(Holt)

“By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Eli Zuzovsky’s brilliantly observed novel offers a kaleidoscopic view of a young queer man’s life, his family and his times, through the lens of his bar mitzvah. Mazeltov is an unforgettable, virtuosic debut.”
–Claire Messud

Jimmy Juliano, 13 Months Haunted
(Dutton)

“Ideal for fans of Stephen King and Stranger Things, Jimmy Juliano’s 13 Months Haunted offers fresh and chilling small-town horrors portrayed through the lens of the Internet boom of the early 2000s, blending computer viruses and the nostalgia of hearing ‘You’ve got mail’ with an intimate haunting by a dark force that is pure evil. The story reminds us that some attachments should never be opened, and some friendships pose a deadly cost. Great scary fun.”
–Craig DiLoui