August

Tashan Mehta, Mad Sisters of Esi
DAW, August 5

The publicity copy calls Mad Sisters of Esi a cross between Piranesi and Calvino and honestly that’s enough for me. Add in a dash of multiversal story-centric adventure and really what more do you need? The book has a ton of hype behind it, as it was originally published by HarperCollins India in 2023 and won a handful of awards at the time—but I’m avoiding learning anything else about it, because it looks like one of those truly joyful adventures best discovered on the page. –DB

Mariah Rigg, Extinction Capital of the World: Stories
Ecco, August 5

I love collections of connected short stories and intergenerational narratives. Extinction Capital of the World promises both, but what really excites me about the collection is its consideration of imperialism and environmental destruction in Hawai’i, and how those conditions intersect with the lives of the people who witness their consequences every day. –Oliver Scialdone, Community Editor

Emily Hunt Kivel, Dwelling
FSG, August 5

I love a fairytale of late-stage capitalism. A world where New York City renters are evicted from their homes en masse doesn’t feel so fantastic to me, but pair a not-so-farfetched dystopia with magic and wonder in a weird little town, and I’m sold. –OS

Elaine Castillo, Moderation
Viking, August 5

I was just starting to wonder how contemporary fiction might metabolize the post-pandemic hellscape our tech overlords are actively coding into being. Thanks to Elaine Castillo (and a few other cool cats on this list), I can queasily say the search is over. This very modern romance-meets-systems-novel kicks off at Fairground, the world’s foremost virtual reality content provider. Our hero, Girlie Delmundo, is a Kool-Aid drinking drone with big ambitions. Epigraphs from Moby Dick and Terminator herald a high-octane industry satire. And I’m a thrilled new fan of Castillo’s bracing, gleefully acerbic voice. –BA

An Yu, Sunbirth
Grove, August 5

Yay new An Yu! As an enjoyer of Ghost Music, An Yu’s previous novel, I’m very excited for this one. Yu works at the intersection of vibey and surreal, which is an intersection that I’m obsessed with. Sunbirth centers on two sisters who live in a small village where the sun is shrinking. One sister runs a traditional medicine pharmacy while the other works for a fancy wellness center. As the sun becomes smaller and smaller, the already struggling village tries to accept its imminent mortality. Then the Beacons appear—people whose heads are replaced by bright, miniature suns. What does this mean for the fate of the town? I love Yu’s atmospheric sensibilities and her quiet, character-driven work. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this one. –MC

Jason Mott, People Like Us
Dutton, August 5

I’m super pumped for this meta, allegedly autobiographical novel following two Black writers working in very different ways. (One hero’s a feted author whose global book tour comes to include supernatural curveballs, the other is struggling to write an elegy in the wake of a school shooting.) Picking up in a universe near the one represented in Mott’s last book, the award-winning Hell of A Book, People Like Us involves the same tonal gymnastics. Mott’s writing is electric. Sentences zing with the energy of darts. But all that riz ultimately serves to convey a lacerating critique of American gun violence. File this one under “genre-bending tour-de-force.” –BA

Eliana Alves Cruz, tr. Benjamin Brooks, Solitaria
Astra House, August 5

Solitaria is a novel about class, liberation, and colonial legacies from a celebrated Afro-Brazilian author. Eunice works as a live-in maid in a penthouse apartment in Brazil along with her daughter, Mabel. Eunice has perfected the art of being invisible, but when tragedy strikes, she must decide whether she can continue to ignore the history of colonial violence that she’s spent so long avoiding. I’m always interested in books that offer a new perspective on complex issues, and Solitaria does just that. –MC

Jessica Gross, Open Wide
Abrams, August 5

For a while, I thought that the promised derangement in Open Wide was going to be the regular kind: a woman who becomes much too obsessed with the man she’s dating, to the point where she ruins everything. (Is that what happens? It’s debatable.) But without giving anything away, because I am glad that I was not prepared for what actually happens: the promised derangement is much more deranged than that. It’s funny and demented and a little stupid, which I mean as a compliment, and when it starts, it doesn’t stop. Gross is excellent at pushing things to their logical conclusion, and then pushing them a little further than that, which is honestly all I want in my literature. –ET, as recommended in our summer reading list

Xenobe Purvis, The Hounding
Henry Holt, August 5

You had me at “The Crucible meets The Virgin Suicides.” Add, perhaps, “meets Nightbitch,” considering the main complaint that the residents of Little Nettlebed have about the Mansfield sisters is that they are maybe, probably, definitely turning into dogs. I’m game. –ET, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Jamaica Kincaid, Putting Myself Together: Writing 1973—
FSG, August 5

Jamaica Kincaid has been good company this year. I reread Annie John and marveled at how much raw truth she was able to pack into that slim little book. In this compendium collection, which includes pieces Kincaid published in The New Yorker and The Village Voice over her long career, completist fans fond of insight can enjoy some of her more penetrating essays. –BA, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Chloé Caldwell, Trying: A Memoir
Graywolf, August 5

Chloé Caldwell’s cult classic novel Women was one of the best books I read last year, so I’m really looking forward to her new memoir. Trying is a memoir about family, marriage, queerness, and starting over. It’s about trying to have a child, but it’s also about trying to find fulfillment and live a life. This book is sure to be filled with Caldwell’s distinct sense of humor and her precise, honest observations about the world. –MC, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Michael Thomas, The Broken King: A Memoir
Grove, August 5

Almost 20 years later, the author of the International Dublin Literary Award-winning debut novel Man Gone Down has returned, this time with a memoir, his first work of nonfiction. In The Broken King, Thomas writes about his literary ambitions and success, and also about his absent father, his estranged brother, his two sons. He writes about being a Black man in America, about being a parent, about love and sadness. “There’s a bridge of beautiful American prose—lyrical, powerful, fearlessly candid—running straight from James Baldwin to Thomas, who is obviously Baldwin’s worthy heir,” writes Francisco Goldman. Like him, he adds, “Thomas writes about the struggle to be a man, and, simply and most complexly, on how to live.” –ET

Aisha Muharrar, Loved One
Viking, August 12

Even if you don’t know Aisha Muharrar’s name, you probably know her work. A crown jewel in the comedy world cabinet, she’s written for belly-laugh factories like Hacks, The Good Place, and Parks & Rec. Her debut novel, Loved One, feels of a tonal piece with all those shows—sly, irreverent, and emotionally sophisticated. Following two women who forge an odd connection after the death of their mutual ex, the book has been described as a where-did-I-go-wrong style excavation. If you also love that structure—and nuanced depictions of heartbreak—let’s put a book club on the books. –BA

Phoebe Greenwood, Vulture
Europa Editions, August 12

Promo copy is describing this one as a modern Catch-22 “on speed.” And the way I leaned in!? Our absurd and violent times feel highly ripe for skewering, and the American war and news industries seem to be doing just about as good a job as they did in the 70s. In other words, I’m so ready for this debut, from former conflict zone journalist Phoebe Greenwood. Set on a beach in Gaza in 2012, this dark and tragic satire examines the media’s complicity in :gestures at world: –BA

Ana Paula Maia, tr. Padma Viswanathan, On Earth As It Is Beneath
Charco Press, August 12

Maia’s first book translated into English, Of Cattle and Men, won the UK’s Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Cercador Prize and I’ve been looking forward to another translation ever since. This one, about a penal colony’s final days and the “most dangerous game” style attitude of the warden, looks similarly brutal and unforgettable. If you aren’t already a prison abolitionist, you will be after reading this. –DB

Catherine Dang, What Hunger
Simon & Schuster, August 12

A novel about food and identity and teenage girlhood, what a treat! What Hunger is about Ronny, a teenage girl whose primary tie to her Vietnamese heritage is through food. Her parents don’t like to talk about their past or the war, but they cook beautifully elaborate meals and teach their children that meat is a symbol of survival. When tragedy strikes, Ronny is suddenly overwhelmed by a craving for raw meat. But where will this craving lead? –MC

Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York
Random House, August 12

Had me at “expansive look at New York in the 80s.” This meaty history spans the AIDS crisis, the Central Park Five tragedies, and the Wall Street crash of 1987. Mahler, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, takes on the end of a decadent era with an eye to analyzing the conditions that laid the groundwork for 45’s rise. This one looks gritty and juicy and very ambitious. High on my TBR stack. –BA

Joanna Pocock, Greyhound: A Memoir
Soft Skull, August 12

It’s hard to beat the propulsive elegance of a road trip narrative, whatever your literary project might be—and for Joanna Pocock that project is the combining of personal reflection, literary criticism, and ecological reckoning (as viewed from the window of a bus). Almost 20 years after journeying from Detroit to LA on a Greyhound, in the aftermath of a miscarriage, Pocock recreates her trip and is joined (in spirit) by fellow writerly road trippers like Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz. With clear eyes Pocock observes and reports from America’s interstitial spaces, its abandoned detours and dark medians, revealing a country of wild and violent edges that somehow still suffers beauty in its midst.  –JD

Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys, Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography
FSG, August 12

EM Forster once described his friend, the poet CP Cavafy, as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” When Cavafy died in 1933, at the age of 70, he left behind 154 poems and limited literary renown; only with the posthumous publication, in 1935, of his complete works in Greek, did that begin to change. Cavafy, who grew up in Alexandria, would come to be credited as the father of modern Greek poetry and, in translation, as a vital and important modernist poet. This new biography sheds light on Cavafy’s troubled, brilliant, migratory life, and confirms the timeless beauty of much of his work. –JD

Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory
Little, Brown, August 12

At last, a book that is actually just as fun as it sounds. This a novel in the form of an MFA thesis, written to expose a revolving door of love affairs of the professors who are reading it, not to mention the graduate student who wrote it. I know. I know! A little bit postmodern, a little bit sexy, and quite funny indeed, you will feel both smarter and more indulgent than usual while you’re reading it (especially if you’ve ever been in any kind of writing program, or had any kind of insane crush), and really, isn’t that the best way to feel, in the summer or otherwise? –ET, as recommended in our summer reading list

Josephine Rowe, Little World
Transit Books, August 12

Josephine Rowe is a remarkable writer, able to capture entire lives in a few paragraphs, creating characters so immediately recognizable, so deeply knowable, that you feel like they’re surely going on with their daily rituals, their heartbreaks and revelations, even after you’ve closed the book. Little World is perhaps her most structurally ambitious work to date, as it follows the unlikely remains of a South American child saint across thousands of miles and many generations, introducing us to all the beautiful, imperfect lives that cross her path, in what is billed as “a haunting reflection on violence and the interdependency of all things.” A must-read.  –JD, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Jessica Francis Kane, Fonseca
Penguin Press, August 12

Kane’s latest novel is about a real episode in the life of the writer Penelope Fitzgerald, who left her husband and youngest child at home and traveled, pregnant, with her six-year-old in tow, to northern Mexico to try to secure an inheritance. But as with all things concerning silver mines, it’s not that simple. As a fan of both Kane and Fitzgerald, I’m looking forward to this one. –ET, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Elaine Hsieh Chou, Where Are You Really From: Stories
Penguin Press, August 19

In Chou’s debut novel Disorientation (you can read an excerpt here), PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperate to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou, fueled by bad food and worse drugs. It’s a satire of academia, race, and art. Her new short story collection (which includes a novella!) confronts many of the same themes via grotesques—mail order brides, au pairs, ugly ducklings, sex bots, dolls. It’s a collection that highlights the slipperiness of truth in storytelling with a touch of surrealism. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Marissa Higgins, Sweetener
Catapult, August 19

There’s a very near future where I’m probably bookclubbing this one with my partner and our friends. I feel very seen by stories about messy lesbians, to the point where I think most stories would be better if they were about messy lesbians. Even better when they balance the absurdity of being alive with the nuances of partnership and queer parenthood. –OS

Kate Riley, Ruth
Riverhead, August 19

Ruth describes her life in an isolated community of “Christian communism”—there is no property, no television, and no tolerance for questions; the Brotherhood of elders makes all the decisions. Her life is recounted in glimpses of her childhood, marriage, and motherhood. Ruth tries to understand her own life. Is she happy? Very much looking forward to this debut. –EF

Natalie Bakopoulos, Archipelago
Tin House, August 19

An unnamed narrator on her way to a translation residency on the Dalmatian Coast has an unsettling run-in with a man on the ferry. While at the residency, the narrator rekindles a relationship with a man from her past, and impulsively sets out on a roadtrip back to Greece. A haunting debut with echoes of The Odyssey, Archipelago strikes a beautiful balance between meditation and mystery. –JG

Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story
FSG, August 19

This is the first major biography of James Baldwin in thirty years, and at 720 pages, it is major—but Baldwin’s life and legacy merits the space. Baldwin scholar Boggs delves into the archives and adds original research and interviews to paint a picture of the great novelist, essayist, and political thinker’s complex artistic and emotional landscape, with special focus on the personal relationships through which his work was refracted. The result is a book, Imani Perry writes, that “brings us the beautiful yet tattered heart of not only Baldwin the intellectual and artist, but Baldwin the vulnerable, yearning, flesh-and-blood person.” I’ll be spending some time with this one. –ET

Susana M. Morris, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler
Amistad, August 19

I spent a summer in LA years ago, and one of the highlights was getting to see selections at the LAPL and Huntington Library from Octavia Butler’s archives. It’s clear from even her earliest writing, in diaries, notes, and the colorful inspiration she wrote to herself, that Butler was deeply engaged with her contemporary world, and that her speculative imagination was rooted in the conditions she observed on the western shore of a teetering empire. Butler’s science fiction bored deeper into the cruelties and contradictions of America, and were always clear-eyed about our evils, our violent habits, and the small embers of hope in our ingenuity and resilience. Morris’s new biography tells Butler’s story within America’s story, and examines how the social, political, and historical forces shaped her life and her work. I’m very excited for this one. –JF

Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun
Norton, August 19

Bill McKibben needs no introduction as the environmentalist voice of our lifetimes: he’s a grounded, solid, thoughtful man who takes our world seriously, as seriously as we all should be taking it. He manages to project both hope and devastation, both warning and optimism. The book mainly orients around the sun and its grand capacity to give the world the energy it needs, if only the fossil fuel industry would let it. Here Comes the Sun promises to interrogate and analyze the ways our world can move forward in creative and logical ways. –JH

Addie Citchens, Dominion
FSG, August 19 

I’ve been waiting for this novel ever since stumbling upon this perfect New Yorker story last winter. And Dominion did not disappoint. This stellar, utterly assured debut about the larger-than-life father and son about whom all congregants of the Seven Seals M.B. Church orbit simply crackles on the sentence level. We’re held in the minds of Priscilla, “First Lady” to the Reverend Sabre Winfrey, and Diamond Bailey, adoring girlfriend of the preacher’s golden son. These left of center women are charming, witty, sometimes heartbreaking chroniclers of the men who govern their lives. But the novel is as much a drama as it is a character study. Citchens is interested in the cult of patriarchy, and the many sins thoughtless worship enables.

Kiese Laymon has praised Citchens for capturing a “breathing” Mississippi with gumption. I’m another happy convert on the strength of this bright new voice. –BA, as recommended in our summer reading list

Tom Comitta, Patchwork
Coffee House Press, August 19

Tom Comitta, author of the, well, patchworky opus The Nature Book, is back with a new endeavor: a story about stories, made up of stories. And if this sounds simple and self-explanatory… read what I just said again. Committa has written a book that combines every writer and every book, but by isolating and exploring the elements that stories fundamentally share with one another. –OR, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Mark Doten, Whites: Stories
Graywolf, August 19

The first story collection from one of our great contemporary satirical novelists—I’m almost afraid to see what they’re going to do with the short form, but I’m sure it will be lacerating—all the hyper-contemporary tales here are narrated by various white people who “are united by a ferocious belief in themselves, certain that everything they’ve done can be justified, if you’ll just hear them out”—and brilliant. –ET, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster
Tor Books, August 19

All the Birds in the Sky is one of the towering instant-classics of 21st Century SFF and I’m so excited for Anders to return to adult fiction (after a terrific YA space opera trilogy). This one, about a witch who teaches her mother magic (and uncovers some dark secrets in the process), should be a total delight for the late summer, one-more-book-before-back-to-school days. –DB, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Melissa Pace, The Once and Future Me
Henry Holt, August 19

This book will blow your mind!!!! It kind of felt like a Marvel movie, but like, one that’s actually good! Pace’s amnesiac heroine, locked up in a mental institution and subjected to strange experimental procedures, must escape her padded prison and find out what exactly she’s forgotten, and what role her husband has played in all this, well, madness. I cannot tell you more without spoilers, but even as someone who reads 150+ books a year, I was genuinely surprised. –MO, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
HarperCollins, August 26

I was at a bar recently talking with a friend about how excited we both were for this book. Granted I am usually talking about books, but still! R.F. Kuang is one of the best fantasy authors working right now and I’m truly so stoked about this book. Katabasis is about a graduate student at the Cambridge school of Magick who has to team up with her rival to journey into Hell and save the soul of her favorite professor. I don’t know what more I can say. If that description doesn’t immediately launch this book to the top of your TBR, we could never be friends. –MC

Helen Oyeyemi, A New New Me
Riverhead, August 26

Helen Oyeyemi occupies a similar space as Wes Anderson in my creative consciousness: they’re making their own shit, and whether or not any given instance works, I’m committed to experiencing each and every iteration. Oyeyemi’s latest folktale-gone-weird is about a woman with a different personality that manifests every day of the week, and what happens when one of those personalities goes rogue and kidnaps a man. It’s bringing to mind Shirley Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest, except weirder. –DB

Leigh Stein, If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You
Ballantine, August 26

Leigh Stein cemented herself as a satirist of Our Present Moment with the very funny Self Care (and attendant social media posts, which still make me laugh); in her latest, a Gothic novel about social media, a woman hired—after being dumped on Reddit—to promote a hype house that is also the scene of a mysterious disappearance. Turns out nothing is scarier than the influence machine. –ET

Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face
Faber US, August 26

For those bored of traditional grammar and seeking sonic sensation, prizewinning experimental novelist Eimear McBride can always be counted on for a good time. (The Irish novelist’s fourth novel, which revisits characters from 2016’s The Lesser Bohemians, comes to us as one of the first offerings from legendary UK indie publisher Faber & Faber’s new US division.) Lovers in London, but make it daringly modernist and inventive and odd. –ET

Miriam Toews, A Truce That is Not Peace
Bloomsbury, August 26

Miriam Toews is one of those IYKYK writers. If you’ve read the dazzling and heartbreaking All My Puny Sorrows, there’s a 90% chance you’ve already signed your name in blood to the Toews hive for life. (This is just statistical math.) Her latest is a rangy memoir, framed as a response to the question, “Why do you write?” And if this excerpt is to be believed, we can expect to find an answer in the affect. Opening pages show Toews’ characteristic wit and guile squaring off against extraordinary pain. (CW: suicide, depression, death.) –BA