JULY AND BEYOND

Benedict Nguyễn, Hot Girls With Balls
Catapult, July 1

I’m always a sucker for a good gonzo satire and this one sounds truly delightful: two trans volleyball players, off-court romance and on-court rivalry, interrogations of celebrity and sports and gender… It looks funny as hell and willing to burn it all down, which we frankly need more of in our literature.  –DB

 

Maris Kreizman, I Want to Burn This Place Down: Essays
Ecco, July 1

Full disclosure: Maris Kreizman is a columnist at this website and I love working with her. She is principled, willing to speak truth to power, and uses her years of experience in the publishing industry to highlight its absurdities and hypocrisies while also celebrating the work of so many of its workers. AND she has a sense of humor. (NB: these things don’t always go together). So am I thrilled that she has a full-blown essay collection coming out that will, among other things, demonstrate to readers “that it’s never too late to become radicalized.” A-fucking-men.  –JD

 

Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea
Riverhead, July 8

If the Titan explosion and the Suez Canal obstruction by the Ever Given have taught us anything, it’s that people love seafaring drama. A Marriage at Sea is the true story of a married couple who leave everything behind to sail around the world and succeed for nearly a year before their boat sinks. The couple is then stranded together on a rubber raft. Rescue is improbable. This goes on for months. Months! Nautical drama, martial tensions—have you clicked away to pre-order the book already?  –CK

 

Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith
Random House, July 8

Shteyngart’s new novel, his first since 2021’s Our Country Friends, is the story of a very volatile family in a very volatile America, filtered through the eyes of a child, who just wants to be loved (the most Shteyngartian of motivations, and the most human). “In its swirls of emotion, its humor, its pathos, and the unsparing humanity of its vision, Vera, or Faith is like some fabulous, hitherto-unknown creature that’s been let out of its bottle and set free,” remarks Michael Cunningham. Sounds about right.  –ET

 

Hannah Pittard, If You Love It, Let It Kill You
Henry Holt, July 15

Did you read the dishy NY Mag story about those four writers whose relationships all exploded? Of course you did. You’ve maybe even read Hannah Pittard’s viral essay in the Sewanee Review, the one that turned into her memoir-of-sorts, We Are Too Many. Now, she turns a fictional eye towards the aftermath of all of that, following a Hana P in Lexington KY going through a mid-life crisis after finding out her ex is publishing a novel with a none-too-flattering version of her in it. I can’t wait.  –DB

 

Ben Brooks, The Greatest Possible Good
Avid Reader Press, July 15

You’ll not forget the Candlewicks once you meet them! This splendid, wry satire is about a wealthy family, self-important and confident in their morality, whose blithe and bumptious existences are thrown into disarray when their father clandestinely decides to give all their money to charity, and so (in their opinions) completely destroys their lives. Droll and all-too-real.  –OR

 

Katie Yee, Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
Summit Books, July 22

Katie Yee is a brilliant young writer whose debut novel, despite not being out for another seven months, is already generating a ton of buzz. I was fortunate enough to be a colleague of Katie’s once upon a time and so, when I heard that she had written a complex, razor-sharp, romantic tragicomedy (about a woman who discovers her husband is having an affair around the same time she discovers that she has cancer), “in the style of Jenny Offill and the tradition of Nora Ephron,” I was not one bit surprised.  –DS

 

Tehila Hakimi, Hunting in America
Viking, July 22

Tehila Hakimi delivers a concise, haunting novel about a woman who relocates from Israel to America for her corporate job, and amidst the mundanity and drudgery of her life, takes up an obsession with hunting. Addicted to the rush of her newfound hobby, lines begin to blur: what it means to be predator and what it means to be prey becomes nebulous and hazy, her day to day life loses its importance, and all the while her fixations narrow, focus, and take aim. Slim, serious, and searching, Hunting in America revolves around some major topics right now: the experience of our inter-country relations, gun usage in our country, and the vacuous void at the center of one’s quest for power and meaning in America.  –JH

 

Daniel Saldaña París, tr. Christina MacSweeney, The Dance and the Fire
Catapult, July 29

In Saldaña Paris’s ambitious new novel, three friends return to Cuernavaca, Mexico, a city on fire—wild fires and, soon enough, a kind of hysterical dancing compulsion overcoming the population. –DM

 

Stephanie Wambugu, Lonely Crowds
Little, Brown, July 29

This novel follows two friends, Ruth and Maria, over the course of a twisty, decades-long relationship. The pair of outsiders initially bond over being the rare scholarship students at their chilly New England Catholic school. When they both wind up pursuing art dreams in New York, competition tests their bond.

This much-hyped debut from a young writer-to-watch enters one of my favorite canons (buds-in-the-city-books) and is set in one of my favorite milieus (a 90s New York art world). Call me seated.  –BA

 

Ed Park, An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories
Random House, July 29

The long wait between Personal Days and Same Bed, Different Dreams is a thing of the past—here comes another Ed Park joint, this time a story collection! Park was a Pulitzer finalist for Same Bed and he brings that same genre-bending, polyphonic style to this collection of stories about modern life and all its perfectly mundane strangeness.  –DB

 

Rax King, Sloppy: Or: Doing It All Wrong
Vintage, July 29

King is an excellent essayist and critic, and her work is never boring or stale: anyone who’s read her at MEL, Welcome To Hell World, or in her previous collection Tacky knows how funny and sharp her writing is. Her new collection of personal essays takes on bad behavior by looking inward, with examinations of sobriety, waiting tables, Neopets forums, and shoplifting from Brandy Melville. King has a blogger’s punch and an essayist’s analysis—her dexterous writing is intelligent, observant, and very, very funny.  –JF

 

Mattie Lubchansky, Simplicity
Pantheon, July 29

Where Mattie Lubchansky’s remarkable debut graphic novel Boy’s Weekend followed its trans protagonist’s attempt to navigate a bachelor party in a speculative near-future, Simplicity finds us a bit further into a dystopian-ish setting. Lucius Pasternak, a municipal employee of the New York City Administrative and Security Territory, is dispatched to study the people of Simplicity, an upstate utopian commune settled over a century ago, back in the 1970s.

While living among the residents of Simplicity, the uptight Pasternak struggles to adapt to the commune’s highly liberated attitudes towards sex and nudity; to further complicate matters, someone—or something—is hunting the people of Simplicity. Lubchansky’s sophomore graphic novel explores the limits of utopian separatism, the downsides to trying to work against an oppressive system from the inside, and how communities can defend themselves and win.  –CK

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
HarperCollins, August 26

Between Babel and Yellowface, I’m hard-pressed to find a reader who doesn’t know Kuang but I think that rare breed will truly go extinct with the sure-to-be-immense release of her latest book this summer. Dark academia, rival academics, a descent into the underworld… yeah, I’m already impatiently waiting to read it.  –DB

 

Jordan Castro, Muscle Man
Catapult,  September 16

The false dichotomy between gym rat and bookworm has stood for far too long. Castro’s sophomore novel, which follows a day in the life of a weightlifting-obsessed English professor “as paranoia slowly transforms his mundane environment into something more foreboding” promises to finally to reveal the truth: that you can be a jock and a nerd at the same time and, if you work hard and persevere, you, too can override the positive mental health effects of working out through the sheer force of neuroticism.  –CK

 

Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness
Mariner, September 16

I’m a huge admirer of Angela Flournoy’s writing and was thrilled to read that a new novel (the follow up to her 2015 debut, The Turner House, which was a deserved finalist for the National Book Award) was on the horizon. The Wilderness—one half of a reported two-book, seven-figure deal—follows four Black women over the course of two decades of friendship, examining “how gender expectations, race, class and the shifting dynamics of city life” make their mark on them.  –DS

 

Susan Orlean, Joy Ride
Avid Reader Press, September 23

Relatively little is known about this title as of today, but the fact that Susan Orleans, author of some of the most insightful nonfiction in contemporary letters, has written a memoir publishing later this year has me eagerly awaiting all news and ready to begin reading as soon as possible.  –DM

 

Adam Morgan, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls
Atria/One Signal Publishers, September 30

A book covering the historical precedent for detractors labeling any publication of sexual or queer-related content “obscene” is going to be extraordinarily relevant in 2025, and that’s probably the more sensible reason to be excited for A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls. What can’t be overstated, however, is the implication that Ulysses is a form of forbidden chick lit. Looking forward to this book forever changing the reputation of Ulysses to that effect, and elevating the story of one of its earliest proponents.  –CK

 

Mona Awad, We Love You Bunny
S&S/Marysue Rucci September

Lovers of Mona Awad’s cult 2019 novel Bunny rejoice—a follow-up is coming this fall. Described as both “a prequel and a sequel,” and also an “unabashedly wild and totally complete standalone novel,” it is sure to cast some much-needed magic for old and new fans alike.  –ET

 

Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me
Scribner, September

The first memoir from the Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things (and fearless, firebrand activist) will focus on Roy’s complex relationship with her late mother, who died in 2022. “I have been writing this book all my life,” Roy said of the upcoming memoir. “Perhaps a mother like mine deserved a writer like me as a daughter. Equally, perhaps a writer like me deserved a mother like her. Even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.”  –DS

 

Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
Ecco, October 21

I can’t wait to dive into Julia Ioffe’s Motherland, which promises to capture the complexity and intersectionality of Russian women’s experiences in a novel and engaging way.  –MO

 

Jen Percy, Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation
Doubleday, November

Jen Percy’s reporting about war, trauma, addiction, and extremism is some of the best around. Her 2016 piece about the loved ones of those lost in Japan’s tsunami who continue to search for them at sea is one of the most profoundly moving pieces of writing about grief I’ve ever encountered. I’m anxiously awaiting her second book, on passivity and women’s survival strategies.  –JG

 

Quan Barry, The Unveiling
Grove, Fall

Quan Barry, it seems, can do just about anything—and for her next feat: a literary horror novel, complete with penguins. The protagonist is a Black location scout named Striker, who finds herself trapped on a remote island in the Antarctic with a bunch of white tourists, battling the landscape and their own creeping madness. Yes please!  –ET