JULY & BEYOND

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David Thomson, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies
Simon & Schuster, July 7

David Thomson has been writing about film for fifty years, so when he argues (as he does in this book ) that  “movies have been a destructive force—responsible for creating an alternate reality and fantasyland that has only deepened the isolation and disconnection of our society over the course of a century,” I’m inclined to hear him out. (And not only because movies are too long to watch at night when I could be sleeping.)  –JG

Rachel Aviv, You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters
Knopf, July 7

Rachel Aviv writes the kind of nonfiction that sucks you in and holds you long after you finish reading. Her last book, Strangers to Ourselves, was one of the most complex and illuminating works I’ve read in recent years. I’d be anticipating this one—which explores mother-daughter relationships—even if it didn’t speak so directly to me. As both a daughter and a mother of daughters, thought, I’m on the edge of my seat.  –JG

Christian Wiman, The Dance
FSG, July 7

I love Christian Wiman’s poems and read them aloud whenever possible. Though his language is that of the every day his preternatural instinct for rhythm fills his lines with a bursting musicality. And though I am not, unlike Wiman, a man of faith, I share in his wonder of everyday holiness, for that ineluctable light that drags us from our solipsisms into a brighter way of being… even if only for a moment, even if for just the time it takes to read a poem.  –JD

Parini Shroff, Some People
Algonquin, July 7

From the bestselling author of the delightful The Bandit Queens comes a novel that sounds unbearably awkward and just as good: Malti Patel finds herself forced to recuperate for an entire week, under the care of her daughter’s soon to be ex-huband, Nathan. Clearly, both have resentments, and things to unpack, though they will, one supposes, also discover that they have at least one thing in common. Shroff is hilarious and winking and sharp but ultimately large-hearted; I think she will knock this premise out of the park.  –ET

Emeline Atwood, A Real Animal
Catapult, July 7

I’d been hearing about this book through the grapevine for a long time before I got my hands on it, and once I did, I understood perfectly. This is a book that is a caliber above and beyond what we have come to expect from the young-twenties-girl-bildungsroman. There’s men, yes, and sex, a lot of it, and yearning to be understood, and for power and a place in the world, but A Real Animal is about the wild, deep, feral core of those themes. It’s about something subterranean, underneath one’s lived experience, underneath, even, one’s trauma. The book follows the protagonist from college, when she experiences a horrible sexual assault, through the next decade, as she builds and breaks relationships, as she builds and breaks a life. There is no straight line. There is no healing. But the book has this feeling about it, like there’s so much within the pages that’s just bursting to get out: a violent and powerful urge for something, for more survival, for more agency, to express one’s pain, to feel better. A Real Animal is as raw and visceral as an open-mouthed scream: you hear it in your bones. You can see its teeth.  –JH

Shannon Sanders, The Great Wherever
Henry Holt, July 7

This book circles one of my favorite riddles for fiction: how do we carry ancestral expectations? When Audrey Lamb, an underpaid gig worker in D.C., inherits family farmland in Tennessee, she goes to claim her birthright—only to discover the property is ruled by four familial ghosts. An epic with supernatural and epigenetic overtones, this debut novel looks like a feast of a story.  –BA

Daniel Mason, Country People
Random House, July 14

After his astonishing North Woods, I am a Daniel Mason fan for life. I’m beyond thrilled that we’re getting another novel so soon, especially one about a family decamping to Vermont to discover a cast of wild characters and a local legend (or local truth), which is being billed as “joyous, absurd, and life-affirming.” This is just what I need.  –ET

Alicia Upano, Everything to the Sea
William Morrow, July 14

This debut novel hinges on an epic premise. In Hawai’i, two lovers (Kenji and Jane) are drawn together for what’s supposed to be a summer fling. But when a tsunami rocks their island, profound tragedy ensues, and immediately ups the stakes of a brief encounter. This big-souled book considers the costs of leaving and staying, especially where rebuilding is required. Upano’s operatic scope and clean, elegant sentences really swept me off my feet.  –BA

Sigrid Nunez, It Will Come Back to You: The Collected Stories
Riverhead, July 14

New Sigrid Nunez! Her first short story collection! “Moving from an inappropriate teenage crush to a therapist’s second chance at love, in this collection Nunez maintains her irrepressible humor, bite and insight, while exploring the philosophical questions we have come to expect from her writing.” Spanning her career, these stories promise the same brilliant writing from one of our best writers.  –EF

Priya Guns, Hustle, Baby
Doubleday, July 14

This second novel from the author of Your Driver is Waiting follows a family of precariously employed Tamil refugees just trying to make it work on the margins as Y2K looms. When a rizz-y day trader promises the world, it’s hard to say no. But chaos inevitably follows the golden goose. Guns is an actor and writer, known for her razor-sharp observations and riotous voice. This one looks like a thrill ride.  –BA

Joanna Kavenna, Seven
Faber & Faber, July 14

The latest novel from British author Kavenna, whose Zed was a Lit Hub favorite, concerns a philosopher seeking an ancient game box in Greece—but “the hunt for this small thing, among the countless lost things, becomes an absurdist quest through time and space: from the earliest human societies to the advent of AI.” Sounds like fun.  –ET

Mark Haber, Ada
Coffee House Press, July 14

Haber is one of my favorite contemporary novelists: a sky-highbrow absurdist with a scholar’s sensibility and an artist’s style. In his latest, a “petty tyrant” in “a remote country in Europe” will stop at nothing to be reunited with his (unfortunately married) beloved—you guessed it: Ada. I’ll read pretty much anything he writes, can’t wait.  –ET

Emily Doyle, Please Don’t Touch the Body
Bloomsbury, July 14

I’ve had the pleasure of glimpsing Emily Doyle’s muscular, heart-forward fiction in a writing workshop, and all I can say is brace yourselves. The body is front and center in these uniquely brewed stories, which range from surreal to poignant. In one piece, a woman fearing fetishization finds agency by writing a sex column. In another, Ronald Reagan is reincarnated as a puppy, and forced to depend on the whims of his queer owners. This debut collection is thrillingly concerned with how we come to feel at ease in—or in power of—our meatsacks.  –BA

Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America
Norton, July 21

From Pulitzer Prize-finalist Phillips-Fein, a book about an American tradition: fighting against equality. You read that right: within are the stories of figures like “John Adams, William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie, journalist Lothrop Stoddard, Henry Ford, Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, Peter Thiel, and others” who “represent this counter-tradition of hostility to democratic government.” You didn’t think it was an accident, did you?  –ET

Colson Whitehead, Cool Machine
Doubleday, July 21

Whitehead caps off his Harlem Trilogy by bringing Ray Carney—business owner, former fence, family man—into the 1980s. The blurb promises a one-last-job kind of story, fitting for the conclusion to a modern classic of the crime genre. –DB

Julie Buntin, Famous Men
Random House, July 21

I love love loved Julie Buntin’s 2017 debut Marlena, so I couldn’t be more excited to read her second novel of obsession: in which a young woman, trapped in her hometown, finds solace in a poet from the same place—and sets off to find him. When she does, the result is a fraught, life-altering relationship, which happens to be Buntin’s forte.  –ET

Claire Vaye Watkins, Yellow Pine
Riverhead, July 21

Claire Vaye Watkins has a gift for depicting the American desert and the people who find themselves there, so I’m very excited for her latest: a novel of intentional communities, fighting corporate power, single parenthood, and second-chance romance in the Southwest.  –DB

Valeria Luiselli, Beginning Middle End
Knopf, July 28

A mother-daughter duo land in Sicily after the collapse of the former’s marriage, setting off an exploration of their own family line as well as the possibilities (and pitfalls) of a changing world. Luiselli is one of the writers pushing fiction forward and wherever she goes, we would do well to follow.  –DB

Jennifer Croft, Notes on Postcards: A Memoir
Catapult, August 4

There are far worse ways to measure out a life than by postcards. Though as a medium they may necessarily limit the depth and intimacy of what we write, they in turn free us of our writerly pretensions, and force us to get to the point. So as someone who once sent 300 postcards (over as many days) to someone very dear and very far away, I am eager to read novelist and translator Jennifer Croft’s memoir in very small parts, as she shares her collected postcard correspondence—with her grandmother, her husband—and muses on the medium itself, equal parts anachronism, archive, and analog delight.  –JD

A. Igoni Barrett, Whyteface
Graywolf, August 4

Whyteface is a sequel to 2016’s Blackass, in which a Nigerian man named Furo Wariboko wakes up one morning to find that his skin has turned white—except for his ass. Four years later, Furo is gainfully employed, going by Frank Whyte, and ready for a vacation, to European capitals where at last he finds himself blending in, at least at first glance. Barrett is a genius of social satire, holding up a mirror to the subtle ways we interact with, judge, irritate, and delight one another.  –ET

Paul Yoon, Etna
Scribner, August 4

If Homeward Bound and Au hasard Balthazar had a baby, it would be Etna. Yoon’s latest work is told through the eyes of an ex-military dog who decides to return home after years of war. On his journey, Etna revisits the places he worked during the war and finds them changed. He meets people and animals struggling to readjust after brutal battles upended their lives, and learns the complexities of life during “peacetime.” But Yoon’s novel offers more reasons for hope than despair as it asks challenging questions about loss, trust, and, of course, home.  –MC

Mimi Montgomery, Murder Bites
Bantam, August 4

From Axios reporter Mimi Montgomery, a frankly delightful-sounding debut mystery about Margot, a D.C. transplant who finds herself in South Carolina, where all her neighbors are obsessed with a reality TV show about dog fashion, which is called Pawsh. Then “the local dog walker is killed in a bizarre incident involving an over-the-top Halloween display featuring multiple Home Depot skeletons,” and Margot finds herself in hot water. But never fear, she will asemble a quirky crew and solve this crime before she’s blamed for it. Fun.  –ET

Margrét Ann Thors, Freyja
Spiegel & Grau, August 4

I can feel that 2026 is the year I finally dive into the Nordic mystery genre, never to return. Freyja’s premise, re-opening an unsolved disappearance twenty years after the child went missing, is standard fare until you hit the kicker: “Unnur may finally have to face… the possibility that she might be responsible for the disappearance of her otherworldly friend Freyja.” If there’s even the slightest possibility Freyja is some kind of missing child-god, it’ll be worth checking out.  –CK

Téa Obreht, Sunrise
Random House, August 4

I’ve been a fan of Obreht since her breakout 2011 debut The Tiger’s Wife; Sunrise will be her fourth novel, and she hasn’t disappointed me yet. I don’t expect her to start now, especially with a book that sounds this good: In 2024, a woman survives a plane crash in the Wyoming mountains. She’s alone, until she finds a strange town, apparently abandoned but almost plucked from the Old West: Sunrise. As the novel goes on, Obreht weaves three timelines together—Coll’s in 2003, Anton Vargas’s in 1902—to unravel the mystery of Sunrise, the ghost town to end all ghost towns. Sorry to fangirl but: YAY.  –ET

Claudia Rankine, Triage
Graywolf, August 4

How to define Claudia Rankine’s work? Poetry, essay, fiction, reportage, memoir… somehow all of the above and also something else altogether? Her latest follows “two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist” over decades of friendship characterized by deep engagement in this collapsing world around us… but also in a game, of sorts, where the two have to collapse to the ground whenever they see each other.  –DB

Richard Russo, Under the Falls
Knopf, August 11

If “sprawling literary page-turner” is your favorite genre, here’s one for you. Richard Russo is a master of creating an entire town full of heartbreakingly realized characters (with many secrets), and Under the Falls promises to be a perfect showcase for his talents. The wayward son of a small-town returns after finding fame and fortune and must confront the old friends eagerly awaiting his return for reasons of their own. Sounds like my ideal summer read.  –JG

Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age
Riverhead, August 11

Chang-rae Lee can do no wrong in my mind—I devoured Lee’s last novel, My Year Abroad, and I can’t wait for this one, a Bildungsroman that follows Korean-American Jeon-Gi as he tries to find his way through early adolescence. I can’t think of any writer better equipped to capture the horrors and hilarity of the middle school years. –JG

Doortje Smithuijsen, tr. Erica Moore, Capitalism is Sexism
Simon & Schuster, August 11

Well, it’s right there on the tin. But for those who need more detail, Dutch philosopher and journalist Doortje Smithuijsen dives into the many, many ways in which capitalism perpetuates patriarchy and relies on the unpaid labor of women to contribute to its endless need for material growth. From trad wives to spin classes to caregiving, Smithuijsen reveals how late stage capitalism strips women of agency and traps them in endless cycles of empty consumption and thankless labor.  –JD

Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times
Henry Holt, August 18

A queer campus novel about a first year Stanford student who has burned out on climate activism and wants to escape her strict upbringing into a world of literature and sex. But as COVID scrambles everything, she and some classmates flee to a farm collective, where the small community starts to fray under the weight of global and personal pressures. I’ve been a fan of Malavika Kannan’s writing from around the ‘net, and am very excited to read her literary debut.  –JF

Katy Simpson Smith, The Maltese Version
FSG Originals, August 18

From the award-winning author of The Weeds and The Everlasting comes a novel about four women “forging their way across time, place, and language in search of desire, power, and connection.” When Max disappears to Malta (leaving a possibly pregnant Leonie behind) to translate wary poet Anna’s work, travel writer Rhoda is dispatched to track him down. Once there, however, Rhoda discovers more than Max’s indiscretions. Smith is beautiful storyteller, and this latest novel sounds like a knottily delightful exploration of love and desire.  –DS

Dorthe Nors, tr. Caroline Waight, Range
Graywolf, August 18

In the latest novel from Lit Hub favorite Dorthe Nors, an astrophysicist retreatst to the country to concentrate on the stars—but can’t seem to get away from the messy, compelling humanity that surrounds her, leaving her shifting her attention from the enormous to the minute and back again.  –ET

Anjet Daanje, tr. David McKay, The Song of Stork and Dromedary
FSG Originals, August 18

I love a chonky deep-dive into the life, art, and impact of a fictional author—this one, following three hundred years of various interactions with the single novel of a Brontë-esque recluse, sounds like just the thing for late summer immersion.  –DB

Ted Scheinman, Jolt: My Electric Journey Out of Darkness
Scribner, August 18

While nobody owes us the hard truths of their experience, it’s always an enormous gift when someone has the courage to share the trials and tribulations they’ve endured. So it is with Ted Scheinman’s Jolt, in which the Smithsonian magazine editor and author of the delightful memoir/travelogue Camp Austen, reveals his long and harrowing struggle with depression, and the steps he took to reckon with it. Namely, and as a last resort, Scheinman decided to undergo electroconvulsive therapy (ECT); and though the ECT worked—much to Scheinman’s relief—it came with a cost to his memory. Not only does Jolt provide an important window into the darker realities of mental illness, Scheinman’s willingness to share his story will no doubt help others who might be struggling. [Full disclosure: I once had a lovely experience with Ted Scheinman as an editor for a magazine feature of mine.] –JD

Susan Stryker, Changing Gender
FSG, August 25

If there was a Mount Rushmore of trans historians, Susan Stryker would be on it twice. She literally wrote the book on transgender history. (It’s called Transgender History.) Any new publication of hers is mandatory reading, and not just because transgender Americans are under an obsessive, incessant series of assaults from the current administration and the right more broadly. Stryker is also uniquely gifted at explaining and contextualizing the history of transness as we know it in ways that are clear, accessible, enlightening, and entertaining.  –CK

Andrés Barba, tr. Lisa Dillman, Last Day of a Prior Life
HarperVia, August 25

I’ve been a Barba diehard since Such Small Hands; his writing is strange and beautiful and gothic. This one, which Mariana Enríquez described as a “ghost story without ghosts,” a woman follows an unfamiliar boy and discovers “a suspended time, a loop, and another life.” What that means, I can’t say, but I want to find out.  –ET

Grace Krilanovich, Acid Green Velvet
Two Dollar Radio, September 1

I was a huge fan of Grace Krilanovich’s bizarro vampire novel The Orange Eats Creeps when it was published in 2010. I kind of can’t believe it’s been over 15 years since then (vampires indeed), but she is finally back with a second novel. I know absolutely nothing about it, but I am lying ravenously in wait.  –ET

Chloe Benjamin, Under Story
Putnam, September 1

Benjamin blew us all away in 2018 with her genre-bending bestseller The Immortalists, but it seems she’s pushing things even further into the realm of the fantastic with her newest book, in which a biologist, hiding out on a remote base in Antactica (as you do), is confronted by a mysterious phenomenon which also draws her estranged husband to the end of the earth. But where—or when—might the phenomenon lead them? Count on Benjamin to ask the big questions—what makes a life worth living? What is the nature of time? Where do we belong?—and entertain us fully all the while. Cannot wait to read.  –ET

Emily St. John Mandel, Exit Party
Knopf, September 10

An Emily St. John Mandel novel is always cause for excitement, and if you liked Sea of Tranquility, this one sounds like another kaleidoscopic, genre-and-planet-spanning jewel of a book: the description promises dopplegangers, disappearances, Paris, Greece, the future. Great. I’ll let her take me everywhere and anywhere.  –ET

T. Geronimo Johnson, The Occidental Book of the Dead
William Morrow, September 15

Incredibly, it’s been over ten years since T. Geronimo Johnson’s bestselling satire Welcome to Braggsville, but now he’s back at last, with a novel in which a Black cop in Atlanta who finds himself patrolling the streets he grew up on—despite having “moved up” to the suburbs, where he lives with his (white) wife and stepson. But a sudden act of violence on the job splits his life in two, and the narrative itself along with it, “presenting two contrasting versions of the American experience as he’s forced to confront the history that shaped him and the compromises required of a good man in a broken system.”  –ET

Ayad Akhtar, The Radiance
S&S/Summit Books, September 29

From Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author of American Dervish and Homeland Elegies comes a very intriging novel, in which a writer, after an accident on a country road “is caught between revelation and madness” and winds up drawn into scandal, secrets, and spiritual transformation. Mary Gaitskill herself wrote that the book is “a fantastic surprise, a novel made of oppositions: almost painfully intimate, culturally wide-angled, vulnerable, shrewd, compassionate and ruthless, tragic and well, radiant. Bordering at times on the ineffable, it is a unique and extraordinary reading experience.” Ok!  –ET

Deesha Philyaw, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman
Mariner, September 29

The way I actually gasped with delight when I saw this announcement! Philyaw’s Secret Lives of Church Ladies is one of my favorite collections of the last decade, and her podcast presence is a lesson in charisma. So anything she sees fit to print will zip right to the top of my TBR pile. Luckily for all of us, her debut novel imagines Scharisse Freeman, “the Beyonce of the mega-church world.” This intrepid empire builder is married to the pastor, and not here to make friends. But when scandal circles on the eve of the Mrs. First Lady USA pageant, Mrs. Freeman finds herself in troubled waters. As Philyaw’s a proven expert on the church lady’s myriad contradictions, I imagine we’re in safe, salacious hands with this one. Take me to church!  –BA

Min Jin Lee, American Hagwon
Cardinal, September 29

Min Jin Lee, current New York State author laureate, whose bestselling masterpiece Pachinko turned her into a superstar, has been working on her third novel, American Hagwon, since at least 2018. She has described it as the final book in her diaspora trilogy: if Free Food for Millionaires is about Koreans in America, and Pachinko is about Koreans in Japan, American Hagwon “is focused on what is most important to Koreans around the world. I want to understand what thematically unifies Koreans who have experienced diaspora. For me, the answer is education. It’s the thing Koreans care about more than anything, so the locus of that book will be the tutoring center that a Korean American woman and man own together as partners, and also about the tutors, the students, and the parents.”  –ET

Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat
Flatiron, September

Hell yes: the Alex Stern trilogy, which Bardugo began with Ninth House, will be completed this fall. I know nothing about this book, other than Bardugo promising it will be “a wild one,” but that doesn’t really matter. Personally, as an adult reader of mostly literary fiction—but one raised on fantasy—these books come close to bringing me that childhood thrill of dissolving into another universe. Which obviously I need more than ever/in this economy, etc. etc. etc.  –ET

Benjamin Moser, Anti-Zionism
Doubleday, September

Benjamin Moser is best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work and Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, but he has also been, for many years now, one of the literary world’s most fearless and insightful critics of Zionism. Anti-Zionism is a deep dive into the history of this ethnonationalist movement, and an examination of how it came to be one of the defining, divisive quandaries of the last two centuries, told through the personal stories of the Jewish figures who “resisted Zionism at the cost of social exclusion, professional banishment, and even their lives.”  –DS

China Miéville, The Rouse
Del Rey, September

Miéville’s first solo fiction effort in more than a decade should be one of the major events of the speculative calendar year. Details are thin on the ground, but we know it’ll be a doorstopper following a woman across the globe as she battles nefarious shady organizations and… well, what more do you need to know, really?  –DB

SL Carroll, The Art of Conjuring
Terrazzo Editions, September

I arrived at this title via a series of begats. My love for Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us begat my following the output of the book’s publisher, Two Dollar Radio, which begat my picking up Gina Nutt’s essay collection Night Rooms, which begat my interest in Nutt as an author and now as the publisher at Terrazzo Editions. The Art of Conjuring is the first novella to be released by the press. This series of begats hasn’t let me down yet, and I expect that streak will continue with this title, too.  –CK