Richard Siken! Helen Oyeyemi! André Breton! 17 new books out today.
The end of the summer is almost here, and it feels difficult to believe that fall is approaching; 2025 remains a year in which time has consistently seemed too fast and too slow all at once. Still, one thing remains predictable: that there are new books to look forward to. Below, you’ll find seventeen new options in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, with an especially robust showing from our nonfiction writers.
I hope you’ll add these to your lists to close out August. It’ll be worth it.
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Helen Oyeyemi, A New New Me
(Riverhead)
“Oyeyemi’s prose is propelled by a subtle animism; her sentences sometimes seem to contain the whole book in miniature….Genres and registers collide: her prose offers, in a single page, poetic candor, sly wit, dad jokes, and contemporary therapyspeak….Some novels insist on being read as prescriptions for living; Oyeyemi’s simply depicts a process: one splinter of a soul briefly gains control of a body, and goes out to be engulfed by the world.”
–The New Yorker
Paula Sanders, Starting from Here
(Random House)
“I read Paula Saunders’s page-turning second novel, Starting from Here, in one intoxicating gulp. The story demands it. It’s a mother-daughter wrangle and also our Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl. Saunders wowed me with her psychological acuity in her debut, The Distance Home, and this new offering exceeds that jewel. Brava!”
–Mary Karr
Kim de l’Horizon, Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues (trans. Jamie Lee Searle)
(FSG)
“In ambitious queer coming of-age novel about family, language, and writing….A crucible of absolute stylistic liberty.”
–EL Diario
André Breton, Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays 1952-1966 (trans. Austin Carder)
(City Lights Books)
“Addressing all the major themes that preoccupied Breton throughout his career—from Trotskyism and anti-colonialism to anti-rationalism, the role of the marvelous, and the ‘complete liberation of poetry and, through it, of life’—these late essays amount to the last word of one of the most influential aesthetic minds of the twentieth century…a vivid portrait of an age….Austin Carder has performed a monster feat of translation here, catching every nuance of Breton’s sinuous, faceted thinking.”
–Cole Swensen
Amanda Uhle, Destroy This House
(Simon & Schuster/Summit Books)
“The American Dream turns pathological in Amanda Uhle’s beautiful memoir, Destroy This House, as Uhle reckons with her parents’ snarled identities and confounding lifestyles. Poignant, wryly funny, and exquisitely written, Uhle masterfully depicts the confluence of ambition and greed, pioneerism and narcissism, love and pain. I devoured every sentence.”
–Erika Krouse
Miriam Toews, A Truce That Is Not Peace
(Bloomsbury)
“Why do I write? Miriam Toews’s response to this impossible-to-answer prompt gives way to a haunting, tragi-comic, and incredibly moving inquiry into the landscapes and the people that define us; the parts of life that make no sense; and the things that, against all odds, keep us alive. A Truce That Is Not Peace is essential reading, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times.”
–Laura van den Berg
Richard Siken, I Do Know Some Things
(Copper Canyon Press)
“[A] brave book. It is brave not only in its content, but its method. It is brave to write about childhood scars, the heartbreak the dead leave behind, or how one’s life must be reconfigured in the aftermath of a stroke, much less all three, which are among the subjects in this collection of seventy-seven prose poems. It is even braver to present these subjects without ornament, with nothing to hide behind…as powerful, and important, as anything Richard Siken has released.”
–Zack Strait
Mizuki Tsujimura, Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon
(Scribner)
“Displaying a matter-of-fact approach to the fantastical that recalls early Haruki Murakami, Tsujimura’s novel is an enchanting read.”
–Financial Times
Thomas Schlesser, Mona’s Eyes
(Europa Editions)
“Art historian Schlesser’s vibrant English-language debut frames a survey of classical Western art with the story of a Parisian man supporting his ten-year-old granddaughter after her sudden bout of temporary blindness….Schlesser seamlessly interweaves the art lessons with Mona’s story, which concludes with an explanation for the cause of her blindness. Readers of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World will love this.”
–Publishers Weekly
Katherine Faulkner, The Break-In
(Gallery/Scout Press)
“Katherine Faulkner is the master of throwing ordinary women into extraordinary, what-would-you-do situations. With her razor sharp takes on middle class motherhood, this is an up-all-night thriller packed with style, acuity, and intrigue.”
–Abigail Dean
Kelly Sundberg, The Answer Is in the Wound: Trauma, Rage, and Alchemy
(Roxane Gay Books)
“[Sundberg’s] genre-blending approach to memoir viscerally invites readers to participate in the author’s alchemical transformation of trauma, shame, and rage into…a narrative that integrates and reinvokes past abuse and experiences in a beautiful sense of presence and purpose…each hard-earned, heart-worn word matters. A painfully beautiful memoir that will appeal to readers of Carmen Maria Machado while also being utterly, unforgettably original.”
–Library Journal
Jacob Tobia, Before They Were Men: Essays on Manhood, Compassion, and What Went Wrong
(Harmony)
“With wit sharp enough to shave a mustache and tenderness deep enough to hold grief, Jacob Tobia has created something urgent and original: a way to talk about masculinity without abandoning those shaped by it. Part memoir, part cultural reckoning, these essays don’t preach—they illuminate, offering us a road map to repair, from one of the most groundbreaking voices on gender writing today.”
–Jen Winston
Donna Leon, Backstage: Stories of a Writing Life
(Atlantic Monthly)
“Brilliantly observant and skilled….These thirty-two essays give readers a welcome behind-the-scenes look at the prolific novelist [behind the Guido Brunetti series]….At last, readers can join Leon on the canals of Venice as she tells them about some of her favorite things.”
–Library Journal
Ilana Kurshan, Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together
(St. Martin’s Press)
“Ilana Kurshan’s dual memoir of her life as a parent alongside her lifelong love affair with reading is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and startlingly poignant. From lessons on friendship learned from Frog and Toad to the Giving Tree’s cautionary tale about love and boundaries, Kurshan shows how the classics of children’s literature work not just to entertain kids but to help parents emotionally connect with them…with wit, verve, and style.”
–Ruth Franklin
LaShawn Harris, Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs and the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City
(Beacon Press)
“LaShawn Harris has given us a great gift. She has taken Eleanor Bumpurs from a poignant image on a poster and given us a rich sense of Bumpurs’ life and family experiences, a crucial analysis of the 1980s economic and police violence that killed her, and a moving history of her family’s and community’s fight for justice. A must-read and an extraordinary piece of research.”
–Jeanne Theoharris
Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide
(Liveright)
“In this magisterial account, journalist French (Born in Blackness) revisits the history of the Pan-Africanist movement through the life of Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, who in 1957 became the first head of state of the first colonized African nation to gain independence….Weaving a staggering amount of history into a propulsive narrative that recasts the twentieth century as a long struggle for liberation, this is a towering achievement.”
–Publishers Weekly
Peter Brannen, The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World
(Ecco)
“[U]rgent and astounding…Brannen weaves together the entire history of Earth, and the origins and tribulations of life over billions of years, with the predicament we find ourselves in today. With the lyricism of John McPhee and scientific bona fides rivaling any academic geologist, Brannen is in a class of his own as the preeminent scribe of Earth science today. This is the book that I want all of my Earth science students to read, and every policymaker and politician too.”
–Steve Brusatte
