Sex ed! Vintage sapphic tales! Constantine Cavafy! 26 new books out today.
It’s August, and, despite (or because of) the madness of the world, I come bearing new books.
Below, you’ll find twenty-six remarkable new options to consider in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. You’ll find fiction on Ukraine, the last zoo in the world, faculty marital drama in academia, reinvented queer pulpy tales for a new era of LGBTQ suppression, and more; poems by Anne Waldman; and nonfiction, including a new biography of the poet Constantine Cavafy; a look at how Oklahoma almost became a Black American separatist state; a collection of essays from trans and gender-nonconforming writers (including me!) created in association with Electric Literature; cautionary explorations of how American sex ed and rehab came to be, and what we need to do to fix both; a memoir of Ukraine; and more.
I hope you’ll enjoy these! Let your to-be-read piles grow.
*
Sam Wachman, The Sunflower Boys
(Harper)
“Sam Wachman’s first novel is an astonishing coming of age story written with the assurance and authority of a seasoned novelist yet captures the most impossibly tender moments of youth. Traversing both peace and war, this novel is an urgent missive from the front lines of the Russian invasion of Ukraine told from the point of view of a brave boy on the cusp of his life.”
–Betsy Lerner
Emma Sloley, The Island of Last Things
(Flatiron Books)
“Electric….A moving and elegiac cautionary tale about the state of the world, and the beauty that we so often take for granted. An all-too-plausible look at what the future might hold for the natural world and the people who strive to protect it.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory
(Little Brown)
“I love novels set in the claustrophobic world of academia. From Albee and Amis to Russo and Jonas, trapping frustrated adults and barely-adults together is always a recipe for exploding characters’ egos and foibles. This novel, which explores the rippling fallout from infidelity in a long-standing faculty marriage, promises to be another addition to the canon.”
–Nicola Kraus
Olia Hercules, Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine
(Knopf)
“Only Olia Hercules could write such a cinematic and brave-hearted book examining what it is to live as a Ukrainian family at a time of unimaginable horrors and yet on every page the reader finds grace, strength, and occasionally the sting of dark Ukrainian humor. Strong Roots manages the near impossible: it is both a deeply personal book and a vital historical record.”
–Caroline Eden
Denne Michele Norris (editor), Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color
(HarperOne)
“Stunning … Across the collection, the complex and multifaceted experiences of trans people of color are rendered vividly, and the pieces urge political action in the present while offering a beacon of hope for a more just future. Readers will find this tough to forget.”
–Publishers Weekly
Gregory Jusdanis, Peter Jeffreys, Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography
(FSG)
“In the fifty years since a biography of the poet last appeared, Constantine Cavafy has emerged not only as the great Greek poet of the twentieth century but as an essential poet of modernity on the world stage, an exile (in many senses of the word) whose work seamlessly enfolds history, memory, and desire. Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys have given us an extraordinary biography, eminently readable and as unconventional, scholarly, and impassioned as its subject.”
–Mark Doty
Anne Waldman, Mesopotopia
(Penguin Books)
“Anne Waldman’s Mesopotopia unfolds in layered, palimpsestic compositions, forming potent murmurations of language: coordinated, shape-shifting, and spectacular. With an epic vision, these poems address complex themes, dreaming and unraveling threads of history and myth. It’s an enveloping performance, an urgent invocation. An utterly astonishing collection.”
–Hoa Nguyen
Josephine Rowe, Little World
(Transit Books)
“Little World holds tenderness, rage, faith and grace, and it does so in language–so precise, so exacting–it seems, at once, to cut through and join together the complexities of our relations. Each new work from Josephine Rowe is a revelation.”
–Madeleine Thien
Fumio Yamamoto, The Dilemmas of Working Women: Stories (trans. Brian Bergstrom)
(HarperVia)
“The Dilemmas of Working Women is a delight. With acute insight and sly humor, Fumio Yamamoto depicts the lives of modern Japanese women in all their complexity. The characters, in their quirky idiosyncrasies, are deeply familiar; their stoicisms, heartbreaking. A colloquial and breezy translation that does not read as such.”
–Yoon Choi
Jessica Francis Kane, Fonseca
(Penguin Press)
“Miraculously, wrenching and charming, imaginative and true, Jessica Francis Kane’s Fonseca brings the indomitable Penelope Fitzgerald, and this entrancing world of Fonseca, to life. We watch riveted as Fitzgerald grasps at and grabs for the freedom, the art, that so many of us yearn toward, continue doggedly to search for, even as circumstance, family, the dredges and seductions of life continue to get in our way.”
–Lynn Steger Strong
Caleb Gayle, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State
(Riverhead)
“In this enthralling saga, journalist Caleb Gayle resurfaces the little-remembered late-nineteenth-century effort to turn Oklahoma into a Black state….Gayle’s stylish, brisk account elegantly incorporates many tangents….It’s one not to miss.”
–Publishers Weekly
River Selby, Hotshot: A Life on Fire
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
“What a wonderful, compassionate, sharply observed, beautifully researched, open-hearted book. Selby has lived a big, courageous life, and that largesse is evident on every page, in the form of the rigor and curiosity of the narrative voice. Ostensibly about fire-fighting, Hotshot turns out to be a beautiful reflection on justice, the environment, the self, and much more.”
–George Saunders
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
Yiming Ma, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us
(Mariner Books)
“Ma’s brilliantly inventive These Memories Do Not Belong to Us weaves worlds around a central question: What happens when technology enables a totalitarian government to break into the last private frontiers of the internal mind? Chilling, poignant, and uncomfortably timely, Ma’s braided memory dispatches explore a future in which the shifting concepts of safety, loyalty, and truth lead nowhere except condemnation.”
–Tessa Hulls
Nick Fuller Googins, The Frequency of Living Things
(Atria Books)
“[S]tunning prose: a rare blend of music, language, and depth. With a piercing understanding of the complexities of the human heart, Googins explores both the destructive and healing connections that tether us to those we love. The destinies of the three sisters, Josie, Emma, and Ara, explode off the page. Wise, clever, and profound, this novel is an exploration of the natural world, sisterhood, addiction, sacrifice, and the impossible choices of love.”
–Patti Calahan
Sarah Fonseca (editor), Octavia C. Saenz (editor), The New Lesbian Pulp
(Feminist Press)
“What do you get when you pair the subversive spirit of vintage lesbian pulp with the in-your-face sass and sexuality of contemporary sapphic stories? You get this thrill-ride of an anthology. Its tangy edges and savory depths are the perfect antidote to the bitter political realities of the present day.”
–Susan Stryker
Shoshana Walter, Rehab: An American Scandal
(Simon & Schuster)
“Rehab is a beautifully woven and deftly reported deep dive into a side of the opioid crisis that has too often skirted public scrutiny. Shoshana Walter’s debut is an intricate and urgent investigation into the systems that are supposed to heal — but often harm — those struggling with opioid addiction, told with a journalist’s rigor and with immense heart.”
–Keri Blakinger
Martha H. Patterson (editor), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (editor), The New Negro: A History in Documents, 1887-1937
(Princeton University Press)
“This absorbing collection with impressively detailed commentary and engrossing thumbnail biographies and notes demands the attention of scholars of U.S. letters, history, and culture and invites serious general readers to consider the continuities of Black self-reflection and struggle.”
–Library Journal
Tim Queeney, Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization
(St. Martin’s Press)
“I must admit, when I saw Tim’s book with three hundred pages on rope, I was skeptical anyone could make this subject even marginally interesting for this many pages! I should have known better. Tim has woven together a fascinating blend of history and technology, leading us from the pyramids of ancient Egypt to the wonders of modern synthetic fibers stronger than steel. Every chapter is loaded with arcane information delivered in an engaging style. It’s a great read.”
–Nigel Calder
Peter Orner, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter
(Little Brown)
“Masterfully written, funny, often achingly moving, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter confronts us with at least two central questions: how much of our own daily fumblings in life are passed down to us? And how, precisely, does one learn to love and be loved anyway? There’s more here too, of course—the seductive power of celebrity, the ties that should bind but do not…truly unforgettable…If there is a more daring and original narrative voice in contemporary American fiction than Peter Orner’s, then I don’t know whose it is.”
–Andre Dubus III
Zhang Yueran, Women, Seated (trans. Jeremy Tiang)
(Riverhead)
“A suspenseful and layered novel….Thanks to Zhang’s astute storytelling, characters that first appear to be villains become more complex as the years of disappointment and fractured ambitions that have shaped them come to light. This gripping drama offers an intimate view into contemporary China’s class dynamics.”
–Publishers Weekly
Phoebe Greenwood, Vulture
(Europa Editions)
“Vulture is the Scoop of our age–an absurdist tale of western media cynicism exposed by the unending horror of Gaza. Greenwood has created an antiheroine narrator whose view of the world is so darkly acerbic and sharply observed that, even as Sara appeals us with every turned page, we cannot bear to leave her side.”
–Julian Borger
Erik Loomis, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice
(New Press)
“Historian Loomis profiles in this inspiring account twenty activists from the seventeenth century to today who each convey a specific lesson for political organizing….Readers will be galvanized themselves.”
–Publishers Weekly
James Delbourgo, A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now
(Norton)
“What a dazzling cabinet of curiosities! James Delbourgo shows in this mesmerizing book the parallel between people’s psyches and their objects. From the high-end art collector to Jeffrey Dahmer’s horrifying temple of human bones, nothing puts the human soul on display like collecting. A Noble Madness makes a fundamental contribution to the study of human psychology.”
–Justin Smith-Ruiu
Alex Wellerstein, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age
(Harper)
“Truman presided over the only wartime use of nuclear weapons, and he also more forcefully checked military encroachments on this weapon than any subsequent commander-in-chief….In this page-turning account, Alex Wellerstein brings us closer than we have ever been to understanding the paradoxes of how, through numerous actions and inactions, large and small, one quite ordinary man—perhaps because he was so ordinary—shaped the nuclear age.”
–Michael D. Gordin
Nalini Jones, The Unbroken Coast
(Knopf)
“The Unbroken Coast is a beguiling epic…[set in a fishing village in] Mumbai grappling with the treacheries of progress and the inexorable march of time. Illness devastates the novel’s humble, endearing protagonist, who bravely crosses class boundaries in her enthralling search for peace. Readers will find a home in Jones’s razor-sharp portraits of family life.”
–Hirsh Sawhney
