August is here, and with this new month comes new books to look forward to—and we certainly need things to look forward to. Below, you’ll find a whopping twenty-seven new books to consider in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, spanning everything from the lives of Charlotte Brontë and James Schuyler to Bruce Springsteen albums; poetic odes to Black musicians; infertility; the revealing lives of birds; a sequel to the celebrated Korean American sci-fi novel Ocean’s Godori; a new career-spanning collection from Jamaica Kincaid; and much, much more.
Find some sun (unless it’s one of those by-now-common heatwave days), curl up with one of these, and enjoy. I hope these bring you something you need. Stay safe, everyone.
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Mariah Rigg, Extinction Capital of the World: Stories
(Ecco)
“These ten stories expertly explore desire, loss, displacement, and environmental fragility across characters throughout Hawai’i….Electric and lyrical. Rigg’s a master short story writer with unbelievable skill.”
–Debutiful
Elaine Castillo, Moderation
(Viking)
“Tender and cutting, engrossing and immediate—Elaine Castillo’s Moderation is a moving meditation on connection, growth, and how, in a world that’s constantly on the verge of ending, one way we move forward is cultivating our own. Castillo’s prose is luminous and lucid, balancing humor and emotion with wicked aplomb. Castillo expertly stretches the possibilities of language; Moderation is infinite.”
–Bryan Washington
Emily Hunt Kivel, Dwelling
(FSG)
“Festooned with razor-sharp observations and style, Emily Hunt Kivel’s debut is a tale for our precarious moment, treating the melancholy facets of social decay, austerity, and gentrification with dazzling wit and originality. Dwelling announces the arrival of a new voice in literature who is exhilaratingly up to the task.”
–Alexandra Kleeman
Jamaica Kincaid, Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974–
(FSG)
“Kincaid’s cutting prose shines, and the collection makes for a marvelous account of the author’s life and career. This is a triumph.”
–Publishers Weekly
Brian Buckbee, Carol Ann Fitzgerald, We Should All Be Birds: A Memoir
(Tin House)
“I loved every page of this book: Funny, sad, romantic, and full of pigeons—glorious but under-appreciated, mysterious yet near-at-hand, each an individual, their dramas unseen right under our noses. Yet for Buckbee, suffering from a broken heart and broken body, birds like the injured Two-Step fling open doors of enchantment, healing, and communion. He’s right: We really should all be birds-but since we can’t, the best remedy I can think of is this book.”
–Sy Montgomery
Graham Watson, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life
(Pegasus Books)
“Literary scholar Watson explores in his vivid debut biography the mystery and sensation that surrounded Charlotte Brontë. Piecing together letters collected from Brontë’s friends, family, and publishers, Watson deftly shows how the painfully introverted Brontë manipulated anecdotes from her ‘comfortless childhood’ into ‘a story of self-justification and self-glorification honed over years.’ This fast-moving account of literary fame satisfies.”
–Publishers Weekly
m. mick powell, Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Song in Poems
(One World)
“In poet m. mick powell’s debut collection, Dead Girl Cameo, the deaths of iconic Black female singers and musicians—Whitney Houston, Aaliyah, Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes, Billie Holiday and Phyllis Hyman—go beyond the headlines. Powell resurrects their vivid lives and artistry to paint a more humanizing picture of their legacy while exploring themes of sexuality, survival, grief and stardom.”
–USA Today
Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Joy Is My Middle Name: Poems
(Norton)
“Joy Is My Middle Name is a mantra, motto, and winking forewarning in this magnificent debut….A poet with the capacious charms and chops of Sasha Debevec-McKenney comes around once a generation or so: Morgan Parker, Wanda Coleman, Frank O’Hara. Joy Is My Middle Name is bold as hell. It’s revitalizing.”
–Terrence Hayes
Harryette Mullen, Regaining Unconsciousness: Poems
(Graywolf)
“Regaining Unconsciousness unfolds like wisdoms written on the walls of a maze of mirrors. Straightforward passages turn into figurative reflections and allusive pathways….No poet is more mercurial while frank, more understated while exacting, or more enlightened while inquisitive. Regaining Unconsciousness is every bit as virtuosic and singular as the great Harryette Mullen.”
–Terrance Hayes
Elaine U. Cho, Teo’s Durumi
(Zando/Hillman Grad Books)
“Without a moment to catch our breath, Teo’s Durumi picks up right where Ocean’s Godori left off. The thrills and chills of nonstop action belie the profound questions on capitalism, colonialism, caste, family loyalty, and identity formation upon which the wildly inventive, cinematic plot is built. All this, and two achingly steamy love stories, make for a delicious, thought-provoking, can’t-put-it-down read.”
–Alice Stephens
Megan Cummins, Atomic Hearts
(Ballantine Books)
“An exquisite first novel about the body’s fragility, the spirit’s opacity, and the elastic absolution of narrative. Megan Cummins’s restless, devoted protagonist—a young writer working toward something like truth in the shadows of her father’s addiction, and in friendship’s frank light—is the kind of protagonist I’ll find myself thinking of years later, as of a good friend: ‘I should call Gertie.'”
–Rachel Lyon
Jason Mott, People Like Us
(Dutton)
“The follow-up to Mott’s National Book Award-winning Hell of a Book weaves the stories of two Black authors—one on an international book tour, the other confronting a deadly school shooting—into a comedic, surreal exploration of love and loss.”
–The New York Times
Nathan Kernan, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler
(FSG)
“I discovered James Schuyler’s poems fifty years ago and the charm and the mystery of his poems has made him always my Number One. Now Jimmy’s life, so warmly and astutely told by Nathan Kernan, is here for us, a page-turner and a queer and passionate, glittering literary gem.”
–Eileen Myles
Peter Ames Carlin, Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run
(Doubleday)
“Carlin, who has published biographies of R.E.M., Paul Simon and the Boss himself, pulls back the curtain on the making of Springsteen’s Born to Run album fifty years after its release. Drawing on interviews with the artist and his inner circle, Carlin revisits how each song was written and recorded while shedding light on the arduous studio sessions and their parallels to Springsteen’s career.”
–The New York Times
Chloe Caldwell, Trying
(Graywolf)
“In this sharply honest memoir, Women author Chloe Caldwell sets out to write about infertility—but ends up charting a far messier, more unexpected transformation. What begins as a chronicle of trying to conceive becomes a reckoning with betrayal, queer desire, and the question of what it actually means to build a life.”
–Electric Literature
Tochi Eze, This Kind of Trouble
(Tiny Reparations Books)
“THIS KIND OF TROUBLE is an incandescent and moving portrait of star-crossed lovers caught between the weight of tradition and secrets carried across generations. In turns tender and unflinchingly honest, Tochi Eze explores a world where duty and desire are often at odds. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this intimate, emotionally resonant, and profoundly human story.”
–Francesca Ekwuyasi
Ella Berman, L.A. Women
(Berkley)
“Ella Berman’s writing is transportive, hypnotic, and addictive. I fell wholeheartedly in love with the intensity of these L.A. Women and the way Berman unabashedly explores the deep, glimmering, and turbulent waters of artistic ambition amid the alluring backdrop of 1960’s Los Angeles. This novel reads like a spell, a California fever dream, and a risk taking excavation of the moments that most define us. L.A. Women is phenomenal.”
–Chelsea Bieker
Princess Joy L. Perry, This Here Is Love
(Norton)
“In the manner of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, this sweeping and greathearted novel presents a cast of unforgettable characters driven by their hopes and yearnings, men and women who in the face of the suffering and loss and violence of bondage manage to go about the ‘brave business of love.’ This is a beautiful book.”
–Janeet Perry
Khadijah Queen, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A Veteran’s Memoir
(Legacy Lit)
“[Y]et another extension of the brilliant universe of Khadijah Queen, one where the pages are richly populated. With people, with places, with rich, granular details. And, with all of that population, still, an attention to and affection for each single part of the larger machine, which makes Queen’s narrative world-building feel like it is reaching for you, demanding you to enter, and be walked through each place, each life, each passage of time. This book is a gift.”
–Hanif Abdurraqib
M. G. Sheftall, Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses
(Dutton)
“There are more than 100,000 still-living hibakusha—survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sheftall’s book recounts the survivor memories of Aug. 9, 1945, when the world’s first plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, three days after the world’s first atomic weapon was dropped on Hiroshima….A definitive account of a watershed moment in history.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Fara Dabhoiwala, What Is Free Spech? The History of a Dangerous Idea
(Belknap Press)
“[A] global history of free speech…written with wit, fluency, and dazzling erudition. Constantly surprising, and full of subtlety and nuance, it reveals what a new and innovative idea free speech was when it was first upheld as a civilized goal in the eighteenth century—and how many extraordinary twists and turns it has taken ever since….Examining who in history could speak and who was silenced, Dabhoiwala reminds us of the crucial relationship between speech and power…a work of great profundity and brilliance.”
–William Dalrymple
Lisa Ridzén, When the Cranes Fly South
(Vintage)
“A simple yet effective meditation on mortality, love and care….Anyone anywhere who has worried for a crumbling parent, or worried about the crumble in themselves, or simply worried that their dog understood them better than their family, will identify with Ridzén’s novel and take it to heart.”
–The Guardian
Miranda Mellis, Crocosmia
(Nightboat)
“Two women, mother and daughter, move to the woods to escape dark forces that plague the mother’s dreams. What follows is an incisive and beautiful meditation on imagination and intention in the Anthropocene. An apocalypse narrative infused with hope and a domestic story that shines a light on our collective power, Crocosmia functions in conversation with Jenny Offill’s Weather and Debbie Urbanski’s After World while existing in a universe all its own…a revelation.”
–Sarah LaBrie
Åsne Seierstad, The Afghans: Three Lives Through War, Love, and Revolt
(Bloomsbury)
“Åsne Seierstad is one of the greatest, most courageous journalists of our time. While others were desperately fleeing Afghanistan, Seierstad traveled there alone to see the impact of the Taliban victory. This is an important, heartbreaking book about the limits of military power, religious fundamentalism, America’s broken promises and the profound betrayal of Afghan women.”
–Eric Schlosser
Kathleen B. Casey, The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America
(Oxford University Press)
“[E]xamines purses, pocketbooks, and handbags not through a fashion lens, but as ‘fraught but vital object[s]’ with fascinating histories. The book’s evocative case studies and contemporary images focus on working- and middle-class women and their pouches of personal items from the antebellum South through the twentieth century, uncovering how purses functioned as emblems of identity, protection, and status….A common theme is that purses have served as intimate spaces of women’s privacy and power…an impressive study.”
–Foreword Reviews
Joshua Sharpe, The Man No One Believed: The Untold Story of the Georgia Church Murders
(Norton)
“A riveting page-turner about miscarried justice, an insightful journey to a fascinating time and place, and a triumphant tale about the search for truth in our tangled legal system. With his tireless reporting, Joshua Sharpe shines a light that not even the dark waters of the Okefenokee can obscure.”
–Thomas Mullen
Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
(Doubleday)
“In his masterful and gripping account of the Iranian revolution, Scott Anderson gives us a page-turning history lesson that is more relevant than ever: A story of American diplomatic blunders and miscalculations that led to the loss of a vital ally and the commencement of hostilities that have roiled the world for nearly four decades…lays bare the folly and hubris that led to the shah’s demise, the hostage crisis and a radical theocracy that would reshape the Middle East.”
–Rajiv Chandrasekaran