August 1
Time’s Mouth
by Edan Lepucki [F]
The latest from Lepucki (a Millions alumn!) is a quintessentially California novel, spanning the dense forests of Santa Cruz and the urban sprawl of Los Angeles. Centering on Ursa, who can (sort of) time travel and is drawn early on into an all-women cult (I’m listening), Time’s Mouth wrestles with memory, inheritance, and whether we can ever be extricated from our past. —SMS
Mobility
by Lydia Kiesling [F]
The sophomore novel by Kiesling (another Millions alum!) is a story of class, power, and climate change, as well as American complicity and inertia. Kiesling is one of the best writers working today, and the Namwali Serpell calls this latest book a “deeply engrossing and politically astute tale,” so this one is especially hotly anticipated over at Millions HQ (by which I mean me). —SMS
The Lookback Window
by Kyle Dillon Hertz [F]
Dylan has long kept the formative trauma of his teenage years—being sex trafficked at the hands of a troubled young man—buried, hiding his secret even from his new husband, Moans. But with the passage of the Child Victims Act, Dylan revisits his painful past in order to seek justice and move forward. With little more than memory to go on, will Dylan find justice on his own terms? Or will the search just traumatize him further? Robert Jones, Jr. praises Hertz’s debut as possessing a “fierce and psychedelic honesty reminiscent of Joan Didion‘s best work.” —LA
Walk the Darkness Down
by Daniel Magariel [F]
Following the death of her daughter Angie, Marlene copes with her grief by frequenting the Villas, a dilapidated district where sex workers convene at night. There, she meets Josie, a prostitute who becomes her surrogate daughter. Meanwhile, her drug-addict husband Les is quite literally “at sea,” burying himself in his work as a commercial fisherman. As Josie and Les dive further into their respective worlds, they find an unexpected path forward in their troubled marriage. Hernan Diaz says Mageriel’s novel “rages like a beautiful tempest,” and Annie Proulx counts herself as an admirer of Magariel’s “fine writing.” —LA
Las Madres
by Esmeralda Santiago [F]
The author of the iconic 1993 autobiography When I Was Puerto Rican returns with a novel that moves between Puerto Rico and the Bronx, centering on two generations of women: close-knit group who call themselves “las Madres,” beginning in the 1970s, and their daughters, in present day. Santiago has made her name shining a light on Puerto Rican and Nuyorican life through both nonfiction and fiction, with this latest novel continuing that project. —LF
Family Lore
by Elizabeth Acevedo [F]
Acevedo, who won the National Book Award for her YA novel-in-verse The Poet X, makes her adult debut with this novel of sisterhood, inheritance, and diaspora. The story centers on the women of one Dominican American family who discover secrets that bind them to one another. Julia Alvarez and Jaqueline Woodson are fans, and Kiese Laymon, one of our greatest living writers, calls this one “perfectly crafted and tightly drawn,” adding: “This is how stories should be made.” —SMS
Tom Lake
by Ann Patchett [F]
If anyone can pull off an actually-good pandemic novel, it’s Patchett. Tom Lake centers on a mother and her three daughters, cooped up at home in early 2020, as the mother tells the story of a famous actor with whom she once shared the stage—and a bed. It’s strange to think that our parents were people before we were born, and Patchett’s latest covers that fertile narrative ground with aplomb. —LF
Anansi’s Gold
by Yepoka Yeebo [NF]
In her first book, Yeebo chases an infamous Ghanian conman, John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who pulled off one of the 20th century’s longest-running frauds, living in luxury, fooling everyone, and making millions, all while evading the FBI for years. How long until this book becomes an HBO miniseries starring Isiah Whitlock Jr.? Only time will tell. —SMS
Witness
by Jamel Brinkley [F]
Brinkley is one of the best writers of short fiction around right now, with Yiyun Li comparing him to “iconic short-story writers [like] Edward P. Jones and Mavis Gallant.” His sophomore collection, following 2018’s Lucky Man, comprises 10 stories about life, death, and city-dwelling. I’ll read anything FSG publishes anyway, but Witness in particular looks like a real gem. —SMS
The Plague
by Jacqueline Rose [NF]
Rose, also the author of On Violence and On Violence Against Women, refracts the experience of the pandemic through the work of Camus, Freud, and Simone Weil, using their politics and private griefs as windows into our present moment. A slim volume that, knowing Rose, will have some serious intellectual heft. —SMS
Dark Days: Fugitive Essays
by Roger Reeves [NF]
In his nonfiction debut, poet Roger Reeves combines memoir, theory, and criticism to study race, freedom, and literature. Cathy Park Hong praises Reeves’s “dazzling intellect” whose insights “have truly changed my way of thinking”—I can’t think of a more ringing endorsement from a more reputable endorser. —SMS
The Men Can’t Be Saved
by Ben Purkert [F]
In his debut novel, Purkert asks: What do our jobs do to our souls? Ignoring how upsettingly close to home this question hits, this book sounds like a knockout, following a junior copywriter who is let go from his job but can’t seem to let go of his job. Purket chips away at the ugly, entwined hearts of masculinity and capitalism in what Clint Smith called “a phenomenal debut novel by one of my favorite writers.” —SMS
Pulling the Chariot of the Sun
by Shane McCrae [NF]
McCrae, a decorated poet, recounts being kidnapped from his Black father by his white supremacist maternal grandparents. His heritage hidden, memories distorted, and life carefully controlled, McCrae’s painful childhood allow allows him insights into the racial wounds and violence that permeate this country. A stirring, harrowing personal narrative and cultural indictment. —LF
The Apology
by Jimin Han [F]
I’ve been curious about Han’s multigenerational saga ever since Alexander Chee shouted it out in his 2022 Year in Reading entry. So I’ll give Chee the floor: “Han’s novel, set in Korea and America, is about an ajumma who is determined to keep taking care of her family from beyond the grave, whether they want her to or not. It’s also a great novel to read if you ever wanted, say, more novels from Iris Murdoch (I am like this).” —SMS
The Visionaries
by Wolfram Eilenberger [NF]
De Beauvoir. Arendt. Weil. Rand. These four philosophers are the subjects of Eilenberger’s ambitious group biography and intellectual history, rooted in these women’s parallel ideas and intersecting lives, both of which were largely shaped by WWII. I’ve long been fascinated by each of these thinkers separately, and I can’t wait to see how Eilenberger synthesizes their philosophies and probes the connections between them. —SMS
I Will Greet the Sun Again
by Khashayar J. Khabushani [F]
Khabushani’s poignant debut follows K, an Iranian boy growing up in Los Angeles. Against the backdrop of his father’s destructive ways—gambling coupled with physical and sexual abuse—K struggles to accept his sexuality in light of his Muslim identity. After 9/11, K faces rampant Islamophobia and dreams of becoming “the American boy I want to be.” Megha Majumdar calls this bildungsroman “a marvel…. Reading it, I felt the thrill and joy of encountering a major writer at the beginning of his career.” —LA
August 8
I Hear You’re Rich
by Diane Williams [F]
In her latest collection, Williams, the godmother of flash fiction, delivers 33 short stories that offer glimpses into the mundane and exhilarating beauty of everyday life. Lydia Davis and Merve Emre (who once called Williams “the writer who saved my life—or my soul, if one believes such a thing exists”) count themselves as megafans, and for good reason. —DF
Hangman
by Maya Binyam [F]
Binyam, a contributing editor at The Paris Review, makes her debut with a strange and searching novel about exile, diaspora, and the quest for Black refuge in the U.S. and beyond. Tavi Gevinson and Maaza Mengiste gave this one lots of love, and Namwali Serpell hails Hangman as a “strikingly masterful debut” that is “clean, sharp, piercing.” —LF
Tomb Sweeping
by Alexandra Chang [F]
Chang follows up her much-loved debut novel Days of Distraction with a story collection that spans the U.S. and Asia, chronicling the lives of immigrant families and expectant parents, housewives and grocery clerks, strangers and neighbors and more. Jason Mott and Raven Leilani both blurbed, but what takes the cake is the endorsement from George Saunders, who calls Chang “a riveting and exciting presence in our literature.” —LF
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride [F]
McBride appears incapable of writing a book that’s not a massive success. Following Deacon King Kong (an Oprah’s Book Club pick), The Good Lord Bird (a National Book Award winner), and The Color of Water (which has sold more than 2.1 million copies worldwide), one wonders if McBride was at all daunted by his own track record when he started work on The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a novel about the entwined destinies of people living on the margins of a small Pennsylvania town in 1972. Either way, he has yet to miss, so his latest will surely be another triumph. —LF
How to Care for a Human Girl
by Ashley Wurzbacher [F]
Wurzbacher’s debut novel follows two sisters who become unexpectedly pregnant—and simultaneously have to decide whether or not they will see those pregnancies through. Wurzbacher, also the author of the story collection Happy Like This, explores “the battle between the head, the heart, and the body” that all women experience, in the words of Michelle Hart, positing that “even in the grips of indecision women must get to decide their own lives.” —LA
Liquid Snakes
by Stephen Kearse [F]
In his second novel, Kearse poses a timely question: What if toxic pollution traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? Mourning his stillborn daughter, killed by toxins planted in Black neighborhoods by the government, one man decides to take justice into his own hands. Hannah Gold calls this “a brilliant novel that manages to be, among other things, a pharmacological thriller and an incisive meditation on the poison-pen letter.” —SMS
August 15
Thin Skin
by Jenn Shapland [NF]
Shapland’s first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was stellar, and her latest, an essay collection on capitalism’s creep into our bodies, minds, and land, looks great. Shapland is especially attuned to the porousness that characterizes modern life, having been diagnosed with extreme dermatologic sensitivity—literal thin skin. Alexander Chee calls this a “wrenching, loving, and trenchant examination” of everything from healthcare and nuclear weapons to queerness and feminism. —SMS
August Wilson: A Life
by Patti Hartigan [NF]
Not only is this the first authoritative biography of Wilson—its author actually knew the influential playwright, interviewing him many times before his death in 2005. Hartigan, an award-winning theater critic and art reporter, doesn’t just recount Wilson’s life but analyzes his work, studying his use of history, memory, and vernacular in such indelible plays as Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. A much-needed record of Wilson’s life and work that will help secure his legacy and introduce him to future generations. —LF
The Quickening
by Elizabeth Rush [NF]
In this follow-up to the Pulitzer-nominated Rising, Rush watches the world melt. Chronicling a months-long journey to the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, she and a group of scientists study how climate change is changing our planet—and what this means for our future. But she’s also thinking about her own future: she wants to become a mother. But is it ethical to bring a kid into the world right now? This, and many other salient questions, propel the book. —SMS
The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life
by Clare Carlisle [NF]
We all know Eliot as a genius novelist—but what about as a formidable philosophical mind? In a new study of the Middlemarch author, Carlisle tries to deliver a fuller portrait of Eliot as a woman and a thinker, for whom the question of marriage was particularly salient to her life and work. Carlisle, a brilliant philosophical mind herself, is perfectly matched to her subject here. The kind of book you savor page by page. —SMS
Bee Sting
by Paul Murray [F]
Perhaps best known for his 2010 tragicomic novel Skippy Dies, Murray returns with a story of family, fortune, and what it means—or whether it’s even possible—to be a good person amid societal upheaval (or collapse, depending on how you look at it). As four members of a fairly ordinary family come up against twists of fate in various and sometimes life-changing ways, Murray chronicles their diverging trajectories in what Emily Temple calls “cool-water prose mixed with his trademark wry darkness.” —SMS
August 22
Daughter of the Dragon
by Yunte Huang [NF]
As a lover of Old Hollywood, I practically lept out of my seat when mention of this biography began circulating among my fellow cinephiles. Huang dazzles with a modern reevaluation of the life and career of Hollywood’s first Chinese-American film star, Anna May Wong, detailing the all too common racism, sexism, and ageism that ran rampant through Hollywood (and still does, for that matter). Unsurprisingly, that story is brimming with juicy tidbits, like the fact that both Walter Benjamin and Marlene Detrich harbored massive crushes on Wong. —DF
Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington
by Joanna Moorhead [NF]
In this illustrated biography, the brilliant artist and writer Leonora Carrington—a Surrealist practitioner and vanguard among women painters—finally gets her due. Her fiction (beloved by everyone from Luis Buñel to Sheila Heti) has been resurrected thanks to the valiant efforts of the New York Review of Books and its Dorothy Project, and with this biography published by Princeton UP, her equally dramatic life story will have its moment in the sun too. —SMS
Swim Home to the Vanished
by Brendan Shay Basham [F]
Damien, a young Diné man, retreats to a small fishing village in search of solace following his younger brother’s death. There, he meets two sisters who are also grieving the loss of their younger sister—and believe their mother, Ana María, is to blame for her death. With the town in the palm of her hand (and some possible magical powers to boot), Ana María proves herself to be a formidable foe, but the grief-stricken Damien questions whether to get involved with the sisters’ vengeance. Tommy Orange applauds Basham as “an incandescent new voice full of my kind of melancholic brilliance and unromantic magic.” —LA
Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life
by Anna Funder [NF]
The lives of literary wives have come under renewed scrutiny in reason years, and thank goodness for that. (See: Vera Nabokov, Nora Joyce, every woman in Carmela Ciuraru‘s Lives of the Wives.) So I’m thrilled to see Eileen O’Shaughnessy emerge from the shadows in Wifedom, which reveals the integral part she played in husband George Orwell‘s work, as well as her own merit as a writer. Funder asks: Are the roles of wife and writer forever at odds? —SMS
They Called Us Exceptional
by Prachi Gupta [NF]
Journalist Prachi Gupta grew up in a family that epitomized the “model minority myth.” Her father is a doctor, and Gupta and her siblings followed suit by excelling in school. But Gupta, perhaps best known 2016 interview with Ivanka Trump, sees now that the the quest for excellence and pressures of perfection irreparably harmed her family. Blending personal narrative with history, psychology, and postcolonial theory, Gupta explores how the American Dream warped and fractured the bonds shared by her parents and siblings. —LA
August 29
Holler, Child
by LaToya Watkins [F]
Following up her debut novel Perish, Watkins delivers an 11-story collection that foregrounds the family and turns on loss, hope, reconciliation, and freedom. Per Deesha Philyaw, “Every story, every character, every line of LaToya Watkins’s Holler, Child is a revelation.” As is most of what Watkins writes—be sure to check out this stunning essay she wrote for us just last year. —LF
Dialogue with a Somnambulist
by Chloe Aridjis [NF/F]
Come and take a lap with Aridjis, most recently the author of Sea Monsters, as she guides us through this murky daydream of a book. In this collection of stories and essays, Aridjis’s muses are both quotidian and uncanny: a plastic bag drifting through the wind (a la Katy Perry), a sea-monkey-eating grandma, astronauts in existential crisis. Interested yet? Well, try this on for size—the Deborah Levy calls the book an assortment of “sublime treasures from one of our boldest writers.” —DF
Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare
by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto [F]
Per Elizabeth McCracken, this one is “a knockout. 11 knockouts, one KO for every story.” (Man, she’s good at blurbing.) Indeed Kakimoto’s debut collection tells 11 stories of contemporary Hawaiian identity, mythology, and womanhood. Unruly sexuality, generational memory, and the ghosts of colonization collide in what promises to be an auspicious short-fiction debut. —SMS
Terrace Story
by Hilary Leichter [F]
Based on her award-winning story in Harper’s Magazine, Leichter’s second novel centers on a family who discovers a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet—and must contend with the repercussions of their discovery. In Terrace Story, blurbed and beloved by Jessamine Chan and Hernan Diaz, Leichter asks: How can we possibly nurture love with death always hanging overhead? —LF
