The Millions’ Great Summer 2025 Book Preview

Any book can be a beach read with the right attitude. On offer this summer are a bevy of books to take seaside, or poolside, or to the park, patio, or outdoor setting of your choosing. Here you’ll find just over 100 titles out this summer that we’re excited about here at The Millions. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to dive into based on their authors or subjects. We hope you find your next great read among them.

The Millions is, alas, still on hiatus, but we’re determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim (if, at times, a bit belatedly).

, Sophia Stewart, editor

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July

I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman (Ecco)

Kreizman’s writing captures that distinctly millennial brand of malaise with refreshing wit and vigor, and her always-correct book world takes are informed by a deep love of literature. I’m looking forward to seeing these chops and more on display in her debut essay collection., Sophia M. Stewart

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn (Catapult)

Nguyen’s debut is a subversive satire and romantic romp rolled into one, following two Asian American trans women’s scheme to join a men’s pro indoor volleyball league., SMS

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House)

Shteyngart returns with the story of a precocious little girl as she searches for her birth mother, navigates her imploding family, and strives toward unending love., Eva M. Baron

Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloombsury)

Savas’s followup to her brilliant novel The Anthropologists is a collection of stories that deconstruct contemporary life through the lenses of desire, loss, and intimacy., SMS

A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart by Nishant Batsha (Ecco)

The sophomore novel from Batsha, inspired by the real-life romance of 20th-century radicals M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, tells the love story of an Indian revolutionary and Stanford grad student who fall for one another in 1917., SMS

Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie (Doubleday)

A ruthless theater critic meets his match in a struggling actress, who sets off the unraveling of his reputation after a one-night stand in Runcie’s clever tale, which also offers a piercing critique of power games and misogyny., Sam L. Spratford

Putafeminista by Monique Prada, tr. Amanda De Lisio (Feminist Press)

Brazilian sex worker and activist Prada calls for a working class women’s movement that rejects “whorephobia” and critiques current feminist discourse around sex work in this bracing manifesto., SMS

Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth (Melville House)

Howarth’s queer coming-of-age novel set in small-town Ireland in the early 1990s mines the intensity of first love (and first heartbreak) as well as the pain of being queer in a small, conservative community., SMS

Fools for Love by Helen Schulman (Knopf)

Following her 2023 novel Lucky Dogs, Schulman offers up a smart short story collection complete with a cast of characters including an East Village playwright, a precocious baby, and an American mother and French Orthodox rabbi who become lovers., EMB

The Feather Detective by Chris Sweeney (Avid Reader)

In the 1960s, Roxie Laybourne pioneered the field of forensic ornithology, which is exactly what it sounds like, using feathers to solve bird-related mysteries and crimes, from plane crashes to a racist tarring-and-feathering. Sweeney’s biography must be read to be believed., SMS

A Return to Self by Aatish Taseer (Catapult)

Part travelogue, part memoir, A Return to Self was spurred by the revocation of Taseer’s Indian citizenship in 2019, exiling him from his home of 30 years. Traveling across cities in Turkey and Mexico, he considers questions of identity, home, and why certain sites become historical epicenters., SMS

The Convenience Store by the Sea by Sonoko Machida, tr. Bruno Navasky (Putnam)

Centered on a small-town Japanese mini-mart aptly called Tenderness, Machida’s international bestseller is a heartfelt ode to community and the unassuming delights that help us all endure., SLS

Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems by Vernon Duke, tr. Boris Dralyuk (Paul Dry Books)

I’ve been reading Dralyuk’s translations of and writing about Vernon Duke for a couple years now, courtesy of his wonderful blog, and could not be more excited to see Duke’s Los Angeles poems paired with his 1995 memoir, both rendered in Dralyuk’s always-brilliant translation from the Russian., SMS

A Flower Traveled in My Blood by Haley Cohen Gilliland (Avid Reader)

Gilliland’s sweeping, rigorous narrative history tells the story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the fearless Argentine grandmothers whose pregnant daughters were disappeared and whose grandchildren were kidnapped by the government, and have much to teach us now., SMS

Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore (Tin House)

The 11 stories in Moore’s debut collection explore the lives of Black men and women in the American South, from North Carolina to Florida to Texas, who seek a sense of belonging in the oppressive shadow of history., SMS

Information Age by Cora Lewis (Joyland)

Lewis’s novella of a journalist covering technology in the late 2010s looks back on the not-so-distant early days of our dizzying digital news cycle, through the ears of one woman whose reporting and personal life meld into one noisy milieu., SLS

Blowfish by Kyung-Ran Jo, tr. Chi-Young Kim (Astra House)

A successful sculptor contemplates killing herself by eating a fatal serving of blowfish, just as her grandmother did before her, in Jo’s haunting novel., SMS

Nothing More of This Land by Joseph Lee (One Signal)

Growing up on Martha’s Vineyard, Lee found that his Wampanoag identity didn’t match what he learned about U.S. history at school. Now a journalist, he thinks about the meaning of Indigenous identity today and how one might move beyond colonial legacies., Nathalie op de Beeck

Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde (Riverhead)

Following their acclaimed debut Vagabonds!, Osunde’s sophomore novel conjures up more than two dozen multi-generational characters navigating queer life in Nigeria, who grapple with everything from the risks of authenticity to questions of death and God., SLS

Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee (Summit)

Yee weaves tragedy into comedy in her debut novel, which follows an unnamed Chinese American woman as she navigates the one-two punch of discovering her husband’s infidelity and being diagnosed with breast cancer., SMS

Pan by Michael Clune (Penguin)

A precocious teenager tries to get to the roots of his anxiety after he starts suffering from panic attacks, reading and writing his way toward an explanation, including that the Greek god Pan, from which the word panic, comes, might be trapped inside his body., SMS

Sloppy by Rax King (Vintage)

King follows up her cheeky debut Tacky with an essay collection about bad behavior, from shoplifting to drug use and abuse to mental illness, written with her characteristic wit, cheek, and sense of gallows humor., SMS

Black Genius by Tre Johnson (Dutton)

Johnson’s subversive and entertaining essays weave family and U.S. history to illuminate Black ingenuity and the “brilliance of the everyday,” from 90s airbrush graffiti tees to unassuming family traditions., SLS

The Trembling Hand by Mathelinda Nabugodi (Knopf)

Nabugodi’s new history of Romantic literature illuminates the ever-looming presence of the Atlantic slave trade in the lives and work of Shelley, Keats, and others, exemplifying the difficulty, and necessity, of facing the violent contradictions that undergird the stories we love to read and tell., SLS

An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park (Random House)

Park’s story collection perfects the tongue-in-cheek accounting of modern life that characterized his two novels, delivering a memorable cast of characters whose fates coincide at the border between mundane and strange., SLS

Time of Silence by Luis Martín-Santos, tr. Peter Bush (NYRB)

This new translation restores the most unsavory truths about Franco’s dictatorship to Martín-Santos’s darkly funny 1962 novel, which follows a Nobel-aspiring scientist through the shadows of a society that has hit rock bottom., SLS

The Dance and the Fire by Daniel Saldaña París, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Catapult)

Described as “spellbinding” by PW, Saldaña’s latest is a smoldering tale of three friends whose erotic and artistic dynamics rouse a Mexican city from its collective slumber., SLS

Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky (Pantheon)

From the editor of the satirical comics publication the Nib comes an imaginative and terrifying story of monsters both natural and supernatural, set in 2081 between a dystopian New York City and a cult in the Catskills., SLS

My Clavicle and Other Massive Misalignments by Marta Sanz, tr. Katie King (Unnamed)

Sanz’s autofictional English-language debut is a poetic meditation on illness, mortality, and writing sure to please memoir readers and mystery enthusiasts alike., SLS

Love Forms by Claire Adam (Hogarth)

In a sprawling and emotional tale of an aging woman in search of the daughter she gave up for adoption at 16, Adam probes the many ways love can shape our lives in her latest novel since her prize-winning debut Golden Child., SLS

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu (Little, Brown)

The art world is infamously cutthroat, and an endless source of inspiration for novelists. Wambugu’s debut fits squarely into this tradition, conjuring New York’s art scene in the early 1990s through the intense, competitive, and richly imagined friendship of two ambitious women., EMB

August

Solitaria by Eliana Alves Cruz, tr. Benjamin Brooks (Astra House)

In Cruz’s propulsive liberation novel, a mother and a daughter work as live-in maids in the Golden Plate, the most expensive building in an unnamed Brazilian city. While there, the duo must reckon not only with their own invisibility and dissatisfaction, but with Brazil’s legacies of colonial violence, wealth, and injustice., EMB

He Rolled Me Up Like a Grilled Squid by Yoshiharu Tsuge, tr. Ryan Holmberg (D&Q)

Manga creator Yoshiharu Tsuge, now in his 80s, had a relatively short comics career from 1965, 1987, rising to cult status but plagued by difficulties with his mental health. This collection of his work, spanning 1975, 1981, showcases Yoshiharu’s characteristic blend of the personal and the nightmarish., NodB

People Like Us by Jason Mott (Dutton)

Mott follows up his 2021 National Book Award, winning novel Hell of a Book with a surreal and intimate story about two Black writers contending with loss, longing, and gun violence., EMB

Blessings and Disasters by Alexis Okeowo (Holt)

Perhaps even more than the New Yorker writer’s journalistic chops, Okeowo’s ability to navigate, with nuance and empathy, seemingly hopeless racial divides is what makes this ground-level depiction of her home state of Alabama exceptional., SLS

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë by Graham Watson (Pegasus)

Watson’s debut biography deconstructs the Jayne Eyre author’s swift ascent to literary fame and the dueling narratives that continue to shape her legacy., SMS

The Book of Homes by Andrea Bajani, tr. Elizabeth Harris (Deep Vellum)

Bajani’s episodic, nonlinear narrative traces one man’s memories and rites of passage through a series of northern Italian homes, from infancy in 1976 to 21st-century adulthood., NodB

Moderation by Elaine Castillo (Viking)

As our world becomes more virtual, so too does romance. That shift grounds Castillo’s intriguing latest, where one of the world’s best content moderators must contend with falling in love during a digital, and increasingly isolated, era., EMB

Putting Myself Together by Jamaica Kincaid (FSG)

Intimate in scope and ambitious in subject matter, this collection gathers Kincaid’s early pieces from such publications as the New Yorker, Village Voice, and Ms., exemplifying her stylistic confidence, and evolution, across time., EMB

Friends with Words by Martha Barnette (Abrams)

A Way with Words is the only podcast I listen to, and the fact is that I would die for Martha Barnette, so I can’t wait to read her chronicle of her lifelong love of language., SMS

God and Sex by Jon Raymond (S&S)

Climate disaster, New Age writing, carnality, and meditations on God may seem an unlikely melange, but Raymond brilliantly merges each of these strands into this rigorous and probing novel about an author whose brush with a forest fire pushes him to seek a higher power., EMB

The Dilemmas of Working Women by Fumio Yamamoto, tr. Brian Bergstrom (HarperVia)

Each of the five stories in Yamamoto’s collection centers on a different woman navigating life in contemporary Japan, where the alienation of wage labor compounds with the pressure to be agreeable, maternal, and non-confrontational, patriarchal norms to which these “spiky” women cannot bend., SLS

Loved One by Aisha Muharrar (Viking)

Muharrar, a TV writer with credits on Hacks, Parks and Rec, The Good Place, and more, makes her literary debut with this story of love and loss, about a young woman who goes on an intercontinental journey to recover the belongings of her old friend and first love, who dies unexpectedly at 29., SMS

Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel (FSG)

Perhaps out of necessity, our ongoing housing crisis offers perfect fodder for fiction, or at least that’s the case for Kivel’s aptly-titled, surrealist debut. Part fairy tale, part social commentary, this innovative and wry story follows a young woman’s quest for a home when, in a world-ending twist, every renter is evicted en masse., EMB

Little World by Josephine Rowe (Transit)

Rowe’s story about various lives touched by a child saint’s corpse over space and time is lyrical, varied, and only slightly less strange than it sounds., SLS

Positive Obsession by Susana M. Morris (Amistad)

Octavia Butler was a literary trailblazer as the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction. This sweeping biography probes Butler’s legacy with both sensitivity and rigor, considering the cultural, political, and social contexts that shaped her life and writing., EMB

Black Moses by Caleb Gayle (Riverhead)

It’s a rare and satisfying experience to find a nonfiction book that balances the scope of its content with narrative coherence, without sacrificing either. Gayle’s latest carves a historical epic out of a forgotten episode in the Black separatist movement, enthralling as both a character study and a novel look at America’s racial history., SLS

Stories of the True by Jeyamohan, tr. Priyamvada Ramkumar (FSG)

With evocative, refreshing, and at times volatile prose, Jeyamohan reveals the intricacies of life in contemporary India through stories about bureaucrats, elephants, gurus, and doctors., EMB

The Dancing Face by Mike Phillips (Melville House)

In this highly original thriller, Gus, a Black university professor, plans a burglary to “liberate” a priceless Benin mask from a London museum. The result is a timely meditation on what art institutions owe us and the cultures they plunder., EMB

The Right of the People by Osita Nwanevu (Random House)

Taking up some of the most monumental political questions of our day, including the viability of America’s founding institutions, this treatise from Nwanevu, an editor at the New Republic, is essential reading for anyone who feels their hopes for democratic reform floundering., SLS

The New Lesbian Pulp ed. Sarah Fonseca and Octavia Saenz (Feminist Press)

Who doesn’t love pulp fiction, the more melodramatic the better? This collection is a heady mix of 1950s-era lesbian pulp and newer material that turns up a notch or two the classic tropes of romantic peril, unbridled passion, and revenge., Claire Kirch

Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, tr. Jeremy Tiang (Riverhead)

In this propulsive translation, a nanny witnesses a wealthy Chinese family’s fall from grace, all while knowing their darkest secrets and caring for their only son., EMB

The El by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Vintage)

Van Alst Jr.’s semi-autobiographical novel, inspired by Sol Yurick’s The Warriors, follows a group of teenage gang members in Chicago who trek across the city to attend a high-profile gathering of gangs., SMS

Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin Press)

In Chou’s clever collection, which includes short stories and a novella, features a cast of characters who invariably find themselves in extraordinary situations that shake up their sense of self and make them reconsider their place in the world., CK

The New Negro ed. Martha H. Patterson and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Princeton UP)

This anthology, coedited by the great Skip Gates, spanning 1887-1937 chronicles how generations of Black thinkers from W.E.B Du Bois to Oscar Micheaux to Zora Neale Hurston conceptualized and debated the idea of the “New Negro.”, SMS

The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus (Hogarth)

Antrobus’s memoir untangles his knotty relationship to his own deafness, exploring the “missing sounds” that shaped his life and the sense of in-betweenness that long defined both his aural ability and racial identity., SMS

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens (FSG)

The debut novel from the inaugural FSG Writer’s Fellow is a Black Southern family drama that wrestles with sin, silence, and patriarchy in a small Mississippi town., SMS

Mounted by Bitter Kalli (HarperOne)

As Beyoncé and others push us to reconsider the legacy of the cowboy, Kalli explores how intertwined Blackness, nationhood, and horses have been throughout history., EMB

Patchwork by Tom Comitta (Coffee House)

For fans of Burroughs’s cut-up tradition, Comitta’s latest is a fresh experiment in the limits of literary collage. Using illustrations and passages from classic literature, the Nature Book author fashions a playful story about the search for a missing snuff box, full of sensory surprises and curiosities of craft., SLS

Archipelago by Natalie Bakopoulos (Tin House)

This atmospherically rich book, which follows an unnamed translator at an artists’ residency on a Croatian island, is also chock-full of thought-provoking commentary on authorship and creative identity., SLS

Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs (FSG)

Boggs’s door-stopper of a biography, the first of Baldwin in three decades, examines how the visionary author’s intimate and artistic relationships with four men shaped his life and work., SMS

Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers (Hub City)

Wohlers’s debut novel follows a young woman who arrives at her late grandfather’s apple orchard with the intention of giving up her painting career and social life in order to become one with the trees, until the appearance of an old friend upends her plans., SMS

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)

Marking the first time in two decades that Toews has written about her own life in nonfiction, this memoir is a poignant meditation upon her sister’s suicide, the urge to write, and the limits of memory., EMB

Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles (Picador)

Bowles’s 1943 novel, her only one, now with a new introduction from Sheila Heti, is a modernist tale about two upper-class women who eschew convention and embrace debauchery., SMS

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang (HarperCollins)

Fans of Babel will not be disappointed by Kuang’s latest dark-academia epic, which follows an honors graduate student in “Analytical Magick” and her rival as they embark on a Dantesque journey to rescue her advisor from the underworld., SLS

Such Great Heights by Chris DeVille (St. Martin’s)

This cultural history of the indie rock explosion, from Neutral Milk Hotel and Death Cab to Sufjan and the National, would have blown my teenage self’s mind. It is total catnip to adult-me as well., SMS

September

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner)

In electrifying, intimate prose, Roy’s first memoir traces the her complex relationship with her mother, Mary and how it shaped the person, and writer, she ultimately became., EMB

The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda, tr. Polly Barton (Europa)

Following her last collection Where the Wild Ladies Are, Matsuda’s latest stays focused on the absurdities and traumas of sexism in Japan, presenting 52 fresh, subversive stories that call to mind Shirley Jackson’s short works., SLS

Trip by Amie Barrodale (FSG)

Barrodale’s debut novel follows Sandra, who dies suddenly at a death conference in Nepal and must set off on a quest in the afterlife to help her son, who is both literally and metaphorically lost at sea., SMS

Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Astra House)

Magic, humor, and faith ground Lozada-Oliva’s story collection, which features beheaded bodies, bizarre video games, sentient tails, and haunted punk houses., EMB

Miss Ruki by Fumiko Takano, tr. Alexa Frank (NYRC)

Frank’s translation brings this lighthearted manga into English for the first time. Originally published in Japan in the 1980s, the eponymous protagonist is an offbeat young woman who rejects the rat race for a slower, more intentional life., SLS

The Improbable Victoria Woodhull by Eden Collinsworth (Doubleday)

At once celebrated and maligned, the 19th-century businesswoman and activist at the center of Collinsworth’s biography dipped her toe in everything from mysticism to free love to an unprecedented presidential campaign., EMB

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, tr. Martin Aitken (ND)

An unlikely narrator guides this visceral horror story: a wax doll created by an unmarried noblewoman accused of witchcraft. Through the eyes of this doll, we witness, with startling clarity, the brutality and fear that ruled 17th-century Denmark., EMB

Grace Period by Maria Judite de Carvalho, tr. Margaret Jull Costa (Two Lines)

When de Carvalho’s protagonist sets out to sell his childhood home to fund a trip for his dying girlfriend, he is forced to reckon with the 25 out-of-control years that separate him from his past, which is full of paralyzing love, pain, and apathy., VMS

Reflections on Exile by Edward W. Said (Vintage)

This reissue of selected essays by the great scholar and critic Said, which features the particularly salient title essay on the fate of the Palestinian people, is just the book we need right now., SMS

Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela (Viking)

As polyamory and open relationships gain cultural relevance, Varela’s subversive and generous novel considers the sting of rejection and heartbreak from the perspective of its married narrator who has just been dumped by his younger boyfriend., EMB

Tracker by Alexis Wright (ND)

Decorated novelist Wright returns to nonfiction with a portrait of an influential Aboriginal Australian leader conveyed through collective storytelling, providing a window into Aboriginal culture as it narrates a moment in 20th-century Australian politics., SLS

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym (NYRB)

Pym’s shrewd and ahead-of-its-time 1978 novel about a women’s attachment to a much younger man is back in a new edition from NYRB, featuring an intro from Loved and Missed author Susie Boyt., SMS

Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman (Coffee House)

The country home around which Goodman’s story coalesces is no ordinary haunted house. Through the eyes of a male protagonist, readers feel the titular spirit Helen at once as an intimately tangible presence and a harbinger of the existential stakes of starting one’s life over again., VMS

The Animal on the Rock by Daniela Tarazona, tr. Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn (Deep Vellum)

After the death of her mother, a woman named Irma holes up on a faraway beach to grieve and, the process, undergoes a supernatural metamorphosis in the Mexican author’s latest., SMS

A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco (Tin House)

Vanasco’s memoir looks at how silence is wielded and weaponized through the lens of her own complicated relationship with her mother., SMS

The Lack of Light by Nino Haratischwili, tr. Charlotte Collin and Ruth Martin (HarperVia)

This sprawling, densely populated saga charts the lead-up to and fallout from Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union through the lives of four childhood friends., SMS

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (Mariner)

The brilliant sophomore novel from the National Book Award finalist follows five Black women across two decades as they attempt to shape their lives on their own terms., VMS

Surviving Paris by Robin Allison Davis (Amistad)

We’ve all dreamed of escaping to Paris and living “la vie en rose.” Davis, a Black woman and journalist, has written a memoir of how she did just that, but things did not go exactly as she’d hoped: Davis was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to contend with it far away from her loved ones, all while trying to find her way amid a foreign culture., CK

Bird School by Adam Nicolson (FSG)

It’s a slippery slope from looking up a little brown bird on Cornell’s Merlin app to becoming an all-season birder. For Nicolson, a recognition of nesting species led to setting up a shed to watch wildlife year round. The book’s British setting covers only a narrow range of birds, but its sentiments are universal; the world might have greater peace and sounder environmental policies if everyone took up birding., NodB

Animal Stories by Kate Zambreno (Transit)

Zambreno is one of our most inventive and formally daring writers, and their latest work of nonfiction, a meditation on mortality, alienation, boredom, surveillance, and the animal kingdom, sees them at the height of their powers., SMS

Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond (D&Q)

Pond crafts a graphic narrative biography of the six Mitford sisters, among them writers Jessica and Nancy. Raised in a deteriorating English country manse, the early 20th-century socialites were known for differences of opinion around Empire and fascism. Pond paints the upper crust scene in prim navy, cool periwinkle, and powder blue., NodB

Kaplan’s Plot by Jason Diamond (Flatiron)

Centered on a son who returns to Chicago to be with his dying mother, Diamond’s debut novel is a stunning story of how families bend to accommodate the unspoken, and how, every once in a while, a tenacious individual might straighten things out., VMS

Articulate by Rachel Kolb (Ecco)

The deaf writer’s deft debut memoir probes the many meanings of language, voice, and communication through the lens of her own attempts to harness speech and be perceived as “articulate.”, SMS

For the Sun After Long Nights by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy (Pantheon)

Iranian journalists Jamalpour and Tabrizy chronicle the 2022 women-led protests in Iran over the murder of Kurdish woman Mahsa Jîna Amini at the hands of police, catalyzing one of the country’s largest uprisings in decades: the Woman, Life, Freedom movement., SMS

The Waterbearers by Sasha Bonét (Knopf)

Bonét’s profound ode to Black womanhood narrates the history of America through generations of Black mothers and daughters, including her own., SMS

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (Vintage)

When Marisa goes on a company retreat with her unhinged coworkers, the lies she’s built her whole successful, fine-art-appreciating persona around are threatened to be exposed. What ensues is like a car crash you can’t look away from, if a car crash was as hilarious and well-crafted as Serrano’s writing., SLS

It’s Me They Follow by Jeannine Cook (Amistad)

Cook, founder and owner of the beloved Harriett’s Bookshop in Philly, debuts with a romance starring a bookseller who becomes a reluctant matchmaker., SMS

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead)

After a bout with Covid, a successful author reckons with a dissolving sense of self and struggles to maintain her public persona, in this fictive exploration of consciousness. The No One Is Talking About This author conveys her protagonist’s dissociation and memory loss, heightened when her husband becomes ill and requires her care., NodB

Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp (Knopf)

The state of the world seems uniquely grim today, but haven’t people always thought so? Kemp’s sweeping survey charts the surprising history of societal collapse, bringing some (not always comforting) perspective to our own troubling reality., SMS

We Love You Bunny by Mona Awad (S&S/Marysue Rucci)

Awad returns with another darkly comedic novel set in the “Bunny-verse,” after her 2019 cult classic Bunny, about a lonely MFA student who gets seduced by a creepy clique., SMS

Electric Spark by Frances Wilson (FSG)

The enigmatic Scottish writer Muriel Spark gets her due in Wilson’s illuminating biography, which aims to demystify its stubbornly elusive but endlessly fascinating subject., SMS

Beings by Ilana Masad (Bloomsbury)

Masad’s second novel, after All My Mother’s Lovers, weaves together three narratives, two set in the 1960s and one in the present, of love, loneliness, and supernatural encounters., SMS

Cécé by Emmelie Prophète, tr. Aidan Rooney (Archipelago)

Immersed in the atmosphere and people of a Haitian cité, Prophète’s titular protagonist attempts to claw a life for herself out of the hands of gangs, junkies, grandmothers, and preachers. With her morbid internet following on one side and the pressures of sex work on the other, Cécé is an imperfect and deeply human testament to female resiliency., SLS

The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin (Dorothy)

Taking inspiration from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Lin chronicles her partner Lan Thao’s life and work in this genre-defying portrait., SMS

To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage (Avid)

Ramage’s ambitious and big-hearted debut novel follows one young woman across three decades and multiple continents on her quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut., SMS

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