August 19, 2025, 4:58am

Hi, everyone. Just a brief introduction this week, as I’m dealing with loss, but don’t let that brevity distract or detract from the brilliant new offerings below. You’ll find exciting new biographies of famous figures, powerful debuts, intriguing new novels from promising voices, devastating satires, and cultural reframings.

Enjoy and be safe, everyone.

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Kate Riley, Ruth
(Riverhead)

“[Ruth] claims a place on that high modern shelf next to the offbeat books of Ottessa Moshfegh, Sheila Heti, Elif Batuman and Nell Zink—those possessors of wrinkled comic sensibilities rooted in pain….Ruth is in touch with the oldest and darkest things in our makeup, yet revels in a very modern sense of what Riley calls ‘brainy female despair.’ Under Riley’s author photograph, on the back flap, a sentence reads: ‘This is her last book.’ I hope that’s not so.”
–Dwight Garner

Addie E. Citchens, Dominion
(FSG)

“This is one hell of a novel. Dominion is about two women who see what they want to see, until they no longer can. The storytelling is layered and beautiful and ugly at the same time, and beneath the story there is the other story about small communities and secrets and powers and how feeling like you have to live up to unspoken expectations can destroy you and everyone around you from the inside out…absolutely outstanding. Once I entered this world I didn’t want to leave.”
–Roxane Gay

Natalie Bakopoulos, Archipelago
(Tin House)

“Archipelago is a gorgeous, haunting novel about translation, narrative, and the slippage between selves: who we are and who others believe us to be. We follow our narrator-traveler on her dreamlike journey, from one achingly beautiful setting to another, from one memory to another, tantalized and unsettled by her every encounter. With this novel Bakopoulos weaves a spell and a mystery and makes something wholly her own.”
–Lydia Kiesling

Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story
(FSG)

“Nicholas Boggs’s meticulously researched and passionately written Baldwin is the crown jewel of the ongoing James Baldwin revival. Boggs, in seamless fashion, vividly recounts the personal life of America’s brave Black novelist, essayist, gay liberation oracle, and civil rights activist. Replete with freshly unearthed revelations about Baldwin’s intimate relationships, this epic biography captures Baldwin in full. Highly recommended!”
–Douglas Brinkley

Susana M. Morris, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
(Amistad)

“It’s not simply that Positive Obsession brilliantly explores the threads of the life of Octavia Butler; it’s the way Susana Morris artfully unwinds this life, creating a kind of almost gothic, futuristic, mystery as much as it is biography. I thought I knew Butler and her work. Morris showed me, in the most profound ways, that I knew neither.”
–Kiese Laymon

Kaila Yu, Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty
(Crown)

“Yu is fearless and unflinchingly self-aware. Bringing nuance to our understanding of Asian fetishization, Yu unveils not only her victimization but her participation and, ultimately, her healing and empowerment from the brutality of objectification. In this courageous memoir, Yu has become the role model her younger self was looking for.”
–Bianca Mabute-Louie

Mark Doten, Whites
(Graywolf)

“These venomous, discomforting stories may soon feel “of their time,” but what a time. Imagine the white malaise of Sam Lipsyte and the heightened satire of Gary Shteyngart shot through with a tab of Mark Leyner’s hyperstylized metafiction. Maybe that’s the right frame of mind to ask what white people are really made of, these days. A consciously caustic critique of white fragility that means to leave a mark.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Tom Comitta, Patchwork
(Coffee House Press)

“When the lights go dark, I take comfort in knowing we will always have Tom Comitta’s art. Their new book, Patchwork, is quite simply wondrous: it’s like the love child of a Yorgos Lanthimos film and Anne Carson’s poems, with a wild corner of a Hieronymous Bosch painting peering over your shoulder. Every page is filled with enormous heartbreak and danger but also with enormous love and technicolor–a book that flies into your dreams and plucks magic from deep down.”
–Paul Yoon

Elaine Hsieh Chou, Where Are You Really From: Stories
(Penguin Press)

“Following Chou’s successful debut novel, Disorientation, comes a collection of six stories and a novella, all featuring intriguing Asian and Asian American characters….Chou’s writing maintains its humor while touching on serious, even taboo topics, such as interracial adoption, ethnocentrism, sex work, and fidelity….Chou establishes herself as a writer to watch with another thought-provoking offering.”
–Library Journal

Bitter Kalli, Mounted: On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation
(Amistad)

“Mounted comprehensively re-historicizes the horse in the Americas. Across centuries and art forms, Kalli locates horses, but also their Black riders—from Jamaican dancehall and Beyoncé to Black diasporic spiritual practices and queer forms, to Boots Riley and Frederick Douglass—nothing is left out. I’m so happy to have a book so encyclopedic in its study of how horses power our Black, cultural mythos.”
–Joy Priest

Peter Cozzens, Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West
(Knopf)

“How did such a small, remote speck of a place come to loom so large in American lore and myth? With Peter Cozzens’ artful book, we get the answer. In these pungent pages, you can smell the whiskey, the gunsmoke, the horse lather, the gold dust, and the mining chemicals. And you start to see Deadwood as something more, as a node of raw avarice and frank ambition reflecting larger American impulses that are still alive today…a [book]…as alluring as its subject.”
–Hampton Sides

Garrett M. Graff, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb
(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

“The power of Graff’s oral history is the diversity of voices he relies upon…a comprehensive account…focuses not just on the voices of scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller…[but] also…overlooked pieces of the Manhattan Project’s history, such as how segregation affected life at Oak Ridge. But the most powerful portions come in the final chapters….No writer could describe better the hellscape that the bombs unleashed better than those…who survived it.”
–Associated Press

Isabel Cañas, The Possession of Alba Díaz
(Berkley)

“Isabel Cañas’s third novel, a horror-romance mashup about the sins of imperialism, is astoundingly creepy, but it describes love and lust as clearly as it does the closing-in walls of a demonic silver mine so dark and claustrophobic that it swallows Alba’s words whole. It’s a nauseating pleasure to read.”
–Vulture

Melissa Pace, The Once and Future Me
(Holt)

“A cinematic ride….One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets The Hunger Games—and what an offspring!”
–Kirkus Reviews

Winnie M. Li, What We Left Unsaid
(Atria/Emily Bestler)

“Winnie Li’s What We Left Unsaid is a perfect post-pandemic reflection from the eyes of Chinese American siblings. Every note rings true as we travel with Bonnie, Kevin, and Alex on Route 66 while they unearth a devastating family secret, leading them to finally understand what it means to be a twenty-first century Asian American.”
–Naomi Hirahara

Nicole Nehrig, With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories
(Norton)

“With Her Own Hands gives such a sumptuous insight into the profundity of simple threads. Rich with stories from so many cultures, Nehrig shows how the creation and embellishment of textiles not just gave a voice to those who were allowed none–but also power, hope, and fortitude across the ages.”
–Aarathi Prasad

Jack Hartnell, Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image
(Princeton University Press)

“Hartnell’s revelatory research and plethora of macabre illustrations make the book an unexpected treasure: It shines as both a morbid medical history and a curious record of the early years of information graphics. [Wound Man is] an uncanny history of a classical oddity.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Christopher Whitcomb, Anonymous Male: A Life Among Spies
(Random House)

“Whitcomb’s last book…recounted his escapades in the 1990s as a sniper on the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team….In his new book, he invites readers on a roller-coaster ride through his life’s evolving pursuits, from his childhood on a New Hampshire farm to conflict-resolution G-man and then aspiring foreign correspondent….A deftly written romp through the fantastical world of federal agents, warlords, journalists, and the men who bankroll them.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Hamid Ismailov, We Computers: A Ghazal Novel
(Yale University Press)

“Ismailov’s best novel yet, We Computers braids together exquisite classical and modern poetry, disorienting autofiction, and Oulipian metaliterary trickery, without ever losing its sense of fun. Fairweather-Vega’s translation handles the multilingual quotations and protean range of pastiche with remarkable deftness.”
–Samuel Hodgkin

Rachael Herron, The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland
(Grand Central Publishing)

“Complex relationships between family and friends are explored, and plenty of self-reflection and personal growth add depth to those connections. The characters are inclusive in their range of sexual orientation and gender experiences. The strong, small-town setting increases the feeling of being in a magical bubble. A good choice for fans of Karen White, Alice Hoffman, and books featuring magical realism with a touch of romance.”
–Booklist