Our Most Anticipated Books of July 2023
Every book Kate Zambreno writes changes the game forever after and The Light Room is no exception. A memoir of motherhood that is as much a philosophical treatise on community and conversation with writers from Natalia Ginzburg to Yūko Tsushima.
Need a little summertime pick-me-up? Look no further than the Morisaki Bookshop! After a soul-crushing breakup, Takako makes a fresh start working at her uncle's used bookshop, falling in love with literature and forging new friendships at the nearby coffeeshop.
A groundbreaking debut collection portraying the lived experiences of Black Muslims grappling with faith, family, and freedom in America. With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion, nuance and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it’s the errors that make us human.
A kaleidoscopic, playful reimaging of the lives of the three Brontë sisters (and their brother, Branwell), Half-Life of a Stolen Sister is in turns a fact-based historical portrait, an alternate-universe timeline, and a wholly original novel. Perfect for fans of Rivka Galchen and Katherine Dunn.
"Where can a person living on a melting planet turn, at least before the spaceship fleet is ready, for enlightenment? I’d start, and finish, with David Lipsky’s brilliant epic The Parrot and the Igloo, which I devoured in a single, feverish, page-turning sitting, a perspective-altering dream, a story told in language as sharp and clear as the spring air we knew before all the carbon was released.… You will stare out the same windows when you've finished, but nothing will look the same."
— Rich Cohen, author of Sweet and Low and Monsters
New York Times bestselling author and art critic Laura Cumming reveals the fascinating, little-known story of the Thunderclap—the massive explosion at a gunpowder store in Holland that killed Carel Fabritius, renowned painter of The Goldfinch and nearly killed Johannes Vermeer, painter of Girl with a Pearl Earring—two of the greatest artists of the 17th century.
Listen, if you're not reading Colson Whitehead yet, what are you even doing? You're fixing that, that's what you're doing. Whitehead-heads and the uninitiated alike will revel in this latest novel, a portrait of 1970s Harlem painted in his signature rich, dark humor that makes harsh truths go down smooth.
One Thousand and One Nights meets Circe in this "sumptuous, delicious novel infused with the joys of storytelling" (Leila Aboulela). Set during the third crusade, Every Rising Sun features the fabled Shaherazade in her own words, this time, telling her own story. A beautiful debut novel that is a love letter to the medieval Isalmic world.
In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and marked one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England’s coast with a plastic fish tag. Fourteen years later that fish—dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys—died in a Mediterranean fish trap, sparking Karen Pinchin’s riveting investigation into the marvels, struggles, and prehistoric legacy of this remarkable species.
“A mother’s adoration of her only child might be commonplace, but it is never simple. Hila Blum explores one particular mother-daughter relationship with remarkable acuity. Her novel takes us on a suspenseful psychological journey as she plumbs a great mystery: how the purest maternal love can lead to the most unwanted and even disastrous consequences.”
—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through
A yet-untranslated essay collection on the importance of critical thought, from one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals of the 1990s. Wang Xiaobo’s Pleasure of Thinking is an essay collection as riotous as it is contemplative. Between rollicking anecdotes about living between the East and West and serious musings on the intellectual situations at home and abroad, Xiaobo examines modern life with the levity missing from so much of today’s politico-cultural discourse.
In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers and teachers.
Recent blog posts
- New Halloween Reads for Kids
- Our Most Anticipated Books of October 2023
- Our Most Anticipated Books of September 2023
- Women in Translation Month Picks!
- Our Most Anticipated Books of August 2023
- Our Most Anticipated Books of July 2023
- Summer Reading 2023
- Our Most Anticipated Books of June 2023
- Pulitzer Prize Winners 2023
- Our Most Anticipated Books of May 2023
