Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles (both fiction and nonfiction) to consider for your July reading list.
This month’s titles are about “seeing and being seen,” as the subtitle of Jon M. Chu’s memoir says. Novelists examine life in the time of a pandemic and the lives of immigrants and even breathe new life into an old myth. Some writers show how women have changed our perspective on adolescence and creativity, while others trace the history of political movements. Happy reading!
FICTION
State of Paradise: A Novel
By Laura van den Berg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 224 pages, $27
(July 9th)
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Central Florida during an unspecified pandemic. The unnamed narrator and her sister both have a “fever,” and the sister deals with its strange effects by taking refuge in a virtual world called Mind’s Eye. She disappears, and the narrator must set aside her academic work on medieval pilgrimages to find her sister, all while her father is dying and the world shuts down. Van den Berg (“The Third Hotel”) masterfully blends realist and speculative fiction.
The coin: a novel
By Yasmin Zaher
Catapult: 240 pages, $27
(July 9th)
The economics of Birkin bags combine with colorism, racism, feminism, and more (and goes beyond intersectionality) in Zaher’s surprising and surreal debut novel about a young Palestinian woman living and teaching in New York City. Deprived of most of her family’s fortune, the narrator is “rich and poor at the same time,” as well as black and white at the same time, a nonconformist in the classroom and a psyche about to come apart.
The Shining Sword: A Novel
By Lev Grossman
Viking: 688 pages, $35
(July 16th)
There's a scene in the Barbie movie where all the Kens pretend to ride imaginary horses; it's straight out of Knights of the Round Table and Friends, which is, of course, based on the legend of Arthur, King of the Britons. In other words, Arthur's story is one that's often told. Somehow, Lev Grossman (The Magicians) manages to tell it again, but with a fresh, new twist, bringing the misfits and outcasts to the Round Table to join them even when they struggle.
There is happiness: Stories
By Brad Watson
WW Norton: 304 pages, $30
(July 16th)
Brad Watson died in 2020, already a towering figure in American literature whose short stories explored the liminal spaces between humans and animals (e.g., 1996’s “Last Days of the Dog-Men”). This posthumous collection includes new and previously published work. While “Terrible Argument,” in which a dog watches his humans squabble, stands the test of time, “There Is Happiness” proves that Watson’s later work is also on par with his best work.
Catherine: A Novel
By Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Harper: 320 pages, $30
(July 23th)
Catalina Ituralde, an undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant, arrives at Harvard. But as a senior in high school, Catalina—who uses her precious free time to care for her grandparents living in Queens—fears that her status will prevent her from pursuing a career in her chosen country. In this debut, the author (herself an undocumented Harvard alumna and the author of 2020’s “The Undocumented Americans”) illuminates how so-called Dreamers struggle to succeed.
NON-FICTION
The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us
By Rachelle Bergstein
Atria/One Signal: 288 pages, $29
(July 16th)
Judy Blume has seen it all: bravery, backlash, and now, book sales! In 2016, Blume opened Books & Books Key West. Bergstein celebrates Blume’s nonconformist approach to writing books for young people that deal with issues they care about and need to know about, from puberty (“Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret”) to scoliosis (“Deenie”). It’s a vivid and important portrait of a true literary revolutionary, now 86, and even more important today.
Loving Sylvia Plath: a vindication
By Emily Van Duyne
WW Norton: 320 pages, $28
(July 9th)
Whatever one thinks of Sylvia Plath, her work is considered some of the most brilliant of the 20th century. Van Duyne, a scholar who loves her poetry and her creator, examines Plath's marriage to British poet Ted Hughes and how the verbal, emotional and physical abuse she suffered affected her career and psyche. Like Plath, the author is a survivor of intimate partner violence and carefully, almost tenderly, blends research with experience.
Autocracy, Inc.: Dictators who want to rule the world
By Anne Applebaum
Doubleday: 224 pages, $27
(July 23th)
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Applebaum has written extensively about Russia, the Iron Curtain and the concept of the Soviet gulag. Now she focuses on the network of autocratic rulers whose mutual support, as well as the support of global institutions in finance, weapons and surveillance, allow ever more dictatorships to flourish. As she carefully demonstrates, they care less about ideology and more about power.
The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973
By Clara Bingham
Atria/One Signal: 576 pages, $33
(July 30)
You don’t have to, like me, remember sitting on the living room floor as a child watching Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs at tennis to understand that the years Bingham (“Witness to the Revolution”) glosses over were crucial for the women’s movement. From the 1963 publication of “The Feminine Mystique” to the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, this decade involved personal, political and cultural forces that changed many lives.
Viewer: memories of seeing and being seen
By Jon M. Chu with Jeremy McCarter
Random House: 304 pages, $32
(July 30)
He’s directed films like “Wicked,” “In the Heights” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” but in this memoir Jon M. Chu (discovered at USC by Steven Spielberg) has as much to share about how others can succeed in the film industry as he does about his drama-free upbringing. At his parents’ Silicon Valley Chinese restaurant, he learned to “lay low and just observe,” and his humor and humility come through in vivid detail.
