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‘Parties: Stories,’ Anthony Veasna So (Ecco, August 3)
Set in the Cambodian American community in California, this first collection focuses on queer characters. The legacy of the Khmer Rouge genocide remains, but I mean, who died in 2020, it also creates many joyful moments. In one scene, a character scolds an older generation member: “Violence will not solve our problems, nor will the myth of the model minority.”
[ Read more about So. | Read our review. ]
‘All in One: An Autobiography,’ by Billie Jean King, Johnette Howard and Maryanne Vollers (Knopf, August 17)
King talks about major achievements in his professional and personal life, from winning 39 Grand Slam titles and knocking Bobby Riggs down in a “Battle of the Sexes” match to throwing himself into political and social activism.
‘All of Today’s Common Troubles: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance Against Hitler,’ by Rebecca Donner (Little, Brown, August 3)
Born in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack lived an extraordinary life: she was studying at a German university when the Nazi party took power, taking advantage of the country’s economic and political instability. Alarmed, Harnack organized a large underground resistance group in Berlin and was eventually arrested and killed on Hitler’s orders. Harnack’s great-great-nephew, Donner, draws on notes, diaries, letters, and declassified intelligence materials to provide this window into 1930s Germany and Harnack’s extraordinary actions.
‘Billy Summers,’ Stephen King (Scribner, August 3)
Billy Summers isn’t your typical hitman – for starters, he thinks of Émile Zola when the book opens and has a strict rule about only killing “bad guys”. Though close to retirement, he is convinced to make one last hit, but is cautious: “If film noir is a genre, then ‘one last job’ is a subgenre,” he thinks. “The last job always goes bad in those movies.” His prediction, of course, turns out to be correct, but King offers many unexpected deviations.
‘Burning Man: The Trials of DH Lawrence,’ Frances Wilson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, August 17)
A noted literary biographer, Wilson uses Dante’s “Divine Comedy” to structure this book, which focuses on the middle period of Lawrence’s life, from 1915 to 1925. Each episode finds the author in a new place – England, Italy and the American Southwest – and everywhere follows how he has become an essentially different man. As Wilson wrote: “Despite all his claims about prophetic vision, Lawrence had little idea of what was going on in the room, let alone the world. As a writer, his loyalty was not to truth but to his own contradictions, and reading it today is like listening to a radio station whose frequency is constantly changing. ”
‘God, Man, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning,’ by Meghan O’Gieblyn (Doubleday, August 24)
O’Gieblyn says that current debates about the ethics of artificial intelligence and other technological developments mainly focus on old questions: the body, the problem of free will, the possibility of immortality.” The philosophical questions that guide his book remain open and accessible, and O’Gieblyn, once religious but no longer believing in God, draws strong influence from his own experiences.
‘In the Land of Others,’ by Leila Slimani. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Penguin, August 10)
The first novel in a planned trilogy, this book is Slimani’s World War II novel. Mathilde, a French woman, struggles to adjust to life with her Moroccan husband, Amine. As Amine reconciles her political beliefs with her marriage to a French woman, and Mathilde seeks to find some degree of autonomy in a country she finds hostile, the road to Moroccan independence escalates tensions within the country.
‘Love Songs of WEB Du Bois,’ by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper, August 24)
A National Book Award nominee for poetry, Jeffers in his debut novel traces the history of a family from the arrival of its first enslaved ancestors. At her heart is Ailey, who grew up in the 1980s and returns every year to her parents’ ancestral home in Georgia. As she ages, she reveals secrets about her past that challenge her sense of self and belonging.
‘Seeing Ghosts: A Moment,’ by Kat Chow (Grand Central, August 24)
“Like many ghost stories I grew up with, this one has to start with a death,” writes Chow, founding editor of NPR’s “Code Switch.” The death at the heart of this book belongs to Chow’s mother in 2004. For years, Chow and his family rarely spoke of their mother and even avoided looking at pictures of her. Now Chow dives deeper into her mother’s life and family history, from Hong Kong to the USA and beyond.
‘Something New Under the Sun,’ by Alexandra Kleeman (Hogarth, August 3)
Kleeman’s fiction tends towards dystopia: His debut, “You Can Have a Body Like Mine”, focused on characters whose fascination with television leads them down disturbing paths. Now he follows a novelist, Patrick Hamblin, who comes to Los Angeles to help with the film adaptation of one of his books. The usual Hollywood horrors are here—corruption, big egos, a rebellious former child star—but Patrick is troubled by the extent of the ecological damage he sees in California that is heading towards an environmental apocalypse.
‘The State Must Provide: Why Colleges in America Aren’t Always Equal – and How to Do It Right,’ by Adam Harris (Ecco, August 10)
“America’s colleges and universities have a dirty open secret,” writes Harris, staff writer for The Atlantic. “They never gave black people an equal chance to succeed.” It details how much effort states have made to avoid integration—at the time of writing, six states had “not proven to the federal government that they have removed discrimination in their higher education systems”—and explores how these exclusionary approaches perpetuate inequality.
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