Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles — fiction and nonfiction — to consider for your July reading list.
This month’s titles deal with “seeing and being seen,” to quote from the subtitle of Jon M. Chu’s memoir. Novelists examine pandemic life and immigrant life and even give new life to an ancient myth. Some writers show how women have changed our perspective on adolescence and creativity, while others track 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 9)
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Central Florida during an unspecified pandemic. The unnamed narrator and her sister both have “the fever,” and the sister copes with its strange effects by retreating into a virtual world called Mind’s Eye. She vanishes, and the narrator must put aside her scholarly work on medieval pilgrimages to find her sibling, all while her father is dying and the world shuts down. Van den Berg (“The Third Hotel”) expertly combines realistic and speculative fiction.
The Coin: A Novel
By Yasmin Zaher
Catapult: 240 pages, $27
(July 9)
Birkin-bag economics meets colorism and racism and feminism and more — it’s beyond intersectionality — in Zaher’s stunning and surreal debut novel of a young Palestinian woman who lives and teaches in New York City. Cut off from the biggest portion of her family’s fortune, the narrator is “simultaneously rich and poor,” as well as simultaneously Black and white, a maverick in the classroom and a psyche about to break into pieces.
The Bright Sword: A Novel
By Lev Grossman
Viking: 688 pages, $35
(July 16)
There’s a scene in the “Barbie” movie in which all of the Kens pretend to ride imaginary horses; it’s taken straight from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which is, of course, based on the legend of Arthur, King of the Britons. In other words, Arthur’s tale is often told. Somehow, Lev Grossman (“The Magicians”) manages to tell it again yet make it fresh and new, bringing misfits and outsiders to the Round Table to rally even as they struggle.
There Is Happiness: Stories
By Brad Watson
W.W. Norton: 304 pages, $30
(July 16)
Brad Watson died in 2020, already a towering figure of American literature whose short fiction 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 pieces. While “Terrible Argument,” in which a dog observes his humans quarreling, stands the test of time, “There Is Happiness” proves that Watson’s later work stands up to his best work, too.
Catalina: A Novel
By Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Harper: 320 pages, $30
(July 23)
Catalina Ituralde, an undocumented Ecuadorean immigrant, makes it to Harvard. But by senior year, Catalina — who uses precious spare time caring for her Queens-based grandparents — worries that her status will prevent her from building a career in her chosen country. In this debut, the author (herself an undocumented Harvard alum and author of 2020’s “The Undocumented Americans”) illuminates how so-called Dreamers struggle to succeed.
NONFICTION
The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us
By Rachelle Bergstein
Atria/One Signal: 288 pages, $29
(July 16)
Judy Blume has seen it all: bravery, backlash and now — bookselling! In 2016, Blume opened Books & Books Key West. Bergstein celebrates Blume’s maverick approach to writing books for young people that cover topics they care and need to know about, from puberty (“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”) to scoliosis (“Deenie”). It’s a lively, important portrait of a true literary revolutionary, now 86, who matters even more today.
Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation
By Emily Van Duyne
W.W. Norton: 320 pages, $28
(July 9)
Regardless of your views of Sylvia Plath, her output is considered among the most brilliant 20th century poetry. Van Duyne, a scholar who loves that poetry and its creator, looks at Plath’s marriage to the British poet Ted Hughes and how his verbal, emotional and physical abuse of Plath affected her career and psyche. Like Plath, the author is a survivor of intimate partner violence, and she carefully, almost tenderly, combines research with experience.
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
By Anne Applebaum
Doubleday: 224 pages, $27
(July 23)
Pulitzer-winning journalist Applebaum has written extensively on Russia, the Iron Curtain and the concept of the Soviet gulag. Now she focuses on the web of autocratic rulers whose support from each other as well as global institutions in finance, arms and surveillance allow more and 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 to watch Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs at tennis in order to understand that the years Bingham (“Witness to the Revolution”) covers were crucial to the women’s movement. From the 1963 publication of “The Feminine Mystique” to the 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade, this decade involved personal, political and cultural forces that changed many lives.
Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen
By Jon M. Chu with Jeremy McCarter
Random House: 304 pages, $32
(July 30)
He’s directed movies like “Wicked,” “In the Heights” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” but in this memoir Jon M. Chu (who was 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 “fade into the background and simply observe,” and his humor and humility come through in full color.
