atomic bomb

Contrary to some recent media chatter, the novel isn’t dead: A glance at this month’s choices, which include quirky robot sci-fi, an artist’s tale set in 1950s Mexico and a dysfunctional family’s reckoning with addiction, proves that imaginative storytelling has a strong heartbeat. Meanwhile, whether you’re looking for history or current events, check out an oral history of the atomic bomb, an expert’s thoughts on climate change and a thorough tribute to the writer James Baldwin. Happy reading!

FICTION

Automatic Noodle: A Novel
By Annalee Newitz
Tordotcom: 176 pages, $25
(Aug. 5)

Late 21st-century San Francisco: California has seceded from the United States, and robots serve humans like crypto money launderer Fritz Co, whose Burgers N More is a front. He absconds and leaves four robots adrift, but with aid from unhoused human “robles,” they reconfigure the joint as a ramen shop — until robophobes launch a campaign to shut them down. Robots Staybehind, Sweetie, Cayenne and Hands will capture readers’ hearts.

People Like Us: A Novel
By Jason Mott
Dutton: 288 pages, $30
(Aug. 5)

Soot, one of the protagonists of Mott’s funny and affecting new book, also appeared in 2021’s “Hell of a Book.” Like the (at first) unnamed narrator, Soot is now a middle-aged writer from North Carolina (Mott originally intended this story to be in memoir form), and both men’s paths illustrate the difficulty of reconciling being Black with being American. While the theme of gun violence plays an important role, Mott is ultimately concerned with how and where his characters find safety.

Fonseca: A Novel
By Jessica Francis Kane
Penguin Press: 272 pages, $28
(Aug. 12)

In this fictionalized version of British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s real-life trip to Saltillo, Mexico, in 1952, she arrives pregnant with her son Valpy in tow, hoping eccentric, elderly sisters might keep their promise to leave Valpy their silver mine. “Fonseca” (“dry well” in Latin) is how Fitzgerald always referred to Saltillo, but Kane’s remarkable excavation of this interlude, including real letters from Valpy, drips with juicy conflict and detail.

The Frequency of Living Things: A Novel
By Nick Fuller Googins
Atria: 336 pages, $29
(Aug. 12)

Three sisters make up the band name “Jojo and the Twins” — but Jojo, younger sister to identical twins Emma and Araminta (Ara), isn’t in the band. Instead, she’s the caretaker for her siblings, who made a fortune with their blockbuster hit “American Mosh,” then lost that fortune, in part due to Ara’s substance addictions. Chapters alternate between Jojo, Emma, Ara and their absentee mother Bertie, who all discover that big love has big costs.

Katabasis: A Novel
By R. F. Kuang
Harper Voyager: 560 pages, $32
(Aug. 26)

Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, Cambridge University doctoral fellows in Magick, wind up in Hell looking for their adviser in a dark academia thriller whose title is the Greek word for “downward journey.” This version of Hell closely resembles Dante’s “Inferno,” with many circles leading toward the very worst human actions. There’s a great deal of doubling back and a lot of incantatory action, both of which sci-fi/fantasy stans will appreciate.

NONFICTION

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb
By Garrett M. Graff
Avid Reader Press: 608 pages, $35
(Aug. 5)

Many accounts of the unusual and unholy circumstances that led to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II center on scientific discovery, neglecting the enormous human and environmental toll involved. Not so with journalist Graff’s (“When the Sea Came Alive”) approach, in which everyone from theoreticians to site managers on to survivors of all ages share first-person stories of what they did, saw and understood.

Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974–
By Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 336 pages, $30
(Aug. 5)

Since her 1985 debut novel, “Annie John,” the Antiguan-born Kincaid has been impossible to ignore, and this collection of essays and journalism shows why: Even as some critics have found her prose too personal or political, Kincaid knows she meant it to be so. Ranging from her famed “Biography of a Dress” to pieces for the New Yorker on to essays on gardening, the works speak of a person who has refused to be defined by any kind of constraints.

Greyhound: A Memoir
By Joanna Pocock
Soft Skull: 400 pages, $19
(Aug. 12)

The Great American Road Trip, that idealized trek heading west, might be different now, according to author Pocock, who first made that journey in 2006 from Detroit to Los Angeles in the wake of grief after several miscarriages. In 2023, retracing her steps via Greyhound bus like French writer Simone de Beauvoir (“America Day by Day,” 1948), she discovers fewer humans, more dirt and less safety — but the same magical “sense of no longer existing.”

Baldwin: A Love Story
By Nicholas Boggs
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 720 pages, $36
(Aug. 19)

James Baldwin’s four great affairs (intellectual, romantic, platonic and artistic) provide a beautiful structure for this biography, which includes careful research into the writer/activist’s upbringing and political formation as well as his widespread influence. Beauford Delaney’s creative guidance, Lucien Happersberger’s intimacy, Engin Cezzar’s call to activism and French painter Yoran Cazac’s artistic collaboration — each forms a polished facet of Baldwin’s gem-like dazzle.

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization
By Bill McKibben
W. W. Norton: 224 pages, $30
(Aug. 19)

Since McKibben’s 1989 “The End of Nature,” the world’s temperature has risen by at least 1 degree Fahrenheit. Now the author and environmental activist wants to wake everyone up to the fact that we can’t stop global warming, but we can stave off reaching the next degrees if we enact the kind of political change necessary to use new technologies (like photovoltaic devices) that, instead of draining our planet’s resources, harness those beaming down daily.

Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your July reading list.

It’s officially beach-reads season: Whether you do your reading outdoors or inside in air-conditioned comfort, July’s hot new releases will help you stay cool. Topics range from analog memories of Golden Age Hollywood to a maverick female athlete. Happy reading!

FICTION

In Pursuit of Beauty: A Novel
By Gary Baum
Blackstone: 256 pages, $29
(July 1)

Baum, a journalist for the Hollywood Reporter, draws on knowledge he has gleaned about cosmetic surgery, the profession of his protagonist, Dr. Roya Delshad. Dr. Delshad, who is multiracial and once supposedly plain, remakes herself into a glorious bombshell — but then lands in prison. She’s agreed to consider interviews with a ghostwriter named Wes Easton, who will soon discover why she’s called “the Robin Hood of Roxbury Drive.”

Typewriter Beach: A Novel
By Meg Waite Clayton
Harper: 320 pages, $30
(July 1)

Like the carriage of a well-oiled Olivetti, this novel moves between Carmel and Hollywood, in two different centuries, with ease. In 1957, actress Isabella Giori hopes to land a career-making role in a Hitchcock film; when her circumstances change and she winds up secluded in a tiny cottage in Carmel-on-the-Sea, a blacklisted emigre screenwriter named Léon Chazan saves her. In 2018, his screenwriter granddaughter finally learns how and why.

Vera, or Faith: A Novel
By Gary Shteyngart
Random House: 256 pages, $28
(July 8)

Vera, the child narrator of this wry and relevant new novel from Shteyngart (“Our Country Friends”), brings a half-Korean heritage to the Russian-Jewish-WASP Bradford-Shmulkin family. Between Daddy, Anne Mom, and her longing for her unknown bio Mom Mom, Vera has a lot to handle, while all she really wants is to help her dad and stepmom stay married — and to make a friend at school. It’s a must-read.

Mendell Station: A Novel
By J. B. Hwang
Bloomsbury: 208 pages, $27
(July 22)

In the wake of her best friend Esther’s 2020 death, Miriam loses faith in almost everything, including the God that made her job teaching Christian scripture at a San Francisco private school bearable. She quits and takes a job as a mail carrier (as the author also did), not only finding moments of grace from neighborhood to neighborhood but also writing letters to Esther in an effort to understand the childhood difficulties that bonded them.

Necessary Fiction: A Novel
By Eloghosa Osunde
Riverhead: 320 pages, $28
(July 22)

The title tells so much about how queer people must live in Nigeria, and so does the structure: Osunde (“Vagabonds!”) calls it a novel, although its chapters read more like short stories. If it doesn’t hang together like a traditional novel, that may be part of the point. Characters like May, struggling with gender identity, or Ziz, a gay man in Lagos, know that their identities don’t always hang together in traditional ways — and that’s definitely the point.

NONFICTION

The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature
By Charlie English
Random House: 384 pages, $35
(July 1)

Decades of Cold War espionage between the United States and the Soviet Union included programs that leveraged cultural media. The Central Intelligence Agency’s Manhattan-based “book club” office was run by an emigre from Romania named George Midden, who managed to send 10 million books behind the Iron Curtain. Some of them were serious tomes, yes, but there were Agatha Christie novels, Orwell’s “1984” and art books too.

The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It
By Iain MacGregor
Scribner: 384 pages, $32
(July 8)

Crucially, MacGregor’s painstakingly researched history of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II includes Japanese perspectives. The historian (“Checkpoint Charlie”) treats the atomic bomb more as a weapon of mass murder and less as a scientific breakthrough, while managing to convey the urgency behind its development for the Allied forces.

On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports
By Christine Brennan
Scribner: 272 pages, $30
(July 8)

Let this sink in (basketball pun very much intended): Caitlin Clark has scored more points than any player in major college basketball history. Not just the female players — the male players too. Now that she’s in the WNBA as a rookie for the Indiana Fever, Clark is attracting the kind of fan base once reserved for male basketball stars like Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Brennan’s longtime coverage of Clark’s career makes this book a slam dunk.

Strata: Stories From Deep Time
By Laura Poppick
W. W. Norton & Co.: 288 pages, $30
(July 15)

Each stratum, or layer, of our planet tells a story. Science writer Poppick explains what those millions of strata can tell us about four instances that changed life dramatically, from oxygen entering the atmosphere all the way to the dinosaur era. Ultimately, she argues that these strata show us that when stressed, the earth reacts by changing and moving toward stability. It’s a fascinating peek into the globe’s core that might offer clues about sustainability.

The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne
By Chris Sweeney
Avid Reader Press: 320 pages, $30
(July 22)

The once-unassuming Roxie Laybourne became the world’s first forensic ornithologist in 1960, when the FAA asked the Smithsonian — where Laybourne was an avian taxidermist — to help them identify shredded feathers from a fatal airplane crash in Boston. She analyzed specimens that contributed to arrests in racial attacks, as well as in catching game poachers and preventing deaths of fighter pilots. In her way, Laybourne was a badass.