Jill

If your summer could use a little energy boost, forget the complicated smoothie — turn to one of these fresh book releases instead. From fast-paced World War II history to a slow-burn rescue in rural Wyoming, along with an art-world mystery and a punchy look at modern America, you’ll find something to galvanize your bedside book stack. Happy reading!

FICTION:

Appraisals: A Novel
By Claire Boyles
W. W. Norton: 288 pp., $30
(Aug. 4)

While Boyles’ debut novel ostensibly follows the fate of an Eastern Colorado family farm, its deeper purpose involves showing how dire water resources are for all agricultural endeavors in the region. Maggie and her husband Fish have inherited their land from her grandparents, but they and their teenage daughter Ozzie all know that without irrigation, even defeating big development plans won’t make much of a difference to locals.

The Seekers of Deer Creek: A Novel
By Thao Thai
Mariner Books: 320 pp., $30
(Aug. 4)

Vietnamese American sisters Vivi and Calla are also a curator and an artist. When their father dies and leaves behind a sketch that might be the work of renowned Vietnamese painter K.P. Lý, the siblings embark on a quest to find out whether Lý had connections to their family. Along the way they reexamine their difficult upbringing and find new ways to communicate that matter more than any artwork.

Etna: A Novel
By Paul Yoon
Scribner: 208 pp., $28
(Aug. 4)

Anyone who has seen “The Odyssey” with Matt Damon or is anticipating “Heart of the Beast” with Brad Pitt (about a veteran and his war dog), should pick up Yoon’s remarkable tale of a combat survivor in an alternate present who happens to be a former military dog named Etna. His adventures traversing a broken land of haunted people and animals may be less the stuff of future myth and more about trauma, but Yoon brilliantly creates voices for human and canine that make both more whole.

A Tender Age: A Novel
By Chang-Rae Lee
Riverhead: 368 pp., $30
(Aug. 11)

Jeon-Gi, known as J-G, is a relatively happy 10-year-old in 1976, until a neighbor’s attack on him fuels his own violent ideas. Although he gets a relatively easy sentence after threatening a classmate, J-G’s parents decide to send him to a Christian summer camp. Incidents there that might be sweet nostalgia for other kids only remind him of how different and lonely he feels inside. However, it’s J-G’s adult reason for sharing his experience that hits home.

Sunrise: A Novel
By Téa Obreht
Random House: 368 pp., $29
(Aug. 11)

Many, so so many, historical novels seek to tie a contemporary protagonist to a long-ago event or story; so so many fail to make the connections mean anything. That’s why Obreht’s superb and fascinating new book should earn a place on your 2026 reading list: She not only meaningfully connects the stories of a stranded young woman, an early-20th-century gunslinger, and a historical reenactor, but manages to make them illuminate each other.

NONFICTION:

Triage
By Claudia Rankine
Graywolf: 192 pp., $28
(Aug. 4)

The book’s epigraph says a great deal: “Any attempt to name and describe our lives will always seem unstable because all language is a form of triage.” Rankine’s new attempt at triage focuses on her long friendship with a person identified only as “the theorist.” Anecdotes and analysis are interspersed with photos of all sorts of sofas and couches, calling into question ideas about where and how we find respite and support — or not.

Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches Across the Country We Call Home
By Peter Santenello
Simon & Schuster: 336 pp., $30
(Aug. 4)

Santenello has over 4 million subscribers on YouTube, where he posts videos about every kind of place in America — rich and poor, renowned and hidden, busy and abandoned. Love or hate the author’s self-described nonpartisan approach, you’ll find this book surprising, particularly as it reveals how geography, climate and infrastructure affect community and communication. Think Anthony Bourdain crossed with Michael Moore.

Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War
By James M. Scott
W. W. Norton & Co.: 528 pp., $42
(Aug. 4)

Historian Scott (“Black Snow”) creates a propulsive read about the last days of World War II, in which America’s development of the atomic bomb pushed against Japan’s aggressive majority, with tragic results that many — including the author — believe necessary. The contrast between President Harry S. Truman, who had been in office for a matter of weeks, and Emperor Hirohito, whose military seemed unstoppable, remains shocking.

The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn
By Dave Zirin
Dutton: 320 pp., $33
(Aug. 4)

Recently a friend showed me a list of books recommended by a pundit and asked which one to read first. Without hesitation I told her she should pick up “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn, first published in 1980 and still the most comprehensive remedial tonic to received wisdom I know. Zirin’s lively biography of this activist should remind everyone that history isn’t just about facts and figures but also context and compassion.

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
By Jill Lepore
Liveright Publishing Corp.: 336 pp., $30
(Aug. 25)

Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century’s defining political thinkers, posited that modern life was making “being human superfluous”; her learned successor Lepore warns that our present bears out that idea. One day scholars will teach Lepore’s work alongside Arendt’s, seeing that Lepore interrogates not simply a modern moment, but traces our current machine age back to the 17th-century conceit for artifice as improvement. According to her, the way out is to get back to nature. Meet you in the woods.

WASHINGTON — Democrats have spent nearly two years trying to move past the 2024 presidential election. Now, Jill Biden’s new memoir is forcing them to relive it.

Her new book, “View from the East Wing,” which comes out Tuesday, is already drawing sharp rebukes from top Democrats, some of whom say it is a poorly timed and misleading account of the events that led to the demise of her husband’s presidency.

“Unhelpful … Ripping open a healing scab is never helpful,” John Morgan, a Florida trial attorney who was a major fundraiser for Biden’s 2024 campaign, told The Times. “In my opinion, she was the main problem. She loved the life and didn’t want it to end.”

Those type of frustrations erupted last week as the former first lady began promoting her book, including in a sit-down interview with CBS News airing Sunday, in which she said she thought the sitting president was having a stroke as she watched the 2024 presidential debate.

“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Biden said. The moment “scared me to death,” she added.

For Democrats who had a similar reaction in real time, but who spent months being told by the Biden campaign that their concerns were overblown, her remarks landed like a gut punch. With the midterms around the corner, some bemoaned that Biden was relitigating a sore subject — particularly the question of who knew what about Biden’s aging and cognitive decline.

“What I care about is what happens going forward,” Dan Pfeiffer, a host of “Pod Save America,” a popular progressive podcast, said on the show Thursday. “What bothers me the most is not the timeline of events, but whether Democratic leaders now will ever reckon with the massive breach of trust that came because of how all of that was handled.”

Meghan Hays, a former White House aide to Joe Biden, said on C-SPAN’s “Ceasefire” that although she understands that Jill Biden is trying to sell books, her efforts are not helping the party ahead of the midterm elections.

“We have a lot of momentum in our favor … and when we get pulled back into conversations about age and the election in ‘24, it’s never gonna be a good place for Democrats,” Hays said. “I think it is a tough place to be.”

The Democratic Party found itself trapped in a similar dynamic earlier this month, when the Democratic National Committee released a long-awaited, 192-page report dissecting the 2024 loss. The committee’s chairman, Ken Martin, shared the postelection autopsy after coming under intense pressure from Democratic operatives, and apologized for how he handled its release.

The report faulted Kamala Harris and Democrats’ focus on “identity politics” but did not address Biden’s decision to seek reelection amid health concerns and the rushed selection of Harris to replace him on the ticket.

In her book, the former first lady writes that her goal is to be able to “set the record straight” about what happened during the debate and the months that followed that led to President Trump’s return to the White House, according to the Atlantic, which obtained a copy of the book ahead of its release.

At one point, she writes that she even suspected her husband may have been inadvertently impaired after taking cough syrup. In the CBS interview, Biden maintained that she never saw any signs of cognitive decline while he was the sitting president.

“He was the same, the essence of the same Joe Biden, but yeah, he was slowing down. He was getting older,” she said. “You know, it’s a very intense job. I think it ages you — quickly.”

Morgan, the former Biden fundraiser, said he does not believe the first lady is telling the truth in her memoir.

“If you like fiction it’s good,” Morgan said. He added that her claim that she had never witnessed her husband act in a similar way since the debate “defies the smell test.”

“His keys should have been taken long before that night,” Morgan said.

Michael LaRosa, a former press secretary for the first lady, called Democrats’ reaction to the new memoir “pretty grim.”

“There is a deep reservoir of frustration among ‘formers’ who believe she enables the culture around her and the President rather than challenging it,” LaRosa wrote. “So now they seem to be challenging her.”

Although many Democrats are publicly expressing their annoyance at the conversation Biden has resurfaced, others do not see the former first lady’s comments having an effect on the upcoming elections.

“This is not going to be part of a conversation in the election. It’s going to be part of a conversation in Washington because that is what Washington does, but this is not going to move the needle in New Hampshire or other states where it matters,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist who ran a pro-Biden super PAC during the 2020 election cycle.

Schale was blunt: “She is selling books.”

Even if that is the case, Republicans are taking notice.

In a Truth Social post on Friday, President Trump appeared gleeful to note that Biden was “finally admitting” that she did not know what was wrong with her husband during “our spectacular, and highly rated, 2024 Presidential Debate.”

The president lamented that the former first lady did not compliment his performance.

“In other words, as many have asked, did my strong performance in that debate cause him to plain and simple ‘choke,’ leading to his ignominious defeat, or were other reasons the cause? Nobody else knows the answer to that, BUT I DO!!!” Trump wrote.